In 2011, my 7-year-old dog Trudy lost her sight from SARDS (sudden acute retinal degeneration syndrome). I took her to veterinary specialists frantically seeking a cure for her blindness but there was none.

At first, Trudy bumped into walls trying to find her way around the house. She got anxious and confused easily. I thought our good life was over. I forgot that dogs don’t feel sorry for themselves. They don’t think about the future. They figure things out the best they can and get on with it.

Online experts agree that blind dogs shouldn’t be treated with pity. This makes them think that something really bad is happening. The experts say, “Don’t rush to help your dog because his blindness makes you sad.”

I followed their advice even though it was hard. When Trudy couldn’t find the door, I’d stand there and say in a cheerful voice, “Over here, Trudy,” until she found her way. If she missed a treat I’d thrown her, I’d let her sniff around until she found it. Like dogs everywhere, she has a great sense of smell.

Over the last two years, Trudy and I have grown closer and happier. Strange as it sounds, Trudy is more full of life than ever. She’s become more obedient, probably because I take more time with her. I never thought I could teach this crazy dog to “sit” and “stay,” but I did.

Since she became blind, Trudy—an escape artist—has found her way out of the yard at least four times. Her sight may be gone, but her love of adventure isn’t. After she ran off six months ago, I decided to paint the words “I am blind” on her harness. Since then, neighbors have either called or brought her home within an hour or two.

If you have a blind dog, here are some suggestions:

• Teach your dog to recognize words and phrases such as “Watch it!” or “Over here!” and important commands such as “Sit” and “Stay.” Trainers say that dogs can understand over 20 words and phrases.  One blind border collie has been reported to understand more than 200 words.

• Spend more time walking your dog, going places, and playing games. Trudy likes to hunt for her supper outdoors. I make a ball of dry and wet dog food and throw it across the backyard. Her tail wags until she’s found the last crumb. Dogs love scent games.

• Buy a Kong and other toys that hold treats. Dogs enjoy working for their food. It keeps them busy and happy for long periods.

• Be sure your dog has plenty of water. Dogs with SARDS-related adrenal problems tend to be abnormally thirsty. They pee often and their urine is dilute.

• Install at least one doggie door in your house. Many dogs get upset when they can’t wait and have an accident in the house.

• If your dog has trouble getting to the doggie door in time, put down carpet runners or other cues that lead to the door.

• If your dog has an accident in the house, don’t scold. Just clean it up.

• Don’t leave your dog in places where it’s too warm. When dogs with adrenal problems get hot, they pant more than healthy dogs and are more prone to heat exhaustion.

• Don’t move furniture around or leave large objects on the floor that might confuse your dog. Blind dogs make mental maps of their environment and depend on them.

• Keep a collar or harness with an ID tag on your dog at all times. A microchip is a good idea, too. Many owners find harnesses more effective than collars, because they offer better support and give the owner more control in tricky situations.

• Label the harness “I am blind.” People will treat your dog with understanding without your having to explain. Also, it almost guarantees that some dog lover will bring your dog back if she wanders off.

• If your dog is older and can’t get around easily, use a sturdy harness with a handle when you’re going someplace he’s not familiar with. You can give him a lift when needed.  These harnesses are made for dogs with arthritis and other mobility problems.

• Keep a short hand leash—12 to18 inches—attached to the dog’s collar to help guide her in confusing or upsetting situations when she’s too anxious to obey commands.

• When walking your dog, look for grates in the pavement or other things that might make him stumble. Get him used to words of warning such as “Watch it.”.

• When you approach a strange dog, take a slight detour. Your dog can’t see the stranger and doesn’t respond like a sighted dog. The other dog doesn’t understand why yours is acting funny. Dogs meeting each other send signals about who’s going to be dominant, and misunderstandings can cause trouble.

• If you have a pool, put a fence around it. Trudy fell in my pool twice until I put a barrier up. Luckily I was there to fish her out.

• Buy a pet gate and/or collapsible exercise pen to keep your dog away from dangerous areas.

• If your dog spends time outside in a fenced yard, be sure it’s escape-proof. Inspect it carefully for loose boards, gaps, and tempting openings between the fence and ground. If your dog likes to dig, install chicken wire from the bottom of the fence into the ground. This requires digging a trench for anchoring the chicken wire.

