A sacred space for everyone
Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo The following is a full length video teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo offered at Kunzang Palyul Choling:
Jetsunma examines the various ways that the Judeo-Christian thought field in which we were raied has affected our thinking. We think we understand the concepts but often miss the point through our confusion.
© copyright Jetsunma Ahkon Norbu Lhamo All rights reserved.
The following is respectfully quoted from “To Have or To Harm” by Linden Gross:
Joseph Blackstone, a fifty-three-year-old lab technician, describes himself as a hereditary obsessive-compulsive and his thirty-year marriage as a business partnership rather than a relationship. For two years he had an affair with a waitress from the local country club. Then she broke off their relationship. “I went insane over it. Literally and irrationally insane over a period of five or six years, ” he recalled. “I felt this need to drive by her home in the daytime and sit outside her house for hours at night. I’m not sure why, even now. I phoned her incessantly. I sent letters saying, ‘You did me wrong. Why? Why?’ For those years, I couldn’t eat or sleep. My life was a black hole.
Work had always been sacred to Joseph. He’d always held two or three jobs at once. The stalking of his former lover put an end to that practice. He didn’t have time for both. Gaining power over his ex-lover took precedence. In the meantime, his work, his relationship with his wife and family, and his physical health suffered.
His obsession ultimately ended him in a sanatorium, where he underwent extensive therapy. The cloud he’d been operating under began to lift. “I thought I wanted her back. In retrospect, I guess I couldn’t let go. In the process, I ruined two lives,” he said. “I saw her as my emotional fulfillment. I’d invested all my eggs in that little basket. When she left, my basket was empty. I felt a void within myself.”
Some mental health authorities hypothesize that the need to possess someone who is unavailable stems from childhood feelings of rejection and abandonment. The idealized or fantasy relationship is subconsciously perceived as a way to rewrite history, to fill all of life’s deficits. “There is that magical quality that feeds the fantasy of the stalker and makes him feel that this person can fulfill his emotional needs…and make him feel lovable,” says Orange County psychiatrist Bruce Danto. Denial of the opportunity to make up for the damage suffered during the early years can lead to feelings of desperation and panic as well as a sense that the imagined connection must be preserved at all cost.
The following is respectfully quoted from “To Have or To Harm” by Linden Gross:
What compels some people to become obsessed with others, to hound, threaten, injure, and sometimes kill them in the name of love?
As with most research into criminal behavior, explanations range from the biological to the environmental. Physiological studies, for example, reveal that sexual attraction and the onset of feelings of love often trigger a surge of natural amphetamine like substances in our bodies. Some professionals in the field theorize that higher than usual levels of these chemicals may lead to the aberrant behavior of love-obsessed individuals.
That’s a tantalizing notion. It would explain the incomprehensible and even offer the possibility of a biochemical solution. Other behavioral scientists, however, postulate that some event or series of events during the formative years provoked the deviant behavior, especially in view of similarities between repeat stalkers and serial rapists and killers.
The fact is that the stalking phenomenon is too new and the studies are too few to determine what causes these obsessive behaviors. There aren’t enough physical and social scientists exploring the issue. So, all they’ve been able to ascertain are the traits that these people share.
Here’s what we know:
Stalkers are above average in intelligence. They usually read a lot and will engage in considerable research — as well as expenditures that reach into the thousands of dollars — in pursuit of their objectives. They know just how far they can go without breaking the law. And they refuse to take no for an answer.
Lack of a core identity also ranks high on the list of stalker characteristics. In an effort to make up for this inherent deficiency, love-obsessed individuals psychologically latch on to another person to validate their own worth. “If I could just be with her, I would have accomplished something,” reasons the stalker, whose identity almost immediately becomes submerged in the other person’s.
