“When my husband told me he was having an affair and wanted a divorce, that was a big groundless moment. Reality as we knew it wasn’t holding together.”
She and Chögyam Trungpa had a profound connection, and he became her root guru. He had the ability, she has said, to show her how she was stuck in habitual patterns. Trungpa Rinpoche supported Pema when she decided not to remarry or to get involved in another relationship. “My real appetite and my real passion was for wanting to go deeper,”
“The underlying state of openness of mind has never gone away. It has never been marred by all the ugliness and craziness we’re seeing.”
“There is a story of a woman running away from tigers. She runs and runs and the tigers are getting closer and closer. When she comes to the edge of a cliff, she sees some vines there, so she climbs down and holds on to the vines. Looking down, she sees that there are tigers below her as well. She then notices that a mouse is gnawing away at the vine to which she is clinging. She also sees a beautiful little bunch of strawberries close to her, growing out of a clump of grass. She looks up and she looks down. She looks at the mouse. Then she just takes a strawberry, puts it in her mouth, and enjoys it thoroughly. Tigers above, tigers below. This is actually the predicament that we are always in, in terms of our birth and death. Each moment is just what it is. It might be the only moment of our life; it might be the only strawberry we’ll ever eat. We could get depressed about it, or we could finally appreciate it and delight in the preciousness of every single moment of our life.”
― Pema Chödrön, The Wisdom of No Escape: How to Love Yourself and Your World
https://www.amazon.com/Wisdom-No-Escape-Path-Loving-Kindness/dp/1570628726
1st photo ~ Deirdre Blomfield-Brown (now Pema Chödrön) in Berkeley, mid-1960s. courtesy of Arlyn Bull.
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