Interview: Built on Respect Uses DIY Punk Passion to Aid Tibetan Refugees

When I meet Heidiminx in New York’s Café Brama, she flashes the snow leopards that she had freshly tattooed on her right arm the night before. She’s eventually getting the entire Tibetan flag drawn.

Bringing new meaning to the phrase “revealing interview,” she pulls down the neckline of her shirt to reveal the Buddhist mantra for compassion, “om mani padme hum,” tattooed in intricate lettering and arabesques below her collarbones.

Heidiminx is the founder of online forum Punk Rock Domestics, fashion line Franky & Minx, and most recently, Built on Respect (builtonrespect.com), a nonprofit dedicated to helping Tibetan refugees in Dharamsala, India.  Her current mission finds her in Dharamsala for three months, teaching English, computers, and sustainable business models at the Tibet Hope Center (THC), a non-governmental organization.

Businesswoman, activist, teacher, fundraiser, fashionista — Heidiminx is many things, but she’s no dilettante. Punk rock, DIY, and Buddhism sound like clashing interests, but she has managed to make them harmonize.

She became interested in Buddhism in 2001 when her father sent her a book about the religion. “It was almost written like Aesop’s fables,” she says.

“There were all these little stories and analogies, and then it came down to the whole right view, right speech, right mindfulness, and right effort. I thought, ‘Wait a minute, this is the same thing that we used to do when we were punk rock — work, make a living, be honest, say what you mean, mean what you say, be able to go to sleep with yourself at night, and don’t fuck people over.'”