Should the obsessed individual fail to make a connection–whether from the outset or after a relationship has been attempted–he or she has no well-developed sense of self upon which to fall back. Without the coveted liaison, they have nothing. Since that emotional void is intolerable, the obsessed person can’t afford to accept the rejection, whether overt or implicit. As long as the stalker continues the pursuit, he can convince himself that he hasn’t been conclusively rejected.
When rejection can no longer be denied, the emptiness and humiliation cause obsessed individuals to act out in ways that destroy them as well as their victims.
The following is respectfully quoted from “To Have or To Harm” by Linden Gross:
Chicago, Illinois, August 5, 1989
After violating a protective order three times, Sheila Gallo’s former husband kills her. Their divorce had been final for just two days.
Richmond, Virginia, February 9, 1989
Deborah Frost’s old high-school boyfriend kills her while out on bond. The young man, who came from a “nice family” according to the victim’s mother, had never gotten over her. Eleven encounters with the law over a ten-month period did nothing to change his intentions or the outcome.
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, March 9, 1992
Shirley Lowery waits in the hall outside a courtroom where she’s applied for a restraining order against the man with whom she’d once lived. Before she makes it inside, Benjamin Franklin stabs her nineteen times, fulfilling his promise to make Shirley pay for leaving him.
Boston, Massachusetts, May 30, 1992
Eleven days after Kristin Lardner gets a permanent injunction to keep Michael Cartier away from her, the twenty-two-year-old bouncer walks up to her in the middle of a busy street during daylight hours and shoots her repeatedly in the head. He was on probation at the time, for the beating of a previous girlfriend. “If the courts had checked his record or spoken to police when she sought help, he would have been locked up rather than set loose to kill her,” Kristin’s sister Helen Lardner, a Washington lawyer, testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee.
Statistics on stalking are limited, principally because the cases wind up being classified as the crimes into which they usually escalate, such as assault or homicide. But most authorities agree that the overwhelming number of stalking victims are women. In fact, 90 percent of the fifteen hundred women killed by their current or former mates each year in this country were stalked before being murdered. However, that doesn’t mean that most stalking victims are killed. But “there’s a far greater chance that an ordinary -citizen case is going to result in a tragic conclusion than the celebrity,” says Lieutenant John Lane, who heads the Los Angeles Police Department’s Threat Management Unit, created especially to deal with stalking cases.
Stalkers don’t prey just on their individual targets. In cases involving family units, children frequently wind up as the victims. In October 1992, for example, Andrew Taylor made good on a prior threat. After his attempts at reconciliation — and his intimidation campaign — failed, he kidnapped his one-month-old daughter from her mother, a respiratory therapist. Authorities found the bodies of the unemployed actor and baby, whom he’d strangled, on a nearby bench. Eight months later, a South Dakota man shot his estranged wife and their two children just before their divorce was to become final.
Obsessed pursuers will frequently harass a third party to whom the actual target is attached in order to gain the intense impact and reaction they seek. “The easiest way to get me is to get to the people I love,” says Sarah Jane Williams, whose grandmother wound up in a nursing home after being knocked over by a prowler — presumably Sarah Jane’s stalker — when he broke into her home.
How did he know where to find the ninety-eight-year-old woman? or for that matter Sarah Jane, whom he continues to harass by phone even though she changes her number so often it takes her a few seconds to remember her current one?
Today’s easy access to informaiton has made us all potential victims. In his book Privacy for Sale, Jeffery Rothfeder explains how the proliferation of computerized records containing information about personal, private lives (5 billion records to date in the United States alone) means that a person with the right skills or contacts can find out virtually everything about us, from our whereabouts to our finances to our purchasing habits and family ties.
Why would one person obsess about another to the point of craving this sort of intimate information?
Anyone who has ever fallen in love or been infatuated knows how close the experience can be to a spiritual or drug induced high. Suddenly, our thoughts are consumed with one single being. Everything we see or do seems to bring him or her to mind. We find ourselves doing things we wouldn’t under any other circumstances. Like calling and then hanging up or using a fake voice just to see if anyone is home. Or driving by the house or apartment again and again for a glimpse.
