Lama Tsultrim Allione: Wisdom Rising
SANDRA SEDGBEER: Each of the five Dakinis is associated with a difficult emotion, such as depression, anger, arrogance, craving or envy, as well as corresponding wisdom energy, and the whole point is to move from the difficult emotion into the wisdom energy side of things, such as equanimity and discernment. How can they actually help us shift our emotional challenges into empowerment?
LAMA TSULTRIM ALLIONE: The way the transformation takes place is essentially through sound, light, and visualization. So those three components are present, and you work with the seed syllable of the Dakinis, which is quite literally what the Dakini is born from, that sound, and then through that sound, that color, and the symbolic meaning of the Dakinis and all their accouterments, you sound the seed syllable and you actually become the Dakini. You’re her, rather than seeing her outside yourself and so you start with, let’s say, the anger from emotion, and then the emotion connected to that family is transformed through sound, color, and visualization.
SANDRA SEDGBEER: In ‘Wisdom Rising’ you place your teachings in the context of recent feminine resistance, including the Women’s’ Marches, the Me Too Movement and the Time’s Up Movement. You’ve said that you hope that ‘Wisdom Rising’ can help readers respond with greater wisdom and effectiveness to the distress, challenges, and chaos of our global reality. You had your own experiences of patriarchy and Buddhism; you were criticized by your Buddhist Teacher for being too feminist when you were only trying to bring balance to Buddhism. Tell us how that experience shaped you.
LAMA TSULTRIM ALLIONE: When I began with Buddhism I wasn’t really aware of issues with women. I think because of being western, I was given preferential treatment that a Tibetan woman wouldn’t have gotten. Later on, after Chiara died, I became aware in a different way – in a way it was like a blank in my world. Where is the feminine? What would other Buddhist women do who have lost a child? What is their story? So that put me on the search for stories about women and in the process of writing the introduction to my first book ‘Women of Wisdom,’ I researched women in Buddhism and found out about the history of sexism, and then also became aware of ways that it had worked in me. And I got really excited about women’s’ spirituality and questions like: ‘if religion or spirituality were created by a woman how would that be? How would that be different? And how would it be to be a part of traditions where we were leaders and not just allowed in under certain rules?’ Which is true of all patriarchal religions, I think, and all the world religions that women are very seldom in leadership roles.
So, the death of Chiara, and searching for my own answers began my awareness of the feminine. Of course, I was upset about the sexism, but I also became excited about the feminine and the feeling of, ‘Wow, this is a whole half of humanity that was not really experiencing their full potential.’ So, my effort in ‘Wisdom Rising’ is how we can bring the full potential of the feminine to bear on the current situation?
SANDRA SEDGBEER: And do it in a way that isn’t threatening.
LAMA TSULTRIM ALLIONE: And to make the distinction between fierceness and hatred, and how do we take the anger – because certainly there is righteous anger in women for what’s happened to them over not just recent years but centuries – and turn it into wisdom and transformation? That’s what I did in the book to offer tools for that transformation and inner empowerment from which we can draw.
SANDRA SEDGBEER: Could you give us a brief overview of the five types?
LAMA TSULTRIM ALLIONE: Yes, sure. In the center of the mandala is the Buddha family and this is the elemental space, the color is white, and the emotional pattern is space – spacing out, which takes the form of depression in extreme forms, dissociation, procrastination, forgetting things, spacing out, essentially. Then the transformed emotion, which is the same energy as what I call encumbered emotion, is the same energy with the struggle of the ego removed from it. So, that transforms into spaciousness, the wisdom of space, vastness, so that space becomes spacious.
In the east, which you’d see in front of you in the mandala, is Vajra. The color is blue, the element is water, the encumbered pattern is anger, and the enlightened wisdom aspect is mirror-like wisdom. So, this is anger, but Vajra people are also very austere and scientific and a bit cold; unemotional, but very sharp. Steve Jobs is a really good example; he had that angular body that the Vajra person has. So, it’s taking that clarity which can be tied with anger and sharpness and transforming that energy through the color and the sound, and so on, into mirror-like wisdom which is the mind as a mirror. In other words, it has that clarity of a mirror. Even a very small mirror can reflect a huge landscape. So, our minds are vast, actually, and we think of ourselves as limited but, in fact, our minds are limitless and clear in their true condition.
