Tara Brach

And they're torqued by the perception of separation and wanting and fear, but they're still life, loving life.

And I really resonate with that, that their life-loving life, they're sometimes described as the animal-headed goddesses, you know, that if you think of Tibetan art at the entry to all the temples, there's these animal-headed goddesses.

And they're just the life-loving life energies that can also be incredibly, seem very demonic or threatening or jealous or aggressive or whatever.

And the teaching is...

We don't get to sacred space by bypassing them or transcending them.

It's by meeting these goddesses with presence and with heart that actually frees up their inherent aliveness.

It actually infuses us with more presence and love by moving through them.

And it is the entry to sacred space.

So I'd say that for me, in my experience, it's more about transmuting through presence than any form of bypassing.

Because it feels, in these current times, crucial that we grieve.

And grief is usually covered over by the fear and by the anger and by the aggression.

And when it's not processed, of course, it becomes very destructive.

So what we need is people who have the courage to process, to get to feel what they're feeling and find underneath those feelings what's there, which is usually grief.

There's that one movie where they had this brilliant line, which was that vengeance is a lazy form of grief.

And that as long as we stay in those cycles of blaming others and anger and aggression, we're not getting to the whole deep realm underneath, which is hugely tender because embedded in grief is love.

Embedded in grief is a profound caring.

So I found for myself that if I want to engage in the world,

and I'm doing it from an us-them kind of divided, angry, righteous place, I'm planting seeds of more of the same.

But if I can let my heart be broken, like feel the feelings, feel the anger, feel the fear and go underneath it to the grief,

And then when I act, I'm really coming from a place of care, from sensing belonging and trying to further belonging.