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Dharma If You Dare Podcast
What does it take to live a life of meaning and compassion in our busy day-to-day lives? Tune in to get the knowledge and tools you need to help you tackle life’s biggest obstacles joyfully … if you dare!
About Dharma If You Dare
A Planet Dharma Podcast
Dharma Teachers Doug Duncan and Catherine Pawasarat with to share with you the journey to a life of clarity and bliss. Join them on this podcast of excerpts of their live teachings. They share ancient wisdom updated to speak to the current and evolving paradigm of spiritual awakening in our modern age.
Meet the Speakers
Dharma Teachers Qapel (Doug Duncan) and Sensei (Catherine Pawasarat) are spiritual mentors to students internationally and at their retreat center, Clear Sky, in BC, Canada. They are lineage holders in the Namgyal Lineage, both studying under the Venerable Namgyal Rinpoche and other teachers.
Having lived internationally for many years and traveled extensively, Qapel and Sensei draw on intercultural and trans-cultural experience to broaden the range and depth of their understandings of liberation that they share with others.
Catherine Sensei
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Qapel
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Dharma if you Dare podcast
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BONUS Supporting Loved Ones Through the Death Process
We hope you enjoy this soundbite from Doug ‘Qapel’ Duncan on how to support loved ones through the dying process.
For an extended look at death, dying, and rebirth, check out Episode 7 from this season, about 5 recordings back in the podcast feed. You can also watch that talk as a video on your YouTube channel at youtu.be/rzgLkJ1Yxxk.
If you are finding the teachings of Planet Dharma resonate and are wondering how to explore them further, we recommend the free online course called Wake Up: 4 Paths to Spiritual Awakening. This self-study course gives an introduction to the main approaches that Doug and Catherine employ with students to help them find their speediest path to spiritual awakening. You can learn more and register for free by visiting planetdharma.com/wakeup.
Women in Buddhism: Elevating Our Voices
In today’s talk, Catherine Pawasarat Sensei explores the topic of Women in Buddhism. She talks about her early years as a feminist, becoming an attendant for her male teacher, shifting views in the buddhist world around female rebirth & elevating female tantric deities, among other subjects.
If you enjoy this episode and want to learn more about this topic, check out our website: www.planetdharma.com/
We also offer a self-study course on Women in Buddhism on the Udemy online learning platform. In a series of 20 videos, Catherine Sensei offers an in-depth look at sex, gender fluidity, and female and gender-neutral deities, among other topics. She uses the exploration to pose important questions for our own awakening and for the future of the planet. Check it out on UDEMY.
Podcast Transcription:
Host:
Welcome to Dharma if you Dare. I’m Christopher Lawley, Planet Dharma team member and producer of the podcast. In today’s talk, Catherine Pawasarat Sensei explores the topic of women in Buddhism. She talks about her early years as a feminist, becoming an attendant for her male teacher, shifting views in the Buddhist world around female rebirth, and elevating female tantric deities, among other subjects. I’m sure I’m not alone when I say I look forward to hearing more on this topic going forward. And for today, this talk is a great starting point for the conversation. Before we get to the recording, I wanted to let you know that Wisdom Publications has just published an interview with Catherine Sensei and Qapel on their wisdom podcast. It’s a wide-ranging interview, the first half of which lays out a detailed account of the life of Namgyal Rinpoche. It’s a great synopsis of the legacy that this generation of the lineage is currently carrying forward.
The second half of the interview explores the ways that Qapel and Sensei are honoring the Namgyal tradition of bringing the teachings to new frontiers. You can find a link to the episode in today’s show notes or look for episode number 128 of the wisdom podcast on your favorite podcast app. Being interviewed in the same year as teachers like the Dalai Lama and Robert Thurman is a real honor and I know Sensei and Qapel thoroughly enjoyed their conversation with Daniel Akin. And now here’s the recording.
