Before dawn on August 26th, a glacier collapsed above Kyirong, on the Tibetan side of the Himalayan border. What followed was the kind of thing you read about in climate reports and never think will actually reach the villages you know by name. A wall of water, mud, and rock tore down through Rasuwa and Nuwakot on the Nepali side, swallowing bridges, homes, and hydropower stations as it barreled into the Bhote Koshi and then the Trishuli.

The numbers, as they stand right now, are grim. Nepal’s National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority has confirmed more than 350 dead in Nepal, with over 800 people still missing. Three more deaths in Tibet, hundreds unaccounted for. Many of those swept away were pilgrims on their way to Mount Kailash and Lake Mansarovar — ground held sacred by Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, and Bönpo for as long as anyone has been keeping count.

Rasuwa and Nuwakot aren’t abstractions. If you’ve ever traveled the road north from Kathmandu toward the Tibetan frontier, you’ve passed through them. Tea stops. Prayer flags on the ridges. Small monasteries tucked into folds of hillside. Villages that welcomed dharma students and trekkers alike for decades. Much of that is gone now, or buried under debris.

What actually happened up there

The trigger appears to have been a glacial lake outburst — the technical name for what happens when a glacier’s meltwater builds up behind an unstable dam of ice or moraine, and then the dam fails. When that happens in the Himalayas, gravity does the rest. The water accelerates through steep valleys, picks up boulders and forest and everything else in its path, and turns into something closer to concrete than to a flood.

The Dalai Lama released a statement the day after, expressing sympathy for those killed and displaced, and offering condolences to the bereaved. He also pointed, gently but directly, to climate change as a probable underlying cause. That’s not a controversial claim among glaciologists. The Hindu Kush–Himalayan region is warming faster than the global average, and the number of glacial lakes flagged as high-risk keeps climbing. Events like this one used to be rare. They are becoming less so.

Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, the Bön teacher, shared a short prayer with his students in the hours after the disaster: May those who have passed rest in peace. May the injured recover swiftly. May grieving families find strength and comfort, and may all those offering help be guided by compassion and wisdom. It’s the kind of prayer that sits well whether you have a formal practice or not.

Why this region matters, especially to practitioners

Nepal has quietly been one of the great centers of Tibetan Buddhism in exile since 1959. Monasteries around Boudhanath, Swayambhunath, Pharping, and up into the hills of Rasuwa and Solukhumbu have hosted generations of teachers whose names now appear on the covers of dharma books read all over the world. If you have taken a Tibetan Buddhist teaching in the last fifty years, chances are the lineage passed through Nepal at some point.

For people who came to practice through psychedelics or plant medicine and then found themselves drawn deeper — into meditation, into lineage, into study — Nepal is often where that pivot happens. It’s where teachers are still accessible, where you can sit a retreat for weeks without a credit-card hold on your soul, where the culture around contemplative life is still woven into ordinary streets. Losing infrastructure in Rasuwa doesn’t just hurt the people who live there. It cuts one of the arteries that keeps the dharma flowing out into the wider world.

And the pilgrims. Kailash and Mansarovar are not casual destinations. People save for years, train for months, and travel across continents to circle that mountain. That many of the missing were on their way there gives the disaster a particular weight for the global Buddhist and Hindu communities.

How to actually help without being scammed

Disasters bring out the best in a lot of people, and the worst in a smaller but louder group. Nepali authorities have been explicit: give through registered organizations, not through individual GoFundMe pages or social-media appeals from accounts you don’t know. The scams show up within hours. Slick photos, urgent language, wallet addresses. Skip all of it.

A few groups that were already operating in Nepal before this happened, and are running relief work now:

• Nepal Red Cross Society, coordinated through the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC). They have already released emergency funds and have teams on the ground doing search, rescue, and medical triage.
• GlobalGiving’s Nepal Flood Relief Fund, which pools donations and channels them to vetted local Nepali organizations working on shelter, food, medical care, and longer-term rebuilding.
• Direct Relief, which has been supporting Nepal’s public health system since around 2009 and is coordinating medical aid directly with the Ministry of Health.

If you have a personal connection to a monastery, a school, or a village in the affected area — send there. Direct support to a known institution is often the most efficient help of all, because it skips overhead and lands where you know it’s needed. If you don’t have that kind of tie, use the organizations above.

What to do if you can’t send money

Not everyone reading this has cash to spare. That’s fine. There are other things worth doing.

1. Amplify accurate information. Share links to registered organizations, not fundraisers of unknown origin. Correct the ones you see circulating.
2. Practice, if you practice. Whatever your tradition — Buddhist, contemplative, or none — sitting with the reality of what happened, and dedicating whatever merit or attention arises, is not nothing. Tibetan practitioners have specific practices for the dying and the dead. If you have received them, this is a good week to use them.
3. Keep paying attention after the news cycle moves on. The rebuild in Rasuwa and Nuwakot will take years. The money and attention will dry up in about three weeks. Set a calendar reminder for three months from now and check back in.

Sitting with what a disaster like this asks of us

There’s a temptation, especially online, to turn a tragedy into a performance — a hot take about climate policy, a spiritual bypass about impermanence, a chance to signal something. Try to resist. The people whose villages washed away don’t need our narratives. They need shelter, medical care, and eventually the resources to rebuild. Everything else is us processing our own discomfort.

That said, discomfort is worth sitting with too. This is what climate breakdown looks like at ground level — not a graph, but a valley of mud where a village used to be. It’s worth letting that in rather than scrolling past it. Grief, properly felt, tends to make people more generous and more careful with what they still have. That’s a decent response to a week like this.

For those exploring the contemplative path in a broader sense — including through plant-medicine work, meditation, and the traditions that have long shaped Himalayan spiritual life — a range of retreats connected to those lineages and practices can be browsed on our marketplace here. In the meantime: give what you can, where it will actually land, and hold the people of Rasuwa, Nuwakot, and Kyirong in whatever way you know how.

May those who have died find peace. May the missing be found. May the searchers stay safe.