Green Tara has 20 sisters. They each specialise in practising and living wise compassion in a different area of life.
There are several sets of these. You will find my paintings of the set I practice most, here:
.
These are arranged in a mandala of the four directions, the five elements. So our knowledge of the elements can help us understand them.
One reason I love these Taras is, they show us how to work with emotions, and transform confused emotions to wise love.
As a woman, I feel my emotions have to be part of the practice, I can’t put them aside. The teaching says all emotions are pure wisdom, even the most painful and confused ones. If you look at their real nature, they are pure wisdom.
Our way of practising is that each Tara is a form of compassion and wisdom work in detail with our fears and emotions about those issues. We transform them by dissolving them in the coloured light of wise compassion that Tara’s body is made of.
In these times of climate disaster, war, the degradation of nature, many painful emotions arise. The areas our 21 Taras operate are all very relevant to our present issues.
I’ve done a lot of work with these Taras in groups, especially women’s groups,
For women, they are wonderful role models of how we can practice these things in a woman’s body, and in detail, how the different issues in life could be lived in this woman’s mode.
They also show us, on a cultural level, how we could leave patriarchal values behind. They model how we could live in a matriarchy. I use the name matriarchy not for women lording it over men, but an egalitarian system based on mothering values, according to the laws of Mother Nature. We need that for a sustainable future.