Welcome to Karen Hunter's awesome.

I am Karen Hunter and I am literally taking a journey with Professor Justin

McDaniel.

In this next podcast with him, he tells the story of how he became a monk, how he moved across the world

and literally joined a group of monks. We recently saw monks walk from Texas to Washington, D.C.

He would have been out there with them if this were a couple of dozen years ago.

But his journey into monkdom, fascinating.

Stay tuned.

Here we are.

You take the bet.

Where do you go to become a monk?

Is there a monk school?

No.

I, it was a very, very rural monastery.

It was actually on an island in the middle of a river on the border between Laos and Thailand

and near the Cambodian border too, so where the three countries meet.

And, you know, no electricity, three-tier jungle.

I lived in a like a kind of a

gazebo on stilts because you have to live on stilts because of flooding

and no walls just as a roof.

And so you sleep outside basically under this covering.

And you have to sleep on a wooden table. You're not allowed to have any mattress and you have a wooden pillow actually. And you just have your robes to cover you. And yeah, shave your head, shave your eyebrows, no shoes, no possessions. What? You eat one. Yeah. Where are you going to the bathroom? Because that's my biggest. That's outside in the jungle. Just so. Yeah. There was no bathroom. So there's no toilet. There's no house. There's no toilet paper. There's no. Yeah, many monasteries have those things, but mine didn't.

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