Like you, I’ve had countless past lifetimes in samsara, though I don’t remember them yet. Probably you don’t either. This time around, I was born in northern New Jersey in the spring of 1941. World War II and the Holocaust were raging. The atomic bomb was being developed. A new house cost around $4,000. Cheerios was invented. Commercial television broadcasting officially began. I never learned any details about my birth, but I do know that the first few weeks of my life included some dramatic elements. For one thing, I was thrown out of a car. I never learned who was driving, or what precipitated the accident. All I heard was that my godmother was holding me, and both of us flew out of the car. She held onto me tightly and I was not injured, according to my mother.
No further light was shed on this event until I met the masterful Tibetan doctor Trogawa Rinpoche when I was in my early 40s. Reading my pulse, he told me that I had undergone a life-threatening experience in my first few weeks, and the shock from that event had affected my life force. Finally, thanks to the deeply refined skills of Dr. Trogawa Rinpoche, I had an explanation for the experiences of terror and dread that comprised some of my earliest memories and continued through my childhood. I am not schooled in pulse diagnosis, but it seemed to me that Trogawa Rinpoche’s ability to discern my early experience was due to his level of wisdom refinement.
I cried incessantly during my first few weeks on Earth. This seems perfectly understandable. Pushed through a birth canal, thrown out of a car—it was not reassuring. Years ago, I offered a form of healing work that brought people back to their birth experience, in order to help them move through it in a more positive way. Most people were not ecstatic about being born. On some level, they knew that they were probably in for a rough ride on a rocky road. I certainly belonged in this category.
My distressed parents finally brought me to see Dr. William Carlos Williams, who practiced pediatric medicine in a nearby town. In addition to being a physician, Williams was a poet, who is now considered to be among the foremost American poets. I doubt that my parents knew much or anything about his poetry. After examining me, Dr. Williams told my mother and father that nothing was wrong with me, except that I was very hungry and needed to be fed more. I imagine that I received increased rations, because I have lived to tell the tale. When I began writing poetry in my teens, my father teased me by saying that he was sure that William Carlos Williams had thrown some poetry dust on me when I was a baby. Perhaps he did. I and much else in northern New Jersey could have benefited from a big dose of poetry dust. Though it seems that loosening the entanglements and purifying the sludge of samsara requires quite a bit more than poetry dust.
The area where I grew up played a key role in the growth of the Industrial Revolution, and it felt like that--crowded, busy, intensely focused on the mechanisms of production and progress. Thomas Edison developed one of the first hydroelectric power plants in the world at Great Falls, in the nearby town of Passaic. The American silk industry was centered in nearby Paterson from the end of the Civil War to the 1930s, as immigrant workers from Italy, Poland, and Germany brought their skills to a new land. There we dwelt, my lovable, funny alcoholic father, whose drinking ate into our lives like a hungry spirit, my beautiful, coolly critical mother, my dear little turtle-happy brother and I.
Of course, I had never heard of samsara, karma, or the illusory nature of reality. I was a little girl who felt confined, who dreamed of freedom in wide-open places, dreamed of being let loose amidst mountains, plains, meadows, and rivers. A little girl who dreamed she was Indian, riding a horse like the wind, far from the sorrowful constraints of her family’s travails. I was raised Catholic, but I had an imaginary friend when I was young, someone who was different from anyone I had ever met. He was old, very old. All he wore was a cloth tied around his lower body. He had a long white beard and his long hair was partially tied up on his head in a topknot. He sat at the entrance to a cave, high up in snow-covered mountains. When my heart hurt too much from the pain of ordinary life, I would climb up to sit with him. We didn’t talk. We just sat there. He was the most peaceful, loving being I had ever met. Was he real? Did I make him up? To me, he was very real, though I knew I could not tell anyone else about him. They would mock me. I could not bear to think of it, how they would scorn him. He was so pure and loving.
As I grew older, however, I tried to forget him and eventually, he faded away. As he disappeared, something in me mourned in a muffled, confused way. Many years passed and then in 1977, I had the good fortune to meet Gyatrul Rinpoche, the Tibetan master who has been my spiritual guide ever since. In him, the mountain yogi returned. This is one of the greatest blessings of my life, to be living all these years in the womb of the holy.
