Бесплатный фрагмент - Conversations with Kumari

S V I A T L A N A P A U L E N K A

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.

ABOUT THIS BOOK
Synopsis

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

© Chapter illustrations, 2026

© The MIRSVETA project, design, 2026

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

section one

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.

SECTION TWO

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.

SECTION THREE

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.

Kumari’s life is hedged about with rules. She wears only red — the colour of power and divinity. Her hair is gathered into a particular topknot, and on her forehead is painted a “fiery eye” — the symbol of spiritual sight, of seeing more than ordinary eyes see. The goddess barely touches the ground: gods, it is said, do not walk on earth. From her palace she is carried out on special litters or in a palanquin, and she leaves her house only for the great festivals, a few times a year.

In this is both the beauty and the sorrow of the tradition. A child is worshipped — but the child is deprived of an ordinary childhood: free play with friends, an ordinary school, the right simply to run barefoot in the yard.

When the goddess leaves

Sooner or later the day comes when the goddess departs from the body of the girl. And then the hardest part begins. Yesterday’s living goddess, before whom presidents bowed, becomes overnight an ordinary teenager. She has to learn to walk on the ground — literally, and in every other sense. To master what others mastered over years: school, friendships, household life, arguments, queues, the ordinary awkwardness of being human.

Many former Kumari have spoken of how difficult this descent is. Used to the world coming to them with a bow, used to every wish being a command, they later struggle to live among equals. That is why it is said that goddesses in their souls often remain children. The body grows up, but inside — forever that girl in the palace.

And yet there are other stories. One former Kumari finished university and became a software engineer. Others write books, defend children’s rights, live full, mature lives. Which is to say: the descent from the throne is not a sentence. It is simply another, human, path. And perhaps the most important one.

I read these stories and every word was about me. I had no temple. I had a department head’s office at a metallurgical plant — my own little palace. People came to me too, with requests and decisions. And my face — the gaze, the posture, the tone — was read by them as a forecast too: is the boss stern today, or favourable? I had my own crown — a position, responsibility, status. And I had my own descent from the throne ahead of me — a voluntary leaving for something far quieter, far less commanding. And that descent was hard.

I am that very “grown-up Kumari” the Nepalese talk about. Not the one who stayed forever in the palace in her soul. The one who passed through the throne and came down. And who now teaches others to do the same.

KEY THOUGHT

The fate of Kumari encodes the fate of each of us. First — childhood, in which the world seems to turn around you. Then — the inevitable descent from the throne: meeting a reality in which you are not the centre and not a god, but a person among people. And true maturity begins not on the throne but after it — when you learn to walk on the ground.

Only one who has come down can teach the descent. And that is my task in this book.

SECTION FOUR

Thirty-two signs of perfection

· · ·

“Kumari’s body is the dwelling of the divine. Therefore it must be perfect.”

— From a description of the Battis Lakshan rite

When a girl passes the first round — sturdy health, all her teeth, not a single scar, not a single birthmark, not a single drop of blood lost — the main trial awaits her. She is compared against an ancient list of thirty-two signs of perfection. In Nepali this list is called Battis Lakshan — “the thirty-two signs.”

The list is very old and very poetic. It describes not “beauty” in the modern sense but harmony — a correspondence between the body and certain ideal natural forms. The body is compared to a tree, the neck to a conch, the voice to the song of a bird. Here is roughly how the list sounds, in a free, careful rendering, with notes on what each sign means.

Battis Lakshan: the thirty-two signs of the goddess

01. A body like a banyan tree — slender, branching, deeply rooted; a sign of inner support and the bond between earth and sky.

