By Melissa Moore
As this new year opens, may it arrive not as a demand for improvement,
but as an invitation—to see more clearly, to feel more honestly,
And to meet life just as it is.
May we awaken from habitual drift and familiar stories,
Not by force, but by remembering what matters.
May love and gratitude rise naturally—
For those we cherish,
For those we grieve,
And even for those we struggle to understand.
The heart, when left unguarded, has a surprising capacity to include.
May we remember our belonging to the elements,
To the sun that marks the days,
The wind that carries change,
The earth that holds us unconditionally,
And the water that makes all life possible.
May we receive the earth’s offerings season by season,
walking a little more slowly,
With eyes and heart gently open.
In a world of constant movement,
May we find moments of space—through stillness, through conversation, through practice—whatever helps awareness breathe.
May we turn toward what sustains us:
The people and beings who shape our lives,
Those who came before us,
Those who walk beside us now,
And the small, steady comforts that remind us we are alive.
Gratitude often begins in ordinary places.
With clarity and tenderness,
May we offer thanks for what has been,
and set intentions—for ourselves,
for our shared world, and for all her inhabitants–
From my heart to yours,
wishing you a whole heart
As we step into another year together, Happy New Year!
With love,
Melissa, Steward of Karuna
By Melissa Moore
Each year, after the bright swirl of holidays, a quieter interval appears, an almost imperceptible pause between Christmas (whether one celebrates it or not) and New Year’s Day. In North America, this has become “holiday time,” a period shaped by travel, indulgence, or extra work for many. Yet beneath the surface of our commercial and cultural rhythms lies a deeper question worth asking:
How do we honor the transitional space at the end of the year, the death of one cycle, and the tender birth of another?
As a white woman of European descent, I have spent years wondering how to relate to this threshold in a way that is culturally honest and grounded. Having fully integrated into a Tibetan Worldview, and then steeping back and asking myself, but what of that is my ancestry?
Part of my contemplative and decolonizing work involves exploring the fragmented strands of my own Germanic/Franco lineage, not to romanticize Europe’s past in anyway, but to understand what ancestral practices I have ethically inherited, reinterpreted, or released. Over time, I’ve shaped my own blend of prescribed and creative and emergent rituals for the Winter Solstice and the liminal stretch leading into the New Year.
I first encountered the phrase “Between the Years” while living in Europe. Since then, I’ve come to appreciate that this pause is not simply a quaint cultural expression, but a deeply human phenomenon. Across centuries and continents, people have mythologized this strange and sacred gap in time.
Anthropologically, nearly all cultures recognize liminal moments—dawn and dusk, equinoxes, adolescence, seasonal transitions—periods when time feels softened, unsettled, and more open to insight. The days between December 25 and January 1 form one of the most potent thresholds in the Western ritual calendar.
In German-speaking Europe, Zwischen den Jahren referred to a span of days that did not belong fully to one year or the next. Time was believed to stand still. Fate could be altered. Spirits wandered more freely. Divination deepened.
In ancient Rome, the Festival of Janus honored the god who looks both backward and forward, marking the cosmic hinge between years. In Greece, this period mirrored Hesiod’s idea of Krisis—a time of divine rebalancing.
Across traditions, this temporal gap functioned as a ritual antechamber, a period outside of ordinary chronology when communities released the burdens of the past before stepping into the structure of the new year.
Across Germanic and Alpine regions, the Rauhnächte, the twelve nights after Christmas, are the quintessential “between the years” practices. Houses were cleansed with aromatic smoke: juniper, mugwort, frankincense, birch. These rituals were thought to clarify unseen energies and escort wandering spirits onward. Each night was believed to foreshadow the coming year, and people kept careful track of dreams, omens, animal behaviors, and weather shifts.
Work was minimized. Weaving and spinning were forbidden. Communities understood this threshold as a vulnerable time when the new year was being invisibly woven into being.