In 1952, I married a college sweetheart who joined ROTC and became an Air Force officer after graduation.  After qualifying for pilot training, he started flight lessons in the Piper Cub, then graduated to a retired fighter plane, the Mustang. After that he learned to fly the famous B-17 bomber.

Training began at Gilbert Field in Bartow, Florida, where a class of twenty fresh young lieutenants had their first experience as pilots.

The little J3 Piper Cubs had tandem seats in the cockpit with dual controls, one set for the student and the other for the flight instructor. The plane was easy to pull out of spins and stalls because of its lightness. If the engine couldn’t be restarted, the plane continued to glide downward to a landing in the hands of a skilled pilot.

Despite the safety of the aircraft, one or two of each class of twenty fledgling pilots crashed due to pilot error, generally caused by panic. It was easy to get scared during training stalls, dives, and other death-defying maneuvers.

In 1954, the young lieutenants who survived the first phase of training packed off to West Palm Beach, Florida, where they learned to fly P-51 Mustangs, the fighter planes that shot down German Messerschmidts and Jap Zeroes in World War II. While flying Mustangs wasn’t for the faint of heart, fewer young pilots crashed because were more skilled aviators by this time.

Their flight instructors were old warriors from dogfights over Germany and Japan a few years earlier. By the mid-1950s, many were family men who missed the adrenaline rush of their youth.  When they soloed for leisure or practice, some pulled forbidden acrobatic stunts when they could avoid identification.  Since air-to-ground communications were still primitive in those days, former aces sometimes buzzed the tower, then climbed into the clouds before anyone could catch the ID on their fuselage. Or they did tight barrel rolls for friends on the ground away from the eyes of tale-tellers.

The last phase of training prepared pilots for the airplanes they would fly for the rest of their enlistment. My husband flew a former B-17 bomber—the Flying Fortress.   During WW II,  formations of twenty-five or more bombers flew missions over the Pacific, Japan and Europe. The B-17 stood as high as a two-story building and had a wingspan the length of three city school buses.

Enemy fighter planes had to inflict serious harm on a B-17 to bring it down. Even when one suffered extensive damage, it could usually limp home.  As the war advanced, the Flying Fortress became even more impervious to enemy fire because Air Force strategists found a way to protect formations.  They assigned P-51 Mustangs (“Red Tails”) to drive off enemy fighter planes.  Called “Little Friends,” one squadron of Mustangs was flown by African-American pilots known as the Tuskeegee Airmen, whose story is told in the film “Red Tails.”

With a flight range of almost 2000 miles, B-17s were retired from their bombing missions after the war and served as transport planes, carrying servicemen and cargo to U.S. military bases around the globe.

Prilosec is a drug I started taking in 2001 for heartburn. It’s the best-selling drug in pharmaceutical history, netting billions of dollars in profits for AstraZeneca, the manufacturer. In early 2001, this branded version of generic omeprazole was available only by prescription–$4.00 per pill.  Now the brand name is available for 63¢ each. The generic form is only 40¢.

What happened to Prilosec price?

The Prilosec patent ran out in 2001. Until then, AstraZeneca had a monopoly on omeprazole. Demand let them set the price sky-high. But in 2001 they had to scramble to save their cash cow. Generic companies would soon be able to sell the generic form of Prilosec and charge amounts more in line with production costs.

One corporate strategy was to develop a replacement drug for Prilosec, rename the drug, and get a new patent. Their R&D team came up with Nexium, an isomer of Prilosec. An isomer is a compound almost identical to the parent compound, with a molecule or two tweaked. Unfortunately, the new drug performed no better than Prilosec. It was basically the same compound with a new name and a higher price.

This was a problem. The company had to find some reason to claim that Nexium worked better than Prilosec.  So they surveyed patients taking Prilosec for signs of discontent. To their delight, only half of the patients were entirely satisfied and pain-free.

Drug company tricks

Using a tried-and-true industry move, AstroZeneca designed clinical trials to show improved performance of the new drug, no matter how slight. Data from two of four studies showed enough difference to build a weak case for Nexium. The other two showed no difference. The two favorable studies became the company’s marketing platform. Data from the other two studies were ushered out a back door.

Racing against the clock, the company got FDA approval for Nexium two months before expiration of the Prilosec patent in 2001.  But they needed more time to build a customer base for Nexium before patients could buy low-cost generics.