02. Skin like a lotus petal — clear and tender; the lotus grows out of mud yet stays unstained.

03. A body without a single flaw — no scar, no spot — a sign of untouched wholeness.

04. Eyelashes like a cow’s — long and soft; the cow in this culture is the image of gentleness and generosity.

05. Eyes dark, deep, and clear — a gaze in which a stillness can be seen.

06. Brows thin and well-defined — clarity and composure of feature.

07. A neck like a conch — slender, with fine lines; the conch is an ancient sign of sacred sound.

08. A chest like a lion’s — a sign of fearlessness and dignity.

09. A voice soft and clear, like a bird’s — a sound that soothes rather than wounds.

10. A small, moist tongue — the sign of restrained, unchattering speech.

11. Black, straight hair — thick and healthy; a symbol of life force.

12. Hair curling to the right — with the sun’s direction — a sign of accord with the natural order.

13. Teeth white, even, with no gaps — wholeness and strength.

14. Long, slender arms — the capacity to give and to receive.

15. Tender, soft hands — hands that have known no roughness.

16. Tender, soft feet — feet that barely touched the ground.

17. Fingers and toes of beautiful shape — harmony even in the small things.

18. Thighs like a deer’s — lightness, grace, readiness to move.

19. Round, proportionate calves — steadiness and measure.

20. A body without any unpleasant smell — inner cleanness coming through to the outside.

21. Forty teeth, the full set — fullness — nothing lost.

22. A smooth, clear forehead — the place of the “third eye”, a sign of mind and peace.

23. A head of right, noble shape — the proper crown of the body.

24. Skin that gives off a soft radiance — inner light made visible to the eye.

25. Noble stature and bearing — dignity readable in the very posture.

26. A round seat in the lotus position — the ability to sit still and collected.

27. Calm at the sight of blood — a heart that did not flinch before the terrifying.

28. Fearlessness in the dark — one in whom there is no horror of the unknown.

29. Serenity amid noise and masks — inner silence that nothing from outside can shake.

30. Firmness of nature, like Vishnu’s — a steadiness on which one can lean.

31. Dignity and stateliness in conduct — the carriage of spirit that does not depend on circumstances.

32. A horoscope in tune with the ruler’s horoscope — the agreement of one’s destiny with the destiny of country and world.

A modern reader can easily take this list as a description of looks. But something else is encoded in it. Half the signs do not speak of the body at all but of the spirit: fearlessness before blood and the dark, serenity amid noise, firmness of nature, dignity, the accord of one’s own destiny with the destiny of the world.

In other words: the ancients did not choose the prettiest girl. They chose the one in whom wholeness of body and wholeness of spirit had come together. The one who could not be broken by fear. The thirty-two signs are an ancient portrait of a whole human being.

When I read this list for the first time, I laughed. Not because it was funny — because something inside me was unfolding. I have no banyan trees and no deer about me, of course. But “serenity amid noise,” “firmness of nature,” “the accord of one’s own destiny with the destiny of the world” — these are not about the body. These are about what we are all moving toward, each in our own way. And we are moving precisely through thirty-two “signs” — thirty-two inner qualities, thirty-two lessons.

KEY THOUGHT

The thirty-two signs are not a standard of beauty. They are an inventory of what wholeness is made of: a healthy body, a clear mind, a calm heart, fearlessness, and accord with one’s destiny. And — this is important — the main test for Kumari is not beauty, but a night without fear. The goddess is not the most beautiful one. The goddess is the one who did not flinch.

SECTION FIVE

Six numbers thirty-two

· · ·

“Numbers are the language in which the world speaks to itself.”

— Pythagorean tradition

When we first meet the number thirty-two in the Kumari tradition, it is easy to take it for chance. Well, thirty-two signs — it could have been thirty, or forty. But look more closely, and something strange becomes visible: this same number — thirty-two as a threshold beyond which something new opens — repeats across very different, unrelated traditions. As if different peoples, without ever conferring, all groped toward the same regularity. And the most striking thing is that you can see it in your own body, without opening any ancient books at all.

Let us gather here six such “numbers thirty-two.” Three of them live right inside our bodies — we carry them on ourselves every day, without noticing. The other three come from the great spiritual traditions. And then we’ll look at what all of them together are saying.

