From Nun to Now
The Story of a Former Buddhist Nun
Benja Peterson of Thailand turns 60 this year, and in celebration, she is preparing a gift to honor not only her own life’s journey, but also the journey of all women. From childhood abuse and poverty in Thailand to finding love, marriage and entrepreneurial success in America, Benja has lived to become a friend and inspiration to many.
Transcending to joyful living
A successful business entrepreneur and restaurateur, Benja Peterson has built quite a following since moving to Utah in 2003. And if she doesn’t curry favor with her customers by serving delightfully delectable dishes at her two Thai Garden restaurants, she certainly warms all who cross her path with gentle kindness and a permeating sense of inner peace, joy and personal independence.
Benja has worked laboriously since coming to America to heal from childhood trauma. Traveling to trainings and workshops from East Coast to West, including her favorite retreat destination in San Francisco, Benja has culminated a treasury of tools including healing mediations, spiritual yoga practices, and incredible insight into kindness and self-love. And now, as she prepares to celebrate her 60th birthday, she is eager to share her life’s lessons and the wisdom and teachings that have transformed the pain of her past.
Benja’s effort to heal has been a journey, one that requires daily maintenance. But as she puts it, “I finally feel like a young woman again!” Once bound by chains of poverty, abuse, conservative culture and a strict Buddhist upbringing, she has spent her lifetime preparing for this new decade of freedom and self-discovery.
Sharing what she spent a lifetime learning
After 30 years of marriage to the man who she says, “is still my best friend and buddy,” Benja recently divorced and purchased a home of her own. And for the first time in her life she is experiencing the excitement of dating, independence, and teaching both the art and mechanisms of joyful living.
Located in the historical downtown district of St. George, Benja is building a sanctuary for women. This will be her gift: an institute of spiritual teaching and personal enlightenment.
The outcome of a major renovation, Benja’s Main Street residence is surrounded by a white picket fence and flowerbeds filled with edible plants. A new yoga studio spans the backside of her home with a west-facing glass wall that opens to pools and ponds for mediation, swimming and relaxation. Still under construction is a massage cabana near the swimming pool, a Koi pond for meditation, and indoor treatment rooms for various modalities of spiritual healing.
She is already teaching classes three days a week including Kundalini Yoga, Qi-gong and mediation. And this summer, as her August birthday approaches, she plans to begin offering courses in spiritual healing and healthy cooking.
With a goal of sharing what she has spent a lifetime learning, Benja hopes to teach women how to let go of pain and sorrow and create their own personal sense of strength and self. “It is my birthday wish to give to women what I have received,” she says.
5 hugs each day
Stepping away from her successful restaurant business, with the exception of dropping in for greeting customers and helping on busy weekends, she says she is most interested in devoting her time and energy to helping individuals. “At 60, you get to be the kind of woman you always wanted to be,” she says. “For me, that is being near my family and enjoying a balance of people, food, spirituality and love.”
Fundamentally, Benja says the principles are very simple. For example, “Everybody must give and receive five hugs each day,” She says. “It is good for the human spirit and healing for the heart.”
This is something Benja would know.
Desperately craving affection from her parents as a child, she did not receive a hug until she was an adult and returned to her Thailand home from the United States to visit her mother. “One day I took her arms and wrapped them around me,” Benja recalls. “I told her she was my mother and I needed her to hug me.”
While Benja’s mother allowed for the embrace, she uttered the words, “If I have to,” as her 40-year old daughter reveled in her reluctant arms.
Then she asked, “Do you love me, mama?”
Her mother replied, “If I didn’t love you, you would not be alive today.”
In a culture of survival, this would be the most intimate exchange of words and affection Benja would ever experience with her mother, and one that Benja graciously accepted as beautiful and simply enough.
“My mother knew no other way,” Benja says. “Like her mother and her mother’s mother before her, her trial of life was to survive and to help her children make it from one meal to the next.”
Something Benja has been doing since she was a child growing up in a small, poor district two hours north of Bangkok, Thailand, Benja loves to teach. In her home village Khong Sum Rung, Benja recalls how she would carry small, discarded pieces of chalk home from school. Gathering as many neighbor children as she could find, young Benja would pretend to teach school writing on the side of a neighbor’s outdoor water tank in lieu of a chalkboard.
She would also pretend to cook. By stirring tropical grass and banana leaves into a large pot of water, she would imagine creating succulent recipes and delighting friends and family with her spectacular ability to prepare a good meal. “I remember how it smelled just like real food,” she says. “I was so pleased with myself.”
Perhaps a foreshadowing of her own, Benja has spent a lifetime becoming a teacher and a chef who warms both the hearts and bellies of her students and patrons. One cannot help but love Benja. Truly, she wears her heart on her sleeve, offers a kind and welcoming embrace to all who receive her, and at parting, bows with respect and gratitude to those who share in her day.
To and from her restaurants, she drives the streets of St. George in a jet black jaguar that offers fitting punctuation to her flowing black hair, success and business acumen, and her simple yet sophisticated sense of style. And because she loves largely and willingly, and with laughter that radiates, there are many who celebrate when Benja is near. With an open heart, she has learned to move through each day celebrating the very moment in which she resides, and finding joy in sharing her heart with others.
For Benja, the celebration of life and joy she emanates has not come easy
This part of the story requires taking a closer look at Benja’s childhood home in Khong Sum Rung.
Following the tradition of generations, Benja’s mother went to work each day selling vegetables. She recalls that there was very little time for play, and very little time for love and laughter.
