Tenzin Palmo

"...Once the mirror of the mind is clean of all delusion, gender becomes irrelevant, says Tenzin Palmo. Before that, however, she does detect key differences between male and female practitioners. “Women are naturally at home in the intuitive realms,” she says, “whereas men like to have their feet on the ground. Women, when the mind shifts towards the infinite, don’t feel threatened; they feel at home in that kind of mind...

“Female spiritual energy is very quick — like Tara [the striking, green, female Buddha of active compassion]. You don’t have to be a great yogi to communicate with Tara. She’s always ready. Once women get going on meditation, their experiences are very rapid and high.”

There are, however, some things of which women should be aware when walking both in the world and on a spiritual path: “To be giving, nurturing, and loving is a great advantage,” Tenzin Palmo says. “However, it must be balanced with inner strength and centeredness. Many women are able to generate loving kindness, but they need to take time out to develop awareness and equanimity. Particularly if they have a family, they need to cultivate space — a center of inner tranquillity and poise. Basically, we need to balance a warm, emotional response to others with the inner detachment of clear seeing.”...

Tenzin Palmo is optimistic that “things are changing.” She says, “One of the problems in the past was that even if women became very accomplished, it was very difficult for them to express what they had realized since they were illiterate. Millions of women have attained enlightenment, but nobody wrote their biographies, so you don’t hear of them. They were outside the hierarchy; they didn’t found big monasteries or start lineages, therefore they weren’t considered important. They were the unheard voice...

Surprisingly, Tenzin Palmo believes that the problem now is not sexism from men but from women. “The age-old problem is that women tend to idolize men. They give their deepest respect and devotion to the male teachers and spiritual leaders. Until this fundamentally changes and women begin to support and appreciate their own gender, they will remain weak and overlooked.”...

“Each of us has something to do in this lifetime. We all have negative emotions to be purified and positive emotions to be cultivated. All of us need to reconnect to our source and drop our personal stories, don’t we? Men, women, old, young, from here, from there — it is the same. All you can do is your practice. There is nothing else. Don’t get caught up. Don’t stop. We have to learn how to get out of our own way. Because ultimately, the only thing standing in our way is ourselves.”

- Lucy Powell, Spirituality & Health