A Field Guide to Happiness : What I Learned in Bhutan about Living, Loving and Waking Up by Linda Leaming (Hay House)

Linda Leaming was a young American woman who left her comfortable life in Nashville, Tennessee and went to the small Himalayan country of Bhutan, the country known for its Gross National Happiness, to teach English. Not only did she fall in love with the country but she fell in love with one of its citizens and started a new life there. She wrote about it in her first book Married to Bhutan which was previously reviewed on this blog by Janet Brown.

Leaming has now written a follow up book titled A Field Guide to Happiness with the subtitle of What I Learned in Bhutan about Living, Loving and Waking Up. Leaming has been living in Bhutan since 1997. She married a renowned thangka artist, thangka being a religious painting usually depicting a Buddhist deity. She now shares what she learned and continues to learn in Bhutan about finding happiness. 

When Leaming talks about happiness in this book, she says she’s talking about well-being. She thinks of happiness as “being a state wherein we are ‘without want’”. Her four main points of what she thinks about happiness is, first - “Everyone wants to be happy”. Secondly, she believes “happiness begins with intent”. Her third point, “Happiness doesn’t just happen; it’s a result of conscious action (and sometimes that “action” is to do nothing). Finally, she believes “this action involves doing simple things well”. 

One of the first things she says she had to learn was patience. This was before she got married and became more grounded in living in Bhutan. Her first visit to the Bank of Bhutan was emotionally challenging as she was the epitome of an American living in a foreign country. Americans, those people known for being busy, loud, obnoxious, demanding, and impatient. Perhaps it is an unkind stereotype but may be an accurate description. She says, “In Bhutan, if I have three things to do in a week, it’s considered busy. In the U.S., I have at least three things to do between breakfast and lunch.”

Living in Bhutan has taught her more about herself than she would learn from any psychologist or self-help book. She has learned to be more patient, to “go with the flow”, to do without the modern conveniences of America, such as buying groceries at a supermarket or having a washing machine to do the laundry. She has learned to love and accept herself for who she is, she strives to be a kinder and generous person to others, and she can now talk about death without fear. 

To say this is a self-help book would be an overstatement. Leaming doesn’t push her beliefs on others, she just shares what works for her. She tells her stories in a way that’s delightful and amusing and never condescending. She shares her own weak points and tells the reader how she tries to overcome them or at least not worry about them as much as she used to. What works for Leaming may not work for everyone but I believe as Leaming does, that everyone just wants to be happy. ~Ernie Hoyt

Married to Bhutan by Linda Leaming (Hay House)

When Linda Leaming told people that she was leaving the states to live in another country. a common response was “Butane? Where’s that?” Oh,” she began to tell people,” It’s near Africa. It’s where all the disposable lighters come from.”

A tiny, mountainous country that shares its borders with Nepal, Bangladesh, China, and India, Bhutan has an agrarian, cohesive population that would fill a medium-sized U.S city. Historically isolated by its geography that holds only five habitable valleys and its weather, that often makes any sort of invasion problematic, including aircraft landings, it’s a country that has developed on its own terms. Currency replaced the barter system in the 1960s, both the Georgian and the lunar calendars are observed, and time is cyclical, not linear, based upon the seasons and the belief in reincarnation. Its king voluntarily abdicated in 2006 to make room for a democratic form of government and espouses a system that prioritizes Gross National Happiness, rather than Gross National Product. It has never been colonized, with astute monarchs that made Bhutan one of the few winners in Britain’s South Asian Great Game.

Leaming fell in love with the place in 1994, when she was one of the scant number of tourists to visit it. After two weeks in Bhutan, this 39-year-old American, whose daily life was removed from it by twelve time zones, was captivated. After two more journeys that cemented her feelings, she found a job teaching English and moved there in 1997. It’s been her home ever since.

Candid about her initial difficulties with culture, language, and manners, which she describes as a time of facing “minefields, so many opportunities to make an ass of yourself,” Leaming is too busy learning what she needs to know to indulge herself in the usual expat self-pity. Dzongha, the national language of Bhutan, is her primary preoccupation in which she’s frustrated by her teacher’s insistence that reading and writing come before speaking. Her oral language learning is a clandestine activity, aided by a phrasebook that gives her crucial tools to use at work, in the market, and at a doctor’s office. Unfortunately she’s enchanted by phrases that she’ll never have reason to use, which stick with her and emerge at inappropriate moments. The day she thinks she’s asking a physician a routine pleasantry and discovers his shock when it comes from her mouth as “Take off your clothes and lie down,” ought to be quelling but probably was not. Leaming is too eager to assimilate for chagrin to stand in her way.

