How does a jet-setting financial analyst from London end up a Buddhist nun in Bhutan? Emma Slade is a yoga and meditation teacher and author who left a successful career in finance in her 30s to find peace and meaning in the mountains of Bhutan. Unusual for a mother of a now 12-year-old boy, she was ordained a Buddhist nun in Bhutan in 2014 after rigorous training – the first (and still the only) Western woman to have achieved this in Bhutan. She currently runs an acclaimed charity to benefit special needs children in rural Bhutan.

Slade left a career in global finance in 1997 when, while traveling for business in Indonesia, she was held hostage at gunpoint by armed men in her five-star hotel room.  "Once I had recovered enough to see my life clearly, I felt that I'd been treating it very superficially, and that after this experience, I really needed to inquire more deeply into what it is to be a human being."