Pema Düddul (birth name: Dallas John Baker) is the Buddhist Chaplain in the University of Southern Queensland’s Multi-Faith Service and the Co-Director of Pristine Awareness: Foundation for Buddhist Practice. Pema has been a Buddhist for forty years, discovering at the age of eleven that his personal worldview and the tenets of Buddhism were in perfect accordance. Pema began practising in the Chan tradition in 1979. From the late 1980s he started practising in the Vajrayana, or Tibetan Buddhist, tradition. Pema considers Dudjom Rinpoche, Jigdral Yeshe Dorje (1904-1987) to be his Heart Lama. Over the years Pema has received teachings from masters in all four schools of Tibetan Buddhism and is completely non-sectarian. From 2000 to 2005 Pema held genyen vows with celibacy and undertook a series of retreats of varying durations. In 2005 he received the tantric vows of a white-robe wearer in the Dudjom tradition, the Tibetan Buddhist equivalent of a non-monastic religious minister. He received these vows from one of his principle teachers, Ngakpa Karma Lhundup Rinpoche. It was around this time that he was given the Dharma name Pema Düddul. More recently, Namgay Dawa Rimpoche, one of Dudjom Rinpoche's grandchildren and Dharma heirs, kindly agreed to be Pema's Dudjom lineage guru. Pema has decades of experience as a Buddhist practitioner and has taught mindfulness and meditation in Buddhist, educational and other settings since 2007. Pema is also a certified practitioner of Thought Field Therapy (TFT) and the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT or tapping) as well as a Transpersonal Counsellor. Pema also has a doctorate (PhD) in creative writing and is an Associate Professor of writing, editing and publishing at an Australian university. Pema describes himself as 'a completely run of the mill Buddhist, an extremely ordinary person. By no means a Buddhist scholar, certainly not a great meditator, not in any way masterful, just trying like every other Buddhist to integrate the path of Dharma into everyday life with all its routine challenges'.
