Zér-mé Dri’mèd

Ngakma Zér-mé has been an active practitioner of Buddhism since 1980. Before she met Ngak’chang Rinpoche and Khandro Déchen, she practiced in the Soto Zen tradition with Maezumi Taizan Roshi and Charlotte Joko Beck and later the Shambhala térma of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. She became an apprentice in 1998 and took ordination in 2004.

Her teaching experience began in Shambhala Training in the early 1990s. Over the years she taught many weekend programmes in that cycle, and has worked with students on an individual basis as a Meditation Instructor. She now has a number of apprentices and Aro mentees. She has offered teachings during apprentice retreats for her students and with Ngakpa Seng-gé Dorje, who also teaches in the San Francisco Bay area.

Ngakma Zér-mé was a writer and editor during her life in the workforce. Since retiring, she has learned to apply those skills in support of the Aro teachings and the Arts. Her husband, Carl Grundberg, is a poet, and Ngakma Zér-mé has learned to design and publish his books through a publish-on-demand provider. Her most recent adventure has been writing a book on the gCod of Khyungchen Aro Lingman, entitled Never Expect to Return.

She says: “If nothing else, I hope I can be an example of someone who practises formally and diligently and also attempts to enjoy all of an ordinary human life as containing the possibility of realization—a serious practitioner with a sense of humour.

“If I have a hope for my future as a teacher, it would be to be able someday to transmit the teachings and practices of living the view, enjoying the sense fields, and participating in the infinite purity of the phenomenal world in all of life.

“In the last year of his life, John Muir wrote the following. The words still bring tears to my eyes.”

“Not like my taking the veil—no solemn abjuration of the world. I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.”