Sensei:
I’d like to talk to you today about women and Buddhism. A lot of this is really related to my personal journey. This is a young field still and so in that sense, it’s an exciting time because this field is really being shaped as we speak and there is a lot of room for exploration and discovery in this field.
I’d like to share with you a little bit about my journey and what I’ve found being a female practitioner in Buddhism. My perspective has been really heavily influenced. It’s essential to me that I lived in Japan for 20 years and part of that time I was really trying to go total immersion for part of that time, not all of it. I had mostly Japanese friends and I spoke Japanese all the time and there was a period of time where I dreamt in Japanese. I do speak and read Japanese and so I have a good sense of at least an Asian perspective and to me, that’s really important when we talk about Buddhism.
But let’s back up a little bit. So I grew up in the United States, I grew up in Kansas City. It’s kind of a wild cowboy town. Still I think people shoot from the hip as they say, still from that part of the country. And then I moved to New York City where I went to university at Columbia. I spent a lot of my young life identifying as a feminist. And my earliest feminist memories were singing, “I am woman, hear me roar” on the piano when I was about 10, I think, kind of singing at the top of my lungs and accusing my parents of being sexist because my sister and I, our chores was to set the table and do the dishes and my brother’s chores were to take out the garbage and I thought they were having a sexist division of labor in our chores.
My parents said well that’s fine, you can take out the garbage too, we’re not Texas. So I had double duty, maybe my first lesson in learning to choose how I presented my arguments. I had a lot of male friends as a young woman in the States and I felt like that was an important part of who I was and in college, I felt like I spent a lot of my time educating my male friends – I’m not sure that’s the right word– but trying to share a female perspective with them.
The Male and Female Gender Spheres in Japan
Very shortly after I graduated I moved to Kyoto, Japan and spent more or less the next 20 years there. Well, it’s a completely different culture. It’s about the opposite of the US culture in lots of ways, in that they have very different gender roles, and one of the things that I learned about in Japan but I had not really been exposed to, and I think is important in this conversation about Buddhism, is that they had what they called different gender spheres. So they had the male gender sphere. This was sort of the world that men operated in, lived, and operated in, and they had the female gender sphere. And then if a man and a woman were a couple, then their spheres would sometimes overlap. But they were still pretty separate and they were supposed to be separate. And it was fine to a lot of people a lot of the time that they were separate, like that was natural. That was a really foreign concept to me. And I really didn’t get it. And I found myself in the male sphere a lot of the time.
The word in Japanese for wife is oksan, which means in the back. And so the whole idea where this came from was that the woman was, the houses were deep and the woman was in the back and the man was in the front and the man was kind of in the front interfacing with the world, doing business and the woman was in the back, usually the kitchen was in the back too.
When I first went to Japan, I was like, well that sucks. I don’t want to be in the back and I don’t want to be stuck in the kitchen! This was a big theme of mine as a young American woman. And it took me about 25 years to appreciate that, in a sense, men are running things from the front, interfacing with the world and women are really orchestrating things from inside. So it’s like coming from a place of depth. I’ve met some couples who the gender spheres work really beautifully with and in a way that I admire and respect and I could never do myself, but I have been really impressed with, wow, this really works. Of course the world is changing all the time and it doesn’t work for everybody anymore and things are changing and so we’re adapting.
A Word on Gender in Brazil
I also lived in Brazil for just under a year in the Amazon and again was exposed to a really different kind of gender relations sort of thing. And that was a mixed, well they were both mixed experiences. Some things were really shocking and offensive both in Japan and in Brazil and in the U. S. and anywhere. And some things were really amazing, like wow, you know, I wish we had this in North America and we don’t and maybe can’t. So in Brazil, people would say things like, you know, you let a woman speak to you that way? You know, a man could say that in public, which I found really shocking. Matriarchs there were incredibly powerful women who were really well loved and well respected by the entire community which is something that I haven’t seen that much, myself in North America.