First. The thirty-two systems of the human body

Let’s begin with what is closest — with the body itself. A person doesn’t perceive themselves as a collection of separate organs. The body works in systems — coordinated “orchestras” of organs, each with its own task.

Anatomy usually names ten or twelve large systems: skeletal, muscular, nervous, circulatory, respiratory, digestive, endocrine, immune, excretory, reproductive, integumentary, lymphatic. But look more closely, and each of these breaks down into subsystems — the fine functional systems that sustain human life are counted in considerably greater numbers. In the tradition I lean on here, one speaks of thirty-two systems of vital activity — thirty-two “workers” who, without rest, without gratitude, without a single day off, hold our life together.

Behind the simple thought “the body never lies” there stands, as you see, a whole architecture. Thirty-two systems — these are thirty-two ways in which life sustains itself. And almost all of them work without our knowing. We do not control the heart, give no orders to the liver, run no committee for the immune system. A perfect mechanism already labours inside us. All that is left to us is not to get in its way — and, now and then, to listen.

The thirty-two signs of the goddess and the thirty-two systems of the body are, in essence, the same portrait: the portrait of a whole, well-functioning human being. From the outside — thirty-two signs of harmony. Inside — thirty-two mechanisms of life.

Second. Thirty-two teeth — eight generations of ancestors

Let us look at the body again — and again we find the same number, but in an unexpected turn.

An adult human being has exactly thirty-two teeth. This may look like simple anatomy. But ancient medical and esoteric traditions — Slavic, Vedic, Tibetan — almost in chorus say: the thirty-two teeth are not arbitrary. Each tooth is linked to one of your ancestors. One tooth — for each forebear of the eight generations standing behind your shoulders.

Count it for yourself. You have two parents — that is the first generation behind you. They had four grandparents of yours, the second generation. After that — eight great-grandparents, sixteen great-great-grandparents, thirty-two great-great-great-grandparents. And there you are, at the first rung where the ancestors already number thirty-two. These thirty-two direct ancestors of the fifth generation are, in the tradition, the “root circle” — those whom your body remembers, even if your memory has kept nothing of them.

And if you unfold the count further — every next generation doubles the number, and by the eighth generation the ancestors run into the hundreds. The old sages reasoned this way: the body keeps memory not endlessly. In the teeth, in their number, eight generations along one maternal and one paternal line are imprinted — the masculine and feminine lattice of the lineage, along which life flows. And each tooth is a “place” where one of them lives.

In Slavic folk medicine this was said almost directly: if a young person’s teeth ache without visible cause, it means someone in their distant kin is “unsettled”; one must remember the lineage, say the names, restore the connection. In the Vedic tradition — the same idea in other words: teeth as the “gates of the lineage,” through which we receive our inheritance — both physical and spiritual.

Modern science partly confirms this. Epigenetics — the science of how an ancestor’s experience is recorded in our biology — has shown that the traumas, the hungers, the fears of a great-grandmother or great-grandfather can affect the health of a great-grandchild through biochemical “marks” on the genes. Not the genes themselves, but the way they are read, is inherited along the line. The body really does remember the lineage.

Here is a thought worth pausing on: thirty-two teeth are not separate little bones. They are thirty-two vessels, in each of which one ancestor lives. When we smile, we smile with our whole lineage. When we weep, we weep with the same mouth our great-grandmothers wept with. The thirty-two teeth are yet another way in which the body tells us: “You are not alone. Behind you stands a line.”

Third. Thirty-two vertebrae — the ladder of Kundalini

If the teeth are the horizontal of the lineage, then the next “32” in our body is the vertical. The very one without which a person can neither stand nor walk nor reach upward.

The spine. Count all the vertebrae of an adult human being, including those fused into the sacrum and the coccyx, and you get thirty-three. But if you count only the ones along which “living movement” travels — flexible, mobile, separated by joints and ligaments — you get exactly thirty-two vertebrae. And, particularly important for our theme: the thirty-third turns out to be the atlas, the topmost cervical vertebra on which the skull rests. It is unlike the others. It has no body of its own; it does not resemble any of the rest in shape. It is the threshold through which the spine enters the head.

