About Lama Palden

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I grew up in a middle class family in Marin County, California. In many ways, the people there had achieved the American dream. They headed companies; they had the 2.4 kids, the beautiful house with the great view, the latest cars and good schools for the kids. Yet from about the age of eleven, I began to see how much misery and suffering all these people were in. Even though they had achieved the American dream, people weren’t happy. I started to think that there was something wrong with this path that they’d all taken. It didn’t seem to have great results. They followed the whole path, they did everything one was supposed to do, they achieved the promised results, and they were still miserable. Seeing this, I thought: That’s not the path I want to take.

My family has deep roots in the San Francisco Bay Area with ancestors on both my mother and father’s sides arriving in the 1860’s. The first of three children of Byron and Mary Leydecker, named Caroline Mary, I was inspired by my parents' commitment to world peace, social justice and helping people less fortunate both locally and around the globe. When I was fifteen, I went to work as a volunteer to end the Vietnam War. During this time, I came to realize that war begins with each of our own unresolved anger and psychological issues, and I made a commitment to work for peace by resolving my own anger and other issues.

In the Episcopalian church I attended, though people professed to want peace, many supported the war and this set me on a spiritual search. When I was sixteen, I started doing meditation, which I learned while attending a Quaker boarding school. I practiced yoga, learned about psychology and did free-form dance and movement. I studied Gandhi, non-violence, and comparative religion. By my late teens, I had come to understand that what would ultimately be satisfying was spiritual. I felt intense longing for a much deeper fulfillment than what was available on the worldly path. The longing grew deeper and deeper, and I prayed to meet my teacher. At the time I was studying and practicing Sufism with a wonderful Sufi teacher, and I had studied with a Zen teacher. I honored my teachers, I loved them, I respected them, and I was receiving a lot, but it’s like when you’re trying to find your Mom. There might be all these wonderful mothers, but they’re not your mother.

Then one night, a Sufi friend took me to see Kalu Rinpoche. Sometimes it takes years after you meet somebody to realize they’re your teacher, but for me it happened instantly. I took refuge that night and received the name Palden Drolma (Glorious Tara). This was the major turning point in my life. I started doing the meditation practices that he gave people. Six months later, I went to his monastery in the Himalayas and studied with him as well as with other highly realized teachers from the Tibetan Vajrayana tradition. The weather was terrible, the food was terrible, the conditions were difficult, but being with Kalu Rinpoche felt like sitting in the sunshine. I have always had complete trust in him and in the vastness and depth of his realization. At the same time, he was filled with loving-kindness; he was always joking, so it was a lot of fun. I felt so fortunate to be in the powerful presence of realized beings, and engaged deeply in practice and study.

Years went by before results of the practice started to manifest in a way that I could recognize. I never had flashy experiences or anything like that. It was a lot of hard work for me. Three times, I gave up pretty much everything I had and everything in my life and just did practice. And yet, that didn’t feel like hardship—it felt like joy. Through that whole practice period, I felt my own shadow side and my own shortcomings so strongly—that’s partly why I’m motivated to tell people that habitual neurotic patterns are not necessarily obstacles. It all depends on whether or not we turn them to the path or not. Having authentic teachers, profound teachings and practices minimizes the difficulty of working with our conflicts.

In 1982, I entered the traditional three-year retreat under Kalu Rinpoche on Salt Spring Island in British Columbia. When I came out of retreat, my experience changed suddenly: it felt as though my heart had become completely reconnected with itself, and there was no longer any feeling of separation with myself or spiritually. This didn’t mean that I didn’t experience suffering, but there was no more longing. I had learned many practices and I would continue to work with them for the rest of my life in order to come into more and more awakening, but what I had been longing for had been fulfilled.

After completing the three-year retreat, I was asked to teach at HH Karmapa’s center in Palo Alto, California. I had been married before and had a son, Jacob. During this time I married again and had my second child, Jessie. Then in 1986, on a visit where he gave teachings in Palo Alto, Kalu Rinpoche authorized me as lama. After that, I continued to study with Tibetan masters, as well as with a Lakota medicine woman, and went back to school for a Masters degree in counseling psychology at Santa Clara University.

Beginning in 1992, I studied with Faisal Muqaddam, the creator of the Diamond Logos work. He knew the territory between the spiritual and the psychological, and with him, I was able to work the psychological issues where my ego hadn’t quite caught up with the depth of spiritual practice I had done. He put words to what I had already been doing intuitively, and I began integrating what I learned from him and from my Tibetan teachers with my studies and practice as a psychotherapist. From this integration, I created Stream of Being work, which emphasizes the simultaneous use of spiritual practice with the deep inner work needed to clear our traumas and psychological issues.

In 1996, after I moved back to my childhood home in Marin County, I had many requests from people to share what I had learned in three-year retreat. I began to teach in my living room, but more and more people were interested, so in 1996, with the blessings and support of my teachers, I created Sukhasiddhi Foundation. At Sukhasiddhi, the practices are offered in a non-authoritarian environment in which teachers and community members offer each other support, respect, and friendship. My work as a teacher is to impart the pure dharma as I am able to, and to facilitate the unfolding of the students’ own wisdom. It has been my joy to continually deepen in my study and practice of the dharma.