Sailing in the Shadow of the Buddha

A brief summary of a life-changing epic tale

Our shared dream started before the pandemic. I wanted my wife to quit her soul-crushing job in medicine, she wanted adventure. We could do something different once our third daughter graduated. We decided to sell everything and live on a boat.

We agreed to give it a year and then reassess whether or not it was something we could continue. Long story short, we decided to return to the US and start over on land.

During our journey, I learned more about the Buddha I want to be and the Jungian shadow I am underneath. There are moments in life you can’t understand until you experience them, and the sea was full of these. I became all the parts of myself I knew and a few I didn’t. And each with more intensity than I dreamed I had.

I experienced life-threatening danger. Near-death experiences. More intense fighting with my spouse than I ever expected. Along with moments of actual peace and calm. But mostly it was hard.

The difficulty is palpably intense during our final weeks at sea. This intensity is what I notice most. Nothing is benign out here, and life comes at you differently. Every experience is life or death, or has the potential for near bliss. The sunsets are amazing. The wind can be deadly. When something breaks, you might sink. If something is pretty, it might be something you’ll never see again. There is no permanence, only fleeting.

For a hypervigilant empath, the permanent intensity wears you down. For an adventure seeker, it raises the bar of tolerance. The threshold for the next adventure becomes ever higher. Living at sea features a combination of too much and not enough, depending on who you are and what you expect. And everyone is different.

My wife and I are very similar yet different. I think she struggles with unmet expectations. I wonder if she secretly wanted us to live this life for years, like we have seen others do. And sail around the world. I tried very hard to have minimal expectations, and I think I did well. We both decided we would stop, but she mourns the loss differently.

We decided to stop sailing because of the extreme effect on our marriage. With only one another, we needed to be a solid team. Instead, we took everything out on each other. While our love is solid and our intentions good, our limiting beliefs and childhood traumas got in the way. She needed to do things perfectly for herself according to those standards, whereas I wanted to figure things out by trial and error, together.

Neither approach is better or worse, and a better team would feature elements of both. But we just couldn’t come together.

There is nothing worse than feeling alone in the middle of paradise with your family. Fortunately, I wasn’t completely alone. I sailed with the Buddha, whose helpful precepts kept me sane, and Jung, whose observations about the shadow helped me accept the other parts of myself that came alive during the trip. These fellas taught me more about myself than I ever imagined.

I’m sharing this article as a placeholder and to hold myself accountable for a book by the same title. Please comment if you’re interested — it will help encourage me!