"In America you only get lollipops," I reply shaking my head. I want to join him. Loosen up enough to ask him if he could arrange for me to meet the venerable Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche; I learned last night Shilpa's family considers Rinpoche their guru. I read about Chokyi Nyima, a well known Dzogchen master, in Jeff Greenwald's memoir, Snake Lake, a story about the author's struggle to remain as a journalist in Nepal during the violent revolution in the 1990s or head home for his suicidal brother. Jeff's relationship with Chokyi Nyima seems to be his lifeline as death foreshadowed his days. The intimacy he shares with such a realized person filled me with longing to meet such a teacher. Never in my wildest dream did I imagine I would spend time with Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche as I read the final heart-breaking chapter of Snake Lake in my tiny camper in Ashland, Oregon. It turns out Shilpa's father knows the author too from when Jeff photographed Medawisla Lodge
one of the Buddha statues in his shop for a book cover. Nepal is the small world. One that would eventually release me from my smaller one: my pipedream.
Instead of a glass on the rocks, I try to stay dry with the women in the kitchen in hopes to earn their respect, but Shilpa's mother shoos me back into the living room. The TV blares Bollywood videos filling an otherwise awkward silencMedawisla Lodge
e with her father. As a white woman is it expected I would have a cocktail? What the mother and the daughter-n-law, who traditionally moves into the husband's home, thought me as a guest in their home for months still haunts me. I sat writing and sipping served tea so many mornings, and afternoons reading My Journey to Lhasa by Alexander Davis Neal, the first foreign woman to enter Tibet disguised as an old Tibetan mother, all while Shilpa's mother worked around the house and the daughter-n-law headed out the door for her investment banking career. My insecurities about spending any idle hours journaling or reading plagues me in whoever's home I am in. I was raised with German work ethics, by woman who are always moving. Let's do it faster, faster, faster! Stay busy, busy, busy! Let's spot remove those fears, mop up our shame. Doesn't this house look fantastic? Don't open the bottom drawers! The capitalist God fearing machine churning out more, more, more brilliant beautiful things for but at what cost to the womb and planet?
I have these guilty genes even though my work appears to be a hobby since it brings no money. The fear that I am "dharma bum" as my teacher says looms when the bank emails 'your account balance is below $25' reaches for that first bite. The cycle begins: I comatose such fears with binging. Then I feel out of control and start writing to try and regain lost ground. I write down all the things I ate followed by pages of trying figure why I am so insane. Fine combing the memory for golden hairs of awareness. Undoing the knots until its too tangled in the moments I don't want to face. I need a new escape quick. Doubts whisper: Memoir is bullshit, vanity! Go meditate! These seeming doubts are really my escape goat for not sinking deeper into ink when memories too painful surface, making writing the work I write off instead. Back to the meditation cushion next to the desk. Emotionalizing prayers, cranking it up into a drama....until its time to be silent and 'rest in natural awareness', which is when my insides scream: FUUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCCCCKKKKKKKKKK MEEEEEEEEEEEEE! Off to a new escape: clean, organize the house. I am every neurotic woman in my family staying busy busy, busy with more, more, more. New escape, the ultimate escape: Call boyfriend. I stay in bed until I feel catapulted by guilt to go see my teacher. I drive to my meditation center. And The cycle begins again.
In the living room, I stare at the five foot golden Tara statue's beautifully sculpted body: her lotus bound feet with intricately carved anklets matching her bracelets and long strands of necklaces falling over the sleek belly and perfect breasts. She gazes with compassion beneath a jeweled crown resting upon her ebony hair. Tara ("mother of liberation") is the Buddhist goddess of compassion and action. She is known for giving her crown to a beggar who asked for it in hopes to marry her daughter into a noble family. Tara practices embody the outer, inner and secret teachings that lead one to self mastery though meditation. Tara's symbolism is the last thing on my mind. I want her body, jewels, and silken dress to perform the graceful fluid dance of Tara that I watched Helen Fox Appell teach to her devoted student in Portland, Oregon at the Nepalese temple where I first met Shilpa. Helen helped build Dance Mandala with the Nepalese priest, Prawjal. They continue to authentically pass on the unbroken lineage of Newari dances. Like Buddhist Vajrayana practices, they have been directly transmitted from teacher to student for hundreds of years.
Against my meditation teacher's advice, filled with his warnings that I should stay in retreat and complete my Ngondro practice, I ventured from Portland to Portland, and by a lucky chance to Nepal, in hopes to study the dakini's dance; at least that's what I thought at the time in my pigeon hole view. Dance was just the catalyst for this a life changing journey through the Himalayas that began in Oregon.
At Tashi Choling (a temple located in Ashland's Colestin Valley) I asked Sangye Khandro, Gyatrul Rinpoche's wife and translator, why I have to do ngondro and isn't their a Ngondro for dancers or any other kind of movement that is more feminine. She replied, "If you want to learn to dance with the view you must do your ngondro... but if you find another ngondro, let me know!" Everyone in the retreat laughs except for me. I knew she was telling the truth. Dance with view, dance with the view, dance with the view... her words replay like a mantra I don't know the meaning of as I look at Tara statue's third eye in between conversation with Shilpa's father about which temples are important to visit in the Kathmandu Valley. His whiskey eventually opens both of us. I finally just bluntly ask, "Would it possible to meet Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche?" He shows me the family photos of Rinpoche on the same red velvet couch I am sitting on. It was decided that the very next morning Shilpa and I would venture to the "white monastery" where Rinpoche is teaching. I felt like I won the lotto that night as I laid in bed awaiting the sun.
