Yamabushi training takes you away from normal everyday life, at least in the sense that it takes you away from modern society. Yamabushi training itself is also a part of normal everyday life.

So when I say ‘it’s precisely because we are taken away from our normal, we are able to more greatly appreciate our normal’, I am wrong (as Master Hoshino likes to remind me).

There are different normals. There is the normal everyday life that we have in society, and there is the normal everyday life we have as Yamabushi in the mountains.

It’s not one versus the other, it’s both. At the same time.

So it’s not being taken away from normal that leads to the appreciation, it’s the comparison of normals. And that leads to Ikigai.