Company lawyers found legal loopholes that gave them six extra months of exclusive Prilosec sales.  They dug up a clause in their FDA contract that allowed only one generic competitor on the field at first. According to a former company executive, the idea is, “If you’re going to lose, you lose to one generic. Because if four or five come in, it gets really ugly.”

Corporate greed works

The company’s legal experts stalled the introduction of cheap knockoffs for several years. Delaying tactics, including a series of lawsuits against generic companies, bought AstraZeneca enough time to court U.S. doctors with promotional claims about Nexium, Prilosec’s child.

Although the last U.S. Prilosec patent expired in 2001, not until December 2007 did the first generic manufacturer get FDA approval to sell the drug. By that time, Nexium had a solid foothold. In both 2009 and 2010, AstraZeneca reported Nexium sales at $5 billion.

Today consumers pay ten times more for a heartburn medication (Nexium) no better than its parent drug Prilosec or generic omeprazole. As David Campen MD, a Kaiser physician and pharmacy executive, says, “Nexium clearly is a no-value-added drug.”

Winners Never Lose

This scenario is played out in the marketing and legal departments of most pharmaceutical companies facing the disaster of expiring patents for high-dollar drugs.  Their ploys work almost every time.

Return of Bambi and Thumper

Tanja Askani, a Czech author, photographer, and animal scientist living in Germany, has disseminated a series of Bambi-Thumper photos that have gone viral on the internet.  People find them adorable. When I received the series in my e-mail, I thought they looked too good to be true. They were.

After downloading the photos and examining them in zoom view, I found clear evidence that every photo had been altered substantially. We’re not talking about subtle adjustments in contrast or lighting. The “reality” of animal tenderness and bonding shown in the photos is the result of digital artifice.

Photoshop Magic

Askani’s creative combinations of two more photos into one made me wonder. Were the deer and rabbit ever actually nose to nose? My hunch is that Askani got some good shots but could not resist tinkering with them. I think she ended up creating the photos she wished she had taken, not the ones she actually took.  Being a Photoshop expert,  I know the temptation to make a good image better.  But pasting one image on top of another and passing it off as a miracle of interspecies bonding is fraud.

Arrows in the photos point to some of  the areas of Photoshop fakery. The paste-ins, blending and use of line tools and brushes weren’t even done skillfully. Methinks Ms. Askani has got herself in a bind with her now-famous Bambi-Thumper photographs. How can she acknowledge her deception (which will surely be exposed) and maintain any kind of reputation as an animal photographer?  Or animal scientist, for that matter.

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Nonverbal communication experts say that body language includes facial expressions, tone of voice, and noises made by mouth (sighing, grunting, etc.) Nonverbal messages substitute  for words that people are afraid to use because of the consequences.  Even though body language is as potent as spoken language, we allow people to offend us with it when we would not let them do it with actual words. The same thing applies sarcasm that’s used instead of a direct attack.

Most of us would punish a child who looked at us and said, “Fuck you.” But when the child rolls his or her eyeballs, sighs, and turns away, we might let it pass.  Let’s face it. The child’s body language is saying, “Fuck you.”  If we won’t tolerate spoken disrespect, we shouldn’t allow kids to use body language to get the message across.

Not many mothers would put up with comments like, “Your cooking sucks, Mom. I eat this stuff because I have to.” But we let the child make comments like, “Ugh, what is this, anyhow?” The message is the same.

Body language should be treated like spoken language. True, the child (or adult) is likely to deny any bad intent. But we both know the truth. And since we are the grown-ups, we should act on the truth we know, not the truth the child (or adult) is trying to disguise.

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Police capture Molly the heifer

A 6-month-old heifer was being delivered to a slaughterhouse near New York City when she made a bold dash for freedom.  Sensing that her life was in danger, she broke through a passageway between the cattle trailer and cow pens as workers were unloading animals.  Then she ran like the wind.

Eluding capture, she broke through a fence and took to the city streets.  The slaughterhouse workers chasing her couldn’t keep up. The pursuers called 911 for police back-up.  The calf made it about a mile through quiet neighborhoods before she was cornered by police officers in a fenced area between two houses.

After a van was brought to the site, the calf was led aboard and taken to an animal shelter in Brooklyn, where she spent the night.  By the next morning, shelter workers had given her a name—Molly.  Determined to save Molly, the shelter staff called farms in New York that rescued food animals.

The phone crew found the perfect place—a 60-acre organic farm where rescued cows, pigs, chickens and other animals live in comfort and didn’t have to worry about ending up on someone’s dinner plate.