Shilpa leads us through the shoulder to shoulder meditation hall at Ka-Nying Shedrub Ling Monastery. The first glimpse of my peers: young western Buddhists in Nepal with their saffron robes, pale shaved heads and prayer wheels spinning as they chant in Tibetan. Others in Lulu-lemon numbers sporting malas. Greying brunettes in chupas Tibetan dresses. Judgement floods like poison through my veins. When I hear some guys trying to figure out where Rinpoche is going after teaching, I snap. Buddhist groupies?! My mind reels discrediting all of them one by one in line awaiting to get Rinpoche's blessing, until I catch myself feeling important when Rinpoche recognizes Shilpa and invites us to lunch.
Meeting Chokyi Nyima for the first time. There are no words for this profound moment, except I was having a bad hair day :)
"Where can I practice Ngondro?" I ask Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche after Shilpa pushes my stiff hesitant body towards him. Shilpa squats down next to his plastic lawnchair (one of many surrounding the giant buffet celebrating the end of a week long teaching) and translates for us.
"Rinpoche wants to know where you received Ngondro teachings?" I tell him about my teacher from Maine, a student of Chogyam Trungpa.
"Who?" Chokyi Nyima says holding my face when tears stream. I try to explain about Tashi Choling and the Dudjoim Tesar Ngondro I received a month ago. Rinpoche holds my chin tenderly in his hand the entire time I talk. He looks out at the rain pouring over the edge of the open concrete room beneath the giant incomplete monastery. I feel myself flooded with nervousness, wondering if he is going to tell me to become a nun. He and Shilpa talk in Nepali. Then he looks at me and says in perfect English, "Practice the triple excellent first," he pauses looking at me with a big smile. "I promise you," he adds somehow knowing I need convincing. Rinpoche looks back out at the good omen, rain and sunshine, as if its the first time in his life that he has seen a sun shower. He points with childlike joy and laughs. "She can tell you." Rinpoche calls over a girl who I later learn is from Mexico City and lives in Kathmandu as a Spanish translator. She advises me about his website. I try to hold it together as she explains how to sign up online for teachings. My romantic vision (Plan A) about some far-away Ngondro retreat has been reduced to a username.
All the pressure I have been putting on myself pours down like the afternoon shower as Shilpa and I head out for the Great Boudha Stupa.
The Great Boudha Stupa is a major destination for Buddhist pilgrims from the Himalayas, Tibet and throughout Asia. One legend ("Hidden treasure of the Guru Padmasambhava") says a widow with great aspiration approached the king with her meager saving as a poultry keeper to make a great offering of Boudha. He granted her permission to use land the size of an single ox's skin. She cut the skin into strips and claimed the enclosed land; today the area of the stupa measures 6,756 square meters. Her ambition to build such a magnificent stupa caused much jealously among the rich and powerful. They petitioned for its end, but the king honored his word. "Since permission to build has been given, it shall not be rescinded." Thus, the Boudha stupa continued to be built, rebuilt and restored again and again since the first mention of it circa AD 400 in Chronicles of Newar Society.
We approach the post-earthquake Boudha Stupa in a drizzle making the normally congested area nearly vacant. Men continued to push wheel barrels of mortar up hundreds of steps. Shilpa and I move through the debris onto the second floor, where a table is lined with small sandbags containing the fallen Stupa. I silently thanked the gal I met in Ashland who told me about these unknown keepsakes. We sat down beneath the thunderous sky and everything I'd felt in Chokyi Nyima's presence began to make sense. It was as if I sat down a thousand of those bags that I didn't even realize I was schlepping. Part me of didn't know what to do with my free hands. I'm used to be anxious. A familiar nervousness surfaces, but a deeper solace settles over me like the low sky. I felt myself begin to let go, my chest heaving with release.
"Why are you crying?" Shilpa finally asks.
"I'm so fucking hard on myself." I thought I needed to do thousands of prostrations like Helen everyday, all day at the Stupa on a rented prostration board. I was secretly quite happy they were out of use because of the earthquake's damage.
"We all are," Shilpa says staring up at the men scaffolding across rickety bamboo poles.
"This past winter I jolted off my mediation cushion one morning and began tearing up all my journals. Years worth of writing. I burned the pages in the wood stove. Ever since then, I've been so confused. Until now."
"What changed?"
"They are the same thing." It was one of those moments you realize something as you say it.
The clarity that the process of creating art is the same as meditation, one is fully emerged in their work with full awareness that they are will to go through it no matter what with the aspiration to awaken others, had been obscured for years until this moment. The cycle was broken, but only in thought. Could I actually remember this moment when fears begin to reach?
I sensed my own greatness was being restored in phases like the Stupa each time I returned over the coming monthsas I watched it molded dome eventually shine golden again. I'd circumambulate the Stupa with hundreds of Tibetans. As they spun the Stupa's prayer wheels, I walked trying to convince myself to believe the brochure was telling the truth: "The Great Boudha Stupa answers all prayers. It is like a wish filling jewel, which automatically answers any entreaty and prayer that is made to it....Whoever hears and mention of it will have placed the seed of enlightenment upon their mindstream...
Off to Plan B: Trekking, now that my big secret plan A was a pipedream.
wondrous piece anna, truly wondrous!!!! <3
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