Tibetan Monks Call It the Crying Lamp: The Salt That Kept a Dead Lama Whole for 202 Years Now Cries the Defiled Air Out of Your Home

Pressed for 600 million years. Charged by the weight of the Himalayas. Activated by the warmth of your hand. This "Charged Salt" rips the defiled air out of a room the way it pulled death out of a body.

The first time I saw Lama Dorje, he had been dead for 202 years.
He was sitting up.

Legs crossed. Hands folded in his lap. Head tipped forward a little, like he was listening to something under the floor.

His skin had gone the color of strong tea. But it was skin. Not leather. Not bone.

He still had his eyelashes.

And when the young monk with the lantern stepped closer, I saw his fingernails.

They were pink.

I had been in that cave less than a minute, and I was crying. I didn't
know why.

The old monk next to me put his hand on my back.

"It wasn't the cold that kept him," he said. "It was the salt."

I looked around.

And then I saw what he meant.

The walls of the cave were pink. Not painted. Not lit pink. The walls were solid salt. The floor was salt. The ceiling hung low over our heads, and it was salt too, glowing orange where the lantern touched it.

We were three hundred feet under a monastery in the Himalayas, inside a seam of salt older than the mountain on top of it.

In 1813, when Lama Dorje felt his death coming, he walked down into this cave alone.

He sat against the wall. He closed his eyes.

The monks sealed the door behind him with stones and mud, and they never opened it.

Then, in April 2015, the earthquake that killed nine thousand people in Nepal cracked that door in half.

The monks came down with lanterns, ready to gather his bones.

There were no bones to gather.

There was a man.

So I'm going to tell you how a broke, divorced guy from Ohio ended up kneeling in that cave.

And I'm going to tell you what the old monk told me that night.

Because it changed everything that came after it. The money. My sleep. The woman I married. The way my own home feels when I unlock the door.

And none of it took any effort from me at all.

The salt did it.

Here's who I was before that cave.

I was forty-six.

Divorced for two years. Thirty-one thousand dollars on four credit cards.

I worked a job I was good at, for a boss who never once said my name right.

And my apartment felt heavy.

That's the only word I have for it.

I'd open every window, and it still smelled like a basement. I'd sleep nine hours and wake up like I'd carried furniture all night. Good news never came through that door. Bills did.

You know the feeling. The room where the air just sits there.

Where you come home and your shoulders go up instead of down.

I thought it was me. I thought I was just a guy things didn't happen for.

I tried the stuff you try.

I read the law of attraction books. I made a vision board. I burned sage until my smoke alarm went off.

Nothing moved.

The only reason I was in Nepal at all is that my brother Mike had booked a trek to Everest base camp for his fiftieth birthday.

Three weeks before the flight, he had a stroke.

He couldn't talk right yet. But he could point. And he pointed at the ticket, and then at me.

So I went.

On day six, a mudslide closed the trail. Our guide walked us up to a monastery on the side of the mountain to wait it out.

That's where I met the old monk.

His name was Ngawang. He was eighty-four, and he laughed at almost everything I said.

On the second night, he looked at me across the fire for a long time.

And then he said something no one had ever said to me.

"You are breathing defiled air."

Defiled air.

I made him say it twice.

The monks have an old word for it: grib. They've used it for over a thousand years. It means shadow. It means stain. It means the sickness that comes from living in something unclean.

In English, the closest he could get was defiled air.

Air that has gone bad. Air that has soaked up everything that ever happened in a room, every argument, every bad night, every worry, and kept it.

Ngawang said defiled air is like damp in a cellar.

You can't see it. But you can feel it. It hangs in the air of a closed room. It seeps into the walls. It soaks into the bed and clings to the clothes. It settles on your chest while you sleep. It soaks into you.

And everything good that comes near you has to push through it first.

"Money comes to you," Ngawang said, "and it gets tired before it arrives. Love comes to you, and it turns around at the door."

I asked him where it comes from.

