"Nothing is more essential for the 21st century and beyond than personal transformation. It´s our only hope. Transforming ourselves is transforming the world."
-Mingyur Rinpoche
About
My name is Andrea but you can call me by my Dharma name, Yeshe (Choying Yeshe).
After a life-changing event in my early twenties, I set out on a quest for truth and meaning that has taken me all around the world and into the deepest places within my own being. Looking for answers to life’s most challenging questions, I discovered the wisdom of the Buddhist tradition and began to find the clarity and peace of mind for which I had been searching.
Though even after discovering the Buddhist path, my quest was far from over. For, in and of itself, Buddhism simply gives us a framework, a path, and various methods through which to work out our own existential situation, our own suffering, our own happiness and fulfillment. It does not do it for us. It is for us as individuals to actually walk the path, to actually take the leap, to rise to the epic challenge of spiritual awakening.
For most of us, this won’t be an overnight story of awakening (it wasn’t for the Buddha!). It takes many years – sometimes many lifetimes – to fully awaken to our own enlightened nature and stabilize that realization. But as I have come to see this journey as the whole purpose of our existence, I am wholeheartedly committed to it, regardless of how long it might take, or the crazy and wild places it might take me.
As an expression of my devotion to this path, and my firm conviction that pursuing this path of awakening
– the path of coming to fully understand mind, consciousness, and reality – is the greatest service I can offer to the world, I am now, after many years of preparation, entering long-term intensive meditation retreat under my primary Buddhist teacher, B. Alan Wallace. This, for me, is the ultimate moment of applying the teachings. For many years I have traveled the world (and the internet) collecting precious teachings and meeting precious masters, and all the while doing my best to apply the teachings in my life. But now is the moment for me to truly drop everything else in my life, and single-pointedly apply myself to the path of liberation and awakening..
