HOME TRUTHS

By Adele Hulse

When Lama Yeshe was at Chenrezig Institute in 1976 he called me up to his house, stood over me like he was twenty feet tall, pointed his finger and said, “You, you writer!” Well tee hee hee I said, I do write a little poetry on acid and stuff. “Tch!” he snorted, brushing aside my silly riposte as the meaningless babble it was. “You writer!” he repeated. “I want you to write por me.” (Lama Yeshe couldn’t say “f”.) I shut up this time. “Yeshe Khadro, she give you transcript this course. You pix, make book. Start!”

I went off and spent many months in a caravan in the Victorian Alps and put together what eventually became the white transcript Avalokitesvara Yoga Method. I didn’t know what to write after that, so selling books seemed the next best thing. I moved to Melbourne and started importing such books as were available: the Conch Press edition of Wisdom Energy, Silent Mind Holy Mind, Essence of Refined Gold, Tibetan Tradition of Mental Development and a few others.

Time passed until one day in 1982 while flogging Sister Max’s glittering fashions all over Australia (real Dynasty jobs and very pricey – we could only sell one long red dress in this country because if we sold two they would run into each other), I met a journalist who became a friend. She threw me a few jobs with her newspaper and I gave her Advice from a Spiritual Friend. Both actions had resounding results. Now, thirteen years later, Jenny Brown is a committed Buddhist and I have a newspaper column in a major daily, which has run virtually every week for twelve years. When the column job came up I knew this was what Lama wanted: here was a real chance to work “por him.”

I started out real mild and chatty, using a pseudonym that I have kept for several reasons: I don’t owe my privacy to the world’s Press Barons; people with weak personalities like mine can go crazy with arrogance when their name gets in print; and my family couldn’t stand it. The column survived year after year as I gradually leaked a little deconstructed lam-rim into everything I wrote. When my mother and sister died of cancer seven months apart, I let fly a bit. It was a tremendous relief for me, and the letters I got back from the public convinced me that they too wanted to discuss life, death, pain, love, sex and the whole damn thing in plain terms. Over the years readers have convinced me completely that there is not one human experience that we have in isolation. If you think you’re the only one – you’re not. But major daily newspapers are extremely conservative empires and anything smacking of religious proselytizing is a big no-no. I never use Buddhist terminology, and I check my copy over and over for preachiness, to which the sensitive public is righteously allergic. I pray for the right recipe. I say, “Come on, Lama! What’s the very best thing to say?”

Finally after twelve long years I let rip with a piece on how to meditate, followed immediately with another on how to check meditation results, recommending the book Mindfulness in Plain English (Wisdom). Over four hundred readers sent in letters asking for a copy of the pieces (because they had forgotten to cut them out or it was recycling day), and hundreds of copies of the book were sold through Wisdom’s Melbourne distributors.

The articles were written in an entirely secular manner, the exercises presented clinically and very simply, with absolutely no religious overtones or undertones. Readers told me they had tried several schools for meditation but found the religious atmosphere oppressive and unattractive. They said they wanted to learn to relax, not place flowers in front of a photo of a brown-faced person they had never seen or try and find a blue light in their heads that only gave them a headache. Many told of enormous sums of money they had been charged for the simplest instructions.

A major Government funded public health body then called and asked for consultations in the next couple of months as they wish to include meditation techniques in several of their programs, including teenage suicide projects. A Juvenile Justice organization wants it as a basic training for juveniles with Hepatitis C. The Traffic Accident Board wants help with trauma relief. This is no new big thing – this is Lama Yeshe’s universal education.

The column goes on, and of course I am now in the fourth year of working on Lama Yeshe’s biography. I look forward to telling you more about that later. But the point I really want to make here is that when the guru tells you you ought to be doing something – well, maybe you ought. Lama told one woman that all she had to do was touch the ground for ten minutes every day. He told another never to have red flowers, another to wear green (PS: Where are you Dharmawati? Call, care of Mandala, terih makasi). Any success I have experienced in my work was made possible by Lama. Of course, there are some people who can’t STAND my column – but that’s life.