Other ancient cultures turned toward divination, prophecy, and intuitive listening. The veil between past, present, and future thinned; the conditioned order loosened. People experienced expanded consciousness and remembered capacities.
There were also traditions of licensed disorder. Medieval Europe’s Feast of Fools and Rome’s Saturnalia inverted social hierarchies; servants feasted, masters served, the world briefly turned upside down. Ritualized chaos gave society a way to renew itself.
And always, communities honored the return of the sun. Bonfires burned away misfortune. Candles invoked the light’s return. Fire rituals purified, energized, and symbolized the rebirth gestating in the winter darkness.
Many of these ancient practices still live within us, though often in disguised or secularized form:
And again, the most personal question re-emerges:
What do you do with the liminal space between the years?
For centuries, this period has been understood as a collective portal, marked by suspended time, ancestral presence, purification, dreamwork, divination, boundary-loosening, and the cosmic renewal of the sun’s return.
Purpose:
To attune to the subtle liminality of the days between Christmas and New Year’s, a threshold where the old year loosens its shape and the new has not yet formed. In the Karuna language, this practice cultivates presence, spaciousness, and compassionate awareness as we sense the shifting textures of Basic Sanity in ourselves and the world.
(Ideally practiced between December 26 and January 1.)
Gather:
These represent the five elemental expressions of Basic Sanity: stability, clarity, fluidity, warmth, and spaciousness.
Invitation:
Settle as if time itself has paused. Let this be a moment outside the ordinary calendar, where nothing is demanded and everything is allowed.
Light the candle. Acknowledge each element in your own words. Take your seat.
Feel the weight of your body supported by the ground.
Sense the clean air entering your lungs, enlivening awareness.
Notice the subtle glow in your chest, hands, or belly.
Allow your awareness to soften, spread, and move without effort.
Release striving. Let concerns fall away. Rest in the open field that holds all the elements.
Pause here.
Feel the faint tremble of the threshold. Nothing is determined. This is the womb of the coming year, the quiet field where new forms might arise.
Stay as long as the moment invites.
Afterward, journal gently—approaching whatever arises with curiosity rather than judgment. The new year is yours to enter with clarity, compassion, and presence.
In a world that constantly beckons us to do more, fix more, control more, there is a rare and precious opportunity to simply rest in presence — to reconnect with our basic sanity, clarity, and openness.
That’s the invitation of Brilliant Sanity: Resting in the Four Grounds of Mindful Presence. Drawing on the ancient wisdom of the Satipaṭṭhāna, the Four Foundations of Mindfulness course offers more than meditation: it offers a sheltered passage into the spaciousness of the moment, a place where habitual control, tension, and reactivity can gently soften.
This course is ideal for people who…
If you’ve ever sensed that beneath the swirl of thoughts, emotions, and habitual striving lies a more open, fluid, awake mind, Brilliant Sanity offers a kind invitation to rest into that space. It doesn’t ask you to perform or “fix” yourself; instead, to gently return again and again to presence, curiosity, and simple awareness, and discover how those qualities gradually reshape everything: relationships, inner life, even how you inhabit your body.
I encourage you to join us — whether you are new to meditation or you’ve meditated for decades. This course is offered online (via Zoom), making it accessible no matter where you are. May it be a grounding and awakening beginning to whatever lies ahead on your path.
by Melissa Moore, Ph.D.
As the universe darkens and the sun sinks earlier each evening, we enter the season that invites an intimate relationship with darkness, solitude, and silence. Many of us are well acquainted with the dark — those sleepless nights when, depleted and restless, we find our minds hunting for things to worry about. This nocturnal vigilance mirrors our annual descent into winter, when the outer world grows quiet and the inner world stirs with unease.
