Blackbird: A Childhood Lost and Found Page 10

  The Tylanni Drolma was a small, dark-haired woman wrapped in a prayer shawl. She had a serene smile and vivid amber eyes.

  While I had never been one to place another on a pedestal—I didn’t have a penchant for celebrity—Tylanni had been elevated to star status in my own psyche.

  I found my way to the back of the yurt and eased to a cushion on the floor, all the while staring at this woman, this VIP.

  With all the buildup in my mind, I had expected rockets to explode upon seeing her, but nothing happened. She didn’t even look my way. I was just one of a dozen people—a stranger.

  AS THE RETREAT progressed, Tylanni taught the history of Tara. She was the Buddha of compassionate action, born from the tear of another Buddha. In one story, Tara was a princess who reached enlightenment at a time when it was believed women couldn’t be enlightened. Tylanni told us that meditation on Tara could bring good fortune and remove obstacles.

  I realized early on that it wasn’t Tylanni who drew me. It was Tara, and as soon as I learned some basic history, I was a goner. I filled pages of my journal from Tylanni’s lectures. I thought it was just great that this woman—this Tara—existed in the annals of women’s history. I liked to think it was possible, even provable, that women were capable of active divinity and not just passive acceptance. Whereas the Virgin Mary, in my own mind, kept everything in her heart, Tara was a woman who got the job done. Tara was a powerhouse of compassion with a purpose. Tara was the Go-To Girl. Yes, I liked Tara right away.

  AFTER THE HISTORY of Tara, Tylanni taught the Green Tara meditation practice, which included a series of prayers and visualizations where you imagined yourself as Tara. It was like a kid playing dress-up. Visualization was just an invitation to use your imagination. Giving up my identity as Jennifer, mother, soon to be ex-wife, sad girl, and orphan was a welcome fantasy.

  Tylanni led the practice, and like learning dance steps, it was awkward at first. I worried that I stuck out like a sore thumb but everyone was new to Tara. We were all learning the moves.

  Once we arrived at the section of the meditation where we repeated the mantra—a kind of prayer—in our minds, I became quite calm for a long while.

  Mantra is a short phrase you say again and again, and this mantra was Om Tare Tut Tare. It had a complex meaning I was trying to remember when I felt such an odd thing. As I silently said Om Tare to myself, I felt as if I were being pulled apart. A desperate feeling rose within me—I had this need to reclaim my former identity. I wanted to call out, “I am Jennifer Lauck. I am a writer.” I wanted to stand up and declare this identity to the room. It was so odd, and then, like plastic wrap being pulled from a Jell-O mold, the identity of being a writer just slipped away.

  Om Tare continued to circle my mind and I thought, I am Tara. It was not like being Tara as Tylanni described. I was not a teardrop of compassion or a princess. I certainly wasn’t some green jade woman. But there was, for the first time, certainty. I was certain that I was Tara. I knew it was true. I was.

  This revelation was both wonderful and terrible.

  I opened my eyes and looked around at the yurt, the altar, the candles, and Tylanni, and I thought, What the hell just happened?

  I closed my eyes again and the same certainty returned.

  I was Tara.

  As if it wasn’t enough to become a jade green deity that dated back to 500 BC, I also felt emotion rise within my body. I felt sadness unlike any I had ever felt before.

  Steve used to call me a sad woman but the word “sad” felt paltry when compared to the apocalypse of sorrow thundering up from the core of my own body.

  Tossing the Tara booklet on the meditation table, I stood up and made my way out the door. On the front porch of the yurt—snow topped Canadian Rocky Mountains in the distance—I pulled on my hiking boots and made tracks into the hills. Down a deep ravine, up a hill, down into another ravine, and up one more hill.

  When I could no longer run, I hit the ground and sobs wracked through my body with such stunning force, all I could do was let them have their way.

  Lord, did I cry and the whole time, sobbing and rolling from the power of my own grief, all I could do was watch myself in wonder. I had been holding all that sadness in my body—my small 150-pound self—how was that possible?