The matriarchs had a really powerful position. So I just wanted to share that with you as a bit of context that that’s what has informed a lot of who I am and how I see things and my practice. It really has helped me let go of loosen my views around gender and roles and what is discrimination and what’s appropriate and so on it and just really see how it’s in flux. It’s contextual. There’s no right answer. We’re all figuring this out and that’s an ongoing process. So I came back from Brazil, I’ve been in Japan maybe eight years, I was gonna leave.
Becoming a female attendant
I met Doug Sensei and was just deeply impressed by his teachings and I just loved his teachings. I was a freelancer so I could determine my own schedule and I just ended up spending a lot of time with Doug Sensei to get as many teachings as I could. I knew that I needed those teachings. It was like the sort of water to a person in the desert kind of thing.
Paul Jaffe, a sanga brother, and John Monroe, another younger brother, they invited Doug Sensei over to Japan and did us all a tremendous service. Clear Sky really came out of that sanga and that community and that invitation to Doug Sensei and how great that just after a bubble era in Japan, they had the resources to do that. They could invite him over. They could support him and share the teachings with whoever wanted them. That was really a tremendous act of generosity on their part. Paul started out as Doug Sensei’s attendant and then Paul had a sabbatical year and wanted to travel with Namgyal Rinpoche. And so Doug Sensei said to me because most people have jobs, I was around probably the most and it worked well because I spoke Japanese and I could show Doug Sensei around Kyoto and interpret for him and so on. So Doug sensei said to me one day, he says, well Paul’s leaving, I’m looking for an attendant.
And I said, well, I’d like to do it. And I was like, problem solved. You don’t need to look anymore. And he kind of paused and he said, well, traditionally women are not attendants to men. And I said, well, why not? And he said, well it seems like they’re female conditioning is such that they’re always serving people, they’re always looking after people, they’re kind of subservient. The conditioning is a kind of subservient. They need to break through that in order to unfold. And so we don’t want to put them in a role where they’re subservient because that just enforces that conditioning. And somehow I conveyed to him, no, no, no, you’ve got it all wrong. I’ve been taking out the garbage since I was a little kid. I’ve been training, you know? I’m not subservient and, you know, indeed I had spent all my life as a young woman, you know, already breaking through that conditioning. That much was true. And he said, well let’s think about it and, and we’ll see.
And just by chance that night we were meeting the sanga, about a dozen people, you know, maybe eight guys possibly. We were going to go look at the Sakura blossoms at a famous temple. I just spent the next hour or two that we were together in a state of stress because I was just convinced that some guy was going to get the job of being Doug Sensei’s attendant in this kind of, you know, sexist tragedy. You know, a guy would get the job instead of me. And so every time I saw Sensei talking to a man, I’d be kind of hovering in the background, sort of stalking them, trying to ruin their plans or something. I’m being humorous, but it wasn’t an issue. I was the only applicant for the job amazingly, and I became Doug Sensei’s attendant, and it has been a great experience. I did that for 10 or 15 years or so and it was just such a fantastic opportunity to spend so much time with an awakened being and learn from that and listen and watch and observe and receive teachings and so much in situ, so much as situations arose. As I mentioned, Paul and John invited Doug sensei to Japan in the beginning. So it was kind of Paul and John and I were around. Paul and I were around a lot, John was around a fair bit and Greg Molkentin who some of you know, was also around quite a bit and so there we are again, gets me and four guys and Paul and John were older than I was and they had a lot more resources than I did.
They invited Sensei over. I was very grateful. So I remember one time we were all at our temple, Umedono and it was part of my role to make tea. I’d make tea for Sensei and I’d make tea for students when they came over to have an interview with Sensei and so on. And so I was making tea for Sensei and I thought I’d make tea for Paul and John and Greg there too, so I guess I’m not going to not make tea for Greg. And all of a sudden I was like, wait a minute like here I am in a country, Japan, that sort of officially believes that being female is officially an inferior birth and I’m making tea for four guys. How did we get here? It was an interesting moment and when I say the female birth is considered inferior, that’s a kind of official line in Mahayana Buddhism.
