Childhood: I grew up in Johannesburg, South Africa. I had a really beautiful childhood. I’m the oldest of three kids. I was definitely the princess… and was definitely in charge. I have a very close and loving relationship with my parents and my siblings. We’re all very close. As are my cousins… we had one big extended family loving us. There was trauma of course, I have a father who raged. But always within the context of “I love you”, and always followed by tremendous apologies. And my mother was the typical nurturer, the classical forgiver. Financially, we were very well off.
It was very interesting politically, growing up in apartheid South Africa. When I was little, I would play with the servants’ children but when you got to be 7 or 8, you no longer played with African children. This was confusing for a child, and the beginnings of my learning compassion. Politically, in my latter years of high school and as a university student, I got involved in a left-wing student organization that did work with black kids in the townships. It was illegal, and therefore dangerous. I had friends who disappeared, a cousin that was under house arrest for 7 years because of her involvement with the ANC. My parents were questioned by the police. I was followed because I had an Indian boyfriend. (which was taboo… crossing the color line.)
I also had many significant mystical experiences as a child. I grew up in a Jewish household, although not orthodox (traditionally practicing). My parents on my mother’s side are a very old Jerusalem family. There’s a lot of mysticism in my family. My great grandmother was the last person to be given permission to be buried on the Mount of Olives. The reason I’m bringing it up was that when she died, my grandmother was in South Africa… so when she went back to Jerusalem to look for her mother’s grave, she went to the hut on the hill and the man who had the grave name and numbers wasn’t there. She walked out and she felt somebody leading her. She turned and went straight and turned and when she stopped she was at her mother’s grave. So this type of mystical experience runs through the veins of the women in my family. My mom had them. I had many experiences myself. As wild as you can possibly imagine, covering the full gamut of experiences recorded in all the mystical traditions. It’s what led me into my studies.
Also, growing up in a non-traditional Jewish family, I started doing yoga when I was four. I would go with my mother to yoga class and we would meditate at the end. So I started meditating when I was four and it became my nightly ritual at bedtime. I also would hang out in the field at the bottom of my road in Africa (the fields were where the African churches would meet) African Christianity is a mixture of missionary Christianity and traditional tribal religion. So, in the name of Christ, people would dance and sing and go into trance. And so would I. I’d spend time with African witchdoctors. There was a lot of that sort of thing in my childhood.
When I was 13½, I cut school one day and I went to a mystical bookstore downtown. While I was in the bookstore, Yogananda’s “Autobiography of a Yogi” fell off the shelf and hit me on the head. There was an Indian guru there and he was laughing and said, “This means you come and study with me.” So I studied Vedanta studies as a teenager, the truth kernel of the Vedas. When I left South Africa, I went to live in Israel for a year, where I became very friendly with a Chinese Buddhist and got involved with Buddhism. All of this is to say that prior to coming to the Buddha Field, I had many years of spiritual studies plus initiations by various gurus. I was also initiated by the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala. Many different experiences like that. There was an organization I belonged to in Atlanta that met at a Trappist monastery (because one of the monks was a Trappist. He was given special permission to meet with us as Trappists hold a vow of Silence. However the head of the monastery really liked the focus of our meetings which was the exploration of different religious and spiritual expressions.) There was a Benedictine monk (a very good friend of mine) that was part of it. There was a Native American medicine man and faith keeper for the Muscogee Nation… I was initiated as a spiritual member of that Nation,as well as of the Hopi Nation. There was also a leader in the Sufi Order. (I actually also have initiation in two different Sufi orders). The head of the gay churches in Atlanta was in that group. There were about 8 or 9 of us. A very interesting group of people. And the head of the Rama Krishna Order in the Vedanta Society who is a good friend of mine. This was in the late seventies or early eighties. It was wonderful. So I had a very varied spiritual background, and experience in varied mystical practices before I ever got involved with the Buddha Field.
Education: When I was an undergrad I was probably pretty indifferent to school. I did very well in school, it was very easy for me. As an undergrad, I was a typical 19-20 year old kid, in that, I’d make deals with myself like, “If I can’t get a parking space, I’ll go shopping.” But I passed everything really easily. For my Bachelor’s degree, I majored in English Literature, Social Anthropology and Psychology. And then I left South Africa, lived in Israel for a year, then came to the States. I was a very natural mom and felt very enriched by my experience of mothering. Something about unconditional loving and going beyond yourself. I helped start a ballet company in Atlanta and an International School. I worked for the Southern Center for International Studies (which is Jimmy Carter’s organization… not the Carter Center but a behind-the-scenes political thing. I did fund-raising.) I worked to provide housing for Vietnamese and Russian refugees. I was very involved in the growing-up of Atlanta. When I got there it was a tiny town. But Andy Young was the mayor and he wanted to make it an international city. I was very involved in that stuff. And when my kids got old enough to be at school for the whole day and were involved in after-school activities, I went back to school and studied Interior Architecture and Design. But when I started working in that… it turned out that when people would call me constantly and it was never about “5 beautiful tiles they had to choose from,” it was always some interpersonal drama in their life. And I was on the phone forever with them. One day I realized, “I’m kind of counseling people and if I’m going to do this with any integrity, I have to go back to school.” So I went back to school and got a Master’s degree in transpersonal psychology. And then, subsequent to that, I received my doctorate in East-West Psychology with an orientation in Spiritual Counseling and Spiritual Emergency.
Marriage: Before the BF, I was married. Twice actually. The first time I got married when I was 21. To the guy I’d been dating for 3 years in South Africa. I did the typical South African thing. If you’ve been dating someone for a long time, you get married when you finish your University studies. And so I got married. And then I got pregnant 3 months later. We were both kids and he wasn’t ready for a kid. And I wasn’t prepared to get rid of the kid. So that was the end of the marriage. When my marriage ended, I was 22… with a baby. I was 24½ when I married my second husband, an anesthesiologist. My first husband was a neurologist. They were both in the medical profession. Then, we left South Africa and went to Israel for a year… and then came to the States. I was with my second husband for 15 years before we were divorced. Oddly, I would get some cocked up message from Angelo via Frolic about how I never stuck to things. Not my experience at all. When I met the people from the Buddha Field in Atlanta, I had been divorced for about a year. And I had two kids. My son was 11 and my daughter was 16.
Sexual/abuse problems: Often when I talked to Tighre he would say “what about the sexual abuse you had”. I always told him he was confusing me with someone else. He always said I was in denial. I wonder now if he was told to say that. There was none of that in my family. My father would rage and during that time he was emotionally abusive of course. He has a very short fuse, but thee was no physical abuse at all. And you know, South African people are very above-board emotionally. They shout, scream, love, kiss each other…Very much like Southern Italian or Southern Mediterranean… people singing all the time, all around you. It was like that.
I do know that one of the things that attracted me to the Buddha Field, one of the things that really attracted me was that I was living far from my country of origin and therefore my close family. So, even though I had lots of friends (I always have had) one of the things I loved about the people that I met from the Buddha Field was that they were like this very close family. And I think that was very significant.
