‘Chela’ is Sanskrit for ‘student’, particularly the student of a spiritual teacher. Stories from a Chela is a series of short posts of my personal experiences with His Eminence the 25^th Tsem Rinpoche. I hope that these stories will give you a glimpse into how Tsem Rinpoche, and the unique brand of Dharma that Rinpoche embodied, have benefited me and countless others.

Hurt, Revenge and Black Magic

This story begins a long time ago, when I was in Secondary School in the UK. It was there that I met a friend, let’s call this friend Dee, who I thought was a very kind person. We used to spend a lot of time together and had a lot of the same interests back then – literature, music, food, TV, etc. Over time a strong friendship developed and later, when we were older it turned into romance. Throughout the years I became very attached to Dee. We made plans together and, in a way, ‘committed’ to each other. We were supposed to be in it together for the long haul. I thought that since we had been friends for such a long time, we knew each other well enough to have a proper relationship. We were even close to each other’s families, spending a lot of the time at each other’s houses. By the time we were involved with each other, our families were quite used to us spending a lot of time together.

However, that all changed when I started to hear rumours from others that Dee was flirting with other people, and then it came to light that Dee had cheated on me numerous times. That hurt, it stung so badly that it was the worst feeling I had ever had up until that point in my life. I had given all my emotions, my dreams of a life together, had made plans, and had completely focused my life thinking that I would spend the rest of my life with Dee. But all of that literally came tumbling down. The hurt that it created left me bitter and filled with a lot of anger, to the point that I really wanted to get Dee back. Over time these negative emotions grew and grew. I didn’t let them out or voice them to anyone, so they festered inside and became stronger. I never dealt with these emotions like I should have done in hindsight.

One of the places where we used to hang out was in Dee’s dining room. It was much quieter there than in other places in the house since Dee had three brothers and a sister. On top of that, the house was quite small too. It was an open plan dining room with a kitchen, which I still remember clearly because it was painted a dark red. There was even a Buddhist altar on a small shelf high up on the wall. It was there that we used to talk the most, and it was there that we broke up. That incident seared itself into my mind because it was the place I most associated with Dee for positive reasons, but then became the place that I most associated with negative reasons – of being hurt.

This anger was compounded with two other incidents, unfortunately both were related to money. A friend of my father, Uncle X, had wanted to start up a business, so my father, as the thoughtful man that he is, decided to lend him some funds. Uncle X convinced my father that he would be able to repay the funds and explained how he would do so. Therefore, my trusting father lent Uncle X the money.

Suffice to say, at the time, we were not well off as a family. And though my father gave the money with an open heart, the family could have used it then. But Uncle X did not follow through with his promise, spending the money for himself rather than investing in a business. As such, he was never able to repay the amount that he borrowed, and in fact had to start receiving government benefits because he spent all the money that he was supposed to have used for the business. Up until today, this man continues to rely on state handouts rather than make a living for himself. His wife and children had enough of all his negative antics and left him. Both my parents had to work double hard to make ends meet and I saw how they had to toil so much to raise me and my brother.

The second incident was of a so-called friend of mine, who I’ll call Marvin. He cheated me of my own money that I had managed to make by the time I was half way through university. This ‘friend’ was someone that I had known for some time. In fact, Marvin’s family hailed from the same area in India as my father. Therefore, we bonded first because we were distantly related to each other. This friend, I thought was extremely close to me. We used to spend our free time together and even ended up working in the same company after I graduated from university. When I was studying, he worked odd jobs here and there. I am a British citizen, but he was in the UK on a work visa. We didn’t know that we applied to work in the same company but as it happened, he joined around the same time that I started working there.

When we both worked in the hotel management company, as I progressed up the corporate ladder, so did he. I ended up working at head office, handling the day-to-day finances of the company and working closely with our regional managers. This friend ended up becoming a regional manager, so we communicated often, mostly on work matters. One day, I started noticing small discrepancies in his region’s accounts, but they were negligible, so I didn’t think anything of it.

At the time, he was engaged to be married to a very nice young lady. She was friendly, caring, attractive and they seemed like a good match for each other. However, he was a foreigner with only a short working history in the country. Hence, he didn’t have enough money for the wedding ceremonies. Traditional Indian weddings are quite costly in the UK. So, over a meal one night, he asked me if I could lend him some money.

Unbeknownst to even my family, I had saved quite a sum of money, to the amount of 50,000 pounds. Both my brother and I had taken out loans to attend university and my parents still had a long way to pay for the mortgage on the family house. I had been saving up in order to surprise them, and pay these off in one go. This idea came to me when I was actually in Sixth Form, and knew that the mortgage weighed heavy on my parents’ minds, and my brother and I would have heavy student loans to repay in the future.

