It was December 23rd, 2015. The night started out normally. My girlfriend and I were living the single life vicariously through our friend Brian's tinder account. He was a member of the sangha, the group of Buddhist practitioners, visiting from Lubbock. We were laughing and shouting about each other’s choices when suddenly our phones sounded an amber alert. There was a tornado warning.
As we listened to the weather report on our phones, it was obvious the supercell was headed straight for us. An F5 tornado had already been spotted, the worst possible rating.
The storm in our area was quickly gaining speed. We had to decide quickly. Wait it out in our apartment with no basement or drive quickly to my seven story office building. To my knowledge a tornado rarely or never topples a 7 story building so we ran to the car. From growing up in Nebraska, I knew tornados can be invisible at night so I drove like mad through the turns and watched closely for cars and pedestrians.
I warned my coworkers working through the weekend on the top floor. As they waited in the stairwell with the others, I stared down the road looking for funnel clouds, but I didn’t see any.
The next day we heard that another friend of ours, Alexis–who was visiting from Las Vegas–witnessed a tornado up close. Just two days earlier we stood on a bungee platform. She was standing on the edge looking down and she said, “We really have to put the teachings into practice don’t we.” She was referring to the teachings of Mahamudra, the Great Seal, which we had received from our teacher just weeks earlier in Las Vegas. These are powerful instructions on the way a meditation master experiences the meaning of the teachings in daily life, not experiencing any separation between outer and inner phenomena. As our teacher explained, when one is able to rest in this experience, the inevitable result is fearlessness.
Part 2 gives Alexis' account of standing on the bungee platform, and Part 3 gives her account of staring down an F5 tornado.