Green Tara is our wise natural Self: the numinous presence within, our guiding light, that we long to uncover. Green Tara is the mystery, the magic we long to live in, the light in our eyes: as if we’re on a mountaintop while washing dishes, or a nice light breeze rocks our little boat on a calm sea. She’s a model of what we can be like, in our natural state. She’s in us already, loving, joyful, entrancing, even if we’re tied up in pain and don’t easily let her shine.
Green Tara is shown as ageless and beautiful. When old ladies say, ‘I still feel like a young girl inside,’ that’s Tara: bright, ready for life. Our body may be ill or aging; she is the vitality of our inner wise woman, our magnificent natural self. She knows how to be in the world with an awake clear mind, peaceful and relaxed.
The pool at Tara’s feet reminds us of the oceanic depths within, that we plumb in meditation, where our wisdom comes from. In her crown are jewels the colours of the Five Wisdoms: the wise elements, with which Mother Nature creates her forms.
She’s a Tibetan Buddhist Meditation Deity
Tibetan Buddhists meditate on Green Tara to awaken to our true nature. She’s a different kind of goddess from gods like the ancient Greeks, who are subject to jealousy and not always kind. She’s ‘our own mind, in the form of Green Tara.’ She teaches us as we meditate on her. She embodies the love and clear seeing we already naturally have.
We imagine we become Green Tara, to bring out the wise compassionate goddess within: our body is Tara’s body. We use our creative imagination to get a feel for what it’s like to be in her awakened state. Green Tara lives in the ultimate mystery of who we are. she shows us we are made of love, and Mother Emptiness is innate in us.
Green Tara is relaxed and peaceful, bright eyed, smiling, self-possessed, empowered in a non-ego way, gentle, centred, grounded, one with nature. She embodies the Buddhist teaching.
Meditating is a bodily process. Our body is where we live, and where we find wisdom, not by transcending it. Wisdom gained in meditation doesn’t happen in our head. It’s a whole-of-us state, a whole-body knowing. Through her methods, we embody her wise love, head to foot, heart, breath and spirit. We absorb it into our cells, and develop the habit of living like that.
Even if we have little idea what enlightenment might be like, she reminds us, this is our aim: to find the deepest wise love, and awaken to who we are. She keeps the question alive, who am I really? What is it to be awake?
Like a Dream
When we imagine Tara, we use all our inner senses to create the image – touch and body sensation, sound, smell. It’s usually called visualisation; a better word is sensualisation.
When we dream, our depth sends an image to our conscious mind, to heal us. We send the healing image of Tara to our depth, like a reverse dream, for the depth to grow around. Our depth, commonly called ‘subconscious,’ has its own healing processes.
In imagination, we explore, experiment, and let our creative powers take us to new discoveries. In meditation, we take ‘imagining’ to a deep visceral level.
When we imagine Green Tara in front of us, she’s our companion. We develop a relationship with her. It’s a practice ground for how we relate to ourself and to others.
She arises in emptiness and teaches us form is void
Green Tara teaches us to live the mystery of void and form. First we imagine Great Mother space. Tara arises in that space. Form and void are one. The mystery is that we are still here, living in our life, and yet our form is also emptiness. Her body of green light helps us feel what it could be like to be here, and yet also emptiness. Light is not solid. Her light feels like she’s there, yet not in a solid way.
‘We are the union of bliss and emptiness; our self is just an old habit.’ Adzom Paylo Rinpoche.
Our own mind in the form of a deity
Green Tara has a self; it’s not a separate, permanent, clinging, suffering self. This is a different self, our divine self, who we essentially are, shining wise love with good heart. We keep changing, there’s no solid self to be attached to.
She’s the deity within us, which is there when we drop clinging to the idea of a permanent, separate self. She shows us our essential nature is pure awareness, manifesting as a being of light: your own form, your own mind, in the form of Tara.
Her green colour, compassionate skilful action
Her body is made of green light, the light of compassionate skilful action, all-accomplishing wisdom and light of nature. We infuse our body with her light, and explore all through us what it feels like.
