I have been lucky enough to have many wonderful teachers, but I think particularly of my teacher Dipa Ma. (this is a nickname, meaning Dipa’s mother. Her full name was Nani Bala Barua).

Dipa Ma was a little bundle of a woman wrapped in a white sari with a huge psychic space, radiating light and peace. She had been a student of one of my teachers, Angarika Munindra.

To visit her in Calcutta, one walked through the dirt of a slum alley and climbed four flights of steps up to the tiny room Dipa Ma shared with her daughter. The room was nearly bare, with only a wooden bed and some clothes hung behind a curtain. Dipa Ma greeted us lovingly and quietly. Sometimes she would answer questions or offer us food. We would always leave her presence filled with a transcendent sense of well-being. I often found her sitting cross-legged on the wooden bed in the corner of her room. Greeting me, Dipa Ma would take my head in her hands, stroke my hair, and whisper, “May you be happy, may you be peaceful.” Over tea, as we discussed my meditation practice, she would gently push me beyond my self-imposed limits. “You can do it.” “Sit longer.” “Be more diligent.”

Her love, compassion and equanimity sprang first from her early life of tragedies. Her first child died when he was only a few months old, as did her third, in childbirth, and then her beloved husband died. He died while they were living in Burma, where he was in the civil service. Dipa Ma was grief stricken, developed a heart condition, and couldn’t get out of bed. The doctor came, and told her, “You’re actually going to die of a broken heart unless you do something about your mind. You should learn to meditate.”

With the responsibility of a daughter, Dipa, still to raise, Dipa Ma got out of bed and went to the temple to learn to meditate. With practice, she had transmuted her suffering into enormous compassion. She saw in others the ability to do the same, which is the path to liberation. Her experience made her fierce about practicing meditation. She urged everyone to practice as much as they could to, to stretch outside the boundary of what was comfortable to, as she said, put your heart into what will truly make you happy.

Love emanated from her and she expressed it physically as well. When we were together she took my hand, stroked my hair, and looked deeply into me with the most loving of intentions, better than those I had for myself. In fact these days a photo of her stroking my bowed head is my screen saver. When someone comes into my home and glances at that on my desktop, I say “That’s my teacher Dipa Ma and that’s my 19 year old head.” I think of her every day.