Hi Friends!
Welcome to Rest, a new section of Bodhisavage where we lean into the month’s theme with a recorded meditation—something you can return to whenever you want a chill place to land 🫠
I once got into a full-on debate with a friend about whether a song was “happy” or “sad.” I heard longing; they heard joy. We went back and forth, convinced the other was missing the point until we realized—duh—we were both right. The song wasn’t one or the other. Like the humans who wrote and recorded it, it held both.
Most arguments are like this—they’re not about what’s true, but about defending an artificial binary. We weren’t debating the song itself. We were busy setting up our different experiences as opposite experiences. Then fighting over whose experience deserved to win.
The moment I could shut up long enough to listen, I could suddenly hear both the melancholy chord progression and the hopeful lyrics at once. And, surprise, the song felt more alive, more true—because it was both.
We don’t just think in opposites—we live in a hierarchy of them. Better vs. worse. Strong vs. weak. Right vs. wrong. And as the horrors keep demanding we flatten our complexities more and more, it’s easy to forget that reality doesn’t actually work that way.
But the body knows better. It’s naturally fluid: it moves, it shimmers, it plays in paradox. The inhale implies the exhale. Pain dances with relief. Even our deepest stillness is full of tiny movements.
This week’s meditation is about learning to rest in those contradictions. To feel how heaviness and lightness, stillness and motion don’t cancel each other out—they create each other. We move between them, integrating their rhythm until—ta-da!—we find the whole that’s been holding the parts all along.
It might seem like a stretch to go from something so internal and subtle, to navigating the outer world’s violent polarization. But it’s like flailing around awkwardly in your living room before hitting the dance floor. If we can sit with nuance and opposition in our own skin, we can start holding more complex differences out there.
And that changes everything. We realize we contain multitudes! And so do our relationships! Our art! Our social movements! This is what allows us to find joy in the midst of grief. To live in upheaval without losing our center. To respect each other even in the middle of disagreement.
What starts as a personal skill becomes a collective one. The more we can hold paradox, the more human our solutions become.
This whole month, we’ve been exploring The Wisdom of Equality—that deep, embodied knowing that everything belongs. We’ve met it through courageous connection, through the weird and wonderful soup of interbeing, through the radical practice of Tonglen.
And now, we get to just rest in it. 😌
So find a comfy spot, hit play, and notice: what happens when you stop trying to resolve the tension between opposites and just let yourself be everything, all at once?
Let me know how it goes. Did you become a swirling, binary-defying expanse? Did your brainmeat try to stage a coup? Did you become a sentient cloud? Holler in the comments. ☁️✨
❤️ Lama Tasha
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