Cory Larsen: Road to Shunya-Ta

Author’s Note on Shunya-Ta

Most people spend their whole lives fantasizing about burning it all down—quitting the job, selling the house, buying a one-way ticket somewhere far away. I actually did it. I’m not a saint, a guru, or some wide-eyed seeker of enlightenment. I am a fifty-two year old misfit that’s sick and tired of being sick and tired, stressed, eating bad food, and staring down the long, boring road of American middle age.

This isn’t a story about enlightenment wrapped in incense and smiling monks. It’s about what happens when you step off the map, ditch the safe story you’ve been telling yourself, and end up somewhere raw, uncomfortable, and very, very real.

I went looking for “modern Buddhism” with a camera and a backpack. Instead, I stumbled into something older, harder to swallow, and a lot less Instagrammable: Shunya-Ta—emptiness. Not the nothingness you fear at night, but the kind of emptiness that strips you bare and leaves you lighter.

If you’re looking for travel brochures, this isn’t it. If you’ve ever wanted to disappear, it might feel familiar.

~ Cory Larsen

Road to Shunya-Ta

By fifty-two, I was sick of America—or at least the version of America it had become. An unhealthy obsession with consumption and a job that paid enough to keep me trapped. I lived in a neighborhood where the houses all looked like polite clones, the bar down the street served beer colder than the conversations, and everyone seemed to be counting calories, dollars, and years until retirement.

I wasn’t dying—not yet—but I wasn’t really living either. And that was worse.

So one night, after a boring restaurant dinner and a couple of bourbons, I put everything on the market, gave away most of my furniture, and bought a one-way ticket to Bangkok. I told my friends I was making a documentary about modern Buddhism. They rolled their eyes, patted me on the back, and went back to their lives.

Bangkok was a punch in the mouth. The air tasted like diesel and frying garlic. Tuk-tuks swarmed like angry hornets, and every street corner smelled like something you wanted to eat and something you definitely didn’t. I sat on a plastic stool in the night market, sweating through my shirt, eating grilled chicken and rice that set my tongue on fire. It was glorious, ugly, chaotic—everything my American life wasn’t.

But Buddhism? The temples gleamed, monks posed for photos, incense curled lazily around tourists in cargo shorts. The chants were piped through microphones like a Top 40 hit. I filmed some of it, filled a few memory cards, but it all felt packaged, like religion with a gift shop. “Look at me, look how peaceful I am!” spewed out of the mouth of some random content creator. This didn’t feel right. Was this the face of modern Buddhism?

So I left. North, toward Chiang Mai, then further into the mountains, where the roads cracked into potholes and the jungle grew teeth. This wasn’t the salty and warm beaches of Phuket, this wasn’t the ever-moving energy of Bangkok, this was the jungle, baby. Raw and pure in its beautiful serenity. Cameras, modernity, the West’s fascination with “mindfulness.”  “Modern Buddhism?” That’s for tourists.

What followed wasn’t enlightenment with a capital E. It was days spent sitting alone in a quiet room, looking into myself with unfiltered eyes, listening to stories older than the temples themselves. Vedic hymns about fire and creation, tales of the Buddha that hadn’t been boiled down into fortune-cookie wisdom, and the idea of Shunya-Ta—emptiness not as nothing, but as everything.

At first, my mind fought back. The old trauma response of worry— Friends and family back home, patterns of the old self emerging in familiar and terrifying ways, — battles of war still waging. But slowly, the noise thinned. The silence wasn’t silence at all, but a vastness that didn’t need to be filled.

Eating sticky rice with my hands, drinking water that tasted faintly of rust, and swatting mosquitoes the size of helicopters. I filmed less and less. Eventually, not at all. The story I thought I came for—monks with smartphones, enlightenment in the digital age—didn’t matter anymore.

One morning at dawn, sitting silently while the jungle woke up around me, I felt something unclench inside. No fireworks. No divine visions. Just a release, like a knot in my chest finally giving way.

Will I ever be coming back? Maybe I can be swallowed by the jungle, living out my days on sticky rice and silence. Maybe, I will show up again one day, grayer, thinner, carrying nothing but a half-broken camera and a grin that said I’d seen something worth never explaining.

But one thing was certain: The Cory Larsen who boarded that plane in America had been left behind somewhere between Bangkok traffic and the mountain monastery. What remained was a man who had slipped, however briefly, into the wide-open mouth of ShunyaTa—and didn’t seem to miss the life he had abandoned.

Shunya-Ta (Sanskrit for Emptiness, Voidness)

Shunya-Ta is a sacred stillness we all return to—a living community of Dancers, Dreamers, Artists, and seekers of truth.

We host experiences where sacred meets the human-

Through art, movement, and presence.

We invite you to remember who you are, beneath the noise.

Not a movement, a return.

Not art for art,

But art for a purpose.

Human creative skill and imagination aim to evolve emotion and meaning through self-expression.

Come as you are. You are enough!

Shunya-Ta is not a new idea. It has risen again and again through time, across cultures, and traditions-

Echoing in Stoicism, Hermeticism, Taoism, Buddhism, Shamanism, and beyond.

At its heart lies a simple recognition:

To be human is to create, to be an artist is life itself. To live is to be in a community, to weave something larger than the individual- something that resonates beyond the self.

Wherever people seek meaning,

Shunya-Ta emerges.

Every poem, every song, every ritual or shared meal is Shunya-ta in action.

We are not separate from the cosmos, but living expressions of boundless creativity.

It is both serious and playful, a dance of being and non-being.

Shunya-Ta is a state of free dimension, full of potential and possibilities, like a productive stillness.

When there is nothing to hold on to, there is nothing left to fight.

No self to prove.

The mind enters a state of empty.

Self to self. A return to self.