The King’s Hold – The Journey Within
Philippe Gregoire261 pages • 2022
$ 34.51
Extract
After The Road to the Self, a tale of an inner and outer journey through mountains and souls, Philippe Gregoire hits the road again, or rather, leaves it.
Because in The King’s Hold, it’s no longer the outer road that matters, but what it awakens inside.
From the Himalayas to the rice fields of Bangladesh, from India crossed on a motorbike to the depths of the Indian Ocean, the author keeps chasing truth, intensity, and freedom.
Each step becomes a rite of passage: crossing real borders to break invisible ones, flirting with death to feel alive, loving to understand what being truly alive means.
From Nepal’s dusty tracks to the heat of Dhaka, from wild Indian nights to the underwater silence of deep dives, Philippe tells, raw, but with a new maturity, what the road taught him:
that the King he was trying to crown was no one else but himself, buried deep down in the hold.
An underwater wedding, an ocean crossing on an old wooden boat, training as a professional diver, everything here becomes a symbol of descent into the self.
This book is both a travel diary and a mystical plunge, a cry of a free man and a prayer to life.
But The King’s Hold isn’t just a sequel, it’s a shedding of skin.
The journey is no longer just a backdrop for adventure, but a mirror of the inner world.
Each country crossed becomes the reflection of a state of mind: the dust of Bangladesh, the chaos of India, the purity of the ocean depths.
Between encounters, trials, passions, and revelations, this story shows how losing every point of reference can lead you back to what truly matters.
It’s a journey toward simplicity, toward naked truth, where a man learns that to touch the divine, he must first descend into the hold: the hold of his fears, his wounds, his desires, his broken dreams.
Because it’s there, in the depths of the soul, that the King sleeps, the True Self, the free and sovereign being just waiting to reign again.
Extract
The blue turns infinite. Everything fades, sound, time, the world.
And suddenly, he’s there. A giant from another age, sliding through the light with the slowness of a dream.
A whale shark. I hold my breath, not out of fear, but respect.
It’s like meeting God underwater.
His white spots draw a moving sky of stars, and each beat of his tail seems to make the whole planet vibrate.
I move closer, slowly, tiny. Our eyes don’t meet, but our beings recognize each other.
For a few seconds, I’m no longer a man, I’m a particle of the great whole, swallowed by immensity.
When he drifts away, swallowed by the deep blue, something inside me has shifted.
I’ve just touched the sacred, no temple, no words, no priest.
Further, in India...
We descend, slowly.
The bubbles rise like offerings toward the surface.
Around us, the ocean’s silence becomes a cathedral.
No priest, no witnesses, no dress. Just the sean and two souls saying YES, twelve meters down.
I slip a shell onto her finger, symbol of eternal union.
She laughs through her regulator, a laugh of silver bubbles.
I look at her, floating in the blue light, and I think, this is where real life begins.
The one that doesn’t depend on words or promises, but on breath.
When we rise, the sun shines on us as if blessing our madness.
We come out of the water changed.
United.
Purified.
Free.
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