He pointed at my phone. Then at the window of the guest room, which I had shut tight.

"You people live in boxes," he said. "The air never leaves. Arguments never leave. Bad sleep never leaves. Fear never leaves. It all stays in the air, and the air stays in you."

Then he said the thing that let me breathe again.

"This is not your fault. Defiled air finds everybody who lives in a box."

I asked him how you get rid of it.

He didn't answer.

He just took a lantern, and he took me down the stairs to meet Lama Dorje.

Standing in that cave, Ngawang told me why his people have always trusted salt.

For hundreds of years, when a great teacher dies in Tibet, the monks don't bury him.

They sit him up in the lotus position. And they pack him in salt, right up to the chin.

Sometimes for one year. Sometimes for nineteen.

Only after the salt has done its work do they cover him in gold and put him in a shrine.

The salt first. Then the gold.

"Gold keeps him beautiful," Ngawang said. "Salt keeps him clean."

Because salt does one thing better than anything else on this earth.

It pulls.

Salt pulls the wet out of anything it touches. Scientists have a word for it: hygroscopic. It means salt drinks water straight out of the air.

That's why salt keeps meat from rotting. Rot needs wet. Salt takes the wet away, and the rot has nothing left to live on.

And that's all defiled air is, Ngawang said. Wet, heavy air that has soaked up everything that happened in a room.

So whatever pulls the wet out of a room pulls the defiled air out with it.

"Ordinary salt is asleep," he said. "It pulls a little. This salt is charged. It pulls everything."

Then he told me why.

Six hundred million years ago, the place where we were standing was the bottom of an ocean.

That's not a story. The rock at the very top of Mount Everest is old sea floor. Climbers have carried shells down from the summit.

When that ocean dried up, it left its salt behind, in one thick, pure layer.

Sealed. Before a single human being walked the earth.

And then the Himalayas rose up on top of it.

The heaviest mountains on earth sat on that salt for six hundred million years.

Pressing it. Packing it. Squeezing every crystal so tight that not one drop of the modern world could ever get in.

No smoke. No plastic. No chemicals. Not one breath of defiled air.

Scientists call the inside of a salt crystal its lattice. Picture a honeycomb, made of salt. Under that much mountain, every gap in the honeycomb was crushed shut.

And all that weight didn't just disappear.

It went into the salt.

Think of a spring you press flat with your thumb, and hold there. The harder you press, and the longer you hold, the more it wants to jump.

Now press it with the Himalayas. For six hundred million years.

That's what's inside this salt. Not just salt. The weight of the mountains, stored. Waiting to let go.

"This salt is the old ocean," Ngawang said. "Pressed by the mountain. Charged by the mountain. Nothing has ever touched it."

That's why it held Lama Dorje.

It was so packed, so pure, so charged, that it pulled the death right out of him and kept pulling for two hundred years.

And then Ngawang said the line I still hear every time I walk into my kitchen.

"If it can keep death out of a body," he said, "what do you think it can keep out of your home?"

I asked Ngawang how I could take that salt home with me.

He laughed.

"You can take the salt," he said. "But salt that is cold is only a rock."

Then he walked me to the back of the cave, behind Lama Dorje.

There, in a hollow cut into the salt wall, was a lump of pink salt the size of two fists.

The top had been scooped out like a bowl. Inside the bowl sat a little pool of yak butter, with a wick.

It was black with soot. It looked older than the monastery.

"This is the first one," Ngawang said.

The first salt lamp in the world.

It wasn't made for a living room. It was made for a dead man.

Ngawang told me Lama Dorje carved it himself, the week before he sealed himself in. He set it at his own knees, lit the butter, and kept it burning while he waited to die.

Because Lama Dorje knew a secret the monks have kept ever since.

Cold salt sleeps.

Warm salt breathes.

When the salt is cold, the charge stays locked inside. The spring is held flat. It sits there like any stone on a shelf.

But warm it, and the charge is activated.

The spring lets go.