  If I had seen a woman cry like I was crying that day, I would have called 9-1-1. It was crushing to see such a display of a broken heart. I had no idea.

  EVENTUALLY, WHEN THE tears were done and I was spent, I stumbled back to the yurt. With puffy eyes, I took my place in the back of the room and listened to the others who were now in the question-andanswer phase of the teaching.

  After a bit of time passed and no one seemed to be covering the question of cosmic grief, I asked about the sadness I had felt and if such strong emotion was common in spiritual practice.

  Tylanni regarded me for a long time. Her eyes were so golden and so steady. Finally, she said that meditation, especially on Tara, could bring “a lot” up in people.

  Not to be brushed off, I asked another question. I wanted to know what specifically was coming up, not that “a lot” was coming up.

  Tylanni smiled—indulgent perhaps—and suggested that I just relax and keep practicing.

  NINETEEN

  PRACTICE

  “YOU’RE GOING AGAIN?”

  Steve was incredulous.

  “Yes,” I said. “It takes time.”

  “How hard is it to meditate? ”

  “Hard.”

  We stood at the back gate of my new house and he had just brought the kids home from school. They scurried under my arm and into the house with kisses, hugs, and cries of “What’s for dinner?” and “See you later, Dad!”

  “I leave next Saturday, Steve, it’s just a few days.”

  I moved to close the gate, conversation over, but Steve stopped me.

  “Is this about a guy? Are you going with a guy? ”

  “No,” I said. “No guy. Just meditation. That’s all.”

  “I just don’t get it. You are a Catholic for god’s sake.”

  “I’m not a Catholic,” I said, defensive. “I was a Catholic.”

  “Whatever. I still don’t get it.”

  “Why do you care?”

  “Well, for the kids,” he said. “I want to make sure it’s not some cult, where you all go off and drink poison Kool-Aid or something.”

  We looked at each other and I knew he didn’t think I was into a cult. He was just taking it personally. My new path was leading further away from him. He knew it; I knew it. What could I say?

  “I’m going. I’ll be back in a few days.”

  I pulled the gate closed. Steve didn’t stop me.

  I TRAVELED TO The Pure Land four times that summer of 2004. Each trip, usually about four days, taught me another Tibetan practice: Guru Yoga, Mandala of the Dakini, The Five Buddha Families. But it was Tara that I loved. I couldn’t do Tara practice enough.

  Tylanni—as the door to Tara—became beloved. If I came within three feet of her, I would cry like a fool.

  Tylanni, moved by my intense emotion, was gentle and supportive—very much the caring mother. “I cried every time I thought about my first guru too,” she said.

  As part of my newfound devotion to Tara and to Tylanni, I took what was called Refuge. In Buddhism, like most religions, there are rules to follow: don’t kill, don’t lie, don’t steal, don’t get drunk, don’t gossip. That kind of thing. When you take Refuge, you agree to follow the rules.

  As part of taking Refuge, I was also given a Buddhist name and I was sure it would be Tara and whatever word stood for “writer” in Tibetan. After all, I loved Tara and I was a writer. It made sense.

  Tylanni named me Jampel Sherab, which meant expansive love of transcendent wisdom, or the innate quality of wisdom that cuts through to the truth. While it rang true, I was not looking for my future self, I was looking for some recognizable core self.

  I took Tylanni’s offere
d name, that Jampel Sherab, and shoved myself towards the lofty ambitions such a name seemed to hold. I even gave Tylanni the pearls that had once been passed to me by Auntie Carol as if to say Janet was no longer my mother. I told myself I was now a different kind of daughter who was learning at the feet of a different kind of mother, one who I believed expected me to be expansive and transcendent.

  Looking back, I see I was—in large part—accepting a different version of the same divinity that my first mother, Janet, had foisted on my back. I was binding my fragile self to a living woman—Tylanni—who needed help to build the multimillion-dollar retreat center. As part of our relationship, I willingly cleaned toilets, scrubbed floors, made meals, and handed over huge amounts of time and money. I did everything I was asked and more. I couldn’t do enough. I lived in dread of letting Tylanni down. I wasn’t in a relationship of choice, I was in a relationship of need—for mother, for acceptance, for family, and for home.

