Love your description of Sutra and Tantra!

YES this resonates so hard. Witnessing your evolution through your words and it is beautiful and inspiring. May I someday be able to transform my own electric fences into garlands of roses.

What a beautiful find. To me she appears deep in meditative absorption, yet is simmering with fully alive, compassionate ferocity that could be unleashed at any moment. Pure Dakini energy.

I love the image of the sun just beginning to rise as you offer the tsok remainder...really captures that sense of anything being possible, that is there in the early morning hours as well as during tsok. Thank you for sharing.

I just LOVE this.

Ahhh, LOVE it. Thanks for sharing!

You are not alone. I was on the rollercoaster too. In particular I experienced deep physical/mental/emotional exhaustion following the Uncommon Cho Empowerment. Initially I berated myself for not being able to "push through" and join the tsok feast that followed, but I also felt intuitively that this was a deep clearing taking place in the subtle body, and embraced it. This is just one example. If we're using the metaphor of a rollercoaster, maybe we should try more often to say "screw it" and joyfully throw our hands in the air, instead of clinging to the bar and screaming about not wanting to be on the ride!

This prayer is one of my favorites. I think in the taste of the longing, she is quite close.

Deep insight. Thank you for sharing. Water is resilient, shape-shifting, patient, powerful, life-giving, life-taking...I could go on. Water can wear away the most stubborn, ancient stone. Happy to be "made of water", any day!

Another way I've heard it expressed is "using mind to get beyond mind." I'm beginning to get a taste of that in this Troma Nakmo retreat, something about the dance between discipline and play. Finding expansion through narrowing the margins; needing concentration and a long view in order to slow down, dive deep, and feel my way. To allow "perfection" to evolve through a steady drip of relaxed effort, instead of impatiently trying to force it with ego-driven desire disguised as discipline.