In the margins of “The Essential Chögyam Trungpa,” a book of teachings by the founder of Naropa, she wrote, “Can we practice meditation w/o being afraid of the foreignness?” “Maybe I have the need to talk so much in class and offer so much of my opinion because I don’t actually take the time to process things on my own,” she wrote. She wondered if she should project a quieter presence. In her school notebook, she instructed herself to “contemplate uncertainty” every morning. She was working on “re-integrating, re-patterning, re-structuring,” she wrote to a high-school friend. “All I wanted is to be married to Todd and be a mother,” she said. She had once felt that the ingredients of a fulfilling life were fairly straightforward. ![]() “It was about saying, ‘We are going to kill off these old dualisms, like light and dark, good and bad, dirty and clean, and start to sit with things as they really are.’ ”Īt Naropa, Sharon became self-conscious about the ways in which she had always used her strengths-charisma, warmth, an intuitive capacity to please-as crutches. program existed, he said, at the intersection of postmodernism and Buddhism. I don’t think we expected to be as moved as we were.” The M.F.A. She had thrived in a culture that by her mid-twenties she saw as shallow and spiritually arid.īenjamin Stuber, a classmate at Naropa, told me, “For the more ambitious, type-A students in the class-and I include Sharoni in that group-the spiritual side of Naropa kind of snuck up on us. Congeniality.” Her nickname was Sharoni, and when she wrote it she dotted the “i” by sketching a tiny flower. She went to a Jewish day school, where her drama teacher, Lillian Andron, described her as “Ms. “You disturbed the straight line,” he told her. Her father, Tibor, an Israeli diamond dealer, had teased her on the rare occasions when she didn’t get all A’s. She had grown up in a high-rise in a part of North Miami where people dress for the beach even when they are miles away. In her journal and notes, she assessed her flaws: she was “overly excitable” her work could be “cheesy” she was “not enough of a leader” her sense of self was “defined by who wants me.” Sharon, who was in the master’s program in contemporary performance, had spent several years acting in community theatre in Miami, but she wasn’t sure where the work was leading. ![]() “You are encouraged to let go of habitual patterns of thought, feeling, and action and to continually refresh your experience, viewing yourself and the world anew,” read the welcome letter from the dean of students. ![]() Naropa, which was founded in Boulder, Colorado, in 1974, by a former Buddhist monk, has three meditation halls that students visit throughout the day. She was twenty-eight and had recently married Todd Siegel, whom her friends all described as the perfect husband. She had a heart-shaped face and a guileless smile. Sharon Stern arrived at Naropa University, the first Buddhist-inspired university in America, with a portfolio of glamorous head shots.
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