Ja´zèr Dorje

I can say that since I was around 18 to 20 years old I was quite a self-made man. After a quite an abrupt kind of identity crisis I came out by myself as I didn´t know of anyone else who could do better the job at that time, with quite insightful discoveries which took me quite naturally outside the confines of social and religious conventionalism to a new richer and more open dimension of experience where I started to experience life with much greater freedom and responsibility.

I felt more ordinary and genuinely human in a quite basic way and understand the suffering and neurotic patterns of behaviour in people as the result of their confusion and not of something intrinsically wrong about them. That was quite liberating in terms of abandoning any fixed ideas or positions about anything in general.

I experienced a natural sense of compassion which was enjoyable in its softening feeling and opening in the perception of others and the world.

I also think I had a down to earth approach to all of this and I didn´t need to adopt fortunately any form of sanctimonious appearance or evangelic personality. I always valued and appreciate a healthy sense of humour and simplicity as a good sign of psychological health.

I had some rather inspirational insights about the way we create an artificial identity through habitual patterns of communication with others which give a sense of security that was rather limiting. I had the strong sense that identification of any kind was limiting and problematic.

I started thinking in terms of emptiness and form and the experience of the emptiness of being related to freedom in terms of the openness to integrating as much varied manifestation of form as it presents to that area of emptiness with equanimity.

I also remember at an early stage in my life as a boy I used to get often in a space of wonderment and delight in dwelling in the alternating coexistence of opposites which seemed to exclude each other and found that ambivalence wordlessly delightful. I have a very vivid memory of that and I never put any word to that as it occurred quite naturally. I also found a great delight and wonderment in seen myself removed to other person’s centralised position in the same natural way.

My life become more rewarding in every sense and after years of transiting in periods of life getting involved in Buddhist meditation, romantic relationships, and general worldly wonderings, I had a healthy and satisfactory sense of living where I developed and established good friendships and I had a good and spacious relationship with my family.

The most important aspects that directed and were the ground of my life at that time were simplicity, humour, respect, and space.

I arrived to a point in my life where I thought I was happy enough and could live a reasonably good life considering what was available in the world as it was or as it appeared to be. But that somehow was not enough and I had a strong feeling that I needed to find some teaching or tradition to which I could commit myself completely and which could take me beyond the circling of my self-protective mechanisms to a more open dimension of being.

At that juncture of my life I came to hear about Dudjom Rinpoche and that name brought me a flood of inspiration and excitement which took me to travel to Dharamsala and then consequently to Britain where I could learn English in order to broaden the access to the teachings related to the Nyingma Tradition.

That´s how in the year 1997 I came to meet Ngak´chang Rinpoche & Khandro Déchen and the Aro gTér Lineage, and I found there my home and everything.

In the year 2006 I become ordained in the gö-kar-chang-lo’idé through the inspiration of my Lamas, and immediately after I went to a sangha pilgrimage to Nepal.

On that Pilgrimage I met Sonam Dégyal Wangmo, who was residing in Bodha, Kathmandú, at the time, and who is now my wife. We currently live in the Basque Country in Spain with our two daughters Kelsang and Elaia.