A BIG MILESTONE

Dear Friends,

Last week I returned from being in retreat with my teacher, Lama Tsultrim Allione. It was a big retreat! It’s called Kapala V, and it marked the culmination for me of 14 years of deep study, devotion, and thousands of hours of meditation practice.

There’s so much still that I am processing and integrating from the retreat and having accomplished this milestone. There’s more to share of course, but what I feel now is a lot of happiness and gratitude. Gratitude to my husband Tom who has supported me every step of the way. Gratitude to my two children who have a deep feeling for me and the work I do and who are endlessly sweet about mommy meditating.

Gratitude to my precious grandmother Helen, who was my first teacher, and the one who gave me the imprint of what the loving presence of the archetypal mother might feel like. Her love continues to hold me, even from the other side.

And deep, deep gratitude to Lama Tsultrim and the exquisite Tibetan Buddhist tradition that delineates a path with specific practices, while also reminding me the whole time that we are born with bodhicitta, meaning, we each have within us the potentiated seed of deep heart wisdom needed to ease suffering and walk a loving, meaningful life.

I started studying with her 14 years ago, six months after I got married and before becoming a mother. I can hardly remember a time when the dharma and the sacred feminine wasn’t a backdrop. Now it is the ground of my life and work, my mothering.

When I began this path, I didn’t know where it would lead. I only knew that the teachings and practices helped me deeply, helped me keep my head above water when I felt like I was drowning in those early years of motherhood, which lasted a decade!

I practiced in the middle of the night when I couldn’t sleep during my pregnancies or when I couldn’t go back to bed after all the night time nursing. I fed so many demons around the anger and resentment I felt towards my husband! Those demons transformed into allies. It was these experiences that made me really see all the ways a woman and mother need to be supported.

When Sophia was a baby, I took her to Tara Mandala in Colorado to receive teachings and the other women there held her and sang to her so I could practice. I was so tired the whole time! I went into solitary retreat the month before I turned 40 and brought into that cabin in the woods the questions that would frame this decade of my life.

I have been living into those questions, with many of you by my side, over these last years. It feels important for me to honor this threshold crossing in my life by sharing it with you.

I want to express my gratitude to each of you on this email list. You are reading this because we have been friends for years or we are raising our children together or we are new friends who have met in practice space. Some of you here are my dharma sisters, mentors, wise crones, and my own mother, who gave me this life. Thank you all for being part of the web that holds me. I hope we continue to meet, again and again, in this precious mandala.

I hope we find moments to practice and nurture that which is deep and feeling and sacred in our life. And may what we find nourish us and radiate out beyond us, into the lives of those near and far, known and unknown, without one exception!

So grateful to be in this with you. Let’s practice together soon.

With love,

Jenny