  It had been Janet and Bud who had set me up to fail as divine daughter. What child can save a dying woman?

  Now, I was setting myself up for failure and it was coming faster than I knew.

  OVER THE NEXT year, through fall, winter, and spring, I almost exclusively practiced meditation. I didn’t write. I didn’t date. I didn’t even pursue friendships.

  My children added inches to their height, pounds to their bodies, and words to their expanding vocabularies. Steve and I found the common ground of caring for their needs, and I was a mother and a yogini.

  You could find me in the grocery store, shopping for our weekly supplies and you could find me in the mountains of Calgary where I’d take weekend retreats (while the kids were with Steve).

  As my practice progressed, I’d sometimes take the kids along to The Pure Land and we’d camp together in tents tied to the aspens and pines.

  Spencer became very fond of Tylanni and spent time hiking the trails around the land. Josephine was happy to be close to me, rearranging the altar while I meditated or off picking wildflowers, which she piled in my lap.

  For three years, I lived split between Oregon and Canada, between the demands of being a spiritual student and the demands of motherhood, between my desire to become fully enlightened and the reality of my own flawed humanity.

  I WOULD HAVE been happy doing Tara meditation—just Tara. I was a complete devotee. I had a Tara tattoo on my hip and my license plate read Om Tara. The kids knew that mantra by heart and we’d sing it together when we took baths or long rides in the car.

  But a student of Tibetan Buddhism is expected—some might say pressed—into other practices. Nothing remains static.

  Tylanni eventually encouraged me to study with a master from Tibet. His name was Rinpoche. Tylanni also suggested I get going on a basic practice that all students were required to do: Ngondro (noon-drow).

  Think about plowing hard ground loaded with rocks. That’s Ngondro.

  Ngondro also means you are going to spend two solid years of your life—if you work damn hard—digging into your own human soil and turning it soft and fine so it can grow a sustainable crop.

  NGONDRO, FIVE SEPARATE meditations combined into one, included prayers and mantras for purification (imagine cleaning out your house), for accumulating what is called merit (like putting money in a savings account), and for requesting divine help (picture Moses praying to God for strength before springing the Jews from Egypt).

  To know if Ngondro was working—that is, if I was doing it right and getting the benefit of the meditation—I was alerted to look for rainbows and peacocks within my own dreams. To have these markers meant I was making real strides.

  As I practiced Ngondro each day, through the next two years, the walls of my room at home became papered with drawings that Jo turned out by the dozen each day. Each of them contained a rainbow and some had peacocks too. I didn’t even notice. I was so split in my own attentions, I failed to make the connection between her art and my practice. I’d tape her pages into place, praising her with hugs and kisses, and carried on as if my meditation and Jo were separate.

  IN THE SUMMER of 2007, Rinpoche came to Canada. Of course, I booked my ticket to see him. That was part of the drill. Meet the master, give a status update, receive blessings and instruction.

  After three years of my devotions to Tara, Tylanni, and Buddhism, Steve had finally stopped asking questions. He booked his vacations with the kids to fall at the same time I needed to go into retreat. He said he didn’t understand what I was doing but like me, he thought maybe, just maybe I had found what I was looking for.

  AT THE PURE Land that summer, I set up my solo camp in the scrub oaks, and with more than one hundred of my fellow students, awaited the arrival of Rinpoche.

  He was coming from Tibet, via China and then by way of Germany. He wasn’t the Dalai Lama but in spiritual circles, our Rinpoche was like a rock star. It was said that he saw upwards to 400,000 students a year.

  The night before his arrival, there were rainbow rings around the moon—an auspicious sign.

  Under that moon, I couldn’t sleep and hiked through sagebrush and shadows to the practice yurt. At that hour, 3:00 AM, the yurt was empty and cold. All the meditation cushions were stacked against one wall. Tiny mice raced across the floor in a scramble of wild claws and disappeared under the floorboards.

