Lama Tsültrim Allione Interview

Summary

The conversation explores spiritual calling, encounters with Tibetan Buddhism, and the tension between skepticism and openness to miracles and sacred stories. It also examines how disciplined practices such as meditation and prostrations can transform the body, mind, and sense of self.

Questions This Interview Explores

• How can someone recognize a genuine spiritual calling?
• How should spiritual seekers relate to miracles, myths, and extraordinary claims?
• What are the purpose and benefits of Buddhist prostrations?
• How can faith and openness affect spiritual experience?

Key takeaways

• Openness to extraordinary possibilities can coexist with healthy skepticism.
• Dharma practice can sustain joy even after severe trauma and loss.
• Prostrations combine physical strengthening, devotion, meditation, and humility.
• Spiritual experiences are shaped by the mental and relational field around us.
• Faith can help create the conditions for receiving blessings and unusual experiences.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. I’ve done many hundreds of them now, and if this is new to you and you would like to see previous ones, please go to batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, and look at the Past Interviews menu.

This program is made possible by the support of appreciative listeners and viewers and is made freely available to anyone who wants to watch it. So, if you appreciate it and would like to support it, there’s a PayPal button on every page of the site.

My guest today is Lama Tsültrim Allione, and each word in her name has a story behind it, which we’ll be getting into. She is an author, an internationally known Buddhist teacher, and the founder and resident Lama of Tara Mandala Retreat Center in Pagosa Springs, Colorado.

She’s the author of Women of Wisdom and the national bestseller Feeding Your Demons: Ancient Wisdom for Resolving Inner Conflict, which is now translated into 17 languages, and her upcoming book, Wisdom Rising: Journey into the Mandala of the Empowered Feminine.

She was born in New England to an academic and publishing family. She traveled to India in her late teens, which we’ll be talking about, because it was quite an adventure. In 1970, at the age of 22, she was ordained as a Tibetan Buddhist nun by His Holiness the 16th Karmapa.

After four years living as a nun in the Himalayan region, she returned her monastic vows, married, and raised a family.

A miraculous imprint in stone

Lama Tsültrim: Okay, so we had lunch, and he was in a very altered state. At that time, we didn’t have any buildings at Taramandala; we were just in tents. We were sitting outside the tent after lunch with all the dirty dishes on the table and so on, and he was in this kind of altered state where he was singing Dzogchen poetry. Dzogchen is the highest nature-of-mind teaching in the Tibetan tradition, but it was all rhyming, and I was kind of like, “How is he doing this?” It was going on for about a half hour.

Then I noticed he had the rock in his hand, and he said, “Go and get people with faith.” So I ran up to our outdoor kitchen and tried to figure out who had faith. I told them to come, and maybe about 20 people came. He had the rock in his hand and was kind of moving it back and forth, and then all of a sudden he just went, “Pet,” which is a seed-syllable sound.

Then he looked at the rock, and sure enough, his thumb had gone into it maybe about a quarter of an inch. He looked at the back, and you could see where he would have held it with this finger. It was kind of seared; it looked like the rock had been seared. It hadn’t gone in very far, and then he said, “Oh, there was someone here without faith,” because if everyone had had faith, it would have gone in on both sides.

The maker, or the container, for this to happen in required faith.

I thought that was really interesting because it showed me that the maker, or the container, for this to happen in required faith. That’s kind of what we were talking about before: having that openness to the possibility of something unusual happening.

The other thing that was interesting about that was that he showed it to me and to everybody there and blessed them with it. Then he said, “I want to keep it for a few days and put the blessings into it.” That was another interesting thing for me because I thought, “Well, isn’t it already blessed? Isn’t that enough?” But my understanding of blessings is that it’s almost like a substance that can be put into an object, and then that object has blessing power. So he did keep it for a few days, and I still have it. That’s an example.

Rick: Okay, that’s interesting. Do you have any idea what the mechanics of something like that would be? I mean, on the level of physics, it would be hard to explain, but you know.

Lama Tsültrim: Yeah, that’s an interesting question because my son was a scientist at that time, on a PhD track in microbiology, and not really interested in the Dharma. He came to visit me right after this happened, and I showed it to him. He knew scientifically what would have had to happen for that to happen, and it just blew his mind. Knowing what would be required scientifically, in that moment his mind turned to the Dharma.

Now he’s done four years of solitary retreat. He’s on a PhD track in Buddhist philosophy and already has an MA. Otherwise, he would have been a scientist. So, yeah, it’s an interesting question: How could that happen?

The other thing is that it doesn’t look like force. It looks kind of like if you stuck your thumbprint into butter. You can see the whorls of the thumb in it.

Rick: You can actually see the thumbprint?

Lama Tsültrim: Yeah.

Rick: Oh, interesting. Wow. Well, you know that comment I made a few minutes ago about maybe in past ages this sort of thing was more likely? Some people say that the ambient level of consciousness in the world kind of suppresses possibilities that might otherwise be lively, and that in a world in which a higher level of consciousness prevailed, most people, or many people, would be capable of these kinds of things. They would just be part of human ability, and we would take them rather matter-of-factly and not make a fuss about them. They would just kind of be normal because they were common.

Lama Tsültrim: I think that we live in a field of—of course, the field of nature and our environment—but we also live in the field of each other’s thoughts and each other’s minds. We certainly see this in a relationship with anybody: the relationship with them, and at what level you can communicate, really depends so much on the field of both of those people.

It kind of reminds me of the title of your program, The Buddha at the Gas Pump. Would you recognize the Buddha at the gas pump if you met him there? Would he be able to communicate his wisdom to you if you weren’t open to that level of being?

Rick: Yeah, that’s all sort of implied in the title. It’s just extraordinary people in ordinary circumstances becoming more and more common in today’s world, at least hopefully, and the implications that might have for the world.

The Journey to India and Meeting the Karmapa

Okay, so let’s get back to your story. So there you were, coming overland in a VW bus. I’m sure it’s not something that you and I would want to do at our age, but it’s the kind of thing we did when we were that age. You ended up back in India, and then what happened?

Lama Tsültrim: Well, I did go to see the Karmapa, as I was telling you, and experienced this black-hat ceremony. Then I went sort of in the wave of humanity that was squishing its way to the front to get a blessing with him. You sort of funneled into this single doorway, so it ended up being one by one, but there was lots of pushing and jostling and being with the Tibetans in their big wool chubas and so on.

Anyway, I ended up in front of him and looked up, and he smiled this amazing smile—just the biggest smile I’ve ever seen in my life. Even now, I haven’t seen another smile like that. Then he said something to this Bhutanese doctor who was his translator. He didn’t say anything to me, and then I went on with the crowd.