In our discomfort, we may rush to fill the void, decorating, planning, shopping, anything to resist the pull of stillness. Yet the dark season offers us a precious opportunity to pause, descend, and listen. It asks us to take stock of the year now passing, to sit with what is unresolved, and to allow silence to restore our frayed attention in a world saturated with distraction. Raise your gaze in any public space and notice how many of us are bowed to our phones, our modern votive candles to distraction, each dopamine flicker pulling us further from presence.
This is a beautiful time to turn instead toward home — to tend simple, tactile projects that ground us, to cook and craft, to create warmth and meaning close to hearth and heart. For myself, I’ve been in lifelong recovery from Christmas consumerism, determined to unlearn that conditioning before I die. And yet, I love the lights, the gathering, and the shared delight of preparing our home with my husband, our dog and cat, and my niece, who fills the house with youthful creativity.
In our mostly Buddhist household, we celebrate Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, and Christmas, why not? Gratitude and mindfulness are the true threads that bind them all. How we celebrate, what we buy, eat, and consume deserves attention and care, especially now.
The Winter Solstice is paradox itself: the birth of light within the deepest night. On this day, when the sun reaches its lowest point in the sky, winter is born in the Northern Hemisphere. Here in Colorado, the season also brings its own grounded rituals, changing tires, tucking in the garden, insulating pipes, mundane acts that, when done with awareness, become ceremonies of letting go and renewal. Through these simple gestures, we honor cycles of life and death, reflecting on what has passed, what continues, and what is yet to unfold.
At Karuna Training, we honor these transitions by gathering in circle, listening deeply, witnessing each other’s journeys, and recognizing the light of brilliant sanity that shines through even the darkest times.
Please join me on Sunday, December 21, for our Winter Solstice Ritual, where we’ll lean into the mandala of the Five Buddha Families, reflect on the year gone by, and contemplate our aspirations for the new one. Together, we’ll bear witness to the turning of the light and the renewal of compassion in our shared field of awareness.
Please come along.
With warmth,
Melissa
By Melissa Moore
Radical honesty is not simply about telling the truth in a blunt or moralistic sense. It’s a deep alignment between our inner experience and our outer expression, which is foundational to authentic selfless compassion. The main point of practicing meditation isn’t just to calm down and invite space, but also to open our hearts, and to do this, we need to dismantle our habits of self-deception, which are the root of suffering.
When I first began my meditation journey, I was a naive 24-year-old and intent on appearing and manifesting as someone to admire. Needing to be praised and respected was a long-honed habitual pattern, an extension of garnering approval from my father, which I was now extending into my life and world at an accelerated pace. In reality, to hold up appearances, I was embroiled in deadly eating disorder behavior and self-hatred.
When I ran into Contemplative psychology at Naropa Institute (now University), it was like hitting a wall. I had a rather rude awakening. It took some time to understand that vulnerability, self-ownership of one’s destructive habits, and a genuine bent toward truth-telling were what was valued on the path of openness, self-love, and compassion.
I remember that during my Master's Program in Contemplative Psychology, there was a fishbowl exercise where two people working together would sit in a circle of witnesses and practice meeting genuinely, touching hearts, and listening without fixing, giving advice, or any superficial overlay. In Karuna Training, this is the foundational practice called compassionate exchange.
The primary teacher, Dr. Ed Podvoll, at that time was positively gushing over one woman's capacity to say to another person she was supposed to be helping, “I have no idea how what you’re describing feels, and when you speak about the topic, I notice I dissociate and space out.” Listening from the outside, I thought her comment was inappropriate for anyone helping another person, but, counter to my opinion, this was the most highly praised exchange of the exercise because the woman was so honest. I remember getting immediately scared. Somehow, I persisted, and now I find myself teaching Contemplative Psychology, some 45 years later.
From a Buddhist perspective, suffering arises from ignorance, particularly ignorance of the true nature of self and reality. This includes the subtle and often unconscious ways we deceive ourselves — rationalizing, suppressing, or distorting our experience to preserve ego identity or avoid pain. What radical honestly is and how it works is:
The path of Karuna Training is about liberating ourselves from the trance of false narratives and learning to be ourselves as we are, no matter how we feel in the moment. Only with radical clear seeing can genuine compassion arise — because then we're in contact with what is real.
