Ngakma Zér-mé Dri’mčd
Ngakma Zér-mé has been an active practitioner of Buddhism since
1980. Before she met Ngak’chang Rinpoche
and Khandro Déchen, she
practiced in the Soto Zen tradition and later the Shambhala térma of
Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. She became an apprentice in 1998 and took
ordination in 2004.
Her teaching experience began in Shambhala Training in the early
1990s. Over the years she has taught many weekend programmes in that
cycle, and has enjoyed working with students on an individual basis as a
Meditation Instructor.
She says: “My Lamas are constantly teaching me how to have
kindness and appreciation for myself, and that has always been the key
for the students with whom I have worked. I try to offer them the
unconditionality of attention and appreciation, as a starting point in
terms of how they might see their own lives. My Lamas and my earlier
teachers, especially Charlotte Joko Beck, have also engaged my own
sharpness in a way that allows me to enjoy clarity. The phenomenal
world has provided a number of wary, smart seekers as students, and I
have found great pleasure in working with them. If nothing else, I
hope I can be an example of someone who practises formally and
diligently and also attempts to enjoy all of an ordinary human life as
containing the possibility of realization—a serious practitioner
with a sense of humour. As a disciple of the most unremitting punster
in the Buddhist world, I can tell you that this is a useful
quality. My husband, Carl Grundberg,
and I own five acres and a house in the foothills of
California’s Sierra Nevada mountains, and I could happily spend
the rest of my life getting to know the plants, animals, fungi, and
elements of that place. If I have a hope for my future as a
teacher, it would be to be able some day to transmit the teachings and
practices of living the view, enjoying the sense fields, and
participating in the infinite purity of the phenomenal world in all of
life.
“In the last
year of his life, John Muir wrote the following. The words still bring tears to
my eyes:
“Not like my taking the veil—no solemn abjuration of
the world. I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay
out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going
in.”
Upcoming events with Ngakma Zér-mé Dri’mčd:
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