In 1972 I was teaching at an alternative school in New Mexico. I introduced my class of eight-to-twelve-year-olds to a book called Born in Tibet and we all fell in love with it. When we learned that the author, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, was living in Boulder, Colorado, the children wrote a letter asking if they could meet him. Rinpoche replied that in fact he was soon coming to teach at the nearby Lama Foundation. To our delight, we were invited to visit him there. When we arrived, one of Rinpoche's students met with us briefly. He told the children that Chögyam Trungpa was happy that we had come, but that he wanted the children to know that he was just an ordinary person, nothing special. With plenty of questions and handmade gifts, the children approached him, and they had a wonderful encounter. Three hours later, they returned home. As for me, I guess you could say that I never left. That is when I became the student of this ordinary extraordinary man. EXCERPTED FROM Pema Chödrön's foreward to The Myth of Freedom by Chögyam Trungpa, page xi |
