From Chapter 1

This is the story of my life, and it is also an intimate portrait of my husband, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. The two things are quite intertwined for me. My husband was a Tibetan Buddhist lama, the eleventh incarnation in the Trungpa lineage and the abbot of Surmang, a major group of monasteries in Eastern Tibet. Rinpoche (pronounced RIM-poach-eh), the name by which I usually called him, is a title for great lamas and incarnate teachers, which means “precious one.” Rinpoche left Tibet in 1959 because of the communist Chinese invasion of his country, and after spending a few years in India, he came to England. I met him there when he was twenty-eight and I was fifteen. We were married when I was sixteen, which was quite shocking to both my family and to Rinpoche’s Tibetan colleagues. We loved each other deeply, and we had a very special connection. However, our marriage was highly unconventional by most standards, and it was not without heartbreak or difficulty. In the end I have no regrets.

Rinpoche was one of the first Tibetan Buddhist teachers in the West and one of the very first to teach Westerners in the English language.The time that he spent in the West—between 1963, when he arrived in England, and 1987, when he died in North America—was an important period for the transplantation of Buddhism to the West, and I hope that my viewpoint as his wife may offer a unique perspective on that period. A lot of what my life was about during those years was about him and what happened to him. So a main objective for telling my story is so that the memory of him and of all those things that happened can be preserved.

I also want to talk about our life together and our relationship because it was so human and so intimate. Ultimately I think that this is the essence of the Buddhist teachings: they are about how to live our lives as human beings, intimately, moment by moment. So I will try to share with you what it was really like to love such a person. It was quite extraordinary.

The first time I saw Rinpoche was in December of 1968, during my Christmas break from Benenden School, an elite English boarding school for girls. I was fifteen at the time, and I was spending the holidays at home with my mother and my sister in London. The previous summer, my sister Tessa and I had traveled with Mother to Malta. At that point in my life, I couldn’t communicate at all with my mother, and I felt claustrophobic around her. While we were in Malta, I withdrew more and more into myself, and I read many books about Theravada, Zen, and Tibetan Buddhism. When we got back to London, I started to go to lectures and other events at the Buddhist Society in Eccleston Square. Buddhism was not particularly popular at that time, and none of my friends were interested in it. However, my father had had an interest in Buddhism and after his death, when I was thirteen, I began to question and explore my own spirituality, first reading about comparative religion and then focusing on Buddhist writings. In the autumn of 1968, I read Born in Tibet, Rinpoche’s book about his upbringing in Tibet and his escape from the Chinese. I thought it was an exciting and somewhat exotic story. However, the book was nowhere near as thrilling as meeting the author proved to be!

Over the Christmas holidays, I went to St. George’s Hall to attend a rally for the liberation of Tibet, sponsored by the Buddhist Society. The program went on for several hours, with one speaker after another. I found it quite boring. One of the last speakers on the schedule was the author of Born in Tibet, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, who appeared onstage in the maroon and saffron robes of a Tibetan monk. I looked up at him from the audience, and much to my amazement, I felt an immediate and intense connection. Before he could say anything, however, he collapsed and was carried offstage. We were told that Rinpoche had taken ill, but I imagine that alcohol may have been involved.

Although he was only onstage for a few minutes, I knew that I had a very deep and old connection with him, and it stirred up a great deal of emotion for me.The only way I can describe this experience is that it was like coming home. Nothing in my life had hit me in such a powerful way. I said to myself, “This is what I’ve been missing all my life. Here he is again.” This wasn’t just some exciting, powerful experience. I knew him, and as soon as I saw him, I realized how much I’d been missing him. From that moment on, I wanted desperately to meet him.

Since the age of thirteen, shortly after my father’s death, I had had several very vivid dreams about previous lives in Tibet. I didn’t tell anyone about them because I didn’t know what to say about them, and I thought that people might misunderstand. I didn’t really understand these dreams myself, although somehow I knew that the location was Tibet and these were about previous lives. When I saw Rinpoche, I knew that he was connected to the world that I had encountered in my dreams.

In one of the most vivid dreams, I lived in a nunnery on a large white lake in Tibet. At first I lived in a dormitory with other nuns, but then I was given my own living quarters in a large room dominated by a huge white statue of a Buddha. I stayed in the nunnery for several years, practicing meditation and studying. Then, I left to go on retreat in a cave in the mountains.

In retreat I wore a heavy woolen nun’s robe, which is called a chuba, and it was lined with fur. The furnishings in the cave were spartan, with a small bed in one corner, an area for cooking, and a simple shrine in front of which I practiced, seated cross-legged on a small raised platform. At one time, I could remember the deity that I visualized in retreat, although that memory has faded now. Later, when I described this to my husband, he knew exactly what practice I was doing.

I was terrified of wild animals in the vicinity. I started building a fire near the front of the cave every night to keep the animals away. Eventually, people from a nearby village raised the money to build a white facade to the cave, and then I felt safe staying there alone.