Touching Earth & Sky

Hi Friends!

I’m writing you from the bardo between retreats: just back from teaching at Omega last week, and now en route to London, Ontario to sit in some sweet, unfiltered Dzogchen goodness with Lama Lena and my sangha crew.

There’s a gauzy kind of spaciousness in this in-between. My duffel bag half-unpacked, the connections between people and places all liminal and sparkly, the body completely insure what day it is…

Totally fitting, then, that here we’ve been swimming in the Wisdom of Spaciousness, the last in our exploration of the five enlightened qualities of mind, each one pointing to a different facet of wakefulness: Equanimity & Equality, Clarity, Discernment, Effortlessness, and now — Spaciousness!

Illustration by Beatriz Camaleao

Spaciousness is the vast, openness of awareness that can hold all of our experience — every thought, feeling, identity, vibe — just as it is. Even the experience of being contracted, of being lost, of being… non-spaciousness!

We can get a direct taste of this quality in our own experience, as we did in last week’s meditation on being an ecosystem, where we probed into what it means to be a body with a personality.

And now, to wrap’er up, here’s a delicious Sky Gazing practice.

This meditation was recorded live at Omega, outside in the shade, on a beautiful, bird-chirpy morning. 🙃

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It’s a practice I call Touching Earth & Sky (a title borrowed from Alan Wallace, in his transmission of The Vajra Essence by Dudjom Lingpa).

Here’s how it goes:

• Lie down with a view of sky. (We did this with folks on blankets under the trees.)

• Let the Earth take your weight. Surrender your bones to the ground. (Spend extra time here! Relaxation is the foundation of full presence.)

• Soften your eyes and gaze into the sky. (Not the sun! No burnt retinas, please.) If you don’t have access to open sky, you can imagine it above you.

• Then let awareness do what it knows how to do: Open. Stretch. Merge with sky.

• Thoughts will come. Let them unravel like clouds. Notice how they arise, move, and then vanish without trace, like the footsteps of a bird in the sky.

• Give your full curiosity to the unboundaried vastness of mind. (Where does it begin? Where does it end?!)

This practice melts through the conceptual mind that wants to understand awareness, perform presence, explain spaciousness. Instead, let the sky remind you of the mind’s original shape, directly.

So take your headphones and a blanket to a balcony, the roof of your car, a patch of lawn, a clearing in the woods… whatever slice of sky you can find.

Let me know how it goes! 😎

Till next week,

❤️ Lama Tasha