When Molly arrived, she was fed fresh organic hay, given clean water, and put in a stall with a gentle bull named Wexler.  Molly and Wexler were free to go in and out of the barn into their own grassy pasture.

The owners of the farm, Rex and Connie Farr, rescue farm animals on a regular basis.  One day, a neighbor drove up with six crates stuffed with young chickens that had fallen from a truck crossing a bridge.  The chickens stayed on at the farm as permanent residents.  Another day, a 4-H club brought the Farrs a pony that their group no longer had money to keep.

Wexler, Molly’s boyfriend, came from a private school. He was part of an animal education program.  When the program was shut down, the school asked the Farrs to give Wexler a home.  Rex and Connie Farr also take care of goats, burros and other animals.

When reporters interviewed Rex Farr, he said, “Molly can eat and sleep here for the rest of her life. She’s not going anywhere. With us she’ll have a very good home.”

What about the cattle farmer who lost over $400 in the deal?  He said, “Molly is a gift from me.”   Maybe he figured that an animal as courageous and smart as Molly deserved her freedom.

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Myers-Briggs Inventory

Isabel Myers and her mother, Katharine Briggs—both psychologists— developed the Myers-Briggs Personality Inventory more than fifty years ago.

Carl Jung

They were looking for a way to classify different types of personalities and describe them using the theories of Carl Jung, the famous Swiss psychoanalyst. They wanted to create a tool to help people understand themselves and others.

The Myers-Briggs Inventory was first published in 1975. Its practical applications have been expanding ever since—in schools and colleges, business, counselors’ offices, and other settings.

The Myers-Briggs scale consists of four pairs of personality traits—each representing opposite ends of a continuum. Myers-Briggs test scores show where an individual’s personality lies along each continuum, with capital letters used to identify the dominant traits.

Introversion-Extraversion

The introvert (I) needs privacy and solitude, generally avoids large social gatherings, and is happiest either alone or in the company of one or two good friends. The extravert (E) gets uneasy when alone too much, seeks the company of others, and enjoys mingling.

Intuition-Sensing

Intuitive (N) people tend act on their hunches, which are usually sound. They’re skilled at sizing up others and knowing when situations are risky. At the other end of the scale, people of the sensing (S) type don’t trust impulsive judgments. They prefer solid data and rely on what they can see and feel. Privately the intuitive type thinks the sensing type is earthbound and unimaginative, while the sensing type thinks the intuitive type is impulsive.

Thinking-Feeling

The thinker (T) is ordinarily rational and cool when making decisions—not prone to emotional reactions. The feeling (F) person is more likely to be swayed by sentimental considerations and has a softer heart.

Judging -Perceiving

The judging (J) type is more focused and comfortable with closure than the perceiving (P) type. People with a dominant judging function rarely miss deadlines or are tardy for appointments. The perceiving type is more happy-go-lucky, often has several projects going at once, and is more casual about deadlines. When making a major purchase such as a car, the perceiving type enjoys the information-gathering and comparison-shopping part, but is a little uneasy once a selection has been made—worrying that more research should have been done. The judging person is glad the purchase has been decided upon and the check written.

It’s Hard To Be an INFJ

INFJs make up only 1% to 3% of the population, the rarest of the personality types. They tend to be perfectionists who fear they aren’t living up to their potential. INFJs can always list the things they’ve left undone but have a hard time counting their accomplishments.

INFJs hold strong convictions and are deeply affected by the suffering of others. However, because they are introverted, they prefer thinking about weighty issues to talking about them. Those who are activists—a role toward which they gravitate—take up causes for moral reasons, not for personal glory or political power.

The INFJ is often found at disaster scenes as a rescue worker. When a person of this type sees people or animals being treated cruelly, he or she may fantasize about getting revenge on the perpetrators. Although INFJs are gentle by nature, they are formidable in battle.

The highly developed intuition of INFJs warns them when trouble lies ahead—for themselves or the world. Some people find INFJs pessimistic or even a little paranoid. However, INFJs are more often right than wrong because their intuition is so accurate. This ability makes them effective problem-solvers with the ability to act insightfully and spontaneously.

When INFJs move into their extraverted mode, as they sometimes do, they can express a range of emotions and opinions quite effectively as they have excellent verbal skills. However, they tend to be cautious about revealing their positions. Like other feeling-judging types, they frequently feel caught between the desire to express their opinions and their reluctance to offend people. Some INFJs vent their private feelings to a few trusted friends. The friends are chosen with care, and the relationships are usually characterized by affection and trust.

