Бесплатный фрагмент - Conversations with Kumari

SVIATLANA PAULENKA

PhD in Psychology · therapist · spiritual teacher

· · ·

Before turning to psychology she spent many years at a metallurgical plant — first as a process engineer, then heading one of its departments. Founder of the MIRSVETA project. Kumari is her spiritual name.

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ABOUT THIS BOOK

Alex is thirty-five. He lives in a room in his parents’ flat, surrounded by three hundred books on psychology, esoterica, and spiritual practice. He knows how vipassana differs from dzogchen. He can quote sacred texts from memory. He understands neuroplasticity and imprinting theory. He has been in two cults. He has been searching for enlightenment for fifteen years.

And the whole time, he has been deeply, unbroken, pathologically empty.

One day he simply got into his car and drove — two hundred and fifty kilometres, four hours on the road — to a woman he barely knew anything about. PhD in psychology, therapist, formerly a process engineer and then a department head at a metallurgical plant. No eastern robes, no prayer beads, an ordinary panel high-rise. At the door she asked him only one thing: “Tea?”

That is how Conversations with Kumari begins — the story of nine days that turned one man’s life upside down, and of the many months it took him to put himself back together.

· · ·

This is a book in dialogue. On one side: Alex, intelligent, well-read, exhausted by his own searching, a master at hiding behind other people’s words. On the other: Kumari, calm, direct, sometimes sharp, speaking without pathos or the schoolmistress tone. She does not give answers. She asks questions — and from her questions there is nowhere to hide.

Through their conversations, the reader walks the full route of inner work: childhood imprints that shape adult choices; shame and its neurobiology; spiritual materialism and the seeker’s vanity; the body as forgotten territory; the trap of an endless “search for the self”; boundaries, forgiveness, humility; the architecture of a human being from the standpoint of eternity — and the unsettling question of a world changing under our feet.

Science and spirituality do not argue here; they complement each other, two wings of one bird. After each conversation comes a short, doable practice — something you can begin this evening.

· · ·

Architecture: 32 +1

There are thirty-two conversations in this book — and a thirty-third chapter. The number is not arbitrary. Thirty-two is an ancient symbol of the completeness of a path: thirty-two systems of the human body, thirty-two teeth and eight generations of ancestors, thirty-two vertebrae and the ladder of Kundalini, thirty-two paths of the Tree of Life, thirty-two degrees of initiation, thirty-two signs by which the living goddesses of Nepal are chosen. Thirty-two is everything one can cover by effort and labour. And thirty-three is the step beyond the ladder: the age of Christ, the exit from all counting. The step a person takes alone, when the climb is finished.

A full discussion of the number thirty-two, of the tradition of living goddesses, and of why this book is built the way it is, can be found in the essay “Kumari: The Birth of a Goddess,” which accompanies the main text.

· · ·

Conversations with Kumari is not a manual and not a collection of advice. It is an invitation to a conversation with the wise one who already lives inside every human being — and who is almost always drowned out by noise. A book for those who are tired of searching and ready, at last, to find.

Who this book is for

For those who have read dozens of self-help books and feel only better-read, not freer. For those still looking for “their teacher.” For those who recognise themselves in codependent relationships, in the role of the eternal shoulder to cry on, in the fear of being themselves. And for those who simply want an honest, warm, and unhackneyed conversation about what matters most.

About the author

Conversations with Kumari was written by Sviatlana Paulenka. Kumari is her spiritual name; in this name, and in her own life, the whole plot of the book is encoded. PhD in psychology, therapist, spiritual teacher, founder of the MIRSVETA project. For many years she worked at a metallurgical plant — beginning as a process engineer and eventually heading one of its departments. Sviatlana was born with the destiny number thirty-two and was conceived in the thirty-second region of Russia, where her father still lives today. Why these coincidences are not coincidences at all is told in the essay that accompanies this book.

ILLUSTRATIONS AND PHOTOGRAPHS

Chapter illustrations — original watercolours commissioned for this book. The photograph of the Nepali Kumari (Preeti Shakya, Royal Kumari of Kathmandu) — from publicly available sources. The photograph of the Darjeeling mural and the author’s personal photographs — from the archive of Sviatlana Paulenka.