Compassion without honesty risks becoming what we call ‘idiot compassion,’ which is more like co-dependency, or it becomes performative, as if we are maintaining a conceptualized role, like a therapist or priest may find themselves doing often. Compassion, in its most realized form, isn’t sentimental or people-pleasing. It's fierce and truthful.
When we are not honest with ourselves or others, our “compassion” can become a means to avoid our discomfort by trying to rescue others, offering kind words while suppressing our genuine reactivity, or wearing a well-worn mask that suppresses anything that doesn’t appear copasetic.
Radical honesty allows compassion to include boundaries, speak brutal truths, and not collude with harm — even when it’s uncomfortable. It respects others’ dignity enough not to manipulate or coddle others, who may need a good dose of truth.
Honesty is the ground of mutual trust. In Buddhism, we acknowledge that we’re not separate from others. Genuine compassion emerges from this insight into our interdependence with everything and everyone on the planet, and beyond. We cannot trust ourselves when we’re wearing masks — if we hide our real feelings, our limits, or our truth.
Radical honesty is a practice of showing up fully as we are — not for drama or confession, but as a gesture of intimacy. It says, “I trust this moment enough to be real with you. I trust our basic sanity enough not to pretend.” From this place, compassion isn’t something we do to others — it becomes the field we co-create, where vulnerability and wisdom meet.
Radical honesty is a compassionate act toward reality itself. It’s how we stop wounding ourselves with pretense, stop controlling others with our image, and meet life — as it is — with tenderness and clarity. Without it, compassion lacks depth. With it, compassion becomes the fierce, fearless, and luminous heart of the Dharma.
Radical honesty is essential to touch into when we are learning the Karuna Training practices of Tonglen, Compassionate Exchange, Shining the Jewel practice, all of which are offered in our upcoming online class: Embodying Compassion Through Radical Honesty, held on October 18, November, December, and January, 10:00 am - 1:00 pm MDT. This course offers a 1.5-hour continuity meeting between classes to help students integrate their learning. We hope you will join us.
by Melissa Moore
For over four decades, I’ve contemplated what it truly means to commune with the sacred elements—not just as an educator, but as someone yearning for direct, authentic experience. The five elements—space, water, earth, fire, and air—are often reduced to archetypes or metaphors. But when we engage them as living forces, they become powerful allies in reconnecting us to the sacred fabric of life.
My work has always aimed to support non-dual exchange with the invisible elemental forces through a process called exchange, not as a conceptual abstraction, but as a deeply embodied reality that shapes our daily lives, whether tangible or invisible. Elemental forces speak to us if we know how to listen. I’m talking about water, earth, fire, wind, and space when I speak of the elements, the physicality of these entities.
To engage with them, I’ve come to understand that we must suspend our logical, analytical minds and step into the world of sacred ritual, whether inherited from tradition or intuitively created. Ritual opens the door to intimacy with the elements. True discovery here is a process of remembering, of awakening an ancient, intuitive language that already lives within us.
I first began to explore ritual in a clinical setting, working with women struggling with eating disorders. In the early 1990s, I served as both a counselor and later the Director and lead clinician to a flailing inpatient treatment center in Concord, California. I found myself increasingly at odds with the medical model that pathologized these women's experiences. Instead, I came to see their behaviors as a collective cry—an embodied protest of our disconnection from the natural world, particularly the rhythms of nourishment and seasonality.
Industrial agriculture—with its year-round strawberries and flavorless tomatoes—had severed our link to the land, the seasons, and the sacredness of food. I sensed that this disconnection was mirrored in the emotional and spiritual hunger of the women I worked with. I also wrote my dissertation on the topic of Women, Ritual, and Food.