When INFJs turn from their feeling to their thinking function, they may appear aloof. Others sometimes conclude that this detachment reflects cynicism. A friend might fear that the insightful INFJ is so perceptive about human nature that the friend himself or herself is being judged. Generally this is not true at all. The INFJ is simply distracted by the need to focus and think. Under stress, INFJs are likely to overlook what’s going on in their immediate environment.

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A friend recently checked into a substance abuse rehab center for a drinking problem.  He’s not happy about getting involved in a twelve-step program.   He considers AA a cult and most of its members losers.  However, he now suffers from advancing cirrhosis. Continued drinking means death, his doctor warned.

My friend is an avid golfer, and his best friends are golfers. Alcohol is part of their culture and he considers their drinking adventures entertaining and “cool.” Life without alcohol seems grim and lackluster to him.  Only death would be worse.  And that, of course, is the choice he’s faced with.

Drinking has long been woven into the mystique of golf.  Many famous golfers became alcoholics during their careers.  PGA golfer John Daly is one.  He has been disciplined repeatedly for drunken behavior. Over the years, the PGA Tour ordered him into alcohol rehab at least seven times.   In an interview (while he was on the wagon), Daly said, “Everywhere you turn on tour, there’s alcohol. It’s the country-club scene with drinking before, during and after rounds.”

Harry Vardon, Early Golf Superstar

The tradition of drinking is often stoutly defended by golf devotees. In 1915, Harry Vardon—one of golf’s first international superstars—was asked by a British temperance worker to join the movement against alcohol. His reply was, “Moderation is essential in all things, madam,” he said, “but never in my life have I failed to beat a teetotaler.”

Famous golfers who were alcoholics include George Travers, Tommy Armour, Fred Herreshoff, Noah Begay, and Walter Hagen.  Hagen was so admired by Bill Wilson, a founder of AA, that his name can be found on the pages of the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous..

Alcoholism is common among other celebrity athletes. Jim Thorpe, the legendary track star (who also played football and baseball), was an alcoholic. So were baseball pitchers Rube Waddell, Bugs Raymond, and Grover Cleveland Alexander, plus catcher Rollie Hemsley.

Famous people whose lives were impaired by alcoholism until they gave up drinking include:

King Edward VIII of England
Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., movie actor
Stephen Crane, novelist
Eugene V. Debs, labor leader
Isadora Duncan, dancer
Edna St. Vincent Millay, poet
Sherwood Anderson, novelist
Theodore Dreiser, novelist
Muhammad Ali, boxer
Duke of York, British royal family
Isaac Asimov, scientist/author
David Bowie, rock star
Warren Buffett, billionaire investor
Jim Carrey, actor
Eric Clapton, musician
John Coltrane, musician
Tom Cruise, actor
Rutherford B. Hayes, 19th U.S. President
Stonewall Jackson, Confederate General
Steve Jobs, Co-Founder of Apple Computers
Elton John, musician/songwriter
Stephen King, author
Bruce Lee, martial arts performer Abraham Lincoln, 16th U.S. President David Lloyd George, British Prime Minister
James Russell Lowell, poet/diplomat
Marie-Antoinette, Queen of France
Prince, celebrity musician
John D. Rockefeller, industrialist/philanthropist
Fred Rogers, star of children’s TV show

Mitt Romney, former Massachuetts Governor
George Bernard Shaw,  playwright
Ringo Starr, Beatles drummer
Strom Thurmond, U.S. SenatorPierre Trudeau, former Prime Minister of Canada
Mae West, film star
Malcolm X, Black activist

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The Book: Talking About Acupuncture in New York

Professor J.R. Worsley is widely acknowledged as the person who first brought Chinese medicine to the West. Worsley taught classical acupuncture based on ancient five-element theory throughout Europe and the United States until his death in 2003.  In 1980, he presented a day-long seminar in New York City, which was transcribed and published as Talking About Acupuncture in New York (Worsley, Inc., Churchill Farm, England 2004, 109 pp.)

J.R. & Judy Worsley

In 1999, Professor Worsley and his second wife, Judy, a former acupuncture student, founded the Worsley Institute of Five-Element Acupuncture.  Judith Becker Worsley now manages the Institute.