The ignorance of Women in Buddhism
They do say that in the text that the female birth is inferior and that female practices a lot, a lot, a lot, maybe she’ll have the good karma to be reborn as a male, in which case she may be able to awaken. You can’t even imagine how much suffering that line of teaching has caused women over, let’s say the last 1000 years or more. And I say, this is where it gets interesting because we have to really distinguish between the scholastic study of Buddhism, which is very important. Most of course Buddhist texts are in other languages and they need to be translated, and they need to be studied and there are lots of texts that haven’t been translated yet. Whether it’s, you know, Sanskrit or Pali or Tibetan or Japanese or Chinese and there’s all these different languages, different versions of the teachings in different languages. Then there’s the practice of Buddhism, and those are really different things. A person can be an outstanding scholar and not practice at all, or a person can practice and not really study. It’s really important that they inform one another and it’s really important that we know which one we’re doing and not confuse them.
I am not a scholar and I can’t really tell you a lot of details about which teachings say for example that being born female is an inferior birth. I have read that the Buddha had never taught that. Not being a scholar, I don’t know whether that’s true, but I’ve read someone else who has said that, that that was a later interpretation only by some people in some countries at some times. But certainly that influenced Japanese Buddhism very deeply. For an excellent work on that subject There’s a book called Engendering Faith by Japanese studies in Columbia University. In The Lotus Sutra, the dragon king’s daughter gets awakened. I don’t know what that means, the dragon king. But his daughter gets awakened and the lotus sutra became very important to female practitioners because it was the only sutra, in Japan, it is the only sutra that they could refer to that had a female awakening.
However, we do know that there were many awakened females. Yeshe Tsogyal, for example, studied with Padma Sambhava (Guru Rinpoche) and became a fully enlightened being and a teacher in her own right. She was Tibetan, well maybe before Tibet existed as a country, but she was from the Himalayas there. And we know that there were others. Mahakasyapa was maybe one of the main students of Shakyamuni Buddha. he was one of the 16 arhats and I only just learned a couple of months ago that his wife was fully awakened. And so I was like, wait a minute. So there were 17 arhats, or at least 17 arhats. And why did they only count them as 16 if there was a 17th, who was female, and how many other female arhats were there? So this is what I mean about, this is the early days, still, that we’re uncovering this information and that we have the wherewithal to piece it together and to share it.
Ironically I started teaching. I was quite happy as Doug Sensei’s attendant in many ways, and I started teaching because, well we started teaching together, because some students started telling us that they thought that I didn’t have any realization because I wasn’t teaching. I was always with Doug Sensei and he was always teaching and I was always kind of handling those teachings. I did a lot of serving Doug Sensei and I was doing a lot of the organization for his teachings and travels and so on. And a number of people told us, well if she had the realization, she’d be teaching. Both Doug Sensei and I were kind of astonished that that was the view. And so we kind of figured I guess I’d better start teaching to help change that view. And so that’s really an example of: Realization doesn’t have anything to do with rolls or robes. Someone said I didn’t wear robes enough, or something like that. So it’s really, really important that we don’t get duped by the forms or by the titles.
Who is a realized being?
It was in Naropa, I think that got sort of busted in this realization by, I think a cleaning lady. He was the head of Nalanda University, which was the greatest Buddhist university at the time and therefore one of the greatest universities, and this kind of bigger woman poor bent over, not a very attractive looking woman just came out to him and says, do you know the meaning of what you’re saying or do you just know the words? He said, well I know the words and she smiled really big and he was like look at her smiling and he’s like and I know the meaning to you know, was into having a Mudita moment and then she started crying and he said, why are you crying? And she says because you don’t know you’re lying. To Naropa’s great credit, he went and studied with Talopa because he knew she was right. This is just an example that realized beings don’t always look like realized beings.