During that time, I participated in the Young Enterprise programme, which aimed at teaching students how to start up and maintain a business. Whilst the team I had been in didn’t do so well and disbanded after the programme was over, I did make contacts with other people during the endeavour. And through that I invested the extremely meagre profits I made into the business ideas of someone I had made friends with named Tom, who was much older than me.

He used this money first to open up a small business to print on t-shirts from his house, then later graduated to opening up a stall at Sunday markets. From that he was able to earn some money, and then one day he received the keys for a small little flat, that had been bequeathed to him by his great aunt. He used the profits from his business to fix up the flat and started to rent it out.

He always remembered that I helped him, so he gave me a share of his income from the rent, and I in turn would help him with arranging to fix any problems in the apartment or handle tenants when he was not around. It wasn’t something easy to do because I was studying and at the same time was trying to keep it quiet from my family, so that I could surprise them later on.

The income generated from that, plus the earnings and hefty bonuses from my own job allowed me to save up a good sum of money. My goal was actually 60,000 pounds but then Marvin, who I thought was a friend, asked me for help during that one night over a meal. He said he wanted it for his wedding and he had even been discussing the wedding arrangements with me for some time.

So, thinking that I was helping a friend, I lent him the money. I knew his salary and that as regional manager, he received bonuses for the region’s success. We had just implemented a new marketing strategy and were already seeing a sharp upturn in sales. The company’s board of directors were always generous when it came to rewarding people for their hard work and this was reflected in bonuses. Thinking this, I knew that it wouldn’t take him too long to repay me. He even came up with his own plan to help boost sales in his area, and planned out how he could pay me back within 6 months.

A couple of days later, I found the discrepancies again in Marvin’s accounts. This time instead of ignoring it, I followed my immediate instincts and decided to investigate further. Going to his offices, speaking with his staff and checking the paperwork, I realised that he had been pocketing cash sales, only to return the cash into the office safe a couple of days later. There was something really wrong here. That’s when I cracked down on the handling of cash sales throughout all regions, and reported what I had found. Compared to online bookings or credit card transactions, cash sales were very low, but nevertheless, I knew he was up to something.

Before I could get to the bottom of it, he literally ran away, abandoning his work, stealing the funds that I lent him and even left his fiancé behind. More than the hurt from losing what I had saved up to help my own family, I felt sorry for his fiancé. I knew that my prospects at work were getting better, and eventually I would be able to earn back what I had lost, but his fiancé was worse off. Socially, she was disgraced and with her family being quite traditional, they were irate. Emotionally, the person she thought she would spend the rest of her life with and was in love with, left her. He ruined her hopes and dreams. Just as Dee had done mine. The whole situation once again ripped open the painful memory and my frustration and hatred for Dee grew; frustrations at Marvin’s actions reared its ugly head and my anger compounded. I hated that people could play with other people’s emotions and feelings like they were play things. Some people have no regard for others and how they feel, and that really got to me.

When those involved – our company, his fiancé and her family, and his friends – got together, we discovered that he had a very serious gambling problem. That was why there were discrepancies in his region’s accounts. He was stealing the money to use for his addiction. A few days later, he would replace what he had stolen in hopes that no one would notice. But worse than that, he stole not only my money, but borrowed even larger amounts from his other friends and even his fiancé’s family on the pretext of marrying her.

The incidents around these three figures – Dee, Uncle X and Marvin – left me extremely bitter and angry. The extent to which these people had harmed me and others really affected me. As this anger festered, it turned to thoughts of revenge. As I couldn’t get them back physically, emotionally, or financially, my mind turned towards another angle – the supernatural. Since a young age, I was fascinated by many aspects of the supernatural and even read tarot cards and dabbled in Wicca growing up. But as the anger grew, my thoughts turned to the darker side of the supernatural. That was the main reason that I got involved in what would be termed ‘black magic’. I wanted some form of control not to be hurt again and at the same time, which unfortunately became the overarching reason, I wanted to get some form of revenge on those that had harmed me. My anger had reached a point that I just wanted to get them back.

As the thoughts of revenge began to fill my head, I didn’t deal with what I was feeling. I did no let it out, I didn’t tell anyone how I felt, I did not confide in anyone or find an appropriate way to handle my feelings. I didn’t even know how to handle such a barrage of negative emotions. I got caught up in the tidal wave of my emotions and it dragged me further and further down into negativity.