So, I began co-creating sacred rituals with the women in the eating disorder program I was overseeing. Each week, we explored one of the five elements. On Fridays, we went into nature to enact rituals the women helped design. These ranged from hugging trees in the Redwoods on Earth Day, to releasing grief into the ocean on Water Day, to crafting prayer flags from found objects and flying them on Wind Day. On Fire Day, we visited burned landscapes and offered prayers for rebirth.
The impact was profound. These women came alive. Their spirits stirred. And though some psychiatrists looked on with suspicion, these experiences often did more for the women than weeks of standard inpatient treatment. Eventually, my work came under scrutiny, culminating in a tense inquiry by the hospital’s medical board. I was accused of misleading patients into thinking “there’s nothing wrong with them.” It felt like a modern-day witch trial—a reminder of how ancient ways still threaten systems rooted in control and profit.
These rituals always followed a clear arc: beginning, middle, and end.
What’s most important to remember is that sacred ritual is not foreign to us—it’s our inheritance. Human beings have engaged in ritual for millennia. We only began to forget when we were encouraged to outsource the sacred to priests, gurus, and institutions.
To create a ritual is to reclaim your birthright. To work with the elements is to restore a relational wisdom that lives in your body, bones, and breath. This isn’t about belief—it’s about practice, presence, and remembrance.
Please join me for Discovering Elemental Magic Through Sacred Ritual on Sunday, August 10, 2025, from 10:00–11:00 AM MT for a live, experiential session on creating a personal elemental ritual. This one-hour session is complimentary and will be held via Zoom. Together, we will rediscover the magic that is already within us.
Below is an excerpt from The Diamonds Within Us: Uncovering Brilliant Sanity Through Contemplative Psychology by Melissa Moore. This chapter, "Building Intensity Capacity", introduces concepts we'll explore in the upcoming Karuna Course "Embracing the Energy of Emotions: Accessing the Abhidharma," beginning July 19th.
Searching for meaningful connections remains one of our deepest desires in a world that often feels disconnected and fast-paced. Beyond fleeting interactions and surface-level relationships, we long for soulful bonds—connections that nurture, uplift, and embrace us in love and understanding.
Karuna training offers methods that cultivate soulful bonds. These methods, known as compassionate exchange, teach us to recognize that there is a jewel in everyone, often unmined and unpolished. This requires learning to view and experience others with open-minded awareness and knowledge about how our mind is continually crafting moment-by-moment likes and dislikes of others and the world.
A soulful bond goes beyond mere companionship, rooted in trust, honest inquiry, and authenticity. It’s the kind of connection where words aren’t always necessary, yet hearts communicate effortlessly. These bonds form when we allow ourselves to be vulnerable, to share our truths without fear of judgment, and to embrace others with the same openness.
A loving community becomes a refuge, a source of strength, and a place of belonging. In these spaces, we heal, grow, and discover the true essence of love. Our purpose in Karuna Training is to propagate a wide-minded perspective and selfless compassion in the World.
Love is the foundation of any thriving community. Fostering kindness, active embodied listening, and an atmosphere of inclusivity culminates in a space where people feel valued and supported. In the end, building a community of love is not about finding perfect people but about embracing imperfect hearts with divine love. When we open ourselves to connection, we find that love, in its purest form, is the bridge that unites us all.
Karuna Training invites you to show up fully—flaws, fears, and all. In this space, honesty replaces judgment, and connection becomes possible.
Through compassionate exchange, we practice embodied, nonjudgmental listening. People don’t want quick solutions—they want to be seen, heard, and supported.
Karuna’s curriculum is grounded in the idea that we grow stronger together. As we face pain, paradox, and transformation, we remain open-hearted and rooted in community.
Authentic voice and emotional integration thrive in spaces that feel safe. At Karuna, we co-create an environment where every story matters and every person belongs.
True community means embracing imperfection. We celebrate each individual for who they are—habits, quirks, and all—on their own unique journey of becoming.