It’s really up to us to pay attention and ask questions and you know, hone the swords of our own understanding so that we can sharpen our own perception, sharpen our own awareness, increase the capacity of our own understanding and also be able to discern a good teacher from, say, a famous person who’s a good speaker. Because there are both and there’s the entire range in between. And so it’s very important that students are active in this. You know, we don’t just sit passively and listen, we go for understanding in a very active way and we need to do that so that we push our own understanding, we push our teacher’s understanding, we push our sangha’s understanding and we can find the greatest realization and hopefully study with those people with the greatest realization.
Resources and Gender in Buddhism
Our lineage has traveled a lot. That’s a really strong importance of our teaching. We were in Ladakh, Ladakh is sometimes called little Tibet. It’s in northern India adjacent to Tibet. We were there for about a month. That was a really wonderful trip. We went to all these monasteries, they were amazing. We had a great time. We learned so much and at some point, I realized we were going to lots of monasteries. I asked our tour guide who was a very sincere Buddhist practitioner, and I said can we go to a convent? And he was like, oh sure. So he organized something. These monasteries were simple. They were living not exactly marginally, but not with the comforts that we take for granted. And we went to this convent and oh gosh! The women were in the most amazing states. They were really shiny and radiant and smiley and their convent was a construction site.
It was like half rubble. I was really shocked. I was not really sure how they were living there because it looked a little bit dangerous. It looked like maybe something had fallen, like a roof had fallen in or something. I inquired and they were like, oh, it’s under construction. But it was not actively under construction. And that was maybe my, my first, first-hand exposure to, I think, monasteries can struggle to be solvent, to support all of their monks. And it was very clear that the nuns struggled more. And so this has been a long theme, not exclusive to Buddhism by any means, but there’s this ongoing theme of access to resources that affects female practitioners in a big way. I don’t think that’s necessarily discrimination. I think that just goes way back into human history where men had greater access to resources because they were physically stronger and that was, remembered they’re kind of at the front of the house.
You know, they’re out to sort of whatever mining or getting timber or something because they’re stronger and that’s what they can do, And, and then if women have some kind of connection with those men then they have more access to resources and so then that can work really well. Nuns probably don’t have that much connection with that many men. So there go the resources. The reason that’s important in Buddhism is that that has just kind of spread out like a huge fan or tsunami or something where we know that there were more awakened women than we know about. They just didn’t get written about that much. They didn’t get, you know maybe their teachings didn’t get preserved. Maybe they didn’t get resources. So their teachings weren’t preserved at all. Maybe their teachings exist but haven’t been translated for example.
So as we can see just in our lives, our own lives today, you know, resources is a really big issue and so we just wanna think about or reflect on how that influences practitioners and then how that influences our views, how that influences our ability to practice. When I talk about our ability to practice, I really wanted a woman teacher when I was a young woman before I had a teacher. And I spent several years looking for a female teacher. Two things happened: one, I didn’t find a female teacher, there were not that many of us, and then there were fewer back then. And two, I realized that if I was looking so hard for a female teacher, I probably needed a male teacher. I figured I probably had some work to do, which I think was true. We’re in a really important time in human history where women do have access to resources. We can, in a sense, kind of generate our own resources. This is very, very new in human history.
Women, BIPOC, and other cultures in Buddhism
I just encourage everyone to work with this phenomenon very consciously in how you show up as a practitioner. I think that we can extrapolate this. If we talk about the relationship between male and female practitioners then one thing that’s of great interest to me is: Buddhism in North America is so white, and Buddhism has been in North America for quite some time, mostly in Asian communities, primarily in Asian immigrant communities which we don’t hear about very often. So when you talk about Buddhism in America, I think it’s not unusual to think about the well-known white teachers, probably disproportionately male, not 50-50, anyway. And then that goes down the line to: What about practitioners and teachers of color? What about practitioners and teachers who are not in the binary gender spectrum? So I think this question of women in Buddhism can be really important moving forward because what I’m really excited about is Global Buddhism. You know, what Buddhism looks like in Latin America?
