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When she first started meditating, Lama Tsomo said she tried to do it on her own, gave up and didn't pick it up again until years later.

\"I was really off-course,\" she said. \"I was with the wrong people, doing the wrong stuff, and that kind of thing, living in the wrong place. And I kind of like, 'came to' and said, 'No, no, this is not my path in life. This is not the life I need to live.'

\"And so I decided I have to resume meditating,\" Lama Tsomo continued. \"Because I realized ... all the thousands of decisions I was making throughout my day were that much more on track because I had tuned into myself.\"

By her late 30s, Lama Tsomo said she had studied many different forms of meditation, from Theravada, a sort of \"old school Buddhism,\" she said, to Zen meditation and found the strongest comfort with Tibetan Buddhism after she recognized she had found a teacher with whom she could connect.

\"Recognition is a funny thing,\" she said. \"The lama-student relationship is different than meeting your spouse, but there's still this sort of recognition moment where you go, 'Oh, this is the person for me.' It's interesting. It is a very intimate relationship, but not at all romantic.\"

Lama Tsomo is a student of Gochen Tulku Sangak Rinpoche, under whom she completed three years' worth of traditional practice, and he bestowed on her the lama title.

She went into great detail about the different Tibetan Buddhist teachings and her interpretations, such as what achieving enlightenment meant to her and the controversial belief in reincarnation or having past lives. But another practice she talked about was using meditation as a way to channel sympathy for others' suffering and then replace their pain with feelings of compassion.

\"You imagine that suffering person in front of you and you're seeing their suffering face,\" she said. \"Now you use your breath to really make it real, and you breathe in their suffering into your heart which is a bit of an act of courage. But if you're feeling moved by an act of compassion, you just want to take away their suffering and replace it with happiness.\"

\"You imagine these sort of dense, thick dark clouds of the suffering,\" Lama Tsomo continued. \"And then you breathe out these bright white clouds into them and you see their face changing into a smile.\"

For those who are skeptical or curious about these teachings, Lama Tsomo suggested doing what she did by having \"openness, with asking a lot of questions.\"

\"I think as we get older, we tend to learn less because we tend to decide what's what and that makes less room for learning,\" she said. \"So I try to sort of work against time and try to keep the blinders open.\"

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