© S. A. Paulenka, text, 2026

© Illustrations and cover created by S. A. Paulenka using Nano Banana. Commercial use of the images is allowed in accordance with the service terms, 2026

© The MIRSVETA project, design, 2026

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IN PLACE OF A PREFACE

Inside each of us lives a wise one

· · ·

Inside each human being lives a wise one. Calm. Patient. Always ready to help.

— Kumari

This book begins with a simple but deep question: what does it mean to be human? What hides behind our thoughts, our feelings, our actions? Why do some people find harmony, and others lose themselves in endless searching?

These are not merely philosophical exercises. They are keys to understanding your own nature, your place in the world, your part in something larger than yourself.

Inside each of us lives a wise one. An inner voice that knows the answers to every question that can be asked. But most of the time this voice is drowned out — by the noise of the outside world, by fear and doubt and the expectations of others. This book is an attempt to hear that voice, to make friends with it, and to learn to trust it.

Who Kumari is

In this book the inner wise one takes shape as a living person — a woman named Kumari. She is fifty, though she looks thirty-five. She holds a PhD in psychology and works as a therapist and spiritual teacher. Before psychology she spent many years at a metallurgical plant — beginning as a process engineer and eventually heading one of its departments. She does not give interviews to glossy magazines and does not gather crowds of followers. She simply lives, and now and then she talks with the people who come to her.

Kumari speaks in a soft but certain voice — like an old friend who knows everything about you and is ready to share both joys and difficulties. She does not teach you how to live. Instead, she helps you ask the right questions and find the answers inside yourself.

Science and spirituality: two wings of one bird

The modern world tends to put these two into opposite corners, treating them as enemies. They are not. They complement each other.

Neuroscience reveals the astonishing mechanisms of the brain: how thoughts shape reality, how emotions affect health, how habits change through neuroplasticity. And the old spiritual traditions have been saying the same things — only in different words, for thousands of years. On these pages the two streams meet, and together they make a fuller picture.

How this book came to be

This story was told to me by one person. He came to me after fifteen years of searching — he had read hundreds of books, passed through spiritual schools, tried teachings and techniques. Inside him there was what modern psychology gives the polite name of “burnout,” but which was in fact a deep, quiet emptiness — the emptiness of a man who has stopped understanding who he is or why he is alive.

For nine days he drove to me. After that, for many months — he phoned, he wrote, he came back. From these conversations of ours the book took shape. I wrote them down right away, after each meeting. He did not object, but he asked me one thing: take out the name and the recognisable details. I called him Alex, because I had promised him anonymity. Some of the details I have changed; the essence of his path I have preserved precisely. And I must confess: much of what “I” say in this book is not only me. It is the voices of dozens of people who came to me with similar questions, to whom I gave similar answers. So Alex is both one particular person and many. And, perhaps, in part — you.

Which is why there are two voices in this book. One is mine — in this preface and in the essay that comes before the main story. The other is Alex’s — in the conversations themselves. Don’t be unsettled when they switch. There are not two authors. There is one conversation, told from two sides.

How to read this book

This is not a collection of ready-made solutions, and not a how-to. Life is too complicated for templates. This is an invitation to think.

Read slowly. After each conversation you will find a short inset — a practice, or questions to sit with. Don’t skim them; try actually to do them. You can agree with what is written here, or you can argue. What matters is that you keep asking questions and looking for your own answers.

Read as if you were sitting in a warm kitchen, in a quiet house, talking with someone close, knowing for certain that you are heard. No pressure. Only the conversation.

· · ·

Let yourself sink into these conversations. Let Kumari be your guide. And let yourself become the one you actually can be.

With love and gratitude.

ESSAY · PROLOGUE
KUMARI

The Birth of a Goddess

How one little girl in red called me onto the path — and why this story matters to you Before the main story begins, read this short essay.

It opens what the book is built for — and why there are thirty-two conversations and a thirty-third.