This is not just an anatomical curiosity. The eastern traditions — Indian yoga, Tibetan Tantra — long ago described the spine as a path of ascent. Along it, they say, rises the life energy that India calls Kundalini, literally “the coiled serpent.” She sleeps at the base of the spine, in the sacrum, and when a person is ready, she begins a slow journey upward — vertebra by vertebra, step by step.

The classical description of this path names seven main “stations” — the chakras, the points where the energy lingers longest: at the coccyx, the sacrum, the belly, the heart, the throat, between the brows, the crown. But between these large stations there are many intermediate ones — each vertebra through which Kundalini passes becomes its own small step. And there are exactly thirty-two of those. The thirty-third is not a vertebra, not a part of the “ladder.” It is the atlas. It is the entrance to the skull. It is the place where the spine ends and the brain begins.

Do you see the pattern? The energy passes thirty-two vertebrae — everything that can be passed bodily, in matter, step by step. And the thirty-third — the atlas — is no longer a step. It is a passage. It is a step out of the body into something larger. A step from the top rung of the ladder to where there are no more rungs.

Kundalini, rising up the thirty-two vertebrae, walks the same road Alex walks in this book. Thirty-two is the ladder. Thirty-three is the exit. Only in the case of Kundalini, that ladder is built into our very body, into our very posture. Every time we straighten up and reach with the crown of the head, we repeat that ancient gesture: ascent by thirty-two steps to what lies beyond the ladder.

And perhaps one more thing. Notice: in the case of teeth, and in the case of vertebrae — thirty-two is not a random number. It is a number laid into our very bodily structure. We carry it on ourselves. We carry both the horizontal count of lineage — thirty-two teeth — and the vertical count of ascent — thirty-two vertebrae. If a human being were a temple, the number thirty-two would be written into its walls and into its foundation.

Fourth. The thirty-two paths of the Tree of Life

Let us move now to a very different tradition — to Kabbalah, the mystical teaching that grew out of Judaism and later entered many esoteric currents. At its heart is the image of the Tree of Life.

The Tree of Life is a diagram that describes how the invisible, infinite source manifests itself in the world. It consists of ten spheres — they are called sefirot, “emanations,” steps along which the divine grows ever denser and closer to the earth. These ten spheres are joined by twenty-two paths — channels along which the force flows between them. By the number of letters in the ancient alphabet with which, according to legend, the world was created.

And here is the key count of all Kabbalah: ten spheres plus twenty-two paths make thirty-two. They are called precisely that — the thirty-two paths of Wisdom. Old texts speak of them almost bodily: “the thirty-two teeth of the Great Face,” “the thirty-two nerves going forth from the Divine Mind.” A wonderful echo of the two previous sections, isn’t it? Kabbalists, who knew nothing of our Russian word for vertebrae and nothing of epigenetics, spoke of God in the language of the body. They felt what we feel.

It is believed that, by walking all thirty-two paths, a person walks the whole route — from the dense earthly point at the foot of the Tree to its summit, to unity with the Source.

Notice: here too, thirty-two is not the destination but the road in its entirety. The whole way upward. Thirty-two steps of ascent.

Fifth. Thirty-two degrees of initiation

The fifth example comes from the tradition of Masonic degrees of initiation — more precisely, from its branch known as the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite. Let us not go deep into the history of the brotherhood; what matters for us is one detail, the one that scholars of symbols noticed long ago.

In this system, the student’s path is built as a ladder of thirty-two consecutive degrees — steps. Each next step assumes that the previous has been passed; you cannot skip. And the thirty-second degree carries an expressive name — “Prince of the Royal Secret.” Which is to say: the thirty-second step is the summit of training, the last rung that can be reached by effort and labour.

Scholars of symbols noticed long ago that these thirty-two degrees correspond directly to the thirty-two paths of the Kabbalistic Tree. One and the same idea in two garments: thirty-two steps walked by anyone who wants to rise from the earth to the summit.