The heat makes the salt drink the air around it, fast and hungry. The defiled air rushes in, wet and heavy, and the salt holds on to it.

Then the warmth does the second thing.

It dries the salt out again. And when the water leaves the stone, it doesn't leave empty. It carries a tiny piece of the old ocean back into the room with it.

The salt pulls the defiled air in. And it breathes the mountain out.

In. Out. All night. Like a lung.

That's why warm salt is almost always dry salt. It drinks the room in and breathes it back out so fast, you never see a drop. Dry and warm is what a working salt looks like.

Only when a room hands it more than it can breathe out does the salt let you see the work. The monks have a name for that, and it's the name they gave the lamp.

They call it crying.

"That," Ngawang said, "is why the light is in the salt."

"The light is not for seeing. The light is for warming."

 I thought about the salt lamp my ex-wife bought from a mall kiosk. It sat on our bookshelf for six years.

 We never turned it on once.

That night, Ngawang chipped a piece of the cave wall loose with a little iron hammer. He scooped out the top, filled it with butter, and put it in my hands.

And he showed me the ritual. Three steps. The same three every monk in that monastery does, every night of his life.

STEP ONE: WARM IT. AND KEEP IT WARM.

Light it in the room where you spend the most hours. The room where you sleep, or the room where you work.

Then wait until the salt is as warm as your own hand.

"Warm as a living man," Ngawang said. "Salt as warm as a living man pulls the death out. Salt as cold as a dead man pulls nothing."

That's how you know the charge is activated.

And then you keep it that way. Every day. As many hours as you can.

"One warm night wakes the salt," Ngawang said. "Many warm nights empty the room."

For the first few days, you won't see a thing. You're not meant to. The salt is drinking your room in and breathing it back out, quietly, all night.

In most rooms, that's all you'll ever see. Warm salt. Dry salt. Working salt.

But some rooms are so heavy the salt can't breathe it out as fast as it pulls. And in those rooms, one morning, it starts to cry.

STEP TWO: WIPE IT.

Every morning, take a dry cloth and run it over the salt. Then shake the cloth out of the door or the window.

Never back into the room.

"You don't sweep dirt into the corner," Ngawang said. "You carry it out the door."

Most mornings, the salt will be dry under your hand. Good. That means it's keeping up with your room.

But some mornings, in some rooms, you'll walk in and find the salt wet.

Beads of water all over it, running down the sides like tears, pooling on the shelf underneath.

Don't worry. Nothing is wrong. It means that room handed the salt more than it could breathe out in one night, so it's letting you see some of what it pulled.

Wipe the tears the same way, and carry them out the door.

Wet or dry, the salt is doing the same work. The tears are just the part you sometimes get to see.

What you will notice, wet or dry, is the room. The basement smell goes first. Then the heaviness when you walk in. Then the nights.

"Two weeks," Ngawang said. "Two weeks to empty a room that has been filling up your whole life."

STEP THREE: BREATHE IT.

Once the salt is wiped and warm again, sit close to it. Put your face over it, the way you'd breathe over a cup of hot tea.

Take three slow breaths.

On each breath, think of one thing you want to come to you. Money. A person. A night of real sleep.

"When the defiled air is gone, the road is open," Ngawang said. "Now tell the road what to bring."

That's it.

Warm it. Wipe it. Breathe it.

Keep it on. Keep it warm. Give it two weeks.

I did it for the first time that same night, in the little guest room with the window I'd shut tight.

I lit the butter. I waited until the stone was warm against my palm.

And I fell asleep before I could worry about anything.

I woke up at six, without an alarm. For the first time in two years, I didn't feel like I'd been carrying furniture all night.

The room smelled like the sea after it rains.

I picked up the salt. Warm. Bone dry.

"Dry is good," Ngawang said.

"Here the air is clean. The salt drinks it and breathes it straight back out, and you never see a thing." He tapped the stone. "You see tears only where a room has more to give than the salt can carry."

Then he looked at me and laughed. "In your box, maybe."

Two days later, the trail opened, and I had to go.