  I lit a few candles—enough to get the place glowing—and went to work on the physical part of the Ngondro called prostrations. You dive to the ground, press your body flat and touch your forehead to the floor. Next you push back and stand up again. You do this—count them—one hundred and eight thousand times. 108,000.

  Over the first three months, I had accumulated more than twenty thousand prostrations. I could usually do about two hundred and fifty a day, but in the yurt that night I did three hundred and couldn’t stop.

  The sunrise stained the white snow peaks of the Rockies with the colors of silver and pink and I entered an endorphin high runners call “the zone.” My body was slick with sweat and my breath hit an even pace. Five hundred.

  As the sun exploded into the wide blue sky, the only sound was the thump of my body as it slapped down and slid over the smooth wooden floor. Every six seconds, I was down and up again and then down once more. Seven hundred and fifty.

  My imagination held the visualization of all my families—known and unknown. I conjured Steve, the children, Richard, Peggy, Deb and her children, Bryan, Janet, and Bud. I even imagined my first mother and first father—whoever and wherever they were. I thought of all the faceless connected to me: siblings, aunts, uncles, grandparents, great grandparents. It was a human soup. Nine hundred.

  I prostrated for myself, for all these family members and even for all of humanity.

  Bears, deer, bugs came next. Any creature, large or small, was added to my visualization, my prayers and my prostrations. One thousand.

  I imagined purification and forgiveness and transcendence for everyone and only stopped because soon—very soon—the yurt would be needed for teachings.

  Far off, in the lean-to kitchen, I heard the breakfast bell ring.

  Twelve hundred!

  WHYIN GOD’s name would anyone do these crazy prostrations? I wondered this to myself, as I sat down on my cushion and swabbed off the sweat and sucked for air. I wondered at the question for years in fact.

  In part, I was desperate. I truly believed my only happiness would come from full enlightenment. And I did them because they were expected. Tylanni had done Ngondro as a young woman, and as a student of Tylanni—well, I wanted to be obedient. But there is more to the story—there usually is. In doing those prostrations, something incredible was also happening. I was pressing my forehead to earth, which is a form of frontal lobe therapy as was later explained to me by experts of the brain. It seems I was bowing to heal my own trauma.

  WHEN YOU ARE a student of Rinpoche, you get to meet with the great master—one on one.

  It’s called semtri, or “pointing out instruction
,” where Rinpoche is able to see the nature of your mind. While I had no idea what this “nature of mind” meant, I was properly impressed. I had heard that a student could become enlightened during Sem Tre. Rinpoche could tell you one small thing and poof, enlightenment. Of course, I didn’t know anyone this had happened to. It was like a Tibetan urban legend—useless but intimidating.

  I WAS SHUTTLED up to Tylanni’s house, which was at the top of a mountain, for my meeting.

  I waited my turn in a small bedroom, sitting very still with my hands in my lap.

  Although I would never admit it—I was too devoted to Tylanni to outwardly question this whole scene—I didn’t know about being a student of Rinpoche’s. He was thirty-four years old, a monk, and from Tibet. What did a young monk know about a divorced mother of two from America?

  Across the spectrum of another possibility, I asked myself, What if he knew everything? What if Rinpoche—via his powers of enlightenment—could see so deeply in me that he’d view my past lives and my ruined karma, which were ripening in this life? Would he take one look into my eyes, shake his head, and send me away like some kind of all-knowing grim reaper? Would he say, “I am sorry Jennifer, but your next life will be lived as a bug. Bad karma. Baaad bad karma.”

  When it was finally my turn and I was being led into the room, I felt sure I was doomed.

  Rinpoche was positioned on a loveseat that had been covered in maroon fabric.

  The man was the size of an NFL football player. His shoulders were draped in maroon fabric. His head was shaved to less than a quarter inch of black stubble. His skin was dark brown.

  Spencer, who had met Rinpoche on another retreat, said it like this: “When I met with Rinpoche, I felt like a fifty and when I was done talking to him, I felt like a thousand!”