Hi Friends!
Tonight is our monthly sit on Zoom. There’s still time to register HERE if you want to join! This month’s topic is Effortless Wisdom—what it means to trust the gold that’s already here...

In the middle of Bangkok, inside the grounds of Wat Traimit temple, there’s a Buddha made of five tons of gold. For centuries, it sat encased in layers of plaster—a disguise meant to protect it from looters and invading armies. But, as people do, the monks who did the plastering shirked their mortal coils and took with them the secret of the gold. So generations of people prostrated and made offerings to the plaster Buddha, never suspecting what treasures lay just beneath the surface.
Then, in 1955, as the statue was being moved, a support rope snapped and it fell hard. The plaster cracked! Slowly, the workers chipped away at the ancient stucco to reveal what had always been there: a Buddha of solid gold, that no one had seen for two hundred years.
I have always loved this story. It’s a story about us — the way we layer ourselves with disguises, hide what feels too precious. The way we mistake our temporary disguises for our real essence. The plaster didn’t have to become gold. It wasn’t polished or worked into brilliance. The gold was already there. All it took was a crack.
This idea—that the gold we’re looking for is already here—is hard to trust. We’ve been taught to see worth and wisdom as things we achieve, not things we already are. We don’t believe we’re the Golden Buddha at all. Actually, we think we’re more like the miller’s daughter in Rumpelstiltskin: endlessly trying to spin gold out of straw (and sweat and fear and thin air), convinced that failure will ruin us.
But the gold we seek isn’t something we spin or earn or make. It’s not the prize at the end of your self-improvement plan. It’s what emerges when you stop trying so damn hard to control it all. It’s your “innate unfuckupableness,” as Lama Lena calls it.
I first fell into this relationship with myself a decade ago, during a most monumental breakup. I was completely unmoored. My 12-year relationship (and business partnership) was ending, and so—desperate to duct-tape my life back together—I temporarily moved in with my friend Karine.
Every night, I’d sprawl across her couch like a bag of wet laundry and she’d regale me with hilarious tales from her own seismic lifequakes—like getting divorced and then speeding away from the house with a car stuffed full of whatever she could carry, laughing wildly the whole way; or quitting her cushy law job to become a standup comedian (and writer and humanist priest). She made chaos and heartbreak sound like adventure. So while I was still clinging to my crumbling identity, she was teaching me how to trust-fall into the innate okness underneath it.
“You don’t have to hold it all together, you know,” she said one night, handing me a stiff drink (a healthy pour of straight tequila). “Let it fall apart. It’s happening anyway.”
It was part advice, part dare. In me, something shifted. And that’s when my real practice began. All the meditation I’d done before then was essential prep, but my life had to fall apart completely so I could actually learn to relax into the chaos and the wisdom beneath it. For the first time, I felt what it was like to trust myself.
You don’t need to know what you’re doing—I certainly don’t. Wisdom isn’t about certainty and answers. It’s about trust: trust in this moment, this body, and in the weird perfection of whatever the fuck this is.
It’s happening anyway—the plaster’s already cracking. And that’s okay. That’s where the treasure is.
Let’s sit in that wonky wisdom, at tonight’s sesh 😌
See you there.
❤️ Tasha
Tonight’s 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
We’ll start with a round of the Nine Cleansing Breaths, then rest in innate awake awareness.
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 become a paid subscriber on Substack.
Last night was seriously awesome; for a moment in time my body felt light and free of pain, which hasn't happened in... I don't even know how long. I was able to separate, feel, and release from left to right to center. The various forms of suffering, both physical and otherwise, took the form of thick, pitch-black smoke that slowly decapitated as I breathed in a gentle, glowing turquoise light that allowed me to slowly breathe it out. There was blissful spaciousness surrounding my body, limitlessly in all directions. As thoughts would sneak up on me like playful puffs of multicolored clouds, I would acknowledge and thank them for being with me for a moment and then exhale out the gentle, glowing turquoise light, and they would disperse into the blissful spaciousness. Seriously cool! I find this beautiful space to varying degrees as I remind myself it is always there. Thank you, Tasha, for being so amazing! 🩵
Am so bummed to have missed this. I live in LA and was in the midst of fun evacuation stuff. 😐. If by any chance this was recorded I would love to see the replay.