I carried that lump of salt home wrapped in my bandana, in the bottom of my backpack, through three airports.

Back in my apartment, I set it on the nightstand and put a tea light in the hollow where the butter had been. I lit a new one every morning before work, and another every night.

But a tea light doesn't last a workday. So all day, while I was at the office, the salt sat there going cold, in a sealed apartment full of two years of everything.

Day one. Dry.

Day two. Dry.

Day three. Dry. And the bedroom already smelled a little less like a basement.

On the fourth morning, I reached over in the dark to light it, and my hand came back wet.

I thought I'd knocked over my water glass.

I hadn't. The glass was on the dresser, still full.

I turned on the lamp by the bed. The salt was crying.

Not damp. Crying. Water was running down all four sides of it in thin, steady streams, like somebody had poured a glass over it and walked away.

It had soaked into the wood of the nightstand. It had dripped over the edge onto the carpet and left a dark wet circle the size of a dinner plate.

I looked up at the ceiling first. Dry.

I checked the window. Shut and locked, the way I always kept it.

I put my hand on the radiator. Cold.

I got down on my knees and felt the carpet all the way to the wall. Dry everywhere except that circle.

There was nowhere for that water to come from.

Except the air.

I touched one of the drops and put it on my tongue.

Salt. Exactly like tears.

My heart was going so hard I could hear it in my ears.

And then I noticed the smell.

Not the basement. The sea after rain. The same smell from the guest room at the monastery, filling a bedroom in Ohio at six in the morning.

I took a picture. Then nine more. My hands were shaking so badly that half of them came out blurry.

Because I knew something that nobody else on earth knew.

Ngawang's piece had sat in the guest room of a Himalayan monastery for two nights and stayed bone dry.

In my apartment, it cried in four days.

So what had I been breathing?

Two years of it. Every phone call that ended with my ex hanging up on me. Every Sunday night staring at the credit card app. Every night I lay awake with my heart going exactly like it was going now.

All of it had been sitting in the air of that room.

All of it was running down the side of a rock onto my carpet.

Out of me.

I sat down on the edge of the bed, and I cried too.

The second time in a month. Both times over salt.

Then I did exactly what Ngawang told me.

I wiped the tears off with my bandana. It came away heavy, like a dishrag you pull out of the sink. And I leaned out of the window and shook it out over the parking lot.

Then I sat over the warm salt and took three breaths.

On the first breath, I thought about the $31,000.

That was 6:14 in the morning.

At 11:42, my phone rang.

It was my boss.

The man who had called me "Ron" for six years.

My name is Rob. "Rob," he said. "Got a minute?"

Not once in six years had he said it right.

Then he gave me the Harmon account. The one he had handed to somebody else, twice, while I sat there and smiled about it.

I hung up and looked at the wet circle on the carpet.

Then I looked at the salt.

It was still crying.

The next morning, it was crying again. A little less.

And there was a check in my mailbox for $2,400.

A refund from a contractor I'd fought for a whole year and given up on. No letter. No apology. Just the check.

On the eighth morning, the tears had turned into beads. No more puddle.

That afternoon my landlord called. A man I'd spoken to maybe four times in two years.

He was dropping my rent by $200 a month. "To keep good tenants," he said.

And when I got home that night, I noticed something.

My apartment didn't smell like a basement anymore.

I stood in the doorway and sniffed like an idiot. Nothing. Clean air. Like somebody had left the windows open all day.

They'd been locked the whole time.

On the eleventh morning, there were no beads at all. Just a thin wet film I could only feel when I ran my thumb across the top.

I'd slept nine hours and woken up before my alarm, the way I had in the monastery.

At the coffee shop, the woman behind me in line leaned in and asked what cologne I was wearing.

I wasn't wearing any.

It was the sea.

On the fourteenth morning, I reached over in the dark, and the salt was bone dry.

Warm. Smooth. Dry as a stone in the sun.

At 4:30 that afternoon, my boss called me into his office and gave me a $9,000 raise.