A few days later, I started having this feeling that there was something I was supposed to do, and it was to find my guru. But I was sure it wasn’t him because he was fat and had a gold watch. That disqualified him.

Anyway, then I decided it was this yogi who was up at the mountain where the Karmapa was. He took me to his room, and I was sort of asking him to be my teacher. Then he took a picture of the Karmapa from the shrine and said, “No, it’s him. This is the Karmapa’s guru.” So I thought, “Yeah, maybe I’m just being kind of limited in the way that I’ve dismissed him.”

Then I opened, as we were just talking about, to the possibility of him being my teacher. Eventually, I decided that I would request ordination as a nun. So I went to him one morning and made that request. He looked at me with this long, silent look, and I was looking back at him. It was like he was reading my whole karmic history. Then he nodded and said, “Yes, I will ordain you, but not here. I want to ordain you in Bodhgaya, under the Bodhi tree.”

Rick: Is that where the Buddha got enlightened?

Lama Tsültrim: Yes. He was going there next. I don’t know why—maybe he thought there would be more blessings there. He was doing ordinations in Kathmandu, but in any case, maybe he just wanted to see if I really wanted to do it enough to actually go there and so on.

Anyway, I was ordained there on the January full moon, in a very intimate and powerful ceremony with four main reincarnate lamas connected to him. When I went out from the ceremony, the Bhutanese doctor congratulated me. There I was, with no hair, kind of wondering what I had done.

Then he said, “You know, when His Holiness first saw you there, at Swayambhu, he predicted this. He told me that you were going to be ordained and that you had been his disciple in many lifetimes.” That was interesting because it was certainly not in my mind at that time, but he could see it. He said, “And you will benefit the Dharma. He predicted that you’ll benefit the Dharma in your life,” which seemed like a very remote possibility. It didn’t seem possible at that time.

Rick: Yeah. So you did years of rather intense practices, I understand, including long silent retreats in Himalayan caves and things like that. Give us just an overview of what you’ve been through in terms of that kind of sadhana.

Cave Retreats and Tibetan Buddhist Preparatory Practices

Lama Tsültrim: Well, I lived in India and Nepal for about three or four years, and I practiced in holy and sacred places. Sometimes it was in isolation in caves in the Himalayas. I was up at a cave at one point that was about 16,000 feet high. I was there for six weeks and never really acclimated, but it was an incredible place near Mount Everest.

There were places like that, and then a lot of times I stayed in huts, little stone huts in the Himalayas. I also practiced in Bodhgaya, Sarnath, and some of those sacred places.

My practice was a combination of the traditional Tibetan preparatory practices called ngöndro, which means “that which goes before,” and which are quite rigorous to do. They involve, for example, 100,000 full-length prostrations. If you’re going pretty fast, it takes 20 minutes to do 100, so you can imagine how long that takes.

Rick: You do 100? You couldn’t possibly do 100,000 consecutively.

Lama Tsültrim: No, no, no.

Rick: Over a period of a month or something?

Lama Tsültrim: Yeah.

Rick: It must get you in great shape physically.

Lama Tsültrim: I could do about 1,000 a day after I got going. Some people can do more than that, but I decided just to do 1,000 a day.

My practice was that and also shamatha practice. I was trained by a mountain yogi in a progressive form of shamatha practice, which begins with the quite simple practice of being with the breath and then gradually moves more toward the nature of mind—mind looking at mind.

Rick: So it’s more meditative, inward kind of thing.

Lama Tsültrim: Yeah.

Rick: Do you feel that those physical things, such as the thousand prostrations, or 100,000 over the course of weeks—and you sometimes see these people going on pilgrimages where they prostrate their way all the way up to Mount Kailash or something, over hundreds of miles—do you feel that those are really meritorious?

In retrospect, over the course of your whole life now, looking at all the things you’ve done and all the things you’ve seen, do you feel like people really derive a lot of spiritual benefit from those?

Lama Tsültrim: I still do prostrations every day. I like it. I’m not doing a thousand a day—more like a hundred, or sometimes less than that, depending on my time.

What I experience with prostrations in particular is that, because you go all the way down, it’s almost like a massage of your subtle body as you go down and up. It is very strengthening—physically strengthening—plus it’s tied to meditation.

I haven’t done that kind of practice in Bodhgaya, but I have done full prostrations on the ground around the Bodhi tree. I think the people I’ve seen doing it are just glowing. I met people at Mount Kailash who were doing it, and I think it’s very purifying and strengthening. The devotion and so on that is required is meritorious.

Rick: Yeah, it must. I mean, it takes tremendous determination and dedication even to do such a thing. It also seems symbolically that you’re—I don’t know to whom or what you’re prostrating—but it seems like it must attenuate the ego somehow and cultivate humility.

Lama Tsültrim: Exactly. It’s a thing that works with pride, and it’s quite a complex visualization that you’re doing. You’re not just throwing yourself on the ground.

Rick: Okay.

Lama Tsültrim: No, there’s a whole mind yoga with it as well.

Rick: So it might be something good for Donald Trump to take up and do every morning instead of watching Fox News.

Lama Tsültrim Allione: If only, right?

Rick: Okay, so I want to keep going with your story, but I don’t want to devote all our time to that because your book is very interesting and we want to talk about the points that it brings out in it. Given the amount of time we have and the overview that you must have in mind of the things you consider most important, let’s budget our time and touch upon the most important aspects of your life story, but also save plenty of time for the things you bring out in your book. So how shall we proceed with that in mind?

Lama Tsültrim Allione: Well, maybe I could talk, or you could ask me a little more about my life and the salient points that relate to what has become this current book. Or what parts of my life do you know something about now that you think would be interesting and useful to your listeners?

Rick: Well, people might be wondering why you disrobed and how you ended up having children and all that stuff. As I understand it, disrobing is not that big a deal in the Tibetan tradition. It’s not like you’re sort of cursed and fallen. It’s more like, “Okay, you did your time in that, and maybe it’s time for a new phase.”

Returning Monastic Vows and Finding a Lay Buddhist Path

Lama Tsültrim Allione: Yeah, I mean, they do call you a fallen nun, but what was interesting for me was wondering how they would approach me when I went to give my vows back. I’ll just give a little background on why I decided to do that.

I actually loved being a nun and I was very happy, but I felt like if I did that my whole life, I would start repressing aspects of myself, like my sexuality, and that wouldn’t necessarily be healthy for me. I’m not saying it’s not right for everybody. I think some people are very suited to that, but I wasn’t really someone who always wanted to be a nun. I just kind of ended up as a nun with the Karmapa.

