An excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo called “Longing for the Guru”
In order for you to be with your Teacher, however good or bad that Teacher may be, if you are in a situation where you are close to your Teacher and consistently so and have a great deal of relatively intimate guidance, you must have spent a great deal of time longing for the Teacher. It must be that you have spent a great deal of time making wishing prayers that you would never be separate from your Teacher. There had to be a great deal of time spent in that consideration and with that intention. It’s the only karma that will allow for this situation.
Each of us, then, as we grew up, must have experienced the seeds of that longing. If we look back at our earlier lives, we may not understand that. It’s very difficult to understand how we ended up practicing Vajrayana. We certainly weren’t brought up this way. We certainly had no idea in our younger lives that we were going to be Buddhists, that’s for sure.
Yet, if we were to look in a penetrating way, we would discover that somewhere in our childhood there was a longing. That is the seed or the residue of something that we experienced in a previous incarnation. Because it is not consistent with our culture, because it is not sympathetic with what our culture views as proper, probably when we grew up, we never heard of a Teacher. We never heard of a Guru. We may have diverted into different paths. We may have felt the longing as a need to find ourselves or we may have felt a sense of waiting to be told or to find something that we knew we would find.
For instance, it is possible that you felt a sense of searching and perhaps went from relationship to relationship, searching for someone who would be intimate with you, a certain searching for a fullness that was never found. It could be that you even went from a self-help group to insight situation to church to different kinds of situations that you thought would bring you the answer and you had no idea that it was a spiritual search.
But now, in retrospect, if you examine that, do you think that perhaps you were looking for something you didn’t find because you did not understand exactly what you were looking for? Surely, if you examine your life, you will find something of that longing in your past.
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I was always looking for something, in so many ways. Never found it in the world, then I found You, Jetsunma, and I pray with all my heart that great benefit come from our connection, both now and in future times. May I never be separate from You, Precious Guru!