I hadn't asked for it. I hadn't even thought about asking.

And that evening, I unlocked my front door, and something happened that hadn't happened in two years.

My shoulders went down.

The room was clean.

I cried in that cave. Then the salt cried for me.

And from that day on, things stopped walking past me and started walking toward me.

Here's what I learned in those two weeks. It's the most important thing I can tell you.

The more hours the salt is warm, the harder it pulls.

Leave it on only at night, and it takes its time. Leave it on day and night, and it rips the defiled air out of a room like a drain with the plug pulled.

And here's what I didn't understand until I went back and asked Ngawang.

My lamp only cried because my room was more than it could keep up with. Two years of defiled air in a sealed box, and a salt that went cold every day while I was at work.

"Most rooms, it never cries," he told me. "The salt drinks, it breathes out, and you see nothing. You only feel the room change."

That's the part that matters. Not the tears. The room.

In month two, my ex called and we screamed at each other for an hour. I kept the salt warm and went to bed. By the next evening, the apartment felt like mine again. That fight didn't hang in the air for a week, the way fights always had.

I caught the flu in January and was flat on my back for a week. The room never got that sick-house smell.

My cousin stayed for a weekend, chain-smoked on my balcony, and complained about everything from the coffee to the president. By Monday night, you'd never have known he was there.

Every time, I just kept it warm and wiped it every morning. Wet or dry, the salt never stopped pulling.

By month three, it only cried after a bad day.

By month eleven, the last credit card was paid off.

I cut all four of them in half on my kitchen table and took a picture of that, too.

But the thing I'm proudest of has nothing to do with money.

When I got back from Nepal, Mike was home from the hospital.

And his house felt the way mine used to. Worse.

Curtains shut. TV on all day. His wife Carla walking around on her tiptoes. And Mike in his recliner, furious at a body that wouldn't do what he told it to.

You could feel it the second you stepped into the hallway. It hung there. It pressed on you. It smothered the whole house.

So I did the only thing I could think of.

I gave Mike the salt.

Ngawang's salt. The only piece I had.

I set it on the table next to his recliner, lit it, and showed Carla the ritual.

It cried in two days.

Not a circle on the carpet. A river. It soaked through a folded dish towel by morning.

Carla wiped it every day and shook the cloth off the back porch, just like I showed her. And every day it cried a little less.

On the ninth day, she called me. She was laughing and crying at the same time.

Mike had opened the curtains. Himself. With his good hand.

By the end of the second week, he was making jokes again. Terrible jokes. The same terrible jokes he's been telling me since we were kids.

He still couldn't say all his words. But he could laugh. And that house could finally breathe.

And that's where I met Jen.

She was Mike's physical therapist. She came three times a week.

On her fourth visit, she stopped in the doorway with her bag still on her shoulder and said, "What did you guys do in here? It feels completely different."

I told her about Lama Dorje.

I waited for her to laugh at me.

She didn't. She asked me to dinner.

We were married fourteen months later. Mike gave the toast. He got through every word.

Now, here's where I made my big mistake.

I'd given away my only piece of the cave salt. So I went out and bought a salt lamp.

$24.99 at a home store. Pink, glowing, the same kind you've seen a thousand times.

I left it on for two weeks, day and night, and did the ritual every morning.

Nothing changed. The air sat there exactly like before. Within a week, the basement smell had crept back into my bedroom, and I was waking up like I'd carried furniture all night again.

So I bought three more. One online. One from a crystal shop. One from a mall kiosk exactly like the one my ex-wife bought.

Six weeks. Four lamps. Not one thing changed.

One of them was so light that I picked it up and turned it over. It was two pieces of salt glued together around a hollow.

Another one left pink dust on my fingers. It was dyed.

That's when I understood what Ngawang meant.

Not all salt is created the same.

Almost every salt lamp sold in America is cut from the top of the mine.

That's the cheap salt. The salt that sat near the surface, cracked and broken, soaked by rain and open to the air for thousands of years.

