"YHWH."It is the Name that by tradition we are forbidden to pronounce. Free yourself, I thought. Pronounce it. With no vowels, it came out: "Yyyyhhhhwwwwhhh." It sounded like breath. God's Name: the breath of life! No words, just the whispering, murmuring sound of a deep-drawn breath. For years I took delight in this discovery It hanged the way I prayed.Yet the hart of what had moved me I still had not discovered. I did not know it was my mother's breath I yearned for. For my mother to breathe easy once again, to draw once more a deep and even breath – that would be God for me. For each of us I realized, the deepest Name of God arises from the depths of our own life.
I began to face death and its implications very young. I could never have imagined then how many kinds of death there were to follow, one heaped upon another. The death that was the tragic loss of my country, Tibet, after the Chinese occupation. The death that is exile. The death of losing everything my family and I possessed ... for we had been among the wealthiest and most famous in Tibet.