Undefined, Unbothered, Unfolding

A year of Bodhisavage and the wisdom of not knowing what the hell you’re doing

One year ago this coming week, I started this Substack with nothing but a tug in my chest and 100 email addresses. I wanted to create a space where community, practice, and inquiry into consciousness could germinate. A place to unpack all the tools and transmissions my teachers have tucked into my little Lama-sack. A shared field for this great expedition of living.

But before I started the damn thing, I tried very hard to define what it would be.

I Googled ‘wtf is my niche.’ Built Notion boards. Watched YouTube videos that chastised me for not ‘knowing my audience.’ But I kept coming back to “space”. What I wanted was a space where whoever wanted to practice (and whatever wanted to be practiced) could.

Eventually, I tired myself out enough to stop fiddling and just open a field.

That’s what Bodhisavage has become: a space with a rhythm. A little pulsing lantern on a compost heap.

And somehow, over the course of this year, more than 2,000 people have subscribed. We’ve sat together on Zoom, you’ve invited friends, written back. Things have grown here! Space has become place: a warm container for unfolding.

Now, quite perfectly, this anniversary coincides with the last of the Five Wisdoms we’ve been exploring: the Wisdom of Spaciousness.

If you’re new here: this year we’ve been practicing through the Five Wisdoms—a Buddhist psychological framework that describes ways we get caught in confusion, and the clarity that emerges when we relax into awareness.

The self-portrait I drew for my first Bodhisavage post. Still my favorite selfie 😅

In the Dzogchen tradition, we talk about the spaciousness of mind a lot. Mostly because it’s so fundamental to experience and so misunderstood.

“The spaciousness of mind,” my teacher Lama Lena likes to say, “ain’t a cold, dead nothin’”. It’s awake, alive. It’s the very condition that allows all of your experiences to unfold freely.

This is not a poetic suggestion. It’s functional. Without space, nothing becomes. Not a planet, not a body, not a revolution, not a meditation community on Substack.

Spaciousness is how anything happens. It makes room for transformation, for grief, for new thought, for language, for rest. If we want to grow into something new, we first have to encounter that open, undefinability that is our essential nature.

It’s a radical trust in the creative nature of life itself: we stop pretending we can control the outcomes, and start tending to the conditions instead. Good things will grow, if they have the right kind of soil. And that soil is made of presence. And permission. And pause.

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When we lose connection with our inherent spaciousness (which happens all the time), we feel contracted and confused.

We start needing to define everything, name it, map it, bleed it of its mystery and give it a taxonomy. We wanna feel in control. We wanna feel safe. But when we can’t, we sink into the fog of uncertainty. Not sure what to do next.

Losing touch with the natural openness of mind feels like:

• Mapping every angle in a creative work so that it feels impossible to begin

• Over-scaffolding a project so much that the joy of the challenge fizzles out

• Sinking into a depressive haze when you can’t see the details of your future in high definition.

Opening to spaciousness is courageous because it invites the undefinable. But we don’t have to do anything heroic to be there. We just have to make a little room. Hit publish on that wonky newsletter. Sit down at the blank page. Send the longshot email. Let the field open. See what grows.

I have no idea what will emerge in the next year at Bodhisavage (seasonal practice containers? Probably. Workshops? Maybe. A drunken karaoke sangha? Honestly, wouldn’t surprise me). And as a recovering Type-A control freak, I’m learning to love not knowing.

So this month (and every month!), let the Wisdom of Spaciousness go to work on you. Let it loosen you in the middle of your plans. Let it remind you: you are not a concept or a role. You are an open field. And wild things are growing here.

If you want a meditation to reorient you to space, try this one that I did a few months ago over at my buddy Jeff’s Substack.

The Hidden Half of Experience

Thank you for an awesome first year!

Love,

🌼 Lama Tasha

*PS. There will be no Moonlit Sit this month. I’ll be on retreat, so I’ll send some recorded meditations for you instead :)