Sixth. Thirty-two signs of a great human being

And finally, the sixth example — the one closest to our theme. In the Buddhist tradition there is an ancient idea of “the thirty-two marks of a great human being.” It is believed that the body of one who is born for the highest fate — to become the Buddha, the awakened one — bears upon it thirty-two special marks. In Sanskrit they are called precisely that: lakshana. The same word as in the Nepali Battis Lakshan.

This is not coincidence but direct kinship. The list of signs of Kumari grew from the same ancient soil as the list of marks of a great being. The idea is one: the highest does not come into a random vessel. It comes where everything is already prepared — where thirty-two conditions have come together. Thirty-two signs are signs of readiness.

BRINGING THE SIX TOGETHER

Thirty-two systems of the body — the portrait of a living, well-functioning human being.

Thirty-two teeth — the horizontal of lineage, eight generations of ancestors living in our body.

Thirty-two vertebrae — the vertical of ascent, the ladder of Kundalini from the sacrum to the atlas.

Thirty-two paths of the Tree of Life — the whole route of ascent from earth to summit.

Thirty-two degrees of initiation — the ladder walked by effort, step after step.

Thirty-two signs of greatness — the signs of readiness to receive the highest.

Six traditions, which knew nothing of one another, say one thing: thirty-two is the fullness of the path. It is everything that can be covered by effort. It is the last step of the ladder. The most astonishing thing of all is that three of these six systems live right inside our body — we carry the number thirty-two on ourselves from the moment we are born. And more astonishing still: here and there — everywhere — there is a thirty-third step, which is already beyond the ladder. About this — in the next section.

SECTION SIX

Stepping into the thirty-third

· · ·

“Thirty-two is the ladder. Thirty-three is what begins when the ladder has ended.”

— From this book

We come now to the most important thing. If thirty-two is the fullness of the path, the entire ladder, then what is thirty-three?

Thirty-three is a step from the topmost rung. Not another little step. The ladder is finished. From here on you either stand in place, or you step out to where there are no more rungs.

The age in which everything was decided

Christian tradition holds the number thirty-three as the age of Christ — the age in which the most important things were accomplished: the way of the cross, death, and resurrection. Not at thirty. Not at forty. Not in old age. At thirty-three. On the threshold of what, by ordinary human measure, is called the prime of life.

And the Masonic ladder we spoke of also does not end at the thirty-second degree. Above all those thirty-two steps there is a thirty-third — but its singularity is that it cannot be “earned” by ordinary climbing. The thirty-two degrees are walked by effort and labour. The thirty-third is not a step in the same series. It belongs to another dimension: one does not reach it, one is brought into it. It is not a continuation of the ladder; it is what lies beyond it.

Do you see the repeating pattern? Thirty-two is the limit of what can be taken by effort. Thirty-three is what begins when effort has been spent. The age of accomplishment. The step beyond the ladder.

Why this is, in fact, the metaphor of awakening

Recall our whole book. What is it about? About a man who walked upward on the ladder for fifteen years. Three hundred books, two cults, countless practices, techniques, teachings. He passed, it seems, every step that can be passed. He was a model climber. And he still remained empty.

Because he was stuck on the thirty-second step. At the top of the ladder. He had gathered all thirty-two signs — every piece of knowledge, every page he had read, every “correctness” — and could not understand why the summit had turned out to be empty.

And the answer is simple. The ladder was never meant to bring him to the goal. The ladder only takes you as far as its top. After that — not a step upward, but a step of a different kind. The very step that Kumari calls by various names in the book: “stop being a star,” “agree to be no one,” “stop searching for a special state.” The step where you stop accumulating and start letting go. Where you do not add a thirty-third sign to yourself but step out beyond all counting.

Awakening is not a thirty-third step on the same ladder. It is the end of the ladder as such. Thirty-two is everything one can do, preparing. Thirty-three is what happens once the preparation is finished and you finally just live.