The truth is that, for most of us, we’re in love not just with the person but with our projection of what kind of couple we’ll make, the needs that he or she will fulfill, and the idealized notion of love in general. Before we’ve even gotten to know what we’re really dealing with, we’ve fallen in love with what this person could represent to our future.
The individual whose life is a void waiting to be filled, however, takes those feelings and amplifies them. The person with whom he’s infatuated becomes his reason to exist. Any contact is better than no contact, any information a way to feel more intimately involved even if no relationship exists. That emptiness also helps explain the explosions that take place during the separations or divorces of many couples, when those who have used their relationships to define their identities simply can’t afford to let go.
In a culture where male violence is highlighted daily in the press and glorified nightly on television, the inability to accept rejection can easily mutate into dominance — particularly if it’s the man who’s been cast aside. “It has been sanctioned in society for a thousand years that a man has control over his woman,” says Michael Faymar, training coordinator for the Domestic Abuse Intervention Project in Duluth, Minnesota.
The social conditioning that most American men receive feeds this distorted view of relationships as ownership and love as a predestined occurrence. Even when they have targeted women who don’t return their affections, the socially accepted notion that men choose women, rather than the other way around, feeds their sense of righteousness. “She’s the only one for me,” says the ardent suitor, as if that should be the determining factor in her decisions.
The following is a full length video teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo offered at Kunzang Palyul Choling:
In this final part of the workshop, Jetsunma goes through the practice she developed of Supreme Generosity (called Chod by Tibetan Buddhists). Through this she was able to deepen in her practice. We hope you will too.
© copyright Jetsunma Ahkon Norbu Lhamo All rights reserved.
The following is a full length video teaching offered by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo:
Following on the visit of H.E. Mugsang Tulku Rinpoohce, Jetsunma used him as an example of using your intention to benefit beings in all aspects of your life. By offering all y see, do, hear or anything for the benefit of all – this is a living mandala practice and can transform your life to an extraordinary one.
© copyright Jetsunma Ahkon Norbu Lhamo All rights reserved.
The following is respectfully taken from “Drops of Nectar” published by Ngagyur Nyingma Institute:
Endowed with Garland of Flowers: The Reasons for Exhaustion by Longchen Rabjam:
Om Svasti Siddham!
The delightful enlightened form, like a blooming lotus garden,
Whom gods and humans honor as the omniscient one,
The glorious Samyepa of mountain retreat,
Offers some verses to the ears of people with clear minds!
Nowadays, some people have been, in a manner of speaking,
Claiming I lack knowledge of appropriate manners, wealth and
short of an unconfused frame of mind,
That I am not firmly established in solitude and am extremely exhausted.
To all these, I answer. Listen as I speak!
Although criticized by sublime beings, non-dharmic evil behavior is increasing.
Lies, cunning and fraud are the basis of deceiving others,
Causing regret at the time of death and falling to lower realms in future lives.
Such appropriately worldly manners are better done without!
Sublime beings criticize sensual pleasures as the lasso of samsara.
Bringing on quarrels with everyone, it is the basis for many kinds of suffering.
Even if you have enough, you’re not satisfied and craving increases.
Since it’s the cause for downfalls, it’s fine to be devoid of wealth!
If revulsion towards worldly dharmas does not arise,
There will never be liberation from the ocean of existence.
Toward impermanent and essence-less phenomena,
It’s good to be unattached and better if you are short of worldly plans!
While staying together as one, attachment and hatred naturally increases.
Distractions, diversions and activities become even greater.
By binding one to existence, ego clinging is the cause of bondage.
In this kind of situation it’s better not to have any certainty!
Even my exhaustion is not without a cause.
As I ponder the auspicious throughout the day and night,
[I see] the ocean of samsara, with its waves of birth and death.
We wander here from the natural illusion of ego clinging.
