INWARDS: A Memoir of Despair, Impermanence, and Healing Through Vipassana
by Narry-Joy Narapan Ngamying
Narry-Joy Narapan Ngamying grew up wild and barefoot on the outskirts of Bangkok, the eldest daughter in a house where the drinking never stopped and no one was watching the children. By ten she was running the family water business and had carried an abandoned baby home from a brothel floor. By thirteen she was singing in cafés for her freedom. She went on to fly the world, follow love across an ocean to a small Ontario town, and build one of Collingwood’s best-known Thai restaurants.
From the outside, she was thriving. Inside, she was painting herself smaller every day.
When her marriage collapsed, she flew back to Thailand and was handed a broom. INWARDS is the story of what happened when a woman who only knew how to do learned how to be: raking leaves in a forest temple, sitting through thirty days of silence, and discovering that everything that arises, passes—even despair.
Honest, funny, and unflinching, INWARDS is for anyone who has held everyone else together and lost themselves along the way.