Thirty-two conversations and a thirty-third

This is why the book you are holding is built the way it is. In it there are thirty-two chapter-conversations — and a thirty-third.

The thirty-two conversations are the whole ladder. Every step that Alex walks together with Kumari: imprints and shame, body and boundaries, forgiveness and humility, fear and the search for meaning. This is the full route of inner work — those very thirty-two paths, thirty-two signs, thirty-two systems. Everything that can be passed by labour and honesty.

And the thirty-third chapter is not a step. It is the step beyond the ladder. It is that quiet, almost uneventful chapter where there is nothing left to attain, where all that remains is to live — and that turns out to be enough. The age of Christ. The Prince of the Royal Secret. Stepping into the thirty-third.

KEY THOUGHT

32 is everything that can be passed by effort: knowledge, practices, steps, signs. The limit of preparation.

33 is what begins beyond the limit of effort: awakening, maturity, the agreement to simply be. The age of accomplishment.

SECTION SEVEN

Darjeeling. The mural on the wall

· · ·

“When you have walked your ladder — the world comes out to meet you.”

— From travel notes

I promised to return to my own story — and I return. Because any true story has not only a beginning but also that quiet moment when the circle closes. In my case that moment happened in India, in a small mountain town called Darjeeling.

The town that called me

For a long time I did not know why I was being drawn there. For several years in a row — as if out of the air — that name kept surfacing: Darjeeling. I would happen to open an article about it. Some acquaintance, out of nowhere, would mention it. In dreams I saw mountains so much like the ones around Darjeeling that I would wake with the feeling I had already been there.

I would shrug it off. I had my work, my clients, a life that did not exactly include trips to Indian mountain towns by some incomprehensible call. But the town did not retreat. It kept calling.

And in one particular year that coincided with a particular time. I felt, just then, that something inside me had completed. I cannot say “achievement” — the word is wrong. Rather: the circle had closed on that long inner work that had begun on the day of the training, in front of the photograph of the girl in red. All the thirty-two inner steps I needed to take had turned out to be taken. And I felt: it is time.

I packed a suitcase and went.

A town in clouds

Darjeeling lies high in the mountains, near the border with Nepal, on the foothills of the Himalayas. Every morning the clouds float in, and for a few hours the streets of the old town turn into foggy corridors where sounds are heard before the people making them are seen. The air smells of tea and damp. There are few inhabitants, hardly any noisy tourists — Darjeeling is not a loud place.

On the very first day I wandered the streets without a plan, without a map. I walked where my feet took me. Now and then I stopped — just looked into the fog, and listened to footsteps dying away inside it. In this town it is very easy not to be in a hurry.

On the third or fourth day — I had already lost count — I was walking along one of the old streets, climbing uphill, and turned a corner. And there, on the wall of an old house, I saw her.

The goddess who came out to meet me

On the wall was a mural. Large, painted in vivid colours — red, gold, blue. On it: a woman. Not a girl. A grown woman. With a direct, clear gaze, in traditional red robes, with the mark of the third eye on her forehead. And in her bearing there was not a shadow of childish fragility — she stood with that calm dignity that belongs to those who have walked their own path to the end.

It was her. Kumari. But not the small one whose face I had once wept over at the training. The grown one. The one who had passed through the throne, descended from it, and now stood firmly on the earth.

The mural on the wall of an old house in Darjeeling

Kumari — no longer the girl in the palace, but the woman who has walked her path

· · ·

I stood before the mural and for a long time could not take my eyes from it. I did not weep as I had wept the first time. Those had been tears of recognition: “This is me.” Now there was nothing to weep about. I stood silently — like a person to whom, from a great distance, the one they had long been waiting for has finally come out to meet them. And everything fell into place.

In that moment I understood what had happened. On that first day — many years ago — I had seen on a screen a little girl in red. And then I had been told: “Recognise. This lives inside you.” And now, in Darjeeling, on the wall of an old house — I was being told: “And now you have grown up. You can step onto the earth. You can walk and work.”