Having seen the deep ocean of existence that is difficult to cross,
I despair and, shedding tears, become exhausted!
Please listen to how I am even more wearied by
Examining behavior of other people.
Venerable abbots, teachers and lamas, though quite secure,
Do not pursue the path of Dharma but chase after sense
pleasure and entertainment.
Outwardly peaceful, they are extremely arrogant within,
Having seen their cunning ways, I become exhausted!
Even those endowed with the Dharma pay attention to the wealthy.
The straightforward guides as well are more benevolent
towards their dissimulating retinues.
They pursue the eight worldly concerns, those versed in non-Dharma.
Seeing mere reflections of the Gurus, I become exhausted!
The slanderous ones who engage in divisiveness know nothing
about what is meaningful.
The crooked demonic ones who never take a stand but who live by flattery
Are not pleased by goodness and separate two who are in harmony.
Seeing friends like this, I become exhausted!
Unable to bear it themselves, while expecting others to cope with effort;
Not helping in times of need, and upholding others’ unworthy positions.
Displaying all kinds of moods even for minor things;
Seeing friends like this, I become exhausted!
If you teach those who have no proper respect, you evoke harsh words.
Lacking faith and devotion, rigid as unyeilding wood
They run after food and leave behind the activity of exertion.
Seeing students like this, I become exhausted!
They praise you to your face, and speak badly behind your back.
Not striving on the path of Dharma, but chasing after sense pleasures,
As the final return for your nurture they manufacture quarrels.
Seeing students like this, I become exhausted!
If your food and clothing are inferior, you’re cast down even if
you’re learned.
With great wealth, even the stupid are venerated
And reckoned as talented although their companions are evil and cunning.
Seeing this kind of people, I become exhausted!
They look on those who live in an honest way as being completely uncultured.
They take those who lack wealth as having merit.
They say that those who follow the Dharma have accomplished
only worthless methods.
Seeing this kind of people, I become exhausted!
Those who are expert at fitting into the ordinary are counted
excellent scholars.
Those who mimic good qualities are said to be wise in Dharma
Those who are good at using harsh, stupid and deceitful words
are considered quite exemplary.
Seeing this kind of people, I become exhausted!
With only verbal generosity, they dedicate as though the merits
were complete.
Bringing harm, they are proud as though they had created virtue.
Engaging in non-Dharma, they clearly believe they have
accomplished the journey to the bliss realm.
All these perversions make me quite exhausted!
Without Dharma, obtaining mere trifles is counted as happiness.
And genuine monks without wealth are scorned by all who see them.
When fools are more valued than noble ones,
If there is any feeling, exhaustion is appropriate!
At this time and place, principles are perverted.
Being the opposite of one’s mistakes, good qualities are
reckoned as erroneous.
Just as the beings of Tsuta (a realm where all beings have only one leg) laugh at two-legged humans,
Saying one leg is extra,
The one called Samyepa who composes, teaches and debates,
Now faces insults for acting in accord with the Dharma!
When I expound this truth, the throng of heedless, ignorant fools,
The most stupid who pretend to be studying and contemplating
the system of logic,
The foolish hypocrites with their imposing air of mastery of the
supreme precious three trainings,
And those lofty associates who easily befriend them, are most displeased.
However my body of discipline is superb; the petals of the
three trainings are formed and expanded.
And the excellent ones who can discern the causes assemble at
the fortress of honesty.
In order to awaken delight in their minds I arranged this composition.
All whose minds are clear, please examine whether the
meaning is true or false.
In this manner the sweet-voiced one of mountain retreat
I, Tshultrim Lodro Zangpo composed this.
By this virtue, may I and all beings,
Sit before the great tree of the essence of enlightenment;
After defeating the devils of unpleasant speech,
May we become Dharma Kings with the spontaneously established three kayas!
With the intention of a perfect exposition, this answer, called “Endowed with Rosary that Completely Subjugates”, was composed by the greatly learned poet, the glorious Samyepa, Tsultrim Lodr. It is here complete.
The following is from a series of tweets by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo:
For whom is Dharma written? Not for the ones who feel they know it. That would be a waste. If you are like that don’t listen to me.
Remember I was born in Brooklyn. (So not trustworthy?). I learned late, Aha! But was born young. I’ve always been kind and generous which makes me stupid, a joke.
I am a women past her prime. What use am I? I have seen my nature long ago, yet cannot hardly speak of it. I know the pulse of life, so must be repelled and fought. And because I have a throne and crown will never be loved truly.
But I love you. If you can open your heart and ask me in I will be there. A whore for Dharma, sure. A healer, speaker, -piece of shit, a rose, whatever you need me to be for you.
But not beaten. I will never be beaten as it is pre-ordained.
If you can hear me, I am here for you.
Abandon you? It is the only thing I cannot do.
The following is a full length video teaching offered by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo at Kunzang Palyul Choling:
© copyright Jetsunma Ahkon Norbu Lhamo All rights reserved.
The following is respectfully quoted from “The Gift of Fear” by Gavin De Becker:
Many homicides have occurred at the courthouse where women were seeking protection orders, or just prior to the hearings. Why? Because the murderers were allergic to rejection. They found it hard enough in private but intolerable in public. For men like this, rejection is a threat to identity, the persona, to the entire self, and in this sense their crimes could be called murder in defense of the self. In To Have or To Harm, the first major book on stalking, author Linden Gross details case after case in which court orders did not prevent homicides. Here are just a few:
Shirley Lowery was waiting outside the courtroom for the TRO hearing when she was stabbed nineteen times by her husband. Tammy Marie Davis’s husband beat and terrorized her and their twenty-one-month-old child, sending them both to the hospital. Right after he was served with the restraining order Tammy obtained, he shot and killed her. She was nineteen years old.
Donna Montgomery’s husband had held a gun to her head and stalked her, so she obtained a restraining order. He came to the bank where she worked and killed her, then himself.
Theresa Bender obtained a restraining order that her husband quickly violated. Even though he was arrested, she remained so committed to her safety that she arranged for two male co-workers to accompany her to and from work. Her husband was equally committed: He shot all three to death before turning the gun on himself.
Maria Navarro called 911 and reported her estranged husband had just threatened to kill her and was on the way to her house. Despite the fact he’d been arrested more than once for battery, police declined to dispatch officers to her home because her restraining order had expired. Maria and three others were dead within fifteen minute, murdered by the man who kept his promise to kill.
Hilda Rivera’s husband had violated two restraining orders and had six arrest warrants when he killed her in the presence of their seven-year-old son. Betsy Murray’s husband violated his TRO thirteen times. He reacted to her divorce petition by telling her, “Marriage is for life and the only way out is death.” When nothing else worked, Besty went into hiding, even after police assured her that her husband had fled country to avoid being arrested again, she still kept her new address a secret. When she stopped by her old apartment one day to collect mail a neighbor had been holding, her estranged husband killed her and then himself. He had been stalking her for more than six months.
The fact so many of these murderers also commit suicide tells us that refusing to accept rejection is more important to them than life itself. By the time they reach this point, are they really going to be deterred by a court order?
The last case I want to cite is that of Connie Chaney. She had already obtained four protective orders when her husband raped her at gunpoint and attempted to kill her. The solution recommended by police? Get a restraining order; so she did. Before gunning her down, her husband wrote in his diary: “I couldn’t live with myself knowing she won, or shot got me. No! This is war.” Those three words speak it all, because the restraining order is like a strategy of war, and the stakes are life and death, just as in war.
In a study of 1979 stalking cases sponsored by San Diego District Attorney’s office, about half of the victims who had sought restraining orders felt their cases were worsened by them. In a study done for the U.S. Department of Justice, researchers concluded that restraining orders were “ineffective in stopping physical violence.” They did find that restraining orders were helpful in cases in which there was no history of violent abuse. The report wisely concluded that “given the prevalence of women with children who utilize restraining orders, their general ineffectiveness in curbing subsequent violence may leave a good number of children at risk of either witnessing violence or becoming victims themselves.”