Community is essential and social exchange is non-negotialbe in a healthy, open, and loving life. A place where we feel we belong, and can be ourselves as we are. Consider joining in Karuna’s community in the multiple options available.
Community is essential to a loving, meaningful life. We all need a place where we belong and can be our authentic selves. Explore our paths to connection:
We are opening our doors for multiple ways to enter the community. We hope you will come along.
By Melissa Moore, Ph.D.
We often don’t realize just how vital community is to our lives until it’s gone. In 2018, the spiritual community I had been part of for over 40 years imploded following a 'Me Too' scandal involving our spiritual leader. In the aftermath, I no longer hold any blame toward anyone for what transpired. In fact, I feel a profound sense of gratitude for this disruption. It served as a powerful intervention to awaken me from my own spiritual bypassing—the tendency to ignore uncomfortable truths I had overlooked despite my deep loyalty and engagement. Still, I feel deep grief over losing a lifelong community that had been a constant, binding, and sacred force in my life, and this is undeniable.
Now, more than ever, I understand that community is not just a social construct; it is a holy encounter of belonging—one that cannot be easily replicated or replaced.
Karuna Training, in contrast, has always placed community at its core, with the connections formed in a cohort model both vital and sacred. I often joke that the Karuna community is exceptional, and it’s true, but as the Executive Director, I also know that I’m responsible for ensuring it thrives. Even so, the Karuna community has proven to be a lifeline for me in the absence of my original spiritual community.
Creating a sacred community is about fostering an environment where individuals feel a deep, abiding sense of belonging. A strong community is rooted in shared values, practices, and opportunities for spiritual awakening. Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and with the advent of Zoom, we’ve expanded our offerings beyond the basic and advanced curriculum to create even more opportunities for people to connect and grow together online.
While every community has its own unique flavor, shaped by cultural, religious, or spiritual influences, there are core components that consistently nourish a thriving, values-driven community. Karuna explicitly upholds these ten essential values, which I will outline below:
Creating a sacred community requires intentionality, openness, and a commitment to love, growth, and service. Karuna is a space where individuals unite to learn, support, and grow together in reverence.
If you're inspired to experience these principles firsthand, I invite you to join us for a one-day in-person retreat in Albuquerque, Creating Sacred Community: The Wisdom of Contemplative Psychology, on Saturday, May 3, 2025 from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM MDT exploring Karuna methods inspired by the Five Buddha Families, which evoke the sacredness of community. Through ritual, chanting, and contemplative practices, we will connect with the wisdom of the mandala and cultivate clarity, compassion, and spaciousness. All are welcome—step into a transformative journey with us!
For those unable to attend in person, I will also be hosting a free one-hour virtual Karuna Live session, Finding a Soulful Bond: Building a Community of Love, on Tuesday, May 6, 2025 from 6:00 PM to 7:00 PM MDT. Through guided meditation, discussion, and interactive exercises, you'll discover practical tools for seeing beyond conditioned perceptions and approaching differences with an open heart—essential skills for creating the kind of sacred community we all deeply long for.
In times of profound disconnection and social isolation, the call to create and nurture sacred community has never been more urgent. By honoring the sacredness in ourselves and each other, we weave a tapestry of belonging that sustains us through life's greatest challenges and deepest joys.
by Melissa Moore
I have always been the type of person who walks into a room and feels every imaginable emotion emanating from whoever is in it. I used to make myself responsible for the negative vibes, but I’ve trained myself not to do that anymore. Chögram Trungpa used to say, “Whatever is the room, that’s your mind.” By that, he meant that we are not separate but interdependent. Trungpa was pointing to the non-dual nature of energetic exchange.
These vibes, or unseen emotional energies, are sometimes strong invisible forces. When unchecked, they tend to rule us and often determine how we experience our relationships. When we learn to attune to these invisible energies through the process of exchange, we learn to navigate our worlds more skillfully in communication and community. Humans are adept at experiencing nonverbal invisible energies around us, but we are not always skilled at interpreting those experiences.