Rick: It was kind of a spur-of-the-moment decision, really.

Lama Tsültrim Allione: Very much so. I wasn’t a Buddhist at the time. Anyway, that was one aspect. The other thing was that I came back to the West as a nun, and I was literally the only Tibetan Buddhist nun in the entire country, Tibetan or Western. I was the only one.

That was very lonely because monasticism is really a group practice. You have the support of the other monks and nuns and so on, and I had no support. I’d go into the supermarket and they’d ask me if I’d had brain surgery or if I was Hare Krishna. I just stood out in a way that maybe I didn’t really want to. It wasn’t like that in Asia, but when I got back here, it was like that.

It wasn’t an easy decision. It really wasn’t. It took me about six months to make the decision, but then I finally did, and I returned my vows to Khamtrul Rinpoche, who was a great lama and also a monk in Tashi Jong, which is in the Kangra Valley in India, not far from Dharamsala.

He said, “Dedicate the merit of your time as a nun to the benefit of all beings.” Instead of saying, “You’re a bad girl, you broke your vows,” it was like, “No, take all that positive energy, generate it, offer it out, and then go on.”

My actual teacher at that time wasn’t a monk, so he couldn’t receive the vows back, but he said that of Guru Rinpoche’s 25 disciples—and Guru Rinpoche was the being who brought Buddhism to Tibet—there were only a couple of monastics. They impacted Tibet as practitioners until now, so I shouldn’t feel like I couldn’t follow my path as a layperson.

I did some purification practices because I had broken my vows, and then sometimes I say I got pregnant five minutes later. It wasn’t quite that quick, but it was pretty fast, and I was pretty young and innocent in a way, in terms of relationships and all that.

Within a year of having given back my vows, I was a mother, and then within 17 months of that, I was a mother again. Eventually, I also had twins, so my life completely shifted from having an infinite amount of time for meditation to basically having no time for myself at all—never mind meditation. I hardly had time to brush my teeth.

I had to bring the Buddha to the kitchen sink, the changing table, or the middle-of-the-night, no-sleep experience.

Rick: Yeah, there’s a new movie out with Charlize Theron. I think it’s called Tully. It’s about what a burnout it is to be a mother. So you really went into the thick of it. I remember hearing you say that there were times when you thought, “Oh my God, what have I done? What have I taken on here? This is too much,” and you had some regrets, almost.

Lama Tsültrim Allione: Yeah. I don’t think I ever regretted being a mother, and I don’t think any parent does, at least none that I’ve known. But it certainly is much more than anyone thinks it’s going to be. Having so many so soon and so quickly was very intense.

It was really important for me as a practitioner, actually, because I had to bring the Buddha to the gas pump—or, more accurately, bring the Buddha to the kitchen sink, the changing table, or the middle-of-the-night, no-sleep experience. For seven years, I figured, I didn’t have a full night’s sleep.

It was an amazing kind of training ground for patience, generosity, and all the paramitas in a way that, had I stayed a nun and lived in caves and so on, I wouldn’t have had. I would have had something else that would have been equally valuable, but I really feel like that helped me to understand others and have more compassion for others. Going through that is very humbling.

It was an amazing kind of training ground for patience, generosity, and all the paramitas in a way that, had I stayed a nun and lived in caves and so on, I wouldn’t have had. I would have had something else that would have been equally valuable, but I really feel like that helped me to understand others and have more compassion for others. Going through that is very humbling.

🕊️ Loss, women, and Buddhist history

Rick: Without skipping anything really important, I want to be sure to have plenty of time to talk about the themes in your book. Is there anything else? Here it is decades later, of course, and you’ve raised the kids. One of your children died tragically. Let’s just divert into that for a second. One of them died from sudden infant death syndrome. How did that affect you? I mean, it’s kind of trivial how I’ve tried to ask it.

Lama Tsültrim Allione: Well, it is important because it led me to write my first book. Her death caused me to go into a kind of descent in which everything that I had held on to seemed not to be a support. I felt I needed the stories of women—Buddhist women—and how they dealt with this kind of thing.

At that time, there were no stories of Buddhist women. There was the story of Milarepa, or of course the story of the Buddha, who left his child and went out the window in the middle of the night. He didn’t stay.

Rick: Deadbeat dad.

Lama Tsültrim Allione: Yeah, he probably didn’t even pay child support.

Chiara’s death made me seek the stories of women and the biographies of women, and that became my first book. It also became the way I got interested in the stories of women and then women in general.

I never even thought about it as a subject, but to write the book I had to do research. I found out about the history of women in Buddhism and more about the history of women and religion. It raised my awareness, my consciousness, as we say, about women and gave me a tremendous appreciation of women and the feminine principle.

In a way, that experience, which you brought up, was really seminal in terms of this current book and also a lot of what I’ve done in my life in terms of women and the feminine.

Rick: Yeah, you told this story about how, when you were a nun, you and the other nuns had to sit behind all the male monks, even the little five-year-olds who were fidgety and not paying attention to what was going on. You had to sit behind them, and then all the laypeople sat behind you. They weren’t really into what was going on, either; they were all chatting and having a party. It seems so sexist in terms of the things that were waking up.

Lama Tsültrim Allione: Yeah, it is sexist, and it is one of the vows of the nuns to sit behind the monks always.

Rick: Yeah, there’s a cool story about how you were riding in a car with a Buddhist teacher—you’ll know his name—and you were haranguing him as you were going along about this inequity between men and women in Buddhism. His sister was in the back seat saying, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.” That really set the ball rolling in terms of some significant changes taking place.

Lama Tsültrim Allione: Yeah, it was interesting because he went back to Tibet. This is the same lama who imprinted his hand into the rock, by the way. He made changes in Tibet and came back the next year and very happily reported to me that he had created a college for women so that they could get the same level of degree that the male monks could get. He had made a lot of similar changes.

Rick: That’s great. My impression is that there’s a lot of valuable stuff in the ancient traditions, but if we just accept it all blindly, we’re going to perpetuate a lot of stuff that isn’t valuable. We really have to pick and choose, reevaluate our assumptions, and analyze these things to see if they really hold up. A lot of the stuff might just have been a bunch of crusty old men imposing their misogynist attitudes and establishing some tradition that has no spiritual merit to it whatsoever.

Lama Tsültrim Allione: Yeah, that could be crusty young men, too.

Rick: Crusty young men, yeah, struggling and straining against that to which they were attracted.

Lama Tsültrim Allione: Yes, and making the women the problem.