It was a sign. Not mystical — very human, very warm. As if life, after a long inspection, had finally said to me: “Well — go, then.”

A second image, side by side

There is one more thing I want to tell you, because it became part of the same sign. A few months before my trip, friends and I went to a Holi festival — the Indian festival of colours, when people throw bright powders at one another and laugh. I have a photograph from that day. I am laughing, my hair is loose, my face and clothes are covered in pink and yellow and ochre dust. I look nothing like a goddess in red robes. I look like a woman in her real life, drenched in colour and joy.

Sviatlana at a Holi festival, a few months before the trip to Darjeeling

A woman dropped into ordinary, colourful, laughing life

· · ·

And here is what is striking. On the Darjeeling mural, beside the grown Kumari, there are figures of ordinary local women — laughing women, their faces lit up, dabbed with festive paint, with golden rings in their noses, dressed in everyday clothes. One of them, in the middle of the lower row of the mural, with a wide-open laughing mouth, looked uncannily like me on that Holi photograph. The same loose hair. The same laugh that you can hear through the picture. Even the same dust on the face.

So the mural was showing me both at once: Kumari grown up in the upper register, and the ordinary laughing woman next to her in the lower one. The goddess and the descent of the goddess into earthly life. Both, on the same wall. Both, in the same person.

This was, perhaps, the most important moment of the whole trip. I had felt, all my life, that I carried something heavy on myself — a responsibility I had not chosen, like a goddess in a child’s body. That was what my childhood tears had been about, in front of the photograph of the little girl in red: I had recognised her, because we had carried the same weight. And in Darjeeling it was, at last, made clear: the weight may be set down. You may live a colourful, laughing, ordinary human life. You may step onto the earth. The thirty-two steps of the ladder have been walked. The descent has happened. You are an awakened human being now, not a goddess in a cage.

From the call to the answer

I returned home a different person. I no longer doubted that my work had a name. That the path I had stumbled onto once at the training had not been an accident. That the tears in front of the girl in red had been a promise — and the promise had been kept at the very moment I was ready to receive it.

The book you are holding was born out of that path. Out of those tears, and out of that mural. Between the two — many quiet years of inner work, and the thirty-two steps I had to walk in order to stop being “the department head in her red work-chair” and become simply Kumari, who talks with those who come to her.

KEY THOUGHT

Sometimes our path is sewn into us long before we know about it. Life first gives us a call — a photograph, a name, a melody, a strange recognition after which we want to weep. And then, once we have walked our own ladder, the same life comes out to meet us and confirms: “Yes. That was it.”

If you have had a call like that in your life, and you have still not listened to it — perhaps it is time?

SECTION EIGHT

Why I told you this

· · ·

Dear reader, I am almost done. There is one last thing — the most important — left to say. Why I told you all of this at all.

I could have written a dry essay: here is the tradition of Kumari, here are the thirty-two signs, here are several numbers thirty-two from different cultures, here is the lovely idea of stepping into the thirty-third. I could have made a brief — and let you go on to the main book. Many authors do exactly that.

But I did not want to.

Because this whole book is not about theories. It is about the fact that inside an ordinary person lives a wise one, and in ordinary life there come moments when this wise one begins to speak. Sometimes — in words inside the head. Sometimes — in tears at a training. Sometimes — in a town that calls you for several years in a row. Sometimes — in a mural on the wall of an old house, which you walked past by chance.

And the main thought I want to bring across to you — not through theory but through my own story — is this: your call is already sounding. It may be quieter than mine. It may be different — not a photograph but a song; not a town but a person; not a mural but a single word, heard in passing. But it is there. In everyone.

The trouble of our age is that we have learned to drown it out. We are busy, we are tired, we are “not superstitious,” we are “realists.” But the call is not loud. It does not insist. It shows itself once, waits to see if we recognise — and if we do not, it withdraws and quietly waits for the next time.

· · ·

If at any one point in this essay you nodded — to yourself, not to me — then the wise one inside you has spoken. Do not let that slip past. Listen.