Beyond Meeting or Parting
(En route to Buddha)
Want to indulge in uncommon fun on a Sunday after dinner?
Settle into a comfy reading nook with tales of a yogini’s contemplative journey; her solitary retreats and sometimes freakish, entertaining and (always) sobering escapades through South Asia, Europe and North America. Discover the magic of the quotidian!
N. L. Drolma through the looking-glass, Sangyum Kamala’s residence, Naranthan, Nepal, March 2009
Trekking route, Solukhumbu, Nepal, Dec. 1996 (Photo by N. L. Drolma)
This blog offers excerpts from the memoir that a wily rinpoche tricked me into writing.
In 1996, I cast off the moorings of friends, art career and home in Manhattan for teachings and training with a legendary, reclusive Dzogchen master in the mountains of Nepal. Definitely a spiritual trajectory out of the box for a native New Yorker. I became a social misfit—heh-heh! And now I’m on the web forfeiting a long-kept low profile.
Drumroll, please. Strike those Tibetan cymbals! Blowwwww the conch.
Join me for landslides and an overnight in a taxi on a Bhutanese mountain pass. Face seduction in India. Retreat for three months in the south of France. Tango with death in hospital. Trek to a monastery in the foothills of Mt. Everest. Go sleepless in Hong Kong. Relocate to a mountain village in Nepal… and hole up in a summer cottage on Cape Cod for a winter of solitary retreat.
I write of inspirational encounters with revered Buddhist masters, their mind-bending teachings and unorthodox ways. (Several masters were among the last generation of yogis and scholars to undergo rigorous training in Tibet.) I also speak frankly about obstacles that arose for me in solitary retreat as well as on the road, and how such adversity in actuality can accelerate one’s spiritual maturity. May these anecdotes of my footloose travels not only smash misconceptions about spiritual practice (and renunciation), but illustrate the challenge, grace—and wild humor—of abiding by the dharma in daily life. Never give up, no matter what!
Om Ah Hung,
Khachod Dechen Ling, NYC
Shall We Play with Fire?
The day with Zenkar Rinpoche began innocently enough with packing up his books and other items for his flight back to London. For our tea break, I filled the kettle, turned on the stove and left the water to boil, expecting it to whistle. I didn’t know that Rinpoche’s hosts customarily used the oven shelving as storage space for things that should not be stored in an oven. The kettle whistle didn’t work, but the smell of smoke did as it…
Fait Accompli
How does a ‘nice Jewish girl,’ raised in the sheltered suburbs of New York, convey to a Tibetan Buddhist master her culturally conditioned phobic reaction to the very sound of the word ‘nun,’ and its implied austerity? I can’t say why ‘monk’ doesn’t sound as forbidding, lackluster, or as humorless as nun, but I do know my discomfort with the word was an expression of fear that had no real basis.
Short Hair and Love in Sikkim
Chorten Khandro was inspired to orchestrate a “debate” between me and a long-nailed Tibetan tulku (incarnate lama). The tulku was annoyed that I had let my hair grow a few inches in marked contrast to the severe buzz cut I sported on a previous visit to Chorten Gompa. He felt it was an insult to the buddhadharma that I, a Buddhist nun, eschewed the discipline of a shaved head. Apparently, my short hair was a no-no and warranted investigation…