Rick: Yeah, very good point. There are so many stories of monks being tempted by women and then blaming the women. The women are the big temptress, so how about their self-discipline and discrimination?

Lama Tsültrim Allione: I don’t know if you remember the beginning of my book, but I talked about the split between spirit and matter. Traditions that emphasize transcendence and the disembodied spiritual have traditionally associated women and nature with the nonspiritual.

Rick: I actually love that part of your book. As soon as I started reading it, I thought, “Oh boy, this is great.” I had no idea what your book was going to be about, but I love that topic, and I think I’d like to talk with you about it for a little while because I think it’s extremely important and relevant to the very continuation of the human race, actually.

Lama Tsültrim Allione: Yes, I feel that way, too.

Rick: Yeah, let’s get into it.

Lama Tsültrim Allione: Yeah.

Rick: So spell it out for us. I could elaborate, but you can do it better, and it’s your book, so lay out the whole premise there.

Lama Tsültrim Allione: Historically, women and nature have been treated in a similar way. When women have been respected, nature has been respected, and vice versa.

Lama Tsültrim Allione: Historically, women and nature have been treated in a similar way. When women have been respected, nature has been respected, and vice versa.

In our patriarchal religions, which is pretty much every world religion that we have today, women and nature have generally been considered obstacles to the divine, to the transcendent experience, which is disembodied. Women and nature have been considered obstacles on the path to that transcendent, divine experience and therefore denigrated and considered lesser than in the religion.

The result of that is that women and nature have been considered something that men should control and use and abuse if they want to. What this has led us to is the ecological situation that we’re in today, as well as the situation of violence, harassment, and abuse of women. Is it okay if I talk about Trump?

Rick: Of course. I mean, I’ll get some flak for it, but I don’t care.

Lama Tsültrim Allione: Okay, well, I mean, he’s just such a good example of this, I can’t resist, because his attitude toward nature and his attitude toward women is the same. It’s true. You see him pulling out of the Paris Treaty, and we see him—I don’t even have to enumerate what he’s doing to the ecological situation on Earth, and then what he’s doing to women. So, I’m not speaking politically; I’m speaking as an example of what I’m talking about.

Whereas historically, in religions like some of the Native American tribes, women and nature were considered sacred and esteemed. It was the women, the grandmothers actually, who made the main decisions in the tribe, and nature was always treated with great respect and called the mother.

That’s a different experience, and within that experience, I see this in two traditions that I’m fairly familiar with: the Native American tradition and also the Bon traditions, which are pre-Buddhist Tibetan traditions. There’s a deep recognition of the reciprocal relationship between nature and human beings, and the need to treat them as sacred, and women as well. I talked about that in my book with that story of Bertha Grove.

Rick: I don’t remember that one, and people listening won’t have heard it, so go ahead.

Lama Tsültrim Allione: When we moved to Colorado, the 700 acres of land where I live now, I wanted to make contact with the Native American people whose land it really was. I had synchronistically met a woman at a gathering in Texas a couple of months before we moved here. Her name is Bertha Grove, and she’s a plant-spirit healer and a medicine woman in the Ute tribe.

When I got here, I contacted her, and she came over to Tara Mandala. We started doing sweat lodges and praying. I asked her, “I want permission to do what we’re doing. I want to be in accord with the spirits of this land,” and so on. I started studying with her, and she taught me about this because I was studying herbal medicine with her.

When we went out to harvest herbs, she would say, “If you pick an herb, if you take something, you have to take some hair out of your head and offer it back to the earth,” partly in exchange, but also because when you pull that out of your head, you feel it, and the earth feels it when you take something from her body.

Then she said something else that was also very significant in terms of what we’re talking about. She said, “When you harvest medicine, you always ask permission, and then you don’t take the best plant. You don’t take the biggest flower or herb or whatever. You take the medium-sized ones that are healthy, but you leave the biggest ones because that’s going to strengthen the future.”

She talked about this reciprocal, respectful relationship with nature, which, if we had that, we would not be in the situation that we’re in, which is, as you know, really frightening. What’s happening is becoming more and more irreversible.

I say all that in terms of what we started talking about regarding women and nature and these different kinds of spirituality: one which is transcendent, and one in which the Divine is immanent, meaning in the body or in our life in nature. Whenever there’s a feminine presence in religion, historically, the sacred is immanent, which is interesting. It’s in the body, in the earth.

Rick: Yeah, I don’t think Christianity can be blamed exclusively, but Western society is largely built on a Christian tradition, a Christian background. Christianity was responsible for the burning of maybe a hundred thousand women at the stake, accused of witchcraft because they happened to be herbalists or this or that. Of course, many others of all genders, considered heretics or something, were tortured, burned, and killed.

In our modern, materialistic society, in which the predominant scientific paradigm is one of materialism, in which the physical world is thought to be dead, inert matter, it’s very much a continuation of that sort of mindset, I believe. As you say, if it’s dead, we can do whatever we want to it. We have dominion over the earth, and so on and so forth, and it’s there for our pleasure, for our sustenance, for whatever.

Actually, I always like to say this—and I’ll make this brief—science has also, despite its materialistic attitude, revealed that there’s, if you look at it this way, infinite intelligence lively in every single particle of creation. There is a marvel of laws of nature performing in the function of every atom, every molecule, every cell, and everything.

If you think about what that intelligence really is, you can see, even through the window of science, that the Divine is immanent in creation. It’s all this display of Divine intelligence. So, there it is. Obviously, if you are abusing and misusing that, you are abusing the Divine.

This understanding is a little bit new to me, but a lot of people say, “What do you mean by the Divine feminine?” A few interviews back, somebody really hit home with that, and I thought, “Well, obviously, the Divine feminine is this omnipresence of intelligence in all of creation.” If that were appreciated, then the kind of respectfulness that you were just referring to with that Native American herbalist could filter into all of our different sciences and economic endeavors, and so on, and we could really transform the world. That’s the end of my little riff.

Lama Tsültrim Allione: Well said.

Rick: Get off my soapbox.

Lama Tsültrim Allione: That’s a beautiful image of the inherent aliveness and miraculousness of the phenomenal world. In Tibetan Buddhism, we talk about the phenomenal world as the radiance of the ground of being, or the expression of the ground of being.

The ground of being is the Great Mother, which is pure potentiality, without form, pure potentiality. Then, as the ground expresses itself, it becomes radiance, and that radiance is our world. The world—not only this earth, but the entire universe—is the display of the Great Mother, which is the ground of being, which is pure potentiality, which is emptiness.

