Relax, Let Go, Leave Be: A No-Hustle Start to 2025
This Year’s Wisdom Starts in a Bubble Bath
Happy New Year! We made it!
This New Year’s Eve, my ass stayed home. 🥳 No glitter, no parties, no countdown chaos. Just a bubble bath (cue Maya Rudolph as the Horomone Monstress), a glass of cava, and Lama Lena’s signature words echoing in the quiet:
“Relax. Let go. Leave be.”
These words permeate practice in our Dzogchen community—etched into bracelets, tattooed onto wrists—a teaching so simple it feels like a riddle. How can the entire path—beginning, middle, and end—be distilled into just these three words?
But in my most private moments of transformation, I’ve felt it. Perfectionism melts when I stop striving, stop trying to control, and leave space for creativity to flow naturally. Grief softens when I stop resisting it, stop pretending it’s not there, and let it sit long enough to transform into something tender and mysterious.
Rest doesn’t just restore us; it reveals us. It’s not a pit stop on the way to wisdom—it is the way. Beneath the constant churn of trying to fix or improve ourselves, there’s a luminous clarity that’s been here all along, waiting for us to stop fussing and notice it.
Ever since our sleepy Yoga Nidra session last month, I’ve been sitting with a question: How can I make this simplicity—“Relax, Let go, Leave be”—the backbone of everything I do as a friend, a teacher, a creator of weird stuff?
All at once, inspiration struck. A new translation of an ancient map began to pour out of me: The Five Wisdoms.
The Five Wisdoms come from the Buddhist tradition where they’ve long been a framework for understanding innate intelligence. And now, maybe more than ever, they offer a way to see the enlightened qualities hiding inside every human experience.
Each wisdom has a flavor, a distinct personality, a way it lights up your life—and an edge, where it contracts into its own brand of confusion and pain. Together, they’re like facets of a diamond, each wisdom reflecting its own unique quality of light. When you see them together, they form a complete picture of awareness in action:
• The Wisdom of Equality is the equanimity of recognizing that we’re all in this messy, beautiful life together—that beneath all our differences, we share the same luminous humanity. It’s obscured when our focus narrows into comparison, ranking, and judgment. Anxiously, we tighten our view to favor ourselves, our families, or the groups we identify with, and in doing so, we lose sight of our common ground.
• The Wisdom of Clarity is the sharpness of awareness that cuts through the noise and illuminates what’s real. You feel it in undeniable moments of insight or when a stubborn problem suddenly resolves itself. But when clarity contracts, its rawness feels too intense—overwhelming, overstimulating, exposing. This edge shows up as anger or rejection. The urge to shut down, avoid, or push away.
• The Wisdom of Discernment delights in the details. It’s alive when you notice the dance of a single sunbeam or the way someone’s laughter fills a room. But its edge is grasping: clinging to what feels precious, trying to control what we have, and the anxious fear of losing what we love.
• The Wisdom of Effortlessness is flow—when everything unfolds naturally, and inspiration easily fuels action. Contracted, it feels like striving: every task a mountain, everything a competition. We’re stuck in the heaviness of grinding, pushing, and needing to prove ourselves.
• The Wisdom of Spaciousness holds everything: vast, open, free. It’s where we land when we exhale, when we realize nothing in this moment needs fixing, solving, tweaking. But its edge is confusion—a fog of aimlessness, apathy, or disconnection. We don’t see the freedom in spaciousness and instead feel unmoored by it.
Here’s the magical insight: edges aren’t flaws. They’re wisdom in disguise—what brilliance looks like when filtered through a tight mind and nervous system. Each edge is like a signpost, showing us how and where to relax—not away from the pain, but into the wisdom behind it.
This year at Bodhisavage, we’re going deep, exploring how these wisdoms show up in real life. Each month, we’ll spotlight one wisdom—its edges, its magic, and the way it shapes your experience. Expect stories, prompts, meditations, and some “Damn, that’s me” moments.
It starts with this deceptively simple invitation: Relax. Let go. Leave be.
Join me for our Full Moon Meditation later this month (details below), where we’ll lean into wise relaxation and feel these wisdoms shimmer into focus.
Here’s to a year of discovery, play, and brilliance.
❤️🙃🎉
January Meditation Session
DATE: Monday, January 13, 2024
TIME: 8-9pm EST
LOCATION: Online (Zoom link will be emailed to you on registration)
TOPIC: Effortless Wisdom
DANA: This session is open to all on a donation basis. If you’d like to support this work, you can donate during registration or by become a paid subscriber on Substack.
Upcoming Retreats
Join me and the team at Cardea for a 3-day journey through meditation, creativity, and healing, catalyzed by the power of Ketamine.
Over five days,
and I will journey through 3 pillars of practice rooted in Buddhist methods: practices of stability, practices of expression, and practices of direct-seeing into the bonkers interconnected nature of reality. And there’s even a dance party!K that’s all for now!
Hope your year is off to a good-weird start :) See you on the Full Moon.
❤️ Tasha
I opened this to read unknowingly while in my bubble bath!!!!🛀❤️🙏
I'm really looking forward to the meditation session, thank you! ♥️