She was born Diane Perry in Hertfordshire, England, in 1943, raised in the East End of London above her mother's spiritualist church, and read at twenty in The Mind Unshaken by John Walters that she had always been a Buddhist without knowing it. At twenty-one she sailed for India to find a teacher. In 1964 she met the Eighth Khamtrul Rinpoche, head of the Khampagar lineage of the Drukpa Kagyu, in Dalhousie. He recognized her immediately as a returning student, gave her ordination as the second Western woman to take ordination in the Tibetan tradition, and named her Drubgyu Tenzin Palmo — Glorious Lady, Holder of the Drukpa Kagyu Lineage.
The monastery he ran in Tashi Jong was a community of monks. There was nowhere for her to live, no community for her to belong to, and no precedent for a Western woman in a Tibetan monastery to study the practices that the male monks studied. She spent six years in Lahaul, in the Indian Himalaya at over ten thousand feet, in the small monastery of Tayul Gompa, before her teacher, hearing of her difficulties, instructed her to do retreat.
In 1976 she found a small cave at 13,200 feet on a ridge in Lahaul. She lived in it for twelve years. The cave was three meters by two meters. She built a wooden meditation box about a meter square in which she slept upright, in the traditional posture of long-retreat yoginis, for the entire period. There was no running water and no heat. She grew turnips and potatoes in a small garden in the brief Himalayan summer, did her own firewood, and otherwise lived on what could be carried up the mountain a few times a year. She was snowed in for seven months of every year. Three of the twelve years were in formal three-year retreat — the classical Vajrayana retreat structure — during which she did not see another human being and did not lie down.
In 1988 her teacher's successor, the Ninth Khamtrul Rinpoche, called her out of retreat. She emerged, slowly, into the world; she taught in Italy for several years; and in 1993 she founded Dongyu Gatsal Ling Nunnery in Himachal Pradesh, dedicated to the education and full training of nuns in the Drukpa Kagyu lineage — the training the male monks at Tashi Jong had received and that no women in the tradition had ever been given. The nunnery now has over one hundred nuns from the Himalayan regions of India, Nepal, Bhutan, and Tibet, several of whom have completed their own three-year retreats.
In 2008 the Twelfth Gyalwang Drukpa, head of the Drukpa Kagyu lineage, recognized her as a Jetsunma — a venerable master — the second woman ever to receive that title in the lineage's eight-hundred-year history. Her stated public goal, repeated in many interviews, has been to attain enlightenment in a female body, against the entire weight of a traditional view that the female body is an obstacle to be transcended. She has said: "I have made a vow to attain Enlightenment in the female form — no matter how many lifetimes it takes."
