Margit with a photo of Joschi

Margit Geissendörfer, from Ottobrunn, Germany writes:

“In 1983 when our family decided to get a dog, a friend brought us a book about dog breeds. I opened it up and found a Tibetan terrier was looking at me! I had never before heard of this breed and I was determined: That will be my kind of dog and none else! This is how we got ‘Joschi’. He was a proud dog who always needed to make clear who was the boss in the house. According to him, it was invariably himself. This is just to give you a bit of a back-ground. One day I was rummaging through the books at Hugendubel, the biggest and most well-known book shop in Munich. A book title caught my eye: The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. In fact I just registered “Tibetan”, was reminded of our “Tibetan” dog and thought: “I will take this one!”

For a while the book was just lying around, and one day I started to read it. It touched me very deeply and I knew it contained the truth I was always looking for. At one point I flicked though the back pages and found the address of Rigpa Munich. I called and learned that a retreat with Sogyal Rinpoche would start the next day in Eching near Munich. Without hesitation I registered for it. To tell you the truth, I did not understand much of it, … but in my heart I knew: “This is your path, this is your teacher! This is your big chance!” Ever since then I have been a student of Rinpoche and I am grateful in every moment for this. It is and was the most important encounter of all my lives. Years late, when our dog Joschi died, I went for a walk through the forest with a friend. Suddenly she said to me: “This Joschi was really a great teacher!”

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