About Michael Erlewine
not been given any kind of a path, other than the path of
faith. I hung onto that faith as long as I could, but it told
me very little about how to live and work in this world.
“I had been trying to learn the basics of Tibetan
Buddhism before I even met Trungpa Rinpoche, but the
spark able to weld everything together was missing.
Trungpa provided that spark. I got to be his chauffer for
a weekend and design a poster for his public talk.
“But most important, only about an hour after we met,
Trungpa took me into a small room for a couple of hours
and taught me to meditate. I didn’t even understand
what I was learning. All that I knew was that I was
learning about myself.
“After that meeting, I began to understand more of what
I read, but it was almost ten years later before I met my
teacher, Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche, the abbot of Karma
Triyana Dharmachakra Monastery, located in the
mountains above Woodstock, New York. Meeting
Rinpoche was life-changing.