The Young Lioness

There is a story I have been carrying for a long time. It has been building in the difficult moments, the challenges, the joys, the moments I will never forget. The ones that have left lasting impressions — births, deaths and everything in between.
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I have spent twenty years learning to sit inside myself, forever trying, never entirely succeeding yet growing with every step — closer and farther from myself. An endless labyrinth towards the center.
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In meditation. In hospice rooms, with my kids, with their friends. In sessions with people in the deepest parts of their becoming. And what I kept finding — underneath the grief, underneath the fear, underneath everything that was obscuring truth as it is — there was a light that had never gone out.
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A spark. A fire. Building. Waiting.
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I have two children. Lyla and Bodhi. And my wife, Ashley. They ask me to read to them. Again and again. One more story. And what I wanted more than anything was to put into their hands something that carried what I know to be true — not as a lesson, not as a teaching — but as a story they could feel in their bones.
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So I wrote one.
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And then I wrote twelve more.
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Siṃhī (sim-hee) is a young lioness. She is alone in a cave in the middle of a storm. She is wet and cold. She has lost her mother, and the storm has driven her from her pride, and she does not know the way home. Can you relate?
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She meets a wise snake named Sarpa. And Sarpa tells her a story.
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This is how it has always worked. This is the tradition of the Hitopadeśa, the oldest storybook — the one where wisdom moves through animals, through nested tales, through a voice speaking in the dark to someone who is lost and listening.
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I am just this tradition's aspiring student.
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Siṃhī's journey is thirteen tales. Each one follows the young lioness through one more encounter — with Kūrma, the ancient tortoise who moves slowly and always arrives. With Kālī, who lives in fire. With Karṇa, a great warrior, whose identity no one knows. With Kṛṣṇa, who comes not as a philosopher but as a charioteer, in the moment she may have no power over the outcome.
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The books grow as she grows. The sentences deepen. The silences lengthen. By the last book, she is no longer a cub. And she meets no one. She is the story.
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Two books are available now.
Sarpa and Siṃhī: The Beginning — illustrated on every spread, a picture book for any age, the doorway in. It holds Book One, and the opening of Book Two.
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Siṃhī: The Becoming — all thirteen books, the complete English literary edition, the whole journey from lost cub to adulthood.
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The Sanskrit books are coming, one by one.
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I did not write these books to become an author,
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I wrote them because my children asked for one more story. I am just a simple storyteller, like we all are, repeating the stories I have been given through a beautiful tradition that has given me strength and encouragement in the most difficult of times…
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Because the tradition of the Hitopadeśa is that wisdom lives inside a story — and a story lives inside the one who tells it — and it passes, quietly, into the one who listens.
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The cave is inside you.
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The light is already there.
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You only have to be still.
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Much Love and Big Hugs,

Teo

The books are available now on the Books page.