Last Updated on February 22, 2025 by pg@petergamma.org
Lama Pema Wangyal from the Drukpa Center Kollbrunn Switzerland:
https://drukpazentrum.ch/ueber-uns
lived after his education in Asia from 2006 up to 2023 in the Tibet Institute Rikon Monastry. These are 17 years he has spent at this place. On n February 15, 2023, Pema opened his new Drukpa Kagyü Center in Kollbrunn for the benefit of all interested Swiss citizens, as well as Tibetans belonging to the Drukpa Kagyü.
On LinkedIn it says about Pema:
„I m teacher at Drukpazentrum Kollbrunn. yogtrack graduated Central Universities of Tibetan Higher Studies“
https://www.linkedin.com/in/pema-wangyal-3957aa1a2/?originalSubdomain=ch
We somewhere have read that Lama Pema Wangyal is now self-employed. Pema has spent 17 years in a monastry. According to the Buddhist teaching someone is only then completely mentally healthy when is is completely enlightened. This takes at least around 12 years of hardship in India. Pema has spent 17 years in Switzerland which where hopefully not so hard as a training in India. And should he not be there now to teach what he has learned? But can Pema make living from what he has learned outside of the monastery? This seems to be not so easy.
On Pemas YouTube channel Yogtrack we can see that Pema teaches also how to paraglide on the Pilatus mountain in Switzerland:
A spiritual teacher who does not has to offer paragliding courses is Jack Kornfield:
Jack Kornfield is a trained as a Buddhist monk in Thailand, Burma and India. And next to that, he received a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Saybrook Institute.
On the other hand, Jack Kornfields courses have been criticized to be too expensive:
Someone with a difficult but also intransparent funding was Milarepa:
“The stunning lesson in impermanence gave Milarepa the final push he needed to follow Marpa’s command to meditate in mountain retreat. He stayed there for many years, until his clothes turned to rags, his bones protruded, and the nettles he ate turned his skin green. Hunters and thieves who came upon him thought he was a ghost. When he went begging for food, his uncle, aunt, and neighbors attacked him, and he barely escaped. His sister, who had also become a beggar, wept in misery at his apparently even sorrier state.”
But after Milarepa retreated in his cave, he became the most famous author of Tibet and founded his own school for Tibetan meditation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milarepa
Students of Milarepa where Gampopa. Four of Gampopa’s students founded the four major branches of the Kagyu lineage: Barom Kagyu, Karma Kagyu, Phagdru Kagyu, and Tshalpa Kagyu. Another of Milarepa’s students was the yogi Rechung.
But Peter Gamma from www.petergamma.org
does not know from what Milarepa exactly made a living from as an author and teacher, since his funding was as far as we know not open and transparent.