A friend of mine, another bhikshuni (female monastic) is living up in the Sorokumbu area of Nepal in Tamul, at maybe 10,000 or 12,000 feet high, in a fairly remote village. She sends us offerings from time to time, even though she has very little herself, but she is quite excited about what we are doing here. She recently sent me slides of her hut where she meditates in. She has been up there for some years now, meditating on her own.

Lots of people have the aspiration to go and meditate on their own, but very few can actually do it. She is one of the few who does it. Sometimes we think, “Oh if I could just go meditate on my own, get away from all these obnoxious sentient beings, then I could quieten my mind and gain some realisations and be peaceful. Then I could really benefit others.” We think that going to the mountains to do this will bring that result. Yet when I read her letters, she still has to deal with sentient beings, and she has had a ton of headaches just building the hut where she is going to meditate. She had to crack boulders to build her house out of stone. She did all the woodwork in the house and had to lay concrete on the inside of the stone walls herself. One January, in a windstorm, the whole roof blew off.

It brings home to us that wherever we are and whatever we do, as long as our mind is in samsara, there is going to be headaches, and there is going to be difficulties. She wrote me some letters saying how difficult it was working with the Nepalis who were building her hut, the numerous problems she had with the authorities, and so on. Even if we want to go meditate by ourselves, we are still dependent on sentient beings. Things do not go the way we want, and as long as our mind views and believes these things as problems, they become problems. Wherever we are, if our mind can have a gracious attitude of kindness and compassion, then even the sentient beings that we did not get along with before cease to cause us problems. You see this in the way His Holiness, Zopa Rinpoche or other great masters lived. It is all pointing us back to our practice, to transforming what is within.

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