What is Buddhism look like in Africa? it’s gonna look different and as our consciousness increases about living on one planet, this comes to be really important. I don’t think it’s a good idea for global Buddhism to be dominated by White American Buddhism. And that’s possible because America kind of dominates the global media. So I think we wanna use women and gender in Buddhism as a kind of template for all these other dynamics that are increasingly important now.
Guru/Consort Equality
So I have a confession to make. I was doing a practice with Guhyasamaja, who some of you may know, and that’s a tantric practice. It’s a Yab/Yam male deity with a female consort. (There are at least 100 and eight deities.) I have done more mantras in that because they sometimes have multiple mantras and it can be intimidating, daunting task to do, 100,000 of all those mantras. But I realized with some grief that when I did a tantric deity, I generally only did the male practice side of the practice and if I did the female it was like a really small, you know, maybe at best 75/25, probably less than that, maybe 90/10 or something. On a more hopeful note, I’ve been asking Doug Sensei permission to add to the sadhanas, the tantric sadhanas to make sure that the name of the female consort is there and that her mantra is there. And sometimes we find some other really amazing information and I get Sensei’s permission to add that in. And so well I’m kind of sorry, I’m kind of not, that I just doubled everybody’s number of mantras that we’re gonna do, but that means double the realization. Right, Right? But you know, it’s moments like that that I realized like, wow, I’ve been a feminist since I was 10 or whatever you wanna call it, you know, working for gender equality my whole life, and I’m not saying the female mantra. It really makes me realize how deep this is for all of us and how awesome it is that we have the power to change it.
Host:
We hope you enjoyed this episode. Please rate and review Dharma if You Dare on your favorite podcast app to help more people find and benefit from these teachings. And don’t forget to subscribe to get episodes and bonus content sent directly to your device. As I mentioned in the introduction, Sensei and Qapel really enjoyed being able to connect with Daniel and the wisdom podcast. Planet Dharma is, as the name suggests, committed to forwarding the vision of a truly planetary manifestation of 21st-century teachings of awakening. If you have a publication or a podcast that is interested in adding the voices of Qapel and Sensei to your conversation, you can reach out to me at [email protected], and I’d be happy to put you in touch with our administrative team to explore what that could look like. See you next time, and may all our efforts benefit all beings.
Flipping the Switch: Realizing Our Buddhanature
In today’s talk, Catherine Pawasarat Sensei and Doug ‘Qapel’ Duncan explore the topic of Buddha nature. They look at the various terms that are used to describe it and highlight the challenge of talking about Buddha-nature in a way that doesn’t fall into a conceptual trap that separates us from it. Qapel and Sensei also discuss switched-off and switched-on potential, how Buddhanature gets obscured, and how an effective spiritual practice helps remove these obscurations.
Helping people experience a spiritual awakening is the reason Planet Dharma exists. If you are also passionate about unfolding and awakening deeper and more quickly, we encourage you to enroll in one of our online courses. Each year Qapel and Sensei host multiple online courses live on various topics to empower participants to dive deep into their awakening spiritual practice. Learn more about upcoming opportunities to join these online offerings at planetdharma.com/online.
Podcast Transcription:
Welcome to Dharma Food. I’m Christopher, a Lolly Planet Dharmama team member and producer of the podcast in today’s talk Katherine Sensei and Doug couple Duncan explore the topic of Buddha nature, they look at the various terms that are used to describe it and highlight the challenge of talking about buddha nature in a way that doesn’t fall into a conceptual trap which separates us from it. Koppel and Sensei also discussed, switched off and switched-on potential. How Buddha’s nature gets obscured and how an effective spiritual practice helps remove these obscure actions, helping people experience a spiritual awakening is the reason planet karma exists. If you are also passionate about unfolding and awakening deeper and more quickly we encourage you to enroll in one of our online courses each year, couple and Sensei host multiple online courses live on various topics to empower participants to dive deep into their awakening spiritual practice, learn more about upcoming opportunities to join these online offerings at planet dot com slash online and now here’s today’s recording today, we’d like to speak to you about buddha nature and what is buddha nature and what kind of difference does it make in our daily lives in our spiritual practice When we talk about the buddha, the buddha was a historical person of the clan means sage of the Shakya clan.
