Cooking for People in Retreat
Oral instructions Rinpoche gave me about cooking for people who were in retreat were: “When they come to the kitchen, you tell them to go away. Tell them to go and meditate. Tell them that, if food comes, they should rejoice. If food doesn’t come, they will purify their karmas of being reborn in the domain of the hungry ghosts. And then you should slap them.” Then he did a gesture of slapping someone with his arm. I laughed.
Remembering those words dissolved much frustration during that long retreat, just because I knew he recognized my difficulty in facing my task with lightness.”
[As told by a student]