But by the time he graduated in 2012, he wanted to do something more with his life—and so he traveled to a monastery in Burma, where he was ordained as a Buddhist monk. During his six months there, Cory meditated for fourteen to twenty hours daily, slept on a thin mattress on a wooden plank, and ate two simple meals a day, one at 5:30 a.m. and one at 10:30 a.m. There was no talking, no music, and no reading—just an ascetic regimen meant to break down the walls of the self.
