The Dalai Lama's Foreword
In a recent column, I mentioned that I’d tell a story that’s special to me. It still gives me goose bumps when I think about it, even though it happened almost ten years ago. It’s the day I received a foreword to one of my books from the Dalai Lama.
The Dalai Lama, as if there’s more than one. The story is even closer to my heart right now because of something that happened this week, but more about that in a minute.
I’d written a book called The Only Little Prayer You Need, which was a stretch for me. I didn’t talk publicly about religion, so the idea of writing a book with the word “prayer” in the title shoved me out of my comfort zone and into new territory. But the book wrote itself, essentially. It was about a prayer—I couldn't get around that word, that’s what it was—that floated into my mind on a bad day when I needed something celestial to help me out of a chronic bad mood.
“Please heal my fear-based thoughts.”
Those are the words I heard as I sat in a rental car parking lot, stewing about all the things that had gone wrong in my life lately.
At first the prayer didn’t seem all that potent....but within a couple of hours, I started to realize its power. And within a couple more hours, I’d started writing a book about it.
I wrote every day. I couldn’t NOT let the words flow. When I drove to several Midwestern states on assignment for a client, I wrote in my hotel room. I wrote around family gatherings, power outages and holidays. And when I finished the book, I wrote a proposal for a literary agent.
I promised myself I’d send the proposal to her on a Monday afternoon, and at 4:30 that day I hemmed and hawed, stalling. “Push the button and send it,” said the same voice that had given me the prayer.
So I did.
And at 7:30 the next morning, the agent sent me an email saying, “I love this. I want to represent you.”
This prayer had power.
How long had it taken me to write the book AND the proposal?
The inner voice nudged me to count the days on the calendar.
Forty days. Forty. The prayer had even more power than I’d thought.
But this was only the beginning.
“See if you can get some endorsements,” said my agent. “It’ll help me sell the book to a publisher.”
Endorsements. That meant connections, big names, celebrities. Sitting in my basement office in rural Iowa, where was I going to find THOSE? I needed someone who knew people. And that was my friend Claire.
She lived in Barcelona and had produced The Art of Living, a book of essays written by luminaries like Deepak Chopra, Thich Nhat Hanh, Mikhail Gorbachev, and the Dalai Lama. She included one of my essays in that book—an honor for me and the Madison County acreage that was the subject of the essay.
Would Claire help me get endorsements? I sent her the manuscript, and she immediately said yes.
“Who would you like me to contact? “ she asked.
“Well, I stammered, “Deepak Chopra would be great....” I thought I was dreaming big.
She paused. “How about the Dalai Lama?”
I laughed out loud. Until I realized she was serious.
Unbeknownst to me, she sent the manuscript to his assistant. And on Independence Day, 2013, I opened an email from Claire that said “A miracle” in the subject line.
It was not an endorsement from the Dalai Lame.
It was a foreword from him.
I called Claire, and we both cried. And then I told my agent, and she didn’t believe me.
A few weeks later I received a package from the Dalai Lama’s assistant. It contained an original typed copy of the foreword with His Holiness’s signature.
Did I mention this prayer has power?
So much so that Claire reached out to Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, and after repeated contacts with his assistant, he endorsed the book. Not in time for the first printing. But that’s okay. The second and third printings happened soon after, and Archbishop Tutu’s quote has been on those printings and every one since as the book has spread the power of this prayer to parts of the globe I never realized it would go.
I try not to take these things for granted. And yet, life goes on. The endorsements are not something I think about every day. But this week I got an email from David Katz, who is the founder of the Kauai Writers Conference. Several of us from Story Summit Writers School are going to present classes at that conference in November, which is a huge joy all by itself.
David was emailing me with a specific request. At the conference, he said, he’s going to show a film called Mission: Joy, which is about the friendship between the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu.
“Since you have a connection to both of them,” he said, “would you be willing to introduce the film?”
I have a connection to both of them. To two of the most powerful men of peace and joy this planet has known in generations.
His request takes me back to the healing message of the book, the enduring nature of joy, the connection with something bigger than ourselves. It reminds me of the subject line in Claire’s email: “A miracle.”
It is the best kind of overwhelming, knowing that a simple thought from a bad day in Iowa continues to circle the globe, doing its good work with a stamp of approval from two icons of peace.
Now … there are all sorts of takeaways from this story, and I’m sure you’ll find the one that means the most to you:
Good things come from the worst days. Dream big. Be bold. Ask for help. Trust your friends. Never give up.
And then there’s the one that I’m still learning, almost ten years later.
This prayer has power.
I am infinitely grateful.
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Here we are, in alphabetical order.
This is mind-boggling! Miracles occur. And I am guessing the Dalai Lama said to someone, “You’ll never believe it but I got to write a foreword for Debra Engle’s book!” :-)