Leaving Suffering Behind

Txomin Pascual

May 16, 2024

I met Rinpoché thanks to a therapist that provided me with therapy in Bajamar. Spain. In that period, I was making and selling handicrafts, and I did not really have a stable home. My life plan in short term was thrilling. First, I was going to receive 16 therapies in two weeks. After that, the plan was to go from Tenerife to La Palma in a sailboat of a friend that I had just met in La Graciosa. My elder sister was spending the winter there and I wanted to stay a few day with her. And then, I intended to fly to India, buy a motorbike, and travel with another friend who I would meet there. Life was young, but after connecting with Rinpoche, I decided to change that plan for staying in Tenerife North, in Meriling, just studying and practicing.

My life had not been funny in the last years. With no exceptional external reason to suffer, I was in pain. When I was 17 year old I had my first anxiety attack. It was in my mother’s hometown festivals. I was having dinner with friends, getting drunk, smoking joints… There was no rational reason to have an anxiety attack. I did not even know what an anxiety attack was, and it took me a few months to find it out, months during which I believed I was the only person in the world to suffer from it. I thought I was just going crazy. This single event changed my life forever, literally overnight.. I became insecure, easily scared, I was always about to have another crisis, I lost my self-esteem.  It was a cruel and unexpected step from childhood to adulthood.

After a few years of despair, I started to overcoming myself, mainly with the help of a notebook, my first real therapy. I made some travels, I moved to Ireland for some months, I went to Argentina for a toxic relationship, I came back to Pamplona, and again I started to travel. From the outside, I looked more or less like a normal person, but inside I still was in pain.

It was in La Graciosa that I met this girl. We liked each other from the beginning, we talked about our lives. She had some hard experiences when she was a child, and there was this therapist in Tenerife that had made a difference and changed her life. She had developed her own therapy, she did not even touch her patients, I wanted to try it myself as well!

The therapies were just crazy. I felt like I was having a body, speech and mind surgery, like taken out from a chronic cloud of pain an confusion. It was like leaving behind a 20kgs backpack that I had always carried with myself. I understood, among many other things, that wellbeing, clarity and compassion, were different aspects of the same thing.  I was a new person, brand new personality, more happy, more compassionate. There is when she told me that I needed to do some work for myself. I asked for recommendation and her answer was Rinpoche. She literally said, “If you are going to choose a Master, you just choose the best”. I was lucky enough and that very weekend there was an online retreat. It was a first sight love, what I had always been looking for without even knowing.

But inside every big story there are always several small stories. You do not go from Christian to Buddhist from one day to another. There is a transition. First you deny your cultural heritage and become atheist to embrace science. Then, in your way to self-knowledge, in your search for truth, you realize that there are things that science can not explain. You meet people, you read books. My first spiritual book was Krishnamiurti’s “The First and Last Freedom”.

In Argentina I met a guy that recommended that I practice yoga. I studied Hatha Yoga for a few months to realize that it was kind of my way and that I wanted more. Far from what I would ever expected, I was a spiritual person. And, along with my personal transformation, some parts of me started to wake up, and not always for good. I found, for instance, that there are energies all around, dark energies that condition our lives, and make us sick. And I thought, as a matter of logic, “If there are dark energies, then there must be luminous energies. But, where are they?” I understood it when I was studying the Thun book, tears running over my cheeks: Here they are!

It was all that I had ever wanted. A way of light, a way of compassion, a way of love, real love.

I wish I could say that I connected with teaching for that reason though, that I met Rinpoche because I was looking for truth, because I was trying to find myself, because I wanted to be a better person. However, that view, somewhat opportunistic, is only partially true. The real reason why I met Rinpoche is because I wanted to leave suffering behind.