Local woman meets Dalai Lama through non–profit

May 29, 2019 | Sarah Heinonen
sarah@thereminder.com

Cheri Brady of East Longmeadow met the Dalai Lama in February.
Reminding Publishing submitted photo

EAST LONGMEADOW – Cheri Brady, a nurse practitioner and holistic healer, lives in East Longmeadow but her heart is with displaced Tibetans, half a world away.

“We all want to help, but we don’t always know how to help,” Brady said.

Brady traveled to Nepal and Tibet in 2004 and became interested in the Bon tradition of Buddhist meditation. Soon after, Brady met the world leader of the Bon tradition at a teaching of his in New York. She said that when he learned she was a nurse practitioner, he told her that if she provide medical care at an orphanage in Northern India, he would teach her about the Bon tradition and advanced meditation.

“That's how it all started,” Brady said.

Brady now travels to northern India and Nepal, sometimes twice a year, to help Tibetans who’s families have been displaced since the Chinese began occupying Tibet in 1959, and many Tibetans were forced to flee.

“I wanted to know how we could best help these people, not westernize them, but support their culture,” said Brady, who grew up in the Air Force and said she was taught to respect every culture she came into contact with.

That’s why, in 2016, Brady started Heart Mantra, a non-profit that raises money to directly impact displaced Tibetans, especially children. Heart Mantra offers medical, educational, and infrastructure aid to impoverished areas.

Through Heart Mantra, Tibetan children in northern India have received beds, mattresses, and medical care, Brady said. They also have begun a dairy barn so that children can have access to milk.

The infrastructure Heart Mantra helps with is focused on safety rather than modernization. For example, Brady said, they raised $8,000 to repair a set of rickety and unsafe stairs which children had to traverse to get to school.

In 2017, The Republican ran a story about Brady’s work with displaced Tibetans following the April 2015 earthquake that devastated Nepal. After the story was published, Heart Manta received enough donations to purchase cows and feed for a Dolpo village that had lost their cows, and therefore their livelihood, in the earthquake.

She began the organization because she saw people’s desire to help, but also skepticism of where the money goes when people donate to many aid organizations.             Brady said the money donated to Heart Mantra goes directly to people and kids, rather than through the government.

Brady follows a paper trail of all donations made through Heart Mantra. She gave the example that if money is donated to purchase a washing machine for a village, she wants to see a receipt for the machine and a photo of it after it is installed.

“I like to help people be dependent on themselves,” Brady said.

Heart Mantra is currently collecting donations to fund neurosurgery for a 15-year-old boy who is in an orphanage in Northern India. Brady explained that the boy’s spine is curved forward resulting in his posture crushing his lungs. She would like to be there when he has the surgery.

Heart Mantra aims to help displaced Tibetans outside of Northern India, as well. Dolpo is a region of northern Nepal that is high up in the Himalayan Mountains, where there are no highways or roads.

“Two hundred years ago it used to be part of Tibet,” Brady said. The villages in Dolpo are culturally Tibetan. Brady said that they speak Zhang Zhung, a language that predates Tibetan.

“To really see Tibet today, you go up here,” Brady said. She said that Chinese-occupied Tibet is highly regulated. “You are being watched every single moment,” she said. When Brady visited in 2004 areas outside of the capital, Lhasa, were quite rural and, “looked like Tibet.” When she returned in 2013, she said, it was completely different.

“They had destroyed the culture,” Brady said. She said Lhasa now looks like any large Chinese city.

“[The Chinese] have done the most incredible job of getting rid of an entire culture.”

Due to the remote nature of Dolpo, Brady said it took a month to hike there. Much of that travel was along narrow animal trails that wind up the mountain faces.

The group that Brady traveled with began with eight people, but by the second day, she said, four of them wanted to leave due to the hard conditions. She said it was another couple days of hiking before the group reached an area where a helicopter could land to pick up the four.

Brady took the daunting trip, she said, because she wanted to make personal contacts with the people of Dolpo.

Dolpo itself is very rural. Brady said it may take one or two days to travel between the small villages. She said that many in Dolpo live in nomad camps, as herding animals is their primary source of income.

“It’s a hard place to live,” said Brady. Because of that, many people send their young children south to orphanages in India where they can receive an education. Brady said these parents know that they may never see their children again, but believe it is in the child’s best interest. Brady called these children, “partial orphans.”

The Tibetans in Dharamshala, the home of the Tibetan Government-In–Exile, have retained much of their Tibetan culture, Brady said, but many of the people that she has met in northern India or Nepal want to return to Tibet.

“They never have the full status as Indians or Nepalese. They’re refugees,” she said.

In early 2018, Brady submitted a request for an audience with His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, the religious and political leader of many Tibetans around the world. At the time, Brady said, her request was “politely” rejected.

However, in February, Brady was in Dharamshala to attend a teaching by the Dalai Lama. The night before the teaching, she was informed that her request for an audience with the spiritual leader had been granted. Brady said she was certain her work with Tibetan refugees had made a difference in her permission to meet him.

“You feel his presence,” Brady said of her visit with the Dalai Lama. “You feel his gentleness.”

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