The ground of being is the Great Mother, which is pure potentiality, without form, pure potentiality. Then, as the ground expresses itself, it becomes radiance, and that radiance is our world. The world—not only this earth, but the entire universe—is the display of the Great Mother, which is the ground of being, which is pure potentiality, which is emptiness.

The world—not only this earth, but the entire universe—is the display of the Great Mother.

To me, that’s a beautiful way to see our world. Maybe all of you who are listening now, who are looking on, could just look around where you are and experience what you’re seeing as the play of your own mind, or the display of luminosity that is effulging from the ground of being.

That’s such a different experience from there being me and then there’s other, and me and that. Even if that is alive, it’s still that to me. The experience of nonduality and the display of the radiance of being gives such a different feeling to the material world, which in many traditions would be considered not spirit.

Rick: Yeah, it gives you a sort of sense of a gentle, compassionate approach to everything. You would no sooner harm something that is ordinarily considered to be external to yourself than you would harm your own arm, because the environment, the world, is no longer considered external to yourself.

Lama Tsültrim Allione: Yeah, and even that word “environment”—it’s saying that you’re the main thing and then there’s your environment, when actually you’re not the main thing. You’re a tiny fragment of the main thing.

The fierce feminine and the Dakini mandala

Rick: I don’t know if you remember that old margarine commercial where somebody was eating something and they thought it was butter: “Mmm, butter.” No, it was Mother Nature. She was offered this thing, some butter, and then they said, “No, this isn’t butter, it’s margarine.” Then she gets really mad and says, “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature,” and throws a lightning bolt or something. Do you remember that?

Lama Tsültrim Allione: No.

Rick: It was back in the ’60s, probably. In any case, if everything is the Divine, if it’s all Divine intelligence, if that which some consider to be dumb matter is really Divine, then how much tolerance does the Divine have?

A mother is tolerant to a certain extent of her children, and then at a certain point she has to discipline them. What do you see as the sort of potential, or even current, disciplinary action that the Divine feminine, Mother Divine, may take—or may already be taking—with those of us who are abusing her?

Lama Tsültrim Allione: Well, she’s already doing it with climate change, with hurricanes, winds that we’ve never seen before, and so on. It’s not her kind of retribution, but it’s a natural attempt to balance and to try to keep balance within an imbalanced world. Certainly, no one is immune to it. Even rich people are not going to be able to get away with it.

Rick: Yeah, their little private islands are going to get inundated.

Lama Tsültrim Allione: Yeah, they already are. That kind of brings us to the theme of my book about fierce compassion and the fierce feminine, which I speak about in the book. I think that’s part of what this is: fierce compassion of the natural world, which is this natural display of the ground of being.

What inspired me greatly was the Women’s March in 2016, was it?

Rick: Yeah, it was the day after the inauguration.

Lama Tsültrim Allione: Seeing five million women and their allies—male allies and all kinds of gender allies—rising up and being fierce in a way that I hadn’t seen for a long time was incredible. What I loved about what I saw—I mean, I’m in a very remote part of Colorado, so I wasn’t in the marches—was a lot of humor and happiness in those women who were also being fierce, and nonviolence and nonaggression.

This idea that you can be fierce and hold your ground, stop complaining and do something about it, and yet embody the feminine, was beautiful to me. It was incredible to see so many women standing up to that and yet having humor with the pink pussy hats. That came out as a kind of slap back to Trump, you know, what he had said and so on.

Rick: Yeah, a friend of mine sent me a photo of the march in Berkeley, I believe it was, and there was a picture of a dog. It had a sign on its back that said, “Pussy grab protection dog.”

Lama Tsültrim Allione: Yeah.

Rick: I’m sorry I interrupted you. You were saying something about Trump.

Lama Tsültrim Allione: Yeah, I was just saying that he called Hillary a nasty woman.

Rick: Right.

Lama Tsültrim Allione: Then women flipped it. That phrase was embraced and turned into an empowerment slogan, like, “Never underestimate the power of a nasty woman.”

Dakinis and the Fierce Feminine

The dakinis in the Tibetan tradition, which is what I write about in the book, are embodiments of that—the fierce feminine. They are dancing, and the wisdom dakinis are considered equal to the Buddhas in Vajrayana, and yet they’re female and they’re dancing. They hold a hook knife in their raised right hand, and so on.

Rick: And they’re usually stomping on some prostrate man on the ground, you know, prostrate and lying there.

Lama Tsültrim Allione: Well, it’s not a man; it’s a symbol of ego. Ego, okay? Yeah, it’s trampling on the ego, which could be either male or female. But anyway, it’s an archetype, if you will, that has been disallowed. You were talking about the witches—there’s such a fear of the feminine that it’s, “Let’s burn her,” because those were mostly independent women or women who didn’t do what their husbands wanted them to do. And so then they were like, “She’s a witch.”

There was a lot of repressed sexuality at that time too, a lot, and so there was all that kind of twisted into that experience. But in any case, in my book I teach about the mandala of the five Dakinis, each of whom has different characteristics and is an embodiment of a different kind of wisdom. And so I wanted to just talk for a minute about the mandala, if that’s okay.

Rick: Yeah, please.

Lama Tsültrim Allione: Because that’s something I think is a very important idea that is known to some extent, but in some ways not deeply enough known, which is why I wrote the book to begin with. The mandala is a template of wholeness. Normally, I think we think of something like this as a mandala—that’s a Tibetan mandala—but nowadays pretty much anything that’s a circle with a center is a mandala: mandala coloring books and so on.

But the mandala within the Tibetan tradition is actually a structure. It’s three-dimensional, and the practitioner, the meditator, places themselves within that template, which is a circle with four quadrants. The center is also a place in the mandala; it’s not just a dot in the center. It’s a whole place in the center.

And so, if we place our minds within the mandala, as we do in a mandala meditation, the fragmented parts of ourselves, of our minds, are drawn in and then placed into that template of wholeness and transformed by that, because of the symbolic power and meaning of each of those directions, which the practitioner learns and knows.

And so it’s different from mindfulness, which is bringing yourself into the present moment—very important, and a base for this kind of practice—but it’s imbued with symbolic meaning. The East has a certain color, meaning, and element, and so on, all the way around the mandala.

That experience of pulling in, reining in our wild minds, and then placing them within the mandala is a three-dimensional experience in which you are the Dakini, and then there’s the white Dakini in the middle. The white Dakini symbolizes space and all-pervading awareness. Then, in the East, there is another one, in the South, and so on.

