Cave in the Snow

Vicki MacKenzie, c1998

Biography of Jetsunna Tenzim Palmo. Read this after I read Into the Heart of Life, which was after I got to meet Tenzim Palmo at one of her last US lectures (May 2011).

Found her story to be really inspiring. She expresses such clarity of purpose, resolve, and goodwill. Her path seems to be one she was both destined to take and one that was enabled by her commitment and clear purpose to achieve enlightenment. I am amazingly moved by her commitment to achieve enlightenment as a woman as a way to shift the balance of power within Buddhism and to bring the power of women more fully into the world.

The journey that she undertook to spend her 12 years in the cave was pretty amazing. The time in te cave was a different kind of amazing - challenging, even life threatening, and perfect all at once. (I confess to it all having a certain intoxicating appeal from the perspective of this over-scheduled, deluded existence...)

Some quotes:
“The only problem with bliss is that because it arouses such enormous pleasure, beyond anything on a worldly level, including sexual bliss, people cling to it and really want it and then it becomes another obstacle.”

Her description of the perspective gained after those 12 years is exactly what I had imagined:
“...while I was in retreat everything became dreamlike...one could see the illusory nature of everything...because one was not in the middle of it. And then when you come out you see that people are so caught up in their life - we identify so totally with what we’ve created. We believe in it so completely. That’s why we suffer, because there is no space for us.....Now I notice that there is an inner distance towards whatever occurs, whether what’s occurring is outwards or inwards. Sometimes, it feels ike being in an empty house with all the doors and windows open wide and the wind just blowing through without anything obstructing it. Not always. Sometimes one gets caught up again, but now one knows that one is caught up again......[This is not] a cold emptiness but a warm spaciousness. It means that one is no longer involved in one’s ephemeral emotions. One sees how people cause so much of their own suffering just because they think that without having these strong emotions they’re not real people.”