So, I found a woman who was willing to teach me magic, though I didn’t tell her the reason why I wanted to learn from her. I travelled to the United States and lived with her for a while. I learnt many different things from her, about spirits, about magic, about the supernatural and various ways of understanding our place in the universe and how to utilise certain energies for our own will. One of the last things I learnt was a curse, able to harness the destructive energies of a band of loup garou or werewolf spirits. This was difficult to accomplish, as they are known for their vicious and wild nature, but over time I was taught how to do it. The final ritual took around two weeks to complete, but on the very last night, as I felt the presence of those malevolent beings more and more, I knew something was wrong. I knew if I released these spirits on the three people that had caused me pain, they would have suffered tremendously. Most likely, knowing what the spirits were capable of, they would have even died. I wanted nothing more than to harm them but I knew that it was wrong. I knew harming them in this manner was not the right to do even though they had hurt me so much. So, I held back and reversed the ritual.

The woman I was studying with was taken aback that I didn’t carry through with my plans. She had no children, no other close students who stuck around. Her hope of carrying on her legacy, at that time anyway, lay on my shoulders. She was kind to me. She had been through a lot in her life, and knew what it was like to seek some sort of recompense for the hurt caused by others’ actions. I believe she genuinely loved and cared for me. Her abilities made her a great healer, but also someone who cast the most powerful curses and hexes. But knowing that what I was doing was wrong, how could I remain there? Over the next couple of weeks, I packed up and returned to the United Kingdom. This hurt her deeply and over time, I believe she came to despise me. Hopefully, by now she has forgiven me for letting her down and maybe she can understand why I did what I did in leaving her.

Sengdongma. Click on image to enlarge or click here for more beautiful thangkas.

It was during the time spent with her that I contacted various spirits and entities. Whilst, when I started to stop the practice, the majority of these beings left me, one in particular stayed and harassed me for the longest time. It was only after meeting Tsem Rinpoche’s teachings online and meeting Rinpoche in person, was I given the opportunity to solve that issue. Rinpoche gave me the practice of Sengdongma, and over time, engaging in her prayer and mantra every day, I was able to keep this particular spirit at bay.

But the problem of my unresolved anger still remained until last year. This anger and the thoughts of revenge turned itself inward after I stopped learning black magic. It made me cold towards people. I began to self-sabotage relationships with people, thinking to myself, “before they leave me or hurt me, it’s better not to be around them.” So, I never got close to anyone and left situations that I felt would get difficult.

In truth, these situations are just a part of life, and through hours and hours of counselling, Tsem Rinpoche finally broke through to me and I revealed this story. It was something that I had never told a single person in its entirety before. Rinpoche once again showed me kindness, compassion and care, even suffering physically so that he could help me. I saw Rinpoche do this not just for me, but countless others as well. He was someone that could really change people’s lives.

As Rinpoche said, no matter what situation we are in, we are always going to be suffering in some form or another. That is just the way that life is, after all it is the first of the Four Noble Truths, the first teaching Buddha ever gave – life is suffering, and we all need to accept the fact before we can move on. Plus, in a safe environment that I am in, in the middle of Kechara Forest Retreat, a place where everything is geared towards the practice of the Dharma and bettering oneself, it is the best environment where I can heal that hurt and pain, and not let it affect others around me.

It was Tsem Rinpoche that finally allowed me release from years of internalised anger and the destructive self-sabotaging of relationships

Since coming to Kechara, I have not felt a release like I did when I revealed this story to Rinpoche and some of my Dharma brothers and sisters. It is a story of hurt, but it is also a story of healing. No matter what pain we go through in life, and how we act and become, we should not let it affect other people. Eventually we can heal ourselves and learn how to weather the torrential storm of samsara and better ourselves on our spiritual journeys.

Even though I previously thought that I was not harming anyone through my actions, the very fact that I was introverted was itself damaging to others around me, especially those closest to me. I was so angry that people could cause pain, especially emotional pain to others, however allowing that feeling to fester inside me eventually led me to do the same thing to other people, albeit in different ways. Who can trust or be close to such a guarded person? Simply by making this story known has released years of built up emotion, that allows me to be free, and to finally be able to open up to those closest around me, and have real relationships with other people.

For more interesting information:

• Stories from a Chela – Unconditional Love
• Stories from a Chela – Sacred Handprints
• Stories from a Chela – The Journey to Manjushri
• Stories from a Chela – Taking Refuge
• Stories from a Chela – Daimajin and Wrathful Deities
• Stories from a Chela – Real Worship
• Stories from a Chela – The Roadside Seller
• Stories from a Chela – Blessing the Animal Realm
• Stories from a Chela – Real Transformation
• Stories from a Chela – Za Rahula and Strange Habits
• Stories from a Chela – Spiritual Nourishment for All
• Stories from a Chela – The Lama that Builds
• Stories from a Chela – The Teaching in the Tea
• Stories from a Chela – Incense Offering That Saves Lives
• Stories from a Chela – Supernatural Protection

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