So when you are her, it’s not just like you’re in this symbolic structure; you’re there as this fierce embodiment of wisdom and feminine power. And so, when I saw the march, I thought, “Wow, what if all those women had the resource—the inner resource—of a mandala practice of the five Dakinis?” They would then have that to draw on for their activism, for the changes that they’re trying to make.

This was sort of brought home to me because there was a woman there who spoke up. Just recently, I learned her name because there were 150 women, and at the time I didn’t know her name. But I told the story and then found out who she was.

In any case, she said she had complained about politics her whole life, had been very depressed, and her marriage had been bad. She had come to Kripalu, where I taught this a year before, and had been placing her mind in the mandala for a year. She said her entire life had changed. Her marriage had changed in a good sense, she wasn’t depressed anymore, and she felt so empowered that she was running for Congress.

Rick: Oh, yeah. Cool. You also mentioned someone named Virginia on a retreat in Bali who fell off a ladder and injured herself rather badly or something, and she practiced this Dakini Mandala.

Lama Tsültrim Allione: Ingrid.

Rick: Oh, was it Ingrid?

Lama Tsültrim Allione: Yeah, yeah, yes. And then, after this woman spoke, other women stood up and said, “I have to give a testimonial too.”

There was a woman who said she was an activist. I guess some people are professional activists, but she had been feeling so drained and had just lost all her energy for it in this climate. But then she did the Dakini Mandala practice, and she said she felt like she had this huge well to draw on for the energy of her activism.

And then I’ll just tell you one more, because these are different and significant. There was another woman there who said that she had been born into an abusive family and had been sexually abused as a girl, pretty severely. She said, “I honestly can say that I have been miserable most of my life. By doing this practice, this is the first time that I have felt that I can accept and love my female body, feel empowered in it, and actually feel happy to be a woman.”

And she said, “This is extraordinary.” She wasn’t young—you know, she was maybe 45 or something—and she’d never had this experience before.

So now the book is going out to many people. This has been something I’ve taught—I’ve been teaching it—but not exactly privately. It’s not like a book that goes out and then many people have this tool, which I’m very excited about offering.

The Dakinis and the mandala and so on are really part of this Vajrayana tradition, which is quite secret and very precious. So I really thought about it a lot before publicizing the Dakinis, but I feel like these are urgent times. We have to pull out the stops and offer what we can to help and change the situation in the world. The Dakinis are activists, and they get things done.

The Dakinis and the mandala and so on are really part of this Vajrayana tradition, which is quite secret and very precious. So I really thought about it a lot before publicizing the Dakinis, but I feel like these are urgent times. We have to pull out the stops and offer what we can to help and change the situation in the world. The Dakinis are activists, and they get things done.

The Dakinis are activists, and they get things done.

It’s exciting for me to think that now that it’s in book form—and it will be in an audiobook too—it will be able to reach and help not only women but also men to make the change that we need to see.

Are the Dakinis real?

Rick: Two questions. One is, I interviewed a woman a few months ago named Kavita Chayan, who’s a cardiologist, and she also wrote a book about Dakinis, more from the Hindu tradition. I got the impression from her and from you that they aren’t just mythological figures, but are actual conscious beings who have some kind of authority, some kind of actual existence, and who have a function in the universe and a powerful and profound influence. So answer that part before I ask the second one.

Lama Tsültrim Allione: Do the Dakinis have an ontological existence?

Rick: Do they exist as much as you and I exist, or as much as anything exists?

Lama Tsültrim Allione: Right, yeah, and of course—

Rick: But on a subtle level, obviously, because we don’t see them walking around anyplace.

Lama Tsültrim Allione: Yes. Well, in the beginning of my practice, I did think that they didn’t really exist, that the Dakinis and all these deities in the Tibetan pantheon were more or less like archetypes—mythical archetypes. But then I’ve had some experiences in my life that have shifted that, where I’ve had experiences with them that have led me to believe that they do have an ontological, or beyond my own beliefs, existence. So I would say yes.

And I don’t think you have to believe that to benefit from them. If you simply see them as an aspect of your own enlightened mind, an archetype that you can identify with and draw forth your own qualities, that’s fine. But if you ask me personally, I would say yes.

Rick: Yeah. The way I like to think of it is, if you find that to be a bit of a stretch, then take it as a hypothesis. Take everything as a hypothesis that can be explored and maybe verified, maybe not. But don’t just say, “No, such a thing couldn’t exist,” because you’re not being scientific, for one, and you’re not being open-minded.

My understanding of things is that there’s a whole—we could say—vertical dimension to life, and the things that we ordinarily see are just the crust on the surface, or the tip of the iceberg. There are all sorts of subtle realms with all sorts of impulses of intelligence, if you want to call them that, who are very instrumental in the whole process of creation.

Lama Tsültrim Allione: Yeah. And as I said, I think it’s not only possible to take them as a hypothesis, but even if you take them merely as an archetype or as symbolic beings that you would identify with to cultivate a certain aspect of your consciousness and of your being, then that’s fine.

You don’t need to believe in the Dakinis. That’s really not necessary.

Rick: Yeah. In fact, I would say that with any really valid spiritual practice, you don’t need to believe in anything. Buddha was famous for saying, “Don’t believe something just because I said it. Just test it in the light of your own experience and your own understanding.” It should really be an experiential investigation, not a matter of just blind faith.

The second part of my question was—

Lama Tsültrim Allione: What was your second question?

Rick: Yeah, it’s actually a second question: Can you learn this Dakini Mandala thing from your book, or do you have to come and take a course someplace?

Lama Tsültrim Allione: No, it’s in the book.

Rick: Okay, which I didn’t finish.

Lama Tsültrim Allione: That was another—

Rick: It’s at the end?

Lama Tsültrim Allione: There’s a practice of the mandala of the five Dakinis, and that was another decision I made. I do say in the book that, really, in the Tibetan tradition, you should have the empowerment, the oral transmission, and then the explanation of a full mandala. But this is an introduction. It’s an experiential introduction that you can do from the book.

There are also audio downloads of the practice, and there will be an online course that will be ready at the end of June. So there are different ways that you can access this.

There are also practices in the book involving integration with the elements, which you might enjoy. The Dakinis are considered to be wisdom manifestations of the elements. So I talk about a practice, for example, of sitting with water. Where do you live?

Rick: Iowa. We have water.

Lama Tsültrim Allione: You have water, and lakes, I imagine, and rivers.

Rick: Ponds and lakes and rivers.

Lama Tsültrim Allione: So let’s say you go and sit by a river. It’s a little bit like what Siddhartha did in Hermann Hesse’s book. I imagine you read it in high school or something.