One Side Wisdom, One Side Compassionate skilful Action
Her right hand is on her knee in the gesture of giving; the left at her heart shows fearlessness. Her right foot is forward a little so she can jump up and help when needed. Her left leg is drawn back, resting in the peace of primordial wisdom. Green Tara cares for all creatures. She gets her hands dirty, pulling us out of trouble, ignorance and suffering. She takes the peace and steadiness of the meditative state with her into action. She shows us how to live the deep insight of meditation, while active in the world.
Wisdom and compassion are two wings we fly with to awakening.
With Tara, we practise what it’s like to be a compassionate wise woman: resting in union with the vast spacious peace, commonly called Great Mother in Buddhism. We still live and act, in our worldly body, while knowing we’re a part of it all, not separate.
The Eight Fears are Wise Love.
The eight fears are:
praise and blame,
loss and gain,
notoriety and fame,
pleasure and pain.
The eight fears bother us when we hang on to our ego. We fear being hurt by blame, or losing praise. However, we all have the pure nature that can awaken to this mystery that void is form. When we stop hanging on, the mystery will appear.
‘Tantric yogis and yoginis transform negative emotions to positive,’ said my teacher. Green Tara has many ways of dealing with the eight fears.
She floods it all with her green light of compassion. Compassion dissolves the pain. Our form that we appear in is made of compassion, all form has the nature of compassion.
‘Tara conquers enemies by revealing their nature as emptiness’, (Chimed Rigdzin Rinpoche’s text).
when we’re not trapped in clinging, which is the eight fears, we all have the pure nature that can awaken to void is form.
One way she does this is just to be her glorious self. It all washes off her like water off a duck’s back, she knows it’s emptiness. There’s no substantial reality to anything.
A Woman’s Body
Tara gives a feel of what wisdom can be like in a woman’s body. This is how I felt as a woman. She made me feel more like who I really was, and brought out my real potential which patriarchy suppresses.
The standard Buddhist teaching is that gender is irrelevant, your gender or the deity’s. However, it was enormously helpful for me, to visualise a body the same as my own. My woman’s body can identify with Tara. Nuns do it in Tibet too. Long ago, Tara vowed always to be reborn as a woman, to show women it’s possible to awaken in a woman’s body.
Both men and women practise Tara. For all genders, Tara trains us to experience wisdom in female form. Green Tara is an awakened heroine. We meditate on her to develop those strengths in ourselves.
Spiritual life in the Everyday
Many women have said to me, they want to live their spiritual life in the everyday, not to withdraw to a mountaintop to find our spirituality. Tara’s life-affirming path teaches us to experience ‘ordinary’ life as full of magic and mystery
Tara is active while maintaining her enlightened calm. She finds it in every moment as she acts. That is the path of tantra. Tantra means a thread in woven cloth. we can find awakening in any moment. That makes everything sacred. There’s no thing, no moment, that doesn’t have the Great Mother innate within it.
Magic is always there. Mother moment is the only place to find it. With 24 hour non clinging awareness, we can be in life and have our sacred awareness in every moment.
This is a woman’s way. We can live our spiritual life, running after children, in work, in relationships with people and nature. She’s active and involved. I imagine myself as an awake being, whatever I’m doing.
Life-supporting culture
Green Tara embodies values of a life-supporting way of life.
In patriarchy, compassion and empathy are seen as weak. Caring for all living beings in nature, in our present world, is not respected. All of us, men and women, are honoured for the kinds of strengths that are not seen as weak and effeminate.
Green Tara is not weak. When she strikes the ground the seven worlds shake. She is a powerful goddess of skilful compassion. This is a completely different set of values from the ways we live at the moment. Tara is the strength of men too. Compassion is the power of a true hero, not the capacity to kill, not the power of the sword.
Values associated with mothering are our strengths. These strengths, caring for all life with compassion, are what we need to survive our climate future. Embody Tara’s strengths and feel empowered. Let’s honour our heroes for being like the heroine Green Tara.
In our future of disrupted climate, to preserve our human life, we must also preserve the life of all nature. Mother Nature supports our life; we can’t live without her. We can build our whole way of life, our life supporting sustainable future, on Tara’s mothering ways, which are the same as Mother Nature’s: caring for the life of all beings.
21 Taras: