Episode #135: Following the Dhamma (Bonus Short)
“We just felt like we knew Myanmar, and it didn't seem like a foreign place to us.” So says Tamara Edwards, currently the Center Teacher at Dhamma Pabha, a vipassana meditation center in the tradition of S.N. Goenka. Tamara speaks about how her spiritual journey took her, time and again, to Myanmar. “To be honest, we felt completely at home there! We felt completely familiar with both monastic and lay life in Myanmar… It only enriched our experience.”
Growing up, Tamara had little inclination to look into meditation, but her interest was piqued when she took a tour through India in the 1990 and met some fellow travelers who had just completed a 10-day vipassana course. Unable to attend a retreat during that trip, she made plans to sit her first course at Dhamma Aloka in Melbourne. The teachings stuck, and Tamara became dedicated to the practice, eventually living long-term at the organization’s headquarters in Dhamma Giri, located outside of Mumbai.
She found a Dhamma partner, Jamie, and together they sat and served courses. However, after a while, real world concerns crept back in, and they found they needed to take some time away to earn a livelihood. But after two years, they wanted to reorient their life back towards meditation. “We felt that we’d strayed somewhat from our true path,” Tamara explains, “and decided at that point that we wanted to return to full-time Dhamma sitting and serving, and thought the best way to do that would be to finally fulfill both of our dreams and go and sit a long course in Burma.” With that in mind, in 2012 they enrolled in a 30-day course at Dhamma Nidhi, a vipassana center in Bago.
Tamara and Jamie also traveled widely throughout the country, particularly those sites in the lineage of S.N. Goenka. Eventually, they found a sense of home and community at the Webu Sayadaw Monastery in Ingyinbin, which she describes as “the most peaceful place on Earth.” This was a place Tamara simply couldn’t get enough of. “I used to say to my husband all the time, ‘My goodness, if there were anywhere I could spend the rest of my days, it would be here!’” Webu Sayadaw was a 20th century monk believed by many to be fully enlightened, and Tamara notes how he had predicted that “busloads” of pilgrims would one day come to the humble village, and so came to see herself as living through that prophecy.
After repeated extended visits to the monastery, Tamara came to feel she wanted to take a deeper plunge, and so decided to ordain as a nun. With permission from a senior teacher in the Goenka organization and her husband pledging to serve as her lay attendant, the pathway was cleared for her to renounce. Doing so opened up her practice as well as her interactions within the community in ways she never could have anticipated.
“To take robes was a whole new level altogether!” she describes. “I found that as lay meditators, we're aiming to develop our practice to be able to develop wisdom towards ultimate reality. And then I found as a nun, that it was almost expected that we live into the ultimate reality. The monastics in Myanmar are not termed as ‘people.’ They're ‘the noble ones,’ and they're [supported] to live into that ultimate reality of the matter and nature. And so I felt that expectancy almost not to identify myself in the apparent reality, but rather in the ultimate reality. It strengthened my scope of practice.
Tamara later decided to don robes a second time, and following her return to lay life, she felt fulfilled in this particular aspiration. “After my second ordination, I felt like I'd done what I needed to do. Since disrobing after the second ordination, I knew then that I wouldn't be doing it again in this life, that I'd fulfilled some need within me that needed to be fulfilled, and very happily closed that experience in my life.”
One experience that stands out during her time in the country is when she visited U Agga, a Dutch monk living in the remote forests south of Dawei. She and her husband were shown to their kutis, and it was the first time she had experienced that kind of isolation and gotten a taste of how it felt to be a forest monastic. With no running water, they had to take daily trips to the river to fill buckets. And with no people around for miles, the three had to take morning walks every day to gather their food from local villagers, which they would then eat in silence in their kutis. “That was an experience like none other,” she says simply.
Tamara finds something ironic, and deeply tragic, about recalling these memories in 2022, when Myanmar is facing such terrible conflict. When the coup first launched, she was glued to her screen, yet felt there was nothing she could do to help those she cared about so deeply. “I felt so helpless that there was absolutely nothing we could do,” she notes. “But I couldn't turn away from it! And so I was watching everything that happened there, the horrifying footage that was coming out, because I felt like it was a responsibility, I guess a way of escaping the feeling of helplessness.” Eventually her obsession began unbalancing her mind, and so Tamara had to take steps to limit how much she was following the latest news, while still trying to be in touch with close friends and giving donations to nonprofits.
Her practice is also of great help during these times. “I have to sit with those [disturbing] feelings when they occur,” she says, “and extend the merits and the benefits of our own peaceful lives here in Australia, to the people in Burma through mettā… I don't think time and space matters so much. You can be very close to people in meditation. And so I try to extend my support through my practice of mettā.”