Anyway, you look at the water and listen to the sound of the water, and then you integrate with the water, meaning that there’s no separation between yourself and the river. There’s no journey between yourself and the river. You go into a state of oneness with the water.

So that’s an example of an integration-of-the-elements practice, also with fire and so on. With all of the elements, in the chapters on the five Dakinis, at the end I offer those element meditations. They’re not the Dakinis. You’re not believing in anything, and you’re not visualizing anything. You’re simply being with what is—with the lake, the wind, or the fire.

Rick: And I presume these practices are as much for men as for women, right? They’re not just for women.

Lama Tsültrim Allione: Yeah, definitely. In Tibet, the Dakini Mandala was definitely equally, if not more, practiced by men than by women.

I brought it out as a tool for women because of seeing the women’s marches and feeling that women needed an inner seat of wholeness from which to operate, from which to gain strength. But all of these practices are equally powerful and transformative for men and women.

Practicing in difficult times

Rick: Let me ask you a question that came in from a listener, Mark Peters in Santa Clara, California, and I’ll add a little bit to his question. He said, “What do you do to avoid becoming overwhelmed by the pace of environmental degradation? If you could point listeners to one or two daily practices that might deepen the connection with the Great Mother, what would they be?”

The part I want to add on is, let’s say you’re very busy, as you were when you were raising your young children, and you don’t have a lot of time. What kind of practice would you advocate that people are actually going to be able to do if they only have 15, 20 minutes, 30 at the most, a day to do some kind of practice that will be gratifying enough and easy enough to actually stick with it?

Lama Tsültrim Allione: Yeah. Well, his question was connected to the degradation of the environment, that sort of devastation of that experience, and the grief that we all feel, and in some ways the powerlessness that we all experience.

I would say to Mark, you can do the Dakini Mandala practice in 10 minutes. It doesn’t need to be long. It can be longer than that, but it’s certain seed syllables and so on that, once you learn them, you can do. What that will do is give you this inner power. I like the word “empowerment”—I-N, empowerment—so that we can have empowerment outside.

The other thing about the Dakinis is they are activators. You could say they’re activists. I think that would give him a resource to draw from for activism. It’s really easy to fall into a feeling of helplessness and depression, thinking, “What can we do?”

Another quick story I’ll tell about Tibet: When the Chinese were coming into Tibet, there was a lama named Tungchuk Dorje. It was obvious what was going to happen, and he kept building stupas. Stupas are big, huge—maybe higher—but he was building about that size of a stupa. People said to him, “Why are you doing that? They’re just going to come in and tear it all down.”

He said, “It doesn’t matter. I have to keep making progress in the good, and the merit of that and the effort of that are going to have a positive effect no matter what happens once it’s done.”

We still have to make progress in the good, make those actions, take those steps, even if they’re small steps.

So I think that’s something to think about when we get depressed and feel like, “It doesn’t matter what I do. It’s still happening.” We still have to make progress in the good, make those actions, take those steps, even if they’re small steps, and not get depressed and feel helpless, but do something, because the benefit and the merit of that will remain, even if it doesn’t have a long-lasting life like those stupas.

Rick: Yeah, I remember reading a list of points from Mother Teresa or somebody about how if you do this, this, and this, people are going to just knock it down, but do it anyway. It’s just the doing of it that benefits you, even if it isn’t appreciated or it doesn’t last in the material realm.

Lama Tsültrim Allione: And it does have an effect. It does benefit others as well.

Absolute and relative truth

Rick: It does, yeah. Do you need to wrap it up, or do you have time for a few more questions? Some questions have come in.

Lama Tsültrim Allione: I can do a few more.

Rick: Okay, so we’ll jump around a little bit because these questions are not tightly related, but I’d just like to ask a few. This is Marie from Colorado. Maybe you even know Marie. She said, “I appreciate the conversation about the importance of taking care of the natural world, and it seems like Taoism is one spiritual path that honors this deeply, though I’m trying to reconcile this with a non-dual view in which there are just the arising and dissolving of phenomena within the ground of pure awareness, like waves arising and dissolving back into the ocean. Can you please comment?”

Lama Tsültrim Allione: Yeah, so I would comment that you have to separate absolute truth and relative truth. At an absolute level, from a Buddhist point of view, everything’s empty. There’s no fundamental reality once you really start to unpack anything—ourselves, me, or any kind of material things. So that’s the absolute truth.

But at the relative level, for example, I have a body and I need to take care of my body. I try to keep it healthy in order to be a benefit, and our world does exist at a relative level. It’s sort of like the difference between, let’s say, you’re coming toward a red light and you’re driving. If you stayed in the absolute point of view, you would just say, “Oh, that’s empty. That’s just this luminous red light and this empty pole that it’s standing on. I’ll just keep going.”

Rick: Yeah, smash.

Lama Tsültrim Allione: So it’s important, I think, that absolute truth is also really important, and to be able to hold those two truths.

This mudra—I don’t know if you can see it.

Rick: Yes.

Lama Tsültrim Allione: Can you see that?

Rick: Uh-huh. Yeah. Hold your hands up a little higher, like in front of your face.

Lama Tsültrim Allione: Yeah.

Rick: There we go. Okay, now we see it. It’s almost like the yin-yang symbol.

Lama Tsültrim Allione: Yeah, so this one’s coming across like this, and this one’s coming up. That would normally be held at your heart, and it’s the mudra of the two wheels of the Dharma. It’s called the Dharma Chakra Mudra. The top one is absolute truth, and the bottom one is relative truth, and they’re there together to symbolize that we need to hold those two truths. Marie, that’s a good question.

Rick: It is a good question. It’s an important one; it comes up a lot, actually. There are a lot of people who, in some way—I don’t know if it’s intellectually or actually experientially, though I think often intellectually—take refuge in the absolute truth and then just become very detached from or dismissive of the relative.

I heard a story about a guy in India, an American over there, who developed an infection on his leg and kept ignoring it because, obviously, the leg is an illusion. He almost got to the point where he had to have the leg amputated before he received medical treatment, and he could have died. So you really have to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and take care of each thing on its own level.

Being recognized as a tulku

So maybe this will be the last question. This is from Marcus from Philadelphia: “How did you feel about being recognized as a tulku?” You’re going to have to tell us what a tulku is. “Did the recognition cause Tibetans to treat you differently as a Westerner and a teacher?”

Lama Tsültrim Allione: So tulku is a reincarnation, and this happened to me quite late in my life, in 2007, when I was in Tibet. I had been guided to go to Tibet at that time through a vision that I’d had in 2006 of Machik Lopton, who was an 11th-century woman teacher. She had told me I needed to find her lineage and preserve it, and that it was urgent.