With parents who were primarily absent, always laboring to provide food and shelter, Benja was far from ever feeling alone. One of nine children, she was raised in a two-level, two-room shanty. “It was one room on top of the other,” Benja recalls. “Mom would sell vegetables and serve food downstairs, and we would all sleep together upstairs in one room with one small window.”
Benja’s father worked away at a mill and returned home only once a month. “He would spend one night with us, and the next day, he would be gone,” she says.
To relieve some of the financial burden and pressure, Benja’s mother gave two daughters to an aunt who had only sons. And while her sisters would return once a year to visit, Benja was left at home with a blind sister and five brothers, leaving her vulnerable and unprotected as her mother worked long hours and occasionally traveled to Bangkok.
Today, Benja breathes deeply and determinedly when stating, “I have forgiven my brothers, but those experiences were very difficult and they have had a tremendous and painful affect on my life.”
In her childhood, Benja recalls never having a single toy. But what she did have was plenty of imagination and a beloved piece of a coconut shell that she cherished and played with and carried like a companion.
And she had the Buddhist teachings she was raised on. “I am so grateful that my mother taught me to meditate and to embrace the power of now,” she says. “She did not have time to teach me to be a woman, but the ability to meditate is something that has saved my life.”
Counter to the culture she was raised in, Benja says she always desired love, affection and companionship. And so she thought whole-heartedly when her mother cautioned her from repeating the mistakes she had made by getting married. “I remember the only advice she ever gave me,” Benja says. “It was simple. She just said, ‘Don’t be like me.’”
For her daughter, Benja’s mother wished for a life of comfort without pain and poverty. She advised Benja to stay single, go to school to become a teacher, avoid getting married and look forward to a government-funded retirement. But Benja is a romantic, and what her mother wanted for her, she says, “simply did not click for me at all.”
From Buddhist nun to Mormon missionary
At age 18, Benja left home and entered a monastery where she devoted her time, energy and whole heart to cooking for the resident monk. This is where she learned to use coconut as a base for many meals — a signature practice she carries with her today. And bashfully, she recalls how she knew she must leave the monastery when she realized she was developing feelings for the monk. “You cannot be a devoted and loyal servant if you have a crush on the monk you are intending to serve,” she says.
And so Benja enrolled at a teacher’s college, and began teaching kindergarten and preschool. For Benja, this was a time of personal journey as she set out looking to find the physical affection, love and attention she had both dreamed of and desired. And for many of the choices and decisions she made in these early years of her womanhood, she describes feelings of guilt and shame and sadness for looking in places where true love did not and could not exist.
“I remember feeling lost and very ashamed and very bad,” Benja says. “Then one day I met missionaries that said I could be baptized and wash my sins away. And for the first time in my life, I felt freedom from sin and pain.”
After being baptized a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, at age 24, Benja decided to serve a mission of her own. “I was very excited about the gospel of Jesus Christ and feeling clean,” she says. “I wanted to tell everyone.”
At age 25, and leaving her new teaching job at a junior high school, Benja accepted the call to serve as a translator missionary assigned to work in a local refugee camp for the church’s welfare program.
“I loved being a Mormon missionary,” she says. “I had finally found a way to feel clean, to serve, and to feel close to God.”
While serving at the refugee camp, Benja recalls meeting a tall, handsome American who answered to the title “Elder Peterson.” From California, Elder Erick Peterson was also serving a church welfare mission. After he returned home to the United States at the completion of his mission, Benja accepted an invitation to extend her mission from 18 to 24 months. During this time, the two corresponded by mail, and after two years of service, Benja was released. There to greet her was “Elder Peterson.”
“We could not show any affection toward one another without offending or embarrassing my family,” Benja recalls. In Thailand, it is unacceptable to publicly display caring and emotion. “I finally said to Erick, ‘We have to get out of here.’”
Together, the couple moved to California where Benja could enjoy being comfortable expressing and receiving the affection she desired. “We could walk and hold hands and for the first time it was okay,” she says.
While raising their family of four children, the Peterson’s moved to Florida, spent two years in France, and then arrived in St. George, Utah, just as Benja was turning 50. Here, she began teaching community yoga and cooking classes to share her homeland traditions, and working with her son to develop plans for a restaurant business.
No longer actively attending any church, Benja uniquely identifyies herself as a Mormon Buddhist, claiming you must know one religion to help you completely understand the other. “In my life I have learned to live in the moment and to stay focused on the straight and narrow way,” she says. “The straight and narrow is the here, the now, and he present.”
It is time to give back now
In Benja’s home, one cannot help but feel the spirit of this remarkable woman. From a compromised childhood, circumstances propelled her to find healing and create a life of her own. She is known in her community today for her success and desire to share what she has gained professionally, physically, spiritually and religiously. She would settle for nothing less. “It is time for me to give back now,” she says. ”It is time for me to share the gift of my life’s journey.”
Dressed in beautiful gardens, pools and statues of Buddha, Benja has created a genuine sanctuary for peaceful mediation in the heart of historic downtown St. George in southern Utah. Benja is happy here. She has found freedom from childhood suffering and spiritual resolution. Each day, she enjoys hours of meditation and conversation as she sits at her front porch visiting with passers by and guests who come to bask in Benja’s wisdom. And over a cup of her favorite green tea, delightfully, she shares the stories of her family, dating, and ideas for classes she is excited to teach.
Benja is 60. She is happy. She is free.
This article originally appeared in Elan Woman Magazine.