Law of Husband and Wife

Near the middle of the seminar [book], Professor Worsley described the Law of Husband and Wife. “In traditional Chinese medicine, when we make a correct diagnosis, in many cases we will find within a patient a husband/wife imbalance…We have the wife part trying to violate the law of Nature by taking the male role, and there is destruction.”

Putting the Law of Husband and Wife in the context of ancient times, he said, “In those days thousands of years ago, of course, the man went out to do the hunting, the shooting, and the fishing to provide for the family. The wife stayed at home to play her natural role—to bring up the child and give strength to the husband, to give him support and love. Without him  she would collapse; he would collapse.”

Cultural Anthropological Perspective

Cultural anthropologists describe primitive heterosexual partnerships quite differently. The notion that a wife’s natural role is to give strength, love and support to a husband reflects a romantic Western view of marriage (and not even a current one), not the reality of life in primitive societies.  A failed or lost husband-wife partnership did not have the same personal consequences thousands of years ago, when mortality was high at all ages. The woman deprived of a partner continued to depend on her female network and the community. She was not prey to the social isolation experienced by many contemporary Western women suffering from failed or lost relationships. In fact, women in primitive societies who had passed the menarche were often called “crones,” implying a state of increased independence and power. Men, too, were probably not susceptible to “collapse” after relationship losses  A man still in his vigorous years could find another woman.

Professor Worsley on “Women’s Lib”

Professor Worsley

Professor Worsley’s comments on male-female energy included: “Why the hell they have to have a woman’s lib I do not know! Everybody knows that the man is the head of the family, and that’s that! The woman is the neck, and she turns the head whichever direction she wants to…Everybody knows that the women are very cunning. They allow the men to put up the fronts and the masculinity and the strength, but it’s really they who’ve got it! …So why women’s lib I don’t know. We need a men’s lib!”

Unbalanced Male and Female Energy

How the dynamic of husband/wife imbalance translates to the clinical acupuncture setting according to the model used by Professor Worsley is unclear.  In the real world, suppressed female energy and unchecked male energy in a society appear to result in excessive aggression and violence. Anthropologically, psychologically, and perhaps biologically, women have a low propensity for physical aggression, preferring indirect strategies for managing conflict. In highly patriarchal societies, their mitigating influence is weakened.

Does Professor Worsley believe that a female emasculates a male when she doesn’t relinquish control to him? Is she in violation of natural law when she is straightforward instead of manipulative (turning the husband’s head “whichever direction she wants to”). According to Worsley,”…with the grace of God, we are able to correct that imbalance and give back the superior energy to the husband, put the wife back in her role, and that patient will then live for their normal life expectancy.”

Physical and Clinical Aspects

Worsley is not specific about what aspect of the husband’s energy is “superior” as he alluded only to men’s physical strength–specifically, the male’s ability to run faster and jump higher. Does that still matter in a society where physical strength is seldom required?  Worsley’s reference to putting the wife “back in her role” is unclear, although the words seem to imply that she has overstepped her bounds.  Lacking sufficient knowledge of traditional Chinese medicine, readers like me are unenlightened about the clinical consequences of a patient having too much “husband” energy or too much “wife” energy.

Translation Problems

Perhaps many practitioners of Chinese medicine think of “husband/wife” imbalance more in terms of male/female imbalance—a state in which male energy lacks adequate female counterbalancing or vice versa.  This would be easier to understand, as the roles of ‘husband” and “wife” are sociocultural arrangements, not anthropological or biological.  Or perhaps the concepts of yin and yang would better explain the Law of Husband and Wife to those newly acquainted with acupuncture theory. Maybe the translation of Chinese terms and concepts into English is part of the problem.  Some Chinese teachers of five-element acupuncture warn that accurate translation from Chinese to other languages is impossible.

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Noted Lama Visits Gainesville

Bardor Tulku Rinpoche

On Friday, October 21, 2011, Bardor Tulku Rinpoche appeared at the Historic Church of Gainesville on NE First Street in Gainesville, Florida, to speak on “Buddhism and Family Life.” After his formal talk, he entertained a variety of other topics in a question-and-answer period. Bardor Rinpoche is recognized as an incarnate lama by His Holiness the 16^th Gyalwa Karmapa.

Shortly after 7 pm, the lama was assisted to the podium by two monks, as he has been experiencing some difficulty walking since a stroke in early 2010.  He was greeted by an audience of several hundred people who bowed with respect, some by prostrating themselves.  Several members of the audience brought white silk scarves to be blessed by the lama.