CONTENTS OF THE ESSAY

What this essay is about

I. The girl in red

How I saw her, and why I wept

II. What the living goddesses are

The Nepali tradition I knew nothing about at the time

III. Goddesses in their souls remain children

Life in the palace, and the difficult descent

IV. Thirty-two signs of perfection

Battis Lakshan — the ancient portrait of a whole human being

V. Six numbers thirty-two

Body, teeth, spine, tree of life, degrees of initiation, signs of greatness

VI. Stepping into the thirty-third

Why the path ends where the age of Christ begins

VII. Darjeeling. The mural on the wall

How the goddess came out to meet me — now grown

VIII. Why I told you this

A letter to you, reader

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1. The girl in red

· · ·

Sometimes the soul recognizes its own before the mind has caught up to what just happened.

— An old observation

I’ll tell you how it all began. Not to talk about myself, but so that you understand: the name of this book wasn’t my choice. I was led to it.

This was long before I became a psychologist. In those years I was still working at a metallurgical plant. I had started as a process engineer; by then I was heading a department. I wore business suits and made decisions that affected people’s lives and paycheques. From the outside, my life looked successful. Inside, it was quiet and uneasy — that quiet uneasiness in which so many live, the ones who have “nothing in particular to complain about.”

One day I went to a personal-development training. Not a spiritual retreat — just an ordinary, secular workshop, the sort there are many of, and which one exactly doesn’t matter now. What matters is what happened to me there, on one of the days.

The exercise that changed everything

They gave us a simple exercise. They said: in a moment, several photographs of children will appear on the screen — boys and girls, different peoples, different faces. Each of you must choose one child — the one who most resembles your inner child. The one who calls to you.

I prepared myself to compare carefully — someone’s eyes, someone’s expression, someone’s gaze. I switched on, as I usually did, my analytical mind.

But when one face appeared on the screen, my mind never had time to compare anything.

It was a little girl. In a heavy, ceremonial scarlet dress. A dark headdress. Enormous dark eyes. On her forehead — a painted “third eye,” gold, with a red drop at its centre. The child’s face was serious, unsmiling. And there was something in that gaze that made something inside me turn over. Not “I think she’s beautiful.” Not “what an interesting photograph.” But — this is me. This is me.

And tears poured down on their own. Silent. I didn’t even understand I was crying until the woman next to me handed me a tissue.

I didn’t know who this girl was. I didn’t know what her dress meant. I knew not a single word from the Nepali tradition, and I had never in my life seen this face before.

But something inside me — the very thing this book calls the wise one who lives within — recognised her. Recognised her, and wept for her a long time.

The girl I saw on the screen — and myself, as a child

A resemblance that became a sign at the very beginning of the path

· · ·

A mirror I didn’t expect to look into

Then, during the same exercise, they asked us to show each other our own childhood photographs. I took mine out — a simple portrait: me, about five years old, a serious little girl with large eyes and a ribbon in her hair. My neighbour, the one who had handed me the tissue, looked at my photograph, then at the still-open portrait of the girl in red on the screen, and said softly: “Look at that. You’re the same face.”

I leaned in. It was true. Not just similar — as if drawn by the same hand. The same tilt of the head, the same unsmiling, serious look, the same shade of something familiar in the face. And — most of all — the same expression in the eyes: a child who sees more than her years should let her see.

It wasn’t fear, and it wasn’t mysticism. It was recognition. I was looking at a stranger’s child from the other side of the world and seeing myself. And in that moment, for the first time in my life, I felt that I had something of my own — something I had never named to anyone, but which had lived inside me from the very beginning. And now that something stood in front of me, in a child’s red dress, looking straight into my grown-up life.

The name I learned afterwards

Only later, at home, did I find out who this girl was. Kumari — the living goddess of Nepal. A little girl into whose body, according to ancient belief, a great goddess descends for a time. Presidents and ministers bow before her. She wears only red. The sign of a third eye is painted on her forehead. She lives in a special house and barely touches the ground, because gods do not walk on earth.

I read this and wept again — now from a feeling almost childish in its simplicity: “So that’s who called me.”

I didn’t yet know everything I would learn later. That the word — kumari — means in Sanskrit simply “maiden,” “the pure one.” That the tradition is many centuries old. That the Nepali living goddess has her own strict path: she is chosen as a young child and sent back to ordinary life as soon as she comes of age. I knew none of that. I only knew that my own life had changed that day.

