The week they called me the dancer

A book became a doorway

In January 2025, an idea I had first encountered while reading Think Like a Monk stopped being only an idea. The book made monastic life feel less like a distant symbol and more like a serious experiment in attention. I searched online, found Bhaktivedanta Manor near London, and discovered its seven-day Be a Monk Challenge.

The official invitation was simple: step away from ordinary distractions, live in a spiritual community and experience its practices from the inside. I arrived curious rather than certain. I was not trying to borrow an identity. I wanted to know what a week organised around devotion, discipline and service might reveal about the way I was living.

“The Monk is not the part of me that withdraws from life. It is the part that remembers the essence and returns ready to serve.”

Before sunrise, the room was already alive

We woke at four in the morning. At that hour the mind has not yet rebuilt all of its usual arguments. We entered the morning programme for meditation, singing and dancing, repeating the sacred names—Hare Krishna, Hare Rama—until the sound became less like something I was performing and more like a current carrying the whole room.

Kirtan is shared, call-and-response devotional singing. What surprised me was its joy. I had expected monastic discipline to feel mainly severe and silent; instead, devotion arrived with rhythm, movement and people fully willing to sing. I love dancing, and I did not miss one. Tiredness could be present, but it did not have to make the decision.

Service gave the philosophy hands

The week was not built only from meditation and discussion. We walked through the gardens, took quiet time alone, cleaned and cared for the spaces around us, and served at the cow sanctuary. I fed the cows, cleaned their area and helped make their beds. The work was ordinary, physical and strangely peaceful. Care stopped being a beautiful word and became straw, food, patience and attention.

Another day we travelled into London and volunteered to distribute food to people experiencing homelessness. The Manor's own accounts describe this service through Food for All as part of the challenge. Moving from the quiet grounds into the speed and hardness of the city made the lesson immediate: spirituality that never reaches another person can become another form of self-absorption.

The most delicious food of my life

We ate sitting on the floor for the whole week. The food was prasadam: vegetarian food prepared with devotion, offered to Krishna and then shared. The Manor explains it as sanctified food, but my first understanding was more direct—it was some of the most delicious food I had ever eaten.

Perhaps hunger after an early start sharpened every flavour. Perhaps it was the care in the cooking, the simplicity of sitting together, or the fact that the meal was received rather than consumed between other tasks. Whatever the reason, eating became part of the practice. Gratitude was not a sentence before the food; it was the atmosphere around it.

A night of music and new friendship

One evening we went into London to sing and play through the night. The mantra moved through streets that normally carried traffic, advertisements and hurried conversations. I learned to play one of the kirtan instruments, badly at first and then with enough rhythm to join the group. Nobody asked for a polished performance. Participation was the point.

I met new friends because we had shared more than information. We had woken in darkness, worked, eaten, served, walked, sung and laughed together. Community formed through repeated presence. For one week, life became smaller in possessions and larger in relationship.

What I carried through the gate

On the final day, one of the monks gave me a name that made everyone smile: the dancer. I had not missed a kirtan or an invitation to move. Even at four in the morning, while part of me was still waking up, another part was already happy to be there.

Then he gave me a second image. He said I was like a swan that could drink the essence and leave behind what was unnecessary. I did not hear that as permission to collect only the pleasant parts of a tradition. I heard it as a responsibility to recognise what was true, practise it sincerely and carry it into the life I actually had to live.

I left Bhaktivedanta Manor without becoming a monk, but with a clearer understanding of the monk within the Spartan Monk Method. The Monk is not a costume or an escape from the world. It is the capacity to simplify, serve, rejoice and remember what matters when the noise returns.