To your right is the south, and that’s yellow. It is the element of earth. The encumbered pattern is kind of interesting because it’s pride and arrogance, but an important piece of understanding is that Ratna Family is actually a feeling of not being good enough and a poverty mentality that creates the need to pump yourself up with pride and arrogance. The Ratna person tends to over-consume, over-eat, over-drink, over-shop, perhaps, and accumulates things in the extreme, which would be hoarding, and all with a feeling that there isn’t enough, that ‘I’m not enough. Therefore, I need more.’ So, that transforms into the wisdom of equanimity, unchanging stillness; it’s giving everything equal value, so you’re not grasping at one thing and rejecting something else. There is evenness in the wisdom aspect of the self.
Then, in the west, the Padma Family, that’s behind you; it’s red, it’s fire, and it’s lust and desire. It’s the obstructive pattern, and the wisdom is discernment. So, the encumbered Padma type is always seducing, even the waiter or the person who is checking you in at the airport, the Padma person needs to have a relationship with them; needs to find out where they’re from and how they are. We all have that need to connect, but in the Padma, it becomes kind of compulsive and it turns into discernment, which is actually interesting. How can this compulsive desire become discernment? Although when you are trying to seduce somebody, you become very discerning about them. You notice every little detail about them, and you relate to them with discernment. So, when that neurotic pattern is transformed, the self-reference of seduction is removed, and it becomes compassion. It moves from passion to compassion and discernment; being able to see relationships of color, sound, of people, and so on. Perhaps putting the right people in touch with each other but without the egoist reference point that we have in the encumbered aspect of Padma; which, by the way, means Lotus. So, that’s the west, behind us.
In the north, we have envy and greed, and the element is air. The aspect that’s under that envy is feeling that somebody is getting ahead of us and we have to hurry up. So, the kind of breathless competitiveness in the Karma Family can lead to workaholic tendencies; overworking because of fear of being left behind. The Karma person, if there’s a party, is afraid they’re not being invited to the party of the A-list. Perhaps it’s a B-list party, and they want to be at the A-list party. So, there’s a feeling of paranoia based on the comparison, and then that wisdom is all-accomplishing wisdom. So, that force of compulsive activity becomes an enlightened activity, and you move from the force to the flow, and in that wisdom, you have a lot of synchronicity and things falling into place when you get into the flow rather than the force with the Karma Family. So that’s a brief journey around the mandala.
SANDRA SEDGBEER: Would you be willing to give us a little example of a practice that you write about in the book? Perhaps working with a seed syllable to transform an encumbered emotion or something like that?
LAMA TSULTRIM ALLIONE: OK. Let’s try the Padma family. The Padma is that compulsive need to seduce or that longing for union. A longing for the partner, the perfect person that is going to make us feel whole, and so that creates a kind of compulsive seduction pattern. It may not be extreme in that sense of compulsive seduction, but just a longing that we might have for the unification with the other, and a feeling that if we could just find the right person, everything would be perfect.
Try to feel that pattern in yourself; how that lives in you if you think about that longing for union.
Where do you feel that? Personally, I feel it in my heart area.
It’s finding that and then working with the seed syllable and the color rather than the full visualization of the Dakinis. So, take a moment and feel into that feeling of longing, noticing how that feels in our bodies and where, and then we’ll sound the seed syllable of the red Padma Dakini, and we’ll see the color red going through our body and lighting it up with bright red luminosity. We’ll just sound it once inwardly rather than projecting it out. The seed syllable is “Mi,” and rather than sounding something like Miiiiiii, it would be more Miii, making your body a chamber where the sound is resonating because you’re working with the sound to transform the emotion. We’ll try that now, again tuning to the emotion and so we can actually feel the transformation take place and notice the feeling of the red in your body.
Continue to Page 3 of the Interview of Lama Tsultrim Allione
