It's another to feel it in your bones. You have said travel is a humbling experience. As a woman, you are very resilient, very strong. For example, zazen is not a place where you go to sleep. This practice is life.
Life is practice.
You're engaged and open to the ten directions. Practice, service, enlightenent, all one. My view is that there can't be personal enlightenment. It only happens within the experience of relatedness, like Indra's Net, a net with jewels at every node reflecting every other jewel. How can we bear witness to the lacerating effects of treachery, betrayal, abandonment, so much a part of out ordinary world.