It was never pressed by the full weight of the mountain. It was never packed. It was never charged.

And it's already full.

Before it even leaves the mine, that salt has soaked up everything around it. Then it sits for two months in a shipping container. Then a warehouse. Then a store shelf under fluorescent lights, while a thousand people breathe on it.

By the time it gets to your house, it's choking on defiled air of its own.

Think of a kitchen sponge that's already soaking wet. You can press it against a spill all day. It won't pick up a drop.

That's the lamp on your shelf.

And then there's the size.

Most store lamps weigh less than 300 grams. That's a little over half a pound.

Ngawang has a rule about that. He told it to me the day I went back.

"The salt must be heavier than your heart."

A human heart weighs about 300 grams.

"Salt lighter than your heart cannot pull what sits on it," he said.

That's why every lamp the monks will let leave that mountain weighs at least 500 grams. More than a pound of salt that sat under the Himalayas for the full 600 million years. Pressed. Packed. Charged.

Enough mountain to pull a whole room.

So when you see a salt lamp for $19.99, ask yourself one question.

How much of the mountain do you really think is in there?

You can't buy 600 million years for the price of a pizza.

Cheap salt is cheap for a reason. It's the salt nobody else wanted.

The strange thing is, people have always known that salt pulls.

They just forgot which salt.

In India, Hindus give up ordinary salt during their holy fasts. The only salt allowed is rock salt from this same mountain range.

In Japan, shop owners still set a little cone of salt by the front door every morning, to pull in customers and push out bad luck.

Sumo wrestlers throw a handful of salt into the ring before every match, to clean it.

And in the Bible, God told the priests, "With all your offerings you shall offer salt."

Every one of them knew salt pulls.

Only the monks knew which salt pulls everything.

Twelve months after I first walked into that cave, I went back.

I wanted to thank Ngawang.

The monastery was still cracked from the earthquake. The same earthquake that opened Lama Dorje's door had split the walls of the prayer hall. The monks were patching it with mud and wood, a little at a time, as they could afford it.

I asked Ngawang if the monastery's salt cutters would cut more of that salt. Enough for people like me, back home, choking in their boxes.

He said no.

I asked again the next day. And the day after that.

On the fourth day, he took me back down the stairs to Lama Dorje, and he agreed. On four conditions.

One. The salt comes only from the vein that runs past Lama Dorje's chamber. The same vein that pulled the death out of him for 202 years. Not from anywhere else in the mine.

Two. It's cut by hand, by the monastery's own cutters, and hollowed the way Lama Dorje hollowed the first lamp.

Three. No piece leaves the mountain lighter than 500 grams.

Four. Every piece spends one night in the cave, beside Lama Dorje, before it leaves.

"So it remembers what it is for," Ngawang said.

Here's what comes in the box:

One Himalayan Crystal Salt Lamp (at least 500g), hand-cut and hand-hollowed.

A warming bulb and cord with an on/off
switch. 

WARM IT.

Put it in the room where you spend the most hours. Switch it on. Leave it on as many hours as you can. Day and night is best.

WIPE IT.

Every morning, run the cloth over the salt, and shake the cloth out of a door or a window. Never back into the room. Most of the time, your salt will be warm and dry. That's a working salt. It's drinking your room in and breathing it straight back out. In a very heavy or humid room, you may sometimes find a few beads of water on it. That's fine too. It's still pulling. Wipe it, carry it out, and keep it on.

BREATHE IT.

Sit close to the warm salt. Three slow breaths. One thing you want to come to you on each breath. Warm it. Wipe it. Breathe it. Keep it on. Keep it warm. Give it two weeks. By the fourteenth day, for most rooms, the air feels lighter, the nights are deeper, and the room is clean.

Why do most people take three?

One for the bedroom, where you sleep and where the defiled air sits on you all night.

One for the room where you work, where the money has to find you.

And one for the person you love whose house you can feel the second you walk in. The way I felt Mike's.