Her language acquisition becomes total immersion when she falls in love with another teacher, a painter of thanka, works of religious art that are highly prized in Bhutan. He’s a man from a highly traditional family who lives in a large apartment within his sister’s home and when he and Leaming decide to marry, he’s reluctant to take his bride away from the hot water heater of her Bhutanese home to a small town.

But Leaming is aware that when she marries this man, she’s also marrying his country and insists the two of them live in her husband’s home. Here she discovers that her domestic skills are decidedly below par and relearns how to sweep, wash clothes, cook, and sew. In a town where almost everything is made locally, with a husband who wore deerskin moccasins made by his father and clothes woven by his mother, Leaming feels that she’s married to “the Last of the Mohicans.”

Her personal anecdotes are quite funny and rather sparse. Leaming’s focus is on the country that has let her become a resident as much as on how it has changed her. Buddhism is integral to every part of Bhutanese life, a daily practice rather than beliefs espoused on Sunday. From the obscene, scatalogical 15th-Century monk whose used underparts are still enshrined near her house to the elaborate, medieval process of her husband’s thanka art, Leaming’s life is pervaded with a system that gradually becomes part of her. So does the beauty of her surroundings which she loves best during the severe cold of winter and the barriers against rapid progress that geography and weather still forestall. She learns to savor the slow pace of her life, in which buying stationery involves going to a spot where handmade envelopes are constructed as she waits, finding sealing wax in an over-stuffed shop with a patient shopkeeper, and falling prey to the seduction of Bhutan’s gorgeous postage stamps.  

Bhutan is under threats, Leaming describes in her final essay. Surrounded by a “geopolitical equivalent to a trailer park,” with its squabbling tribes, avaricious leaders, and drug problems, it works hard to avoid the fate of the former kingdom of Sikkim which is now an Indian state. Climate change is melting its glaciers and flooding is a constant danger. Conversely there’s a shortage of water that may destroy the country’s agriculture. And. as is true all over the world, globalization is closing in through the inexorable incursions of the internet. 

“The world needs Bhutan,” Leaming concludes. Certainly she herself needed it. As a Bhutanese friend told her early on, “You are the arrow that hit its mark.” Her lovely little book poses an irresistible question: how many of us are still arrows in search of our own marks?~Janet Brown

Beyond the Sky and the Earth: A Journey into Bhutan by Jamie Zeppa (Riverhead Books)

In a world where few corners contain a road less traveled, Bhutan is still not a key destination  on the backpacker trail. It is famous for its beauty and its spot on the happiness index, which is just another way of evoking Shangri-La.

When Jamie Zeppa went there as a volunteer English teacher, she detested the place. A chicken effortlessly demolished her high-tech flashlight, the gas stove terrified her, and the children she taught all seemed to have the same name. She lived on cookies and counted the days before she could escape back home to Canada, but her small students had other ideas. Taking her in hand, they brought her fresh food, taught her to use a pressure cooker, and helped her learn to love the village life. Then she was transferred.

In a university setting, Jamie has all the comforts she has learned to live without, from a garden apartment to sliced bread. Her students are all fluent in English and fall into her own age-group. As she helps them discover the intricacies of Macbeth, they give her inklings into the political disruptions that lurk beneath the idyllic surface of the country she has learned to love.

People from the north of Bhutan mistrust the southern Bhutanese, many of whom have roots in Nepal and carry that culture with them. Differences in dress become deadly divisions for some, with Bhutan's "national dress" becoming a symbol of the country's culture and traditions. In Bhutan, Jamie learns, there is "not a dress code but a dress law." And speaking the Nepali language is considered a act of sedition.

Terrified of having its culture and language over-run by people from another country, Bhutan tightens its restrictions and what was a rift becomes a Situation. There is talk of separatism and some of Jamie's students leave the university to fight the "anti-nationals." There are rumors of torture and students who were imprisoned for treasonous acts return to class, "looking years older."

"This is not about democracy or human rights, I think...I have not heard one person speak of mediation or negotiation or even the listening that is necessary for understanding. There is no recognition of any overlap, any common ground...it is a case of two solitudes."

"I love the view," Jamie observes, "but I would not want the life." And then she falls in love, with a man who speaks Nepali when he talks in his sleep, and the life she is reluctant to take becomes in some way hers forever.

This is a love story, but not one between two people. It is a common theme of how a Western woman falls in love with an Eastern country--yet there is nothing common about the thoughts and perceptions and images that Jamie Zeppa brings to this. Her book is one that illuminates on many levels--spiritual, political, cross-cultural.

When she takes the refuge vows that show her commitment to following the path of Buddhism, Jamie realizes, "The practice is the practice...For the rest of my life." Her book plainly reveals how that practice has enhanced her life in Bhutan, in Canada, with the man she loves or without. Reading her words will burnish the perspective of any woman who has fallen in love with an Asian country--or yearns for the chance to do this.