Category: Personal Stories

  • Glesca

    Rouken Glen Boathouse, Glasgow I had a great childhood just outside of the city, Glasgow that is!  Not like the city I grew up in, no it’s now a fabulous bustling town and something to be proud of if you are a Glaswegian… I lived in Orchard Park which is between Giffnock and Thornliebank.  Behind “oor…

  • THE PHOENIX

    I am skiing down through the snow and come across a building called Innovation. I walk through the door, and come across the people at the pay kiosk. I say I have no money with me but I want to meet my other half. They let me go in and I go up the escalator to meet…

  • Visiting Borobudor

    At the top of the Stupa, just before sun rise I had been in Indonesia for over a week, starting in the crazed metropolis of Jakarta then moving on to the University town of Yogyakarta. From Yogya I took a Taxi which got me to my hotel in Borobdor in just over an hour. After…

  • HERMIT

    Buddhism has been part of my life since I was a teenager. Now I have just passed my seventieth birthday. In the intervening years, I have been fortunate to study with some of the leading teachers of the age – Chogyam Trungpa, Kennett Roshi, and Thich Nhat Hanh among them. along with some lesser known…

  • The Trek to Mount Kailash in Tibet

    The trek to Mount Kailash Tibet May 2002 Mount Kailash is the holiest mountain in Tibet and probably all Asia.  It is situated in the Ngari region of western Tibet, which is one of the highest, loneliest and most desolate places on the planet.  It rises perpetually snow capped 7,500 metres from the high desert…

  • Wild White Horses

      In the Tibetan map of the world, the world is a circle and at the centre there is an enormous mountain guarded by four gates.  And when they draw a map of the world, they draw the map in sand, and it takes months and then when the map is finished, they erase it…

  • Are There Any Bodhisattvas in the Room? by Karma Changchub

    “Are there any Bodhisattvas in the room?” KARMA CHANGCHUB·TUESDAY, 19 JULY 2016 “Are there any Bodhisattvas in the room?” When asked such a question, few of us might raise our hands, possibly through a combination of humility and the absence of having more than two arms? Ringu Tulku Rinpoche asked the question when he returned…

  • A Room

    Our grandparents’ house was one story with the thatched roof common to most houses in our particular area at that time. It consisted of a kitchen/cum living room, two bedrooms and what was known as “the good room”, this room was only used on very special occasions such as gatherings at weddings or funerals. I…

  • Lama Ngapa Shakes the Dice

    Keeping an open mind, I decide that my mind would be open enough to have my immediate kismet – if fate has an intermediate stage – foretold by a lama.  The idea of rolling the dice, reading the tarot, seeing angels in tea leaves, stirring the entrails of a dead goat, laying silver on the…

  • Teaching on Holy Isle

      I arrived on the island with no prior knowledge of Edie’s teaching; my mother had recommended attending, having deeply benefited from a previous course on the island, led by Lama Rinchen Palmo. Edie is a wonderfully grounded teacher, whose honesty and humour helped us all feel at ease remarkably quickly; like Ringu Tulku she…

  • India: A Personal View

    When you come from a small country with a population of just over 5 million it’s hard to get your head round the complexities of a juggernaut like India with its 1.25 billion souls – and that was in 2013. The army was called out in Haryana last week where a north Indian martial and…

  • The Tibetan Art of Healing

    The first time I think I was enchanted by the Tibetan Knowledge of Healing was when I was in Dharamsala, India. I took a friend to see the great Tibetan Physician, Dr Yeshe Dondon, one misty winter morning. My friend had told me she had cancer and needed help.  She was a visitor to this…

  • A Time to Weep

    “Grandma, I haven’t seen you cry yet about my leaving!” This, spoken with solemn earnestness, came from my gorgeous seventeen-year-old granddaughter a month before she left for her first term at university this autumn. In the moment that I was waiting for an answer to emerge that would help her feel something from within me,…

  • Stromatolites

      Western Australia has some unique sites:  the Pinnacles in Nambung National Park formed from the remains of seashells; a pink lake in the Esperance area brought about by the acccumulation of algae producing the red pigment beta carotene; and the stromatolites on the outskirts of Cervantes. In the town, all the names of the…

  • Journey to Lumbini

    Lumbini temple A couple of years ago, around January, the bone-freezing climate of Pokhara drove my wife and me down to Lumbini in the Nepalese Terai in search of sun and heat…and a visit to the birthplace of Siddhartha Gautama, born in the year 1563 BCE. (Archaeologists’ discovery puts Buddha’s birth 300 years earlier, although…

  • Dharma Dance: Yumma Mudra

    Rome 15th March 2014 at Casa delle Culture Roma Photos by ©Elio Castoria Having been raised in USA, English is my first language.  I was only 3 years old when my mother used to bring me with her to concerts, theatre and movies.  We lived in Detroit Michigan.  My mother would have rather become an…

  • Dentistry in Nepal by Anita Selva

    This August I returned to the Kopan Monastery in Kathmandu for the third time. However, this visit wasn’t for a retreat, but was instead to provide much needed dental care. I had made contact with Dr George Manos, an Australian dentist who had been a Buddhist for many years, and had finished setting up the…