Transcript/History My name is Reverend Karen Harrison, and I. I want to acknowledge the Earth to the Earth ancestors and hearing the venerable chai and the song as the many sun gather. Marcus son. I I'm born here in Canada and my ancestors are from Northern Ontario and also from the Ukraine. And growing up as a little girl, we would go up north and go. We would do a lot of time out in in the woods, in the bush, as they [...]

Transcript/History My name is Terry, and I live here in Galveston. And we've been here about 30 years. And we came moved down here from New Mexico, Santa Fe, New Mexico, outside Santa Fe, up in the mountains outside Santa Fe, had an art gallery. And so we started an art gallery here. My wife and I did and used a lot of the artists that we were working with up in New Mexico down here. And so we had a nice entry [...]

I would go to bookstores and actually the first book a guy recommended to me was, um, Sex, Spirituality and Ecology by Ken Wilber. And it's a thick, rough going read, right? But I dove into it and it just kind of really opened me up and I thought, okay, I'm going to go further. And I started reading other stuff of his and of course he talks about Buddhism and the relative and the absolute and, you know, these kind of things in there. And one thing led to another. I picked up a book by showing him Trungpa, uh, spiritual materialism, I think it was. And I read two or three of his others, uh, and then I found a book by Sylvia and became the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, and which is written in even more plain English than Trump was even.

And it was a very difficult year for me because I came upon this what I now know it as existential kind of this this urgency or angst, not knowing where I was headed, what I was going to do, having an expensive degree, which I was not going to use and I knew I wasn’t my parents were, to put it mildly, less than than happy about any of that. And what is this, this Eastern stuff you’re starting to talk about some. So I was really pretty lost and it was a difficult time for me. And I had an epiphany that big because of my propensities with the cars and women and drugs and whatever else it was that I wouldn’t survive, that I would I would be driving a very nice car, but I would I will wrap myself around a pole or whatever. And I and I just couldn’t do it. There was nothing in me that allowed me to move forward in that direction. So a friend of mine, an ex-girlfriend, invited me and some others to go out to Naropa Institute for Ram Dass. And I had looked at the book in my in my dormitory be here now and you know the book the famous book from Ram Dass and I had didn’t have a clue what would be here now men but there was a certain internal shift that said I have to I have to learn what this this means. And I went went out to Naropa Institute in 1974.

And I was known for talking people down from bad trips and things of that nature. And he said, Oh, I don’t do that anymore. I just do Zen. Okay, well, that’s interesting. What’s that all about? And so I said, Well, I’m going this weekend. Why don’t you come with me? So that weekend I went with him to the temple on Halsted Street near Fullerton, on the North side of Chicago. I met Matsuoka Roshi, who became my teacher, so I sort of backed into that. Like everything else, I think I’d read maybe a book on Zen or to not not much.

My one year old son came running up to me, Daddy, Daddy! He put his arms around my leg and he hugged my leg and this probably isn’t what happened, but this is what I remember. I kind of shook him off because I was busy. I’m important. I got stuff to do right, plugged it out, went to the office, and then I went off to Brazil and sometime later this came back to me like a ton of bricks. Oh, my goodness. What happened there? And I realized, you know, with a little reflection that I was missing what really mattered in life. So actually, I started listening to a series of lectures on classical music, and Bach dedicated every manuscript he wrote, including the practice pieces for his kids to Jesus Christ, studied, listened to medieval polyphonic masses, and somehow or other they would just hit me.

And when I arrived in India in 1971, I went up to the Himalayas and did a trek from outside of Katmandu to the base camp of Mount Everest. And during that trek, I there were no hotel walls or roads, just paths and the Tibetan villages. And so one could either stay in the home of a Tibetan family and you could sleep on the floor and share their food, or you could stay in a Tibetan Buddhist monastery. And so that's where I first got introduced to Buddhism was on that trek to the base camp of Mount Everest.

Geshe Denma Gyaltsen was born in the Dolpo region of northern Nepal. In 1981 his father brought him to Menri Monastery in India, regarded as the most important Bön monastery, to begin his program of study toward the Geshe degree.

Alejandro is a Senior Teacher of The 3 Doors, an international organization founded by Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche with the goal of transforming lives through meditation, and since 1995, he has been teaching meditation classes and Tibetan Yoga (Tsa Lung & Trul Khor) workshops nationally and internationally under the auspices of Ligmincha International.

Those years were deeply involved with meditation in the path of Raja Yoga, studying the interface of psychology and spirituality, religious symbolism, and raising my fantastic children. In the 90’s, I met a remarkable Canadian born nun, Cecilia Kwiat, and began the ever unfolding process of study, contemplation, and meditation in Buddhism, especially Tibetan Buddhism.

I faithfully, joyfully attended AA meetings for 5 years. During this time I searched for a teacher of meditation. In 1980 I met the 16th Karmapa as above and then Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche and began the Tibetan Buddhist Path, though I have a PhD in world religions and psychology I got during this time.

I started my Zen practice in 1975, got ordained in 1980, and trained in Japan briefly from the fall of 1981 to February of 1982, so I had one training season there.