I’d been teaching her teachings for many years, but this was actually a visionary experience. I practically left retreat. The urgency of it was so intense. But my husband convinced me that it wasn’t a good idea and that we should plan this and so on. So I went the next spring to Tibet.

I was recognized there at the seat of Machik Lopton by the lama there as an emanation of her. When it happened, he made me sit on her throne, and I was like, “No, I’m not going to sit there.” He was like, “You have to.”

He later said he’d had a dream about me three days before I arrived with my group to visit this place: a white Dakini coming from the West, sounding the Dharma loudly. There’s a drum that we use in her practice.

Anyway, I was recognized by him. Then, on the same trip, without this other lama knowing what had happened in Tibet, another lama in Nepal also recognized me. We returned from this whole experience in Tibet, during which that lama gave me her relics, by the way, and told me to bring them here.

I said, “No, this should be in Tibet,” and he said, “I’ve seen so much thrown into that river”—there’s a river below—“by the Chinese. Please take them.”

In any case, another lama also recognized me. He’d had a dream as well, and he wrote a recognition letter. Then His Holiness Karmapa, the 17th Karmapa, gave me the Machig Laptang empowerment.

I think I treated it maybe a little bit differently. I think some people believe it, some lamas believe it, and some maybe don’t. The way that I experienced it, or the value of it for me, has been—it’s a funny thing to say—but to know what I know. This was my immediate feeling when it happened. I was like, “Oh, all those things that I knew but I didn’t allow myself to know, memories that I had, and knowledge of these practices that she taught.”

Rick: You mean kind of past-life memories and knowledge?

Lama Tsültrim Allione: Yeah.

Rick: Yeah, ancient stuff kicking around in there.

Lama Tsültrim Allione: Yeah, and I would just find myself teaching these things and think, “How did I know that?” and dismissing it. It allowed me to let those things in in a different way and to know what I knew. So it wasn’t like anything different, but it was some—

Rick: It gave you a little bit more confidence in that.

Lama Tsültrim Allione: Yeah. It was interesting because I was pretty old already when this happened. I think Karmapa recognized me at an early age, when he ordained me, but he never said who I was exactly.

To me, it’s not like, “Oh, I’m so great.” I’m not so flippant, something like that. It’s really not like that. It’s more like I have a very serious job, which is the restoration of her lineage, which has been fragmented and so on, and was an independent lineage. So that’s my job. It’s actually always been my job, because that’s what I was doing for probably 20 years before I was recognized.

So I’m working for her. That’s how I see it. I’m working for her.

Rick: Yeah. Well, if one believes in reincarnation, then it’s not too much of a stretch to think that that whole recognition might be true. Even the way you were drawn like a moth to the flame initially, when you first went to Nepal, there was definitely some kind of resonance there that didn’t come from your Western education or anything. It was just your destiny.

Lama Tsültrim Allione: Yeah, and I’ve basically never done anything else in my life. I never became a Hindu for a while. It’s just been that, and also very specifically this particular lineage, for a long time.

But in a way, it doesn’t matter either. I mean, this is again that sort of absolute level: Who cares? It doesn’t matter. But anyway, that’s my answer to that question.

Rick: Yeah, it was a good question. I have the opinion that the Divine expresses itself—and just look at nature. Again, there’s such a proliferation and an abundance of diversity and creativity. All the animals and the plants and everything—it’s just a huge variety in the way nature expresses.

I don’t see any reason why spirituality shouldn’t be similar, and that there’s a great variety of different expressions of that which are equally legitimate and relevant or appropriate to those who resonate with them. That’s kind of the premise of this show I’m doing: just talking to all these different people every week. Each one has an orientation and a story to tell, and they all seem fine to me.

You can’t necessarily be a dilettante and try them all because there’s not enough time in life, but it’s a smorgasbord. You pick out the things that really seem to taste good and go for it.

Lama Tsültrim Allione: Yeah, and things that you have an affinity for. Just as I have this Tibetan affinity, everyone does have certain karmic affinities and can kind of build on past-life development and do our best in this life.

Rick: Yeah, well, you’re doing a good job in this one, as far as I can see. I really appreciate what you’re doing. So you’re about to embark on a book tour, and you’re heading off to Kripalu—I think it’s Kripalu in Massachusetts—to present your book, Wisdom Rising: Journey into the Mandala of the Empowered Feminine. We’re speaking in May of years from now, but they can come to your website, which is what? What’s your website?

Lama Tsültrim Allione: Tara Mandala, T-A-R-A-M-A-N-D-A-L-A.org.

Rick: Okay.

Lama Tsültrim Allione: There’s also a page for the book, which is wisdomrisingbook.com. That is the landing page for the book, and it has the trailer about the book and other materials that are connected to it. I’ll also be in New York City—I don’t know if you have listeners there—in the Boston area, in Washington, Key West, Florida, and in L.A. and Seattle, on the West Coast, and in Europe in the fall.

Rick: Well, let me just mention that there’s a page on batgap.com, and we’ll send your assistant information on how to register with us. If people go there, I think it’s under the Resources menu. If you go there and type in your location—let’s say you’re in New York—you put that in, say New York, and automatically you’ll see listed any events by people that I have interviewed that are close to you. The events are actually listed by distance. So first you’ll see New York, then you might see Connecticut, and then you might see Massachusetts or whatever, just radiating outward from whatever ZIP code or location you put in. So I’ll send that information to your assistant, and maybe she can fill all that in.

Lama Tsültrim Allione: Yeah, it’s wonderful what you’re doing. I think you’re able to reach so many people this way and offer—not saying that any of the people that you interview have the ultimate truth—but offer all these different points of view that are hopefully authentic in themselves.

Rick: Yeah, well, we’re all doing what we can, as the Beatles sang, and this is something I seem to be able to do that I enjoy.

Lama Tsültrim Allione: Yeah.

Rick: So thanks so much for your time, and good luck with your book tour. I’ll be putting up a page on batgap.com with links to your website and your books and a bunch of information about you. So if people forget what you just said about your website and all that stuff, they can just come there and follow those links. And as you said during this interview, there is information on how to do the practices in the book, and there will also be some online courses. You’re also going around and doing things in person, so people can pick and choose whatever works for them.

Lama Tsültrim Allione: Okay, wonderful.

Rick: Well, thank you so much, Lama Tsültrim. Did I pronounce it right? Tsültrim. We didn’t get into the Allione part, but that had to do with an Italian husband. You like the name.

Lama Tsültrim Allione: Thank you.

Rick: Good luck, and thanks for all you’re doing.

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