Karma Lodro Lhadron (Ana María Caraballo Jáquez)

Born in the Dominican Republic, Lodro breathed Caribbean air for the first decades of her life. She played in the shade of the mango trees, coconut palms and orange and lime trees on soil scratched over by the chickens that shared the yard. She grew nourished by fruiting vines with passionfruit, breadfruit and other delights growing along the stream that separated the family’s plot from the neighbors. She recalls these days in terms of mangos – the days when one ate as much mango as one wished, the days when a single mango was shared out among the five children.

She calls another key memory “Adventures in Conuco”- conuco being the Dominican term for a plot of land that is being farmed for personal use and for the market.  An uncle had a conuco and each year at harvest time recruited Lodro and a huge mass of cousins who together took the task as a game while working the land. Her favorite was to harvest batata, a root that requires a good deal of skill to entice out from the earth without harming it. Awaiting them at the end of the day’s harvest was a melon harvested on the spot, halved with a machete, handed out with its juices dripping and eaten on the spot along the banks of a stream.

Her mother worked at home managing the household and caring for the family, while her father had been the unofficial vet of the area, often sought out to heal animals or serve as a midwife on difficult deliveries on neighboring farms. When Lodro was still quite young, her father emigrated to Puerto Rico leaving Lodro to be raised along with two sisters and an older brother in a multi-generation family of strong women, including her mother and maternal grandmother. Her father traveling between the two islands at least once a month, visiting the family and investing in a local business in the Republic, in anticipation of rejoining his family there.

However, while working as a port supervisor in Puerto Rico, Lodro’s father lost his life during an accident on the job, a trauma that was compounded when it led the entire family to emigrate to Puerto Rico when she was 13. The two islands are separated by just a few miles of Caribbean sea, but the Dominican land shared with Haiti and the US territory of Puerto Rico are worlds apart.

Lodro describes the move from one to the other as a forceful displacement from her home culture and land as well as a sudden need to assume far more responsibilities in the family, as her mother entered the workforce for the first time. As a result, her experience was to effectively skip adolescence and transition straight from girl to woman. At the same time, she was thrust into a face-to-face encounter with the racism implicit in the life of Dominican emigrants to Puerto Rico. Lodro traces to these years her reserve and seriousness that underlies the optimism and joyfulness that form other important notes of her personality.

Lodro graduated high school and went straight to university to study accounting. Once she had her degree, she immediately sought fulltime employment. She worked seven years for an insurance company and then began trying out other firms, always in accounting, while studying for her MBA at night. Her MBA in hand, she created her own accounting business which she then ran for the next seven to eight years.

Her professional life settled satisfyingly into neat rows of numbers, yielding her security and its forms of success. As it did, her sense of something missing began to gain urgency, finally taking the shape of a thirst for a spiritual path. Her first stop was to try out a charismatic branch of Catholicism with her sister. Next was a yoga community that she dove into fully for two years, dressing in white and undergoing its rituals and meditation practices. Then she and a friend embarked together on a persistent search for options. They tried Kabbala and another yoga group working with ayurveda. Lodro trained in reiki and began studies in alchemy until a series of dreams led her to begin exploring a distinct path on her own. She began preparing to train in Peru with a shaman, but took an interim trip on her own to visit the pyramids in Mexico. When she returned, her friend said to her with great conviction, “Friend, I think I found what we were looking for.” It turns out she had visited Ganden Shedrub Ling, the Buddhist center in Puerto Rico where Damcho in those years was often a visiting teacher. Lodro watched a video by Damcho and enrolled at one in their Basics of Buddism and Madhyaaka courses. A few months later, Lodro met Damcho when she came to Puerto Rico to teach. By the next year, Lodro had taken the leap to join the first three-month Vajrasattva in Oaxaca, Mexico directed by Damcho and the nuns of Dharmadatta Community. The experience had a transformative effect in her life, and inspired her to make the decision to dedicate her life to Dharma as a monastic. With the support of Yangsi Rinpoche, spiritual director of the center in Puerto Rico where she began her Buddhist formation, she departed for India to fulfill her aspiration to become a nun and enter Dharmadatta Community.

A crucial part of her preparation to take her vows was her stay in India under the care and guidance of the community, which was receiving its first new member since its foundation in 2009.

Lodro received her sramanerika vow from Thrangu Rinpoche in April 2014. During her time in India, she began her training in Mahamudra meditacion and received teaching and empowerments from many teachers of distinct lineages, including the Dalai Lama, the Karmapa, Mingyur Rinpoche, Tai Situ Rinpoche, Lama Zopa Rinpoche and many others.

She moved with the other nuns to Mexico and four years later, to Virginia where she co-founded their base there. After receiving shikshamana ordination at Sravasti Abbey from Venerable Bhiskhuni Thibten Chodron, an important step toward bhikshuni ordination, Lodro opted to retire from “active duty” in Dharmadatta Community to focus on her own personal practice and spent time with her family, who reside in Massachusetts and Puerto Rico.