A Knowing, Not a Decision: Twenty Years as a Buddhist Nun

I cannot say that becoming a nun was ever a decision, in the sense of will I or won’t I do this. It was not an intellectual process. It was a knowing.

At the time, I was married with two young sons, going deeper into dharma practice, and living through a great deal of confusion. During an analytical meditation, a certainty arose, clearly, for the first time: You know you want to be a nun. You know it is beneficial. It will happen, and you do not know when or how — since you are in the middle of family life, it might not even be this lifetime. Now let it go. I sincerely did let it go, and my mind found peace on the subject.

Soon after, my five-year-old son asked, in front of the whole family, “Mummy, why aren’t you a nun?” A few weeks later, without any prior discussion, my husband said, in an act of pure love, “It’s time for you to leave. You need to become a nun.” Of course the decision impacted us all. We adjusted around it, not without speed bumps along the way, and to say I am deeply grateful and indebted to my husband and children is an understatement. We remain in close contact to this day.

Twenty years on, people sometimes ask what ordination actually involves — what I was stepping into. But as a Western monastic, I would say it was never really about stepping into anything. It was stepping out. Often, a free fall. The scale of that free fall surprised me. What surprised me even more was what was there to meet it, waiting for my faith and confidence to grow into. The teachers on the path exemplified it and through their compassion and wisdom are there to show us the way. 

I have not walked this path alone. I have had the privilege of serving two senior, accomplished nuns — Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo and Venerable Robina Courtin — whose vision and commitment have benefitted countless beings. I have barely touched the surface of their impact on my path, but the presence of nuns like them, as mentors and living examples, is vital to any woman walking this road.

Jetsunma often speaks of the four signs that moved Prince Siddhartha to go forth and seek enlightenment: sickness, old age, and death, which revealed to him the truth of suffering and upended his entire world, leaving him to wonder what, if anything, could be done. The fourth sign was the renunciate — the reminder that there was a way out. Even now, the robes carry that same weight. People meet them with confusion sometimes, or indifference, or all manner of projection, but they remain an essential and potent reminder: liberation is possible.

If I had to describe how my understanding of monastic life has evolved over these two decades, I would put it simply. Practice is the slow loosening of the grasping mind, so that its natural qualities can shine through on their own.

That loosening has shaped how I hold the many teachers I’ve been fortunate to learn from. His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Mingyur Rinpoche and Tsoknyi Rinpoche have been some of my main teachers. Wisdom teachings are universal truths — the flavours, the delivery, the cultural containers will vary, but the truths themselves do not change. I have my root teachers and my root lineage, and finding different expressions of the dharma only deepens my connection to them. Exploring other teachings helps me see where I might be excluding others, so that I can dissolve those boundaries rather than harden them.

This same openness has carried through the many rooms I’ve taught in over the years — dharma centres, prisons, corporate offices, community centres, online groups reaching people across the world. The truth of suffering shows up differently in each of these places, but underneath, the problem is the same. It might be physical violence in one room and rivalry over who gets the biggest financial bonus in another. However it shows up, it asks to be met the same way — with respect, with kindness, with a willingness to work with it wherever it appears. The teaching itself never really changes. Only the examples do.

What has struck me most, moving between such different worlds, is how little separates them. The call to come home is the same whether you are sitting across from someone in a prison or in a corporate boardroom. Each experience, each iteration of suffering has to be fully respected. The robes seem to cut straight through whatever role a person happens to be playing in their life, whether that role looks like success or looks like ruin. I have come away from these years with a quiet confidence that our innate goodness is universal — that we are, all of us, far more alike than different. Some of us live in physical prisons. Some of us live in five-star resorts. Neither is permanent. Neither defines who we really are. Neither offers real refuge, because neither has any essence to it.

I think of all the people I’ve been blessed to sit with over the years — inmates, executives, children, people living with mental illness, homelessness, dementia and so on — and I recognize the same thing looking back at me each time. The robes remind them of a home they already have. When they reach toward that, from wherever they are, we are both blessed by it.

Looking back now, what surprises me most is simply this: that I am still ordained. And when I ask myself what this life has given me that I could not have found any other way, for me, the answer is just as simple. I wear, quite literally, a reminder — all the time — of a precious lineage of practice reaching back to the Buddha. A visible sign, to myself and to anyone who sees me, that samsara does not work, and that there is something beyond suffering.

This, I think, is why there need to be monastics in the world at all. It isn’t a path for everyone — the Buddha spoke of the fourfold sangha, each part depending on the others, all of them necessary. But the robes belong to everyone, in a sense, whether you happen to be wearing them or simply witnessing someone else wear them. They need to be seen. Someone needs to be standing in the world, quietly, as a reminder that another way is possible.