In her stewardship of Tergar Canada, Janet Ritvo’s kind, ever reasonable and stalwart nature has quietly shone and lent stability to the ups and downs that are part and parcel of organizational leadership and growth. Janet recently stepped down from Tergar Canada but continues close involvement with Tergar 

Janet Ritvo came upon Mingyur Rinpoche quite by chance. She was in a second hand bookstore in Toronto, when she found herself staring at the cover of The Joy of Living. “I really liked his face; it was so open,” she said in an interview from her Toronto home where she lives with her husband Paul.

She remembers opening the book and coming upon the meditation practice of open awareness. “Open Awareness! That is what I want to practice,” she thought and bought the book, called the Minneapolis number inside, and subsequently got in touch with Barbara Jones, founder of Tergar Toronto Practice Group.

Before she knew it, she was part of the Tergar Toronto leadership and then answered a call to step onto the Tergar Canada Board of Directors at its founding in 2017. Tergar Canada is the umbrella organization for Canadian Tergar practice groups.

Janet has been the backbone of Tergar Canada, its longest serving director, taking on the role of secretary and more recently of president. She has tended to Tergar Canada as a mother would a child — with great care and perseverance, providing stability to the ups and downs that organizations commonly go through.

What is it about Mingyur Rinpoche that she likes so much? His gentleness, his humor, his sense of fun and his straightforward approach. “Even his teachings are simple and straightforward!”

A HELPING NATURE
What is it that compels her to volunteer for Tergar? “I just like to help,” said Janet, then pausing a moment before sharing that in fact she came to helping early in life. It developed in a childhood home in which her father struggled fiercely with depression. She quickly learned to see the needs in others, learned to put others at ease, tried to compensate by helping and by bringing home academic awards.

“Perfectionism, I felt, was the way to “right the ship” and so it was important for me to try to be as perfect and good as I could be.”
Not surprisingly, all these experiences fueled an early interest in mental health and she recalled trying to read her mother’s psychology books, Jung and Freud… when only in Grade 2.

Years later she married a research psychologist, earned a Masters degree in Counselling Pschology, and also answered calls at one of Toronto’s Distress Centers, for those on the verge of suicide. It is not an exaggeration to say that there has been a lot of trauma in Janet’s life and she is well aware of its patterns.

Amazingly, the experiences have not closed her down in the slightest but expanded her compassion. “I’ve got this kind of feeling that people should not be left out in the cold. People need help. And then I felt like I could stretch myself far enough to be helpful,” she said.

LIVING IN COMMUNITY
True to the hippie generation, Janet was living on a farm in rural Ontario (making sheep’s wool rugs!) when her then boyfriend convinced her to attend a summer workshop in Vermont. That was in 1974. She did not know anything about Buddhism or the workshop teacher, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche.

Meditation was new and yet not really. Some years earlier a comment from a fellow student in a philosophy class had stayed with her: “It was something like: ‘You can’t understand anything except your perception,’ she said.  “It was the most meaningful little moment in university.”

The Vermont workshop precipitated a series of events that led her to meet John Leon, a devoted Chogyam Trungpa student. John, one of only a handful of students, was invited to move to Halifax to start Trungpa’s seat in North America, and Janet went with him.

Community! They rented a dharma house in Halifax that would become a hub of Trungpa’s activities, with Janet becoming part of the housekeeping team for different events. Frequently she was at Trungpa’s home making dinners and tidying up.

“I liked him,” she said. “He really made me laugh, just the way he would describe neurosis or our habitual patterns.” At the same time, she found him somewhat intimidating as his actions were unpredictable. “He liked to stir the pot,” she recalled. “He was powerful, a kind of crazy-wisdom type person.”

It came as a surprise to her, when at one meeting a decision about who should lead Shambala training on the East Coast of Canada was made. Trungpa Rinpoche, without having first warned her, announced, “Janet Miles [her maiden name].”

She laughed at the surprise it caused but understood the raised eyebrows as she was, seen from the outside, a shy young woman who wore long dresses and was “kind of drifty,” she shared, with her delightfully quirky sense of humour, at once self-deprecating and deeply honest.

But “drifty” was just an appearance. She worked with the other appointed trainer Paul Ritvo (her future husband) to deliver numerous trainings, much like the Joy of Living approach. “That kind of language I found refreshing as opposed to a very religious approach.”

Janet enjoyed the work, everything from xeroxing, postering, setting up the house for the weekend program, preparing the weekend curriculum and even baking the homemade Danish pastries for participants. Even the birth of the first baby didn’t slow her down. “I was xeroxing with my baby in one arm and pressing the xerox buttons with the other.”

But then everything changed with the birth of her second child after which she developed a high fever that left her paralyzed and blind for several months. “I remember lying in the hospital bed thinking “Someone goes to have a baby and ends up paralyzed and blind. That’s like one in a million! And then I was laying there and thinking ‘Well, someone has to be the one! I guess I can handle being the one.”

Perhaps more than anything that comment defines Janet, her deeply accepting nature, her willingness to take on the pain if it might alleviate that of others.
What did the time with Trungpa give her? “A lot more clarity,” she said. “Not being as caught up in kleshas [difficult emotions]. Realizing that there was a way of working with them.”

And what have Mingyur Rinpoche’s teachings given her? “I started to understand being fully with what is – what I am and what is occurring around me. I realized that I don’t need to fix myself or what is happening, no matter how painful it may seem.”

And how does she cope with the ups and downs of organizational work? “I don’t hang on to anger. I kind of let it go. I try not to harden my position, not turn it into a concrete thing. If somebody says something,I may feel the hurt initially but if I don’t fixate, it’s gone.”

These days, apart from volunteering a great deal of time, Janet spends many of her days with her granddaughter Isabel. “I’m learning to see how a three year old sees the world and is in the world.”

About the Author

Franka Cordua-von Specht, co-founder of the Tergar Vancouver Practice Group and Tergar Canada, works for Tergar International’s marketing and communication team. She is a Tergar Guide and facilitates Joy of Living workshops.