Okay so this is going to sound like a cliché. I know it is. But I need to say it anyway because it’s actually the beginning of everything.
I was 22, living in the Netherlands, making more than dutch salare average. I got the residency card. The big house. The relationship. The dog. The lifestyle that, from the outside, looks like you figured it out.
And I felt completely empty.
Not sad in any dramatic way. Not broken. Not obviously burned out. I was working, actually enjoying parts of the work. I was building something on social media that was growing fast. Hundreds of thousands of people were watching the things I made.
By every external metric, I was doing great.
But I would lie in bed too long in the mornings. Scroll too much. Have entire weeks pass where nothing actually landed. Not even the milestones, the trips, the moments that were supposed to feel like arrival. They’d happen and I’d think: okay. Good. And then the emptiness would come back.
“When your life is falling apart, at least you have a clear problem. When your life is technically working and something still feels wrong, that’s the kind of suffering that has no clean language.”
I tried the English frameworks. Anxiety. Burnout. Depression. None of them quite touched it. The productivity world told me I needed better habits. The wellness industry told me more breathwork. Therapy helped, genuinely, but still didn’t name the specific texture of what was missing.
What I was feeling wasn’t a technical problem with my routines. It was more like… spiritual air hunger. Like I was breathing but the air didn’t have enough in it.
Then I started reading closer to home
My family is Buryat-Russian – from Ulan-Ude, in Siberia, about 200 kilometers from the Mongolian border. My father is fully Buryat. My mother is half Buryat, half Slavic Russian. I crossed the border into Mongolia as a kid just to go shopping. Nothing exotic about it.
But when I was in Taiwan for university, surrounded by international students all chasing the same Western dream, the same version of success I’d been chasing, I got homesick in a way that surprised me. Not for Russia specifically. For something older. Something I couldn’t name yet.
So I started reading. Buryat history. Mongolian traditions. Folklore. And I kept running into this word: хийморь. Khiimori.
Most people translate khiimori as “wind horse.” That’s useful the way a doorway is useful, it gets you in. But it’s not the room. Khiimori is closer to: your vital force. Your inner lift. The thing that makes you feel carried by your life rather than dragged through it. It rises and falls. When it’s high, there’s momentum in you – moral, bodily, spiritual. When it’s low? You can keep performing your life long after you’ve stopped actually inhabiting it.
I remember reading about it and just sitting with it. Because there was this huge relief in having language for something I’d been circling for months. I’m not broken. My khiimori is low. And that has reasons. And there are specific practices, going back thousands of years, for raising it.
That’s not a small thing. That’s actually kind of everything, when you’ve been trying to figure out what’s wrong with a vocabulary that doesn’t have the right words.
Here’s what I want to be honest about
The understanding didn’t immediately fix anything. I went through a genuinely dark period, probably the darkest of my life. The emptiness got worse before I could see it clearly. My rheumatoid arthritis, which I’d had since I was 17, flared so badly I couldn’t walk properly some days.
My father took me to see a shaman, a family ritual we’d done before, but that I’d always treated as just a thing we do. Not something I was spiritually serious about. I went reluctantly. With the internal eye-roll of someone who thinks they’re too modern for this.
My arthritis improved. My mental state improved. Genuinely. I can’t explain it rationally and I’ve stopped trying to. I just know something shifted, and it led me to actually take my ancestral practices seriously for the first time. I started doing the practices properly. Praying to my ancestors. Meditating. Actually believing in it.
That’s when I felt my khiimori rising. I can describe it no better than that. It’s like warmth with momentum in it. Like waking up and actually being here, rather than performing here.
And then everything else started making sense
Over 130,000 people on Instagram alone were watching me share things about Mongolian and Buryat culture. And constantl, constantly, in my DMs: where do I go? Who do I book with? Where can I buy something real? And I had nothing honest to tell them.
I’d been to Mongolia myself. Done the tours. Paid decent money.The guide barely spoke English. The “included lunch” was at a gas station. The “Gobi Desert experience” was two sand dunes and a camel you paid extra to ride. Meanwhile nobody was explaining anything. The ger, the textiles, the ovoo we drove past, the songs the driver was singing, all just backdrop. Beautiful backdrop. But backdrop.
What I realized The gap between the Mongolia I was sharing in my content and the Mongolia people were actually being given when they showed up, it became impossible to sit with.
So I called my mongolian cousin Binderiya. Shared my thoughts and he agreed. I flew to Mongolia in 2 days. We drove 20h to a sacred mountain together, Dayan Derkh, and asked for a blessing. The answer was: smooth path. Start it. So we did.
This is what this blog is
Not travel content in the way travel content usually works. Not just “5 best things to do in Ulaanbaatar.” Not beautiful scenery with inspirational captions.
This is: here is what Mongolia and Mongol culture actually is. Here is what khiimori actually means. Here is what good travel into this culture looks like. Here are the objects and stories and people worth knowing about.
You came here because something recognized a word, or a feeling, or a question. The thing you’ve been calling restlessness, emptiness, “just needing a change”, it has an older name.
Your khiimori is calling. Come and see what that means.