In Karuna Training, we call that human capacity to feel the energy of others and environments an ‘exchange.’ Exchange is happening constantly, but not necessarily consciously. For example, when we walk into a restaurant, there are discernable vibes that emulate some kind of energy; foreboding, hurried, and or chaotic - we can feel that energy.
We exchange with people, places, and sometimes entire communities. I remember entering the San Francisco Zen Center for the first time in 1989, and my exchange was instantly a slowed-down mind. If someone is next to us, steps off the curb, and is almost hit by a bus, we feel that close call in our bodies. Regardless of their communication, we can detect their mood when we have phone calls with our mothers or friends. Often, we begin to make things up about what they are feeling instead of asking them what is going on. That tendency to assume what another is feeling based on our reaction is called a projection. Learning to tune in consciously to our exchanges with others is a path of skillful communication and watering the seeds of a compassionate heart.
Think about it… when we come into a space with someone we know well, someone with whom we have a well-honed communication pattern, we instantly feel that person’s demeanor without words. If we sense something negative and seemingly familiar, we instantly project on the other thoughts like, ‘They’re mad at me again,’ or ‘They don’t approve,’ ‘They don’t like me.” Even though we may be accurate in our projections, we might not check them verbally; instead, we can make assumptions and project those onto the relationship with the other person. Entire relationships are driven non-verbally, each person rebounding off one another's projections.
We often act and make decisions about ourselves and others based on invisible emotional energies—mostly unspoken feelings that lead to interpretations out of pieced-together notions about another person or a group. At the first opening circle of Karuna Training, I often say,
‘every important relationship we’ve ever had is in the room because we are in the room.’ Then I ask the new cohort to look around the room and notice that they’ve already decided who they like and don’t like and whether they are conscious of it. The tendency to accept and reject others from our well-honed relationship with invisible energies is usually unconscious. These unconscious internal decisions, nevertheless, drive how that relationship will go in the future.
In Karuna Training, we study the Five Buddha families in community retreat settings to become familiar with and befriend our energetic tendencies. The Buddha Family Mandala is an ancient Tibetan Mandala that compartmentalizes the energetic invisible world into five familiar styles of energy. Through practicing with the Five Buddha Families, we become familiar with energetic styles and the propensities they engender. Our energetic styles include both a wisdom manifestation and a confused one.
Emotional energy works on a continuum, with the understanding that the manifestation of confusion and wisdom are inseparable. Take, for example, the Buddha Buddha Family energy, which is connected with the element of space. Here, the energetic emanation of Buddha can be spacious, open, accommodating, and skillful – allowing for everything to arise as it should in its own time and place. The Buddha family energy also employs space to cover over reality, ignore space, check out, and dissociate from whatever is happening in the room. Many of us have mastered the ability to disappear in plain sight.
The point is to learn to honor and embrace the energetic invisible forces at play – and to accept reality as it is versus fighting with reality in how we want it to be. To accomplish this, we must befriend invisible energies in a tall order because we are prone to our propensities; our habitual tendencies of the mind are to experience all of reality as solid, lasting, and independent. For example, suppose we deny our age and pretend we are younger than we are. In that case, aging and slowing down are inconvenient and inhospitable to our projected reality of remaining young.
Studying and practicing with the guidance and wisdom of the Five Buddhas trains us to trust in the basic sanity of existence—to accept ourselves and others as we are and to live life on life’s terms rather than the self-imposed reality we constantly seek and project.
During the in-person weekend retreat at Drala Mt. Center, “Embracing the Invisible Forces,” which will be held March 14 - 16, we will take an experiential tour of the Five Buddha Families and learn contemplative approaches to working with these energies as they arise in ourselves and others.
Please join us for a romping weekend of invoking the sacred invisible forces and turning our awareness to things as they are.