Several years later I left the plant. Quietly, at first, without any grand declarations. I began studying psychology by correspondence, in the evenings, without leaving my work. Then, little by little, I started working with people. First with friends, then with whoever was brought to me. I never once called this a “spiritual path” — that word would have felt too grand to me then. I called it simply: “I am, at last, doing what my soul leans toward.”

But the name that became my second name was given to me that day, at the training. I didn’t choose it. I was led to it by tears and one photograph.

KEY THOUGHT

Sometimes our soul recognises its own before the mind has caught up to what just happened. If you have had moments like that — an image, a phrase, a face, a melody, after which you quietly wept and could not explain why — these are not foolishness. This is the voice of the wise one inside you. It always speaks first through recognition. Only afterwards do we, its grown-up keepers, slowly learn to hear it.

2. What the living goddesses are

· · ·

“Kumari” in Sanskrit simply means a maiden, a girl, the pure one.

— From the Nepali tradition

After what happened at the training, I began to read. I wanted to understand the tradition I had felt before I knew it existed. Here is what I found.

There is one country on earth where a goddess is worshipped not as a statue, not as an image on an icon, not as a legend, but as a living person who breathes, blinks, and sometimes wants to sleep. The country is Nepal. The goddess is a little girl named Kumari.

Kumari is not a personal name. It is a title and a state. Living goddesses are chosen from ordinary girls in particular families, and they remain Kumari until they come of age. Then the goddess “leaves,” and the girl returns to ordinary life. Another girl is chosen in her place. This has been going on for many centuries.

The goddess the king offended

The tradition goes back to the Malla dynasty, kings who ruled the Kathmandu valley between the twelfth and the eighteenth centuries. Each of these kings had the same patron deity — the goddess Taleju, a fierce and beautiful form of the great mother goddess.

Legend tells that one of the last kings of the dynasty, Jaya Prakash Malla, used to play dice with the goddess herself at night — she would appear to him in her true, dazzling form. But one evening the king grew distracted by her beauty. Instead of attending to the game, desire flared in his heart. He reached for her — and she vanished.

Soon afterwards he heard her voice. The goddess told him she would never again appear to him in her former shape, because he had committed a great wrong by trying to seduce her. But if the king wished to make amends, he was to build a temple in which she would live from then on — in the body of a little girl from a simple family. A girl with no shade of desire, no shade of greed. Pure.

That, the legend says, is how the tradition was born. A god refuses to appear to those who look at the sacred with eyes of lust — and agrees to live only in one who is pure. This thought will be important to the whole of our book. Let us hold on to it.

The girl in whom a goddess lives

Kumari are chosen from the Newar people — the indigenous community of the Kathmandu valley — and most often from the Shakya clan. This is the very clan to which Siddhartha Gautama, who became the Buddha, belonged. Kumari is honoured by Buddhists and Hindus alike: she is one of those rare points where two great traditions meet and bow to a single child.

It is believed that the goddess herself descends into the body of the chosen girl and stays there until the first drop of blood. Any bleeding, any serious injury, and above all the first menstruation, mean that the goddess has left this body. So a Kumari is always a girl who has not yet come of age. Her divinity is fragile and temporary by its very nature.

Before the living goddess, the highest officers of the state bow. By an old custom it was Kumari herself who each year blessed the king, placing a mark on his forehead — and this blessing, in effect, granted him the right to rule for one more year. Even now, when Nepal no longer has a monarchy, the president and the prime minister come to Kumari for her blessing, touching her feet.

KEY THOUGHT

Kumari is not “a little girl pretending to be a goddess.” It is an ancient idea: that the divine is able to live inside an ordinary person — but only as long as that person is pure, untouched by greed and fear. The goddess is not somewhere up in the sky. The goddess is right here, in the room, and you can bring her tea.

3. Goddesses in their souls remain children

· · ·

To become a living goddess is a great honour — and at the same time a difficult, decidedly unfairytale fate. It is important to say this honestly, without gilding. And this is the part of the story I looked at most carefully when I read it first — because I felt: there is something here about me as well.

Life in the palace

The chosen girl is settled in a separate house — Kumari Ghar, the goddess’s palace. Crowds flow there without stopping: people bring her their illnesses, their anxieties, their requests for health and good fortune. From her face, from her gestures, priests and pilgrims read omens — the goddess’s calm is a good sign; tears or trembling foretell trouble.