Some religious groups are designed for the serious-minded and able-bodied. This memoir tells the story of a Southern Baptist girl in Oklahoma, married at eighteen, who by her twenties is living in a Buddhist monastery in the Hudson Valley doing thousands of prostrations — hoping she’ll “finally be introduced to the secret Tibetan practices leading to enlightenment.”
Collins left a marriage and a career as a schoolteacher behind in order to get there. The place was Kagyu Thubten Chöling in Wappinger Falls (Dutchess County), New York — the site of the first traditional three-year Tibetan retreat ever held in North America — in 1982 — just four years before Collins arrived to join the second one.
This memoir takes its place among other stories of spiritual discovery from that time period; Collins writes about the tremendous influence of teachers like Ram Dass, Carlos Castaneda, and Paramahansa Yogananda, whose books she devoured. And her personal account involves direct contact with the renowned Kalu Rinpoche in the final years of his life, with Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche when he was teaching in Los Angeles, and Lama Norlha Rinpoche, who was the abbot of Kagyu Thubten Chöling.
She spends years in the monastery in New York and also travels in India with the famous lamas, serving them, learning from them, but without losing her inquisitiveness.
The author does an excellent job of orienting her predominantly Christian readers in the United States to the nuances of global Buddhism, without straying far from a compelling personal story. For example, in Chapter 8:
“Similar to denominations in the Christian tradition, Tibetan Buddhism has four major lineages: Kagyu, Sakya, Nyingma, and Gelug. The Dalai Lama, as the head of the Gelug lineage, traditionally leads the government. Kalu Rinpoche’s lineage, the Kagyu, is headed by the Karmapa. The Karmapa has four regents, or ‘heart-sons.’ And I was receiving teachings from one of them.”
There are accounts of sexual exploitation, as is sadly common in twentieth-century accounts of practitioners and devotees sitting and studying in male-dominated, authoritarian religious environments. Collins writes, for example, about a friend:
“On our way to Kalu Rinpoche’s monastery, we stopped for the night at a hotel in Delhi. She described how Lama had invited her to his room for a ‘dharma talk.’ After exchanging a few niceties, he grabbed her body and pressed his face into hers. This was the beginning of years of sexual exploitation, a relationship requiring birth control.”
But this is ultimately a story of discovery and redemption, as Collins evolves, becoming no longer a “girl in a box,” but a kind of Christian contemplative who embraces the best of many worlds. She writes, near the end, of participating in a healing ceremony at a small Catholic church where she feels a stillness — "a familiar, well-practiced cue to open to the ever-present compassion of the beloved, to the inconceivable divine.” There’s still plenty of disillusionment, but it’s clear that her spiritual journey is ongoing. She realizes: “For a moment it seemed they were calling me to a deeper well, a well not yet experienced — but it is not so. The deep well is simply here, always right here.”
