I wanted to write something that was very entertaining to read. The hardest part of this novel [The Yoga of Max's Discontent] was how to make a deeply spiritual transformation journey page-turning and adventurous. That was the hardest part to crack for me.

The moment you enter Bhutan, you notice that there are no traffic lights. It is almost like you've stepped into a Shangri-La or a vortex of time 200 years ago. Those kinds of experiences are very much of the countryside of Bhutan, where people are truly happy in the sense of not creating and wanting more.

When I started on the path, too, I really thought I would become a yogi in a cave, but I didn't have clarity about my path. When I evolved in the ashram for six months, I learned a lot, but I realized that it was not my natural state of being. So, I came back to the world.

When I started, these [yoga] were very functional practices, as I said, productive to lose weight, or whatever, and now it has become a very spiritual kind of practice.

In the West, it is the opposite, like you are using these practices [meditation and yoga ] to further your ego by being more productive, being more this, and getting more out of your work and earning more money. In the East, the whole idea is that you are dissolving your essence through these practices.

Almost every yogi that appeared in the book [The Yoga of Max's Discontent] is either somebody I have seen and met and spoken to, or someone who is in my three degrees of separation - I know the source who talks to me about it so well that I believe his story.

Now, I think of my writing as having two foundations: entertainment and meaning. The meaning portion is really me trying to answer my questions. The entertainment aspect of it is how I make a story that can make people turn the pages.