A more recent study done for the U.S. Department of Justice found that more than a third of women had continuing problems after getting restraining orders. That means, favorably, that almost two thirds did not have continuing problems — but read on. While only 2.6 percent of respondents were physically abused right after getting the orders, when they were recontacted six months later, that percentage had more than tripled. Reports of continued stalking and psychological abuse also increased dramatically after six months. This indicates that the short-term benefits of restraining orders are greater than the long-term benefits.
I want to make clear that I am not saying TROs never work, because in fact, most times that court orders are introduced, the cases do improve. It is often for the very reason one would hope: The men are deterred by the threat of arrest. Other times, TROs demonstrate the woman’s resolve to end the relationship, and that convinces the man to stay away. Whatever the reasons they work, there is no argument that they don’t work in some cases. The question is: Which cases?
Restraining orders are most effective on the reasonable person who has a limited emotional investment. In other words, they work best on the person least likely to be violent anyway. Also, there is a substantial difference between using a restraining order on an abusive husband and using one on a man you dated a couple of times. That difference is the amount of emotional investment and entitlement the man feels. With a date-stalker (discussed in the next chapter), a TRO orders him to leave the woman alone and go about his life as it was before he met her. The same court order used on an estranged husband asks him to abandon, at the stroke of a judge’s signature, the central features of his life: his intimate relationship, his control and ownership of another human being, his identity as a powerful man, his identity as a husband, and on and on. Thus, a TRO might ask one man to do something he can easily do, while it asks another to do something far more difficult. This distinction has been largely ignored by the criminal-justice system.
There is a glib response to all this: When men are very violent and dangerous, they are going to kill no matter what, so the TRO can’t make things worse. But here’s the rub: The TRO does hurt by convincing the woman that she is safe. One prominent family-court judge has said, “Women must realize that this paper won’t stop the next fist or the next bullet.” But it isn’t only women who must realize it — it is the whole criminal justice system. A woman can be expected to learn from her own experience, but the system should learn from all the experiences.
Carol Arnett has had experience running a battered women’s shelter and, years before that, running to a battered women’s shelter. Now the executive director of the Los Angeles County Domestic Violence Council, Arnett says:
We shelter workers have watched the criminal justice system fail to protect, and often even endanger women for so many years that we are very cautious about recommending restraining orders. We rely upon the woman herself to plan a course of action. Anyone, in or out of the system, who tells a woman she must follow a particular course that goes against her own judgment and intuition is not only failing to use the philosophy of empowerment, but may well endanger the woman.
Above all, I want to encourage people to ask this simple question: Will a restraining order help or hurt in my particular case? At least then, whatever choice is made can be called a choice and not an automatic reaction. Think of restraining orders as an option, not the only option.
Among those options, I certainly favor law enforcement interventions such as arrests for battery, assault, breaking and entering, or other violations of the law. You might wonder how this differs from being arrested for violating a TRO. Charges for breaking the law involve the system versus the lawbreaker, whereas restraining orders involve and abuser versus his wife. Many batterers find intolerable the idea of being under the control of their victims, and with a court order, a woman seeks to control her husband’s conduct, thus turning the tables of their relationship. Conversely, when the system pursues charges for a crime like battery, it is the man’s action — not those of his wife — that bring him a predictable consequence. Abusers should be fully prosecuted for every offense, and I believe prosecutions are an important deterrent to further abuse, but even then, the women must be prepared for the possibility of escalation.
The bottom line is that there is really only one good reason to get a restraining order in a case of wife abuse: The woman believes the man will honor it and leave her alone. If a victim or a professional in the system gets a restraining order to stop someone from committing murder, they have probably applied the wrong strategy.