Once the lama was seated, his gestures were fluid and his face animated. Although he spoke exclusively in Tibetan, the audience sat in almost complete silence attending his words.  Several minutes of speaking were followed by several minutes of translation.  The gathering ended at 9 pm.  Copies of his book, Living in Compassion, were sold at the exit by his wife and several assistants.

Highlights of the Talk

• A brief history of Buddhist sanghas since the sixth century.

• The importance of honesty in family communications balanced with tact and loving-kindness.

• The necessity of selective autonomy in a marriage or domestic partnership (as opposed to the total autonomy of single life).

• The spiritual benefits of supporting a partner fully and desiring the best for him or her.

• The importance of avoiding competition in a partnership.

• The dangers of subtly sabotaging a partner in order to be “top dog.”

Highlights of the Q&A Period

• The difference between the Western concepts of guilt and regret from a Tibetan Buddhist perspective. Translation of the question posed by an audience member took a few moments because there is only one Tibetan word to cover both concepts. However, as the translator pointed out, Tibetan Buddhists recognize shades of regret/guilt.  Bardor Rinpoche pointed out that we call “regret” is considered positive as it gives one the opportunity to expunge a behavior or thought pattern. “Guilt” is a negative emotion because it allows one to stay mired in identification with the behavior.

• The long-term consequences of blaming our parents for our present problems because of what they “did to us.”  Problems our parents caused us are usually due to “karmic knots” of their own—which are an inescapable part of any human’s life. Parents rarely intend to do their children harm.

• Dealing with the trauma of having had severely abusive parents. Survivors of extreme parental abuse are more likely to heal from childhood wounds when they realize that their abusive parents had karmic knots so severe and overwhelming that they resulted in out-of-control behavior.

• The absence of God in the Buddhist belief system. Buddhists generally do not believe that the world was created by a supernatural being nor that any divinity controls the course of our lives.  Our spiritual welfare begins and ends with us.

• Belief (or non-belief) in evolution.  Most Buddhists believe that while evolution of the human species occurred in the past, we are probably now in an era of “devolution.”  This view applies to humanity in general, not to individual humans, who are still capable of upward evolution through their lives.

• The personal meaning of Buddhist practice and the concept of enlightenment. While words and concepts are important, they are only tools that lead us to the wordless experience of enlightenment and self-knowledge.

• The challenges of raising children in Western culture today. Parents are more likely to help their children survive today’s culture if they themselves seek tranquility through meditation.

• The reasons that children fall into destructive lifestyles. Bardor Rinpoche believes that out-of-control behaviors in maturing children are often the result of earlier parental overindulgence and failure to set healthy boundaries.

Bardor Rinpoche’s Background

Bardor Tulku Rinpoche was born in 1949 in Tibet. During childhood, he lived a nomadic life with his family, who were yak herders. When he was ten years old, he and his family escaped to India because of increased Communist oppression. A failed Tibetan uprising in 1959 caused the escalation of political persecution, causing many lamas to flee the country. Bardor Rinpoche’s parents died in Assam, India, shortly after their relocation due to health problems associated with the drastic climate change. Later he moved to Rumtek, Sikkim, and began his formal Buddhist training.

In 2003, Bardor Tulku Rinpoche founded  Kunzang Palchen Ling, a Tibetan Buddhist Center in Red Hook, New York. He resides on the other side of the Hudson River from the Center.    He also teaches at other Buddhist centers throughout North America. The mission of the Center in Red Hook is to offer Western students the teachings of all major schools of Tibetan Buddhism—but most particularly the teachings and practices of the lineage of Terchen Barway Dorje. More about Bardor Rinpoche and the Center can be found at http://www.kunzang.org/btr-bio.html

“Living in Compassion”

Living in Compassion was published by Bardor Rinpoche in 2004 (Rinchen Publications, Kingston NY, 171 pp). The book is divided into three sections: 1) understanding karma in our personal and family relationships; 2) a commentary on The 37 Practices of a Bodhisattva, a noted Tibetan text on the path of compassion and wisdom; and 3)  discussion of the six perfections–generosity, morality, patience, diligence, meditation, and wisdom. The paperback can be purchased for less than $17.00 from one of Amazon’s subsidiary booksellers at http://www.amazon.com.

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