Kuenza's Diary

I cannot tell you how fun it is to be a mother. But, I also cannot tell you how frustrating it is sometimes. If you are laughing your heart out with your toddler this moment, next moment you are fighting your heart out in how not to shout at him/her. Once you are a mother, each moment of your life is a mixture of different emotions. But on a positive note, the positive emotions almost always win the negative ones. One day, I reached home from my office to find that the carpet in the sitting room had three big holes and the heater was all burned out and black. I was to learn that my three year old daughter, Dechen, burned the candle (a big rectangle shaped candle) on the heater. She imitated cooking food. She told me that she burned a cup, but I could not really figure out. I didn’t understand that there would be no trace left of it. Her words were, “I put a cup on the heater. Now there is no cup to cook food in”. When I asked my 71 year old mother who looks after her in my absence...

I am posting this video here on my blog so that I will have a record of it and don't have to go fiddling back on facebook. The dialogue recorded in Sharchop sounds very interesting and genuine. >This is an interesting video posted in a facebook group .

Dear Dechen, You might feel I didn’t write to you for a long time. I have scribbled short letters to you on my phone and I have not transferred them to my laptop yet. We went to Bartsham, our village on December 17 th  2013 and stayed there till January 10 2014. You, your abi and I went to Bartsham to receive teaching from Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche, which went on for three weeks. We directly went to Bikhar, your father’s village and on 19 th  December 2013 we received blessing from Je Khenpo at the inauguration of a new Zangdo Pelri constructed by Gup Sonam Dukpa. In the evening after the inauguration of the Zangdo Pelri and Wang concluded, we went to Bartsham and your father came back to Thimphu. Anyway, our days there were very fruitful. Ana Pem Zangmo was on break and she volunteered to stay with you when I wen to the lhakhang everyday to receive teaching. If you didn’t get restless, I would have loved to take you along. You went to the lhakhang only towards the ...

I was in my village for nearly a month. My daughter lived with my niece’s daugther who is just two months older to her and a five year old boy. All of them have different temperament – with my niece’s daugther being not that active but quite stubborn and powerful that she has to be given what she wants. My sister-in-law told me that she cries and never stops, until she has what she wants. The little boy is the quiet one most of the time, only talking when my niece’s parents are not closeby. The comments I received were that, she cries a lot but does not move around too much, while, my daughter does not cry much but moves around a lot. A totally worrying interest that my daughter has is her love for climbing and her lack of fear for strangers. She does show a little bit of hesitation at first but still, her father fears that she seems to be a little bit too active. Now, my fear is not her active nature or her lack of fear for strangers. We are now back in Thimphu and she stays home...

I was so happy to be able to attend the teachings by Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche in Bartsham, Tashigang (from 20 th December 2013-10 th January 2014). I rejoice more in the fact that I could take my mother along. As we sat next to each other, hearing nothing but Rinpoche’s voice, I could feel a very deep sense of gratitude to her and I had moments when I could so lucidly pray for her (and all my mothers of past lives). I am grateful to my office for granting this long leave to make it possible. The teaching was on ‘Terton Pema Lingpa’s zapter’ – and he began by telling us that it is important to preserve and uphold his teachings. Rinpoche emphasised that meditation is the key. He said, ‘Do not meditate for a very long moment. Start meditating for three or five minutes a day. But be consistent. Meditate everyday.’ He said, if we did that, there will come a time when we will be habituated to it and we will feel something amiss or a discomfort the way we feel when we do not wash our ...

I am currently in Lobesa with a group of guests from School of Wellbeing Studies and Research from Thailand. Their main interest is organic farming and they take Bhutan as an example where organic farming is widely practiced and believes that Bhutan’s aim of making the country a 100% organic country is possible. So in this connection, we visited a farm in Kabisa, a village on the way to Gasa. Our host and interviewee was a 74-year-old man named Kencho Tshering. He practices integrated farming where he grows different types of fruits and vegetables. He also has three cattle. Though integrated farming is common in Bhutan and it is what we have been practicing traditionally, for people from other countries, it is something strikingly interesting. From my interaction, I learned that organic farming is a farming with knowledge and when they see integrated farming in our farms, they see that our farmers have already been practicing a kind of technique that is encouraged in organic farmi...

I have been reading everything Passu ( www.passudiary.com ) writes, and knowing from his blog about the interesting initiatives that he took at his school (Bajo Higher Secondary School in Wangduephodrang), I have been eager to pay a visit. And today was the day! In the last minute, because of the manpower shortage, I was assigned by my office to take care of the guests from School of Wellbeing (based in Thailand). And it is because of this work that I got to go to Bajo school today. There are seven of them: one from Mynmar, one from France, and five from Thailand. I have been with them since 24 th of this month and I am increasingly feeling privileged to be with the group. I learn a lot, not just from them, but from the different people I am getting to meet, in coordinating their itinerary in Bhutan. For example, I got a chance to meet the Ex-prime Minister of Bhutan, about whom I have only heard what people were talking about and did not really know where he was after the electi...