However often when we talk about a Buddha, we’re not talking about a person, we’re talking about a realization state of rerealization when we talk about rerealization means someone who understands the true nature of reality. So it’s a kind of understanding and when we talk about nature, it’s not an object or a thing it’s more an awareness or a way of being. I was thinking we have these beautiful picture windows here, that are more than a picture window. This is like a drive-in window, we have these big windows out onto nature, this beautiful nature outside here in front of us. And I was gonna say that’s not the kind of nature meant here, but it kind of is right because consciousness is present in everything, including in nature. It’s the natural way of being, the natural way of things And consciousness is everywhere including in nature, especially in nature, which is why we love to go there So when we’re in alignment with nature, the natural way of things, then we’re in touch with this consciousness with this reality, this at one moment this feeling of unity.
So that’s why they say the Buddha or the Christ, they’re not referring to a person, they’re referring to an understanding or realization. So when we talk about Buddha nature, we’re talking about pure perception. We’re talking about consciousness without an object or not necessarily without an object per se, but not seeing any inherent reality in that object. So that means that just this moment, the way it is just now without any comments, observations, thinking or other kinds of marks of it is Buddha nature. And then when we talk about consciousness as a form of awareness, it has certain qualities that we assign names to. But in a sense, if it’s Buddha nature, it can’t be named, you can’t put a name on it because as soon as you do that, you’ve turned it into a concept you’ve turned it into an idea and now you’re caught you’re kind of trapped in the conceptual mind or the thinking mind.
So in that sense, buddha nature is awareness or pure perception and those qualities we assign it like totality, it’s kind of the, it’s the entire field of consciousness not being delineated by discriminations or divisions. It also has a quality of what we call insubstantiality. There’s no object to be found anywhere in the universe really, because as you look deeper and deeper into the atom, it gets less and less substantial So for that reason, this kind of combination of totality and insubstantiality, It’s sometimes called the gaGarbawhich means bach dinosaur garba means womb and tata to means basically that just that. So it’s kind of the womb of form or the womb of manifestation to target a garba Sanskrit and Sanskrit as we said many times, is a language that was created to describe consciousness. So it’s a fascinating language and helpful to have, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t say it’s necessary to study it, but it is helpful, and as we’ve described many times if you look in the Sanskrit dictionary for words such as there’ll be many, many, many different definitions of it.
So it’s kind of a philosophical language where it’s very difficult to translate with one word. So as Doug sensei said, garba means womb One translation is womb of such nous to target to means a kind of such nous way of being targeted. Garba can also be translated as the embryo Of one who has gone beyond. So an awakened being is sometimes referred to as one who has gone beyond this understanding of totality and this lifetime is kind of a womb for that We all have Buddha nature, and we all have this potential to have this understanding. So I like to think of us as being in that womb in the process of gestating, being born, and growing up. So despite all the teachings to the contrary, realizing your Buddha nature or realizing the innate quality of the universe as being inherently spacious, Blissful, and empty is not difficult.
It’s quite simple. InIt’so different. It’s so simple that it’s really hard because if you watch a ballerina or a professional athlete do their thing and make it look so easy. But that ease comes with great practice. So the practice that you’re involved in is to understand, first of all, that Buddhism is not a religion, it’s a methodology, it’s a map, you might call it a map to the reel and as you know, a map is not a reel, A map is a concept. It’s a construction and like a recipe, it’s not a cake. So Buddha dharma Buddha realization isn’t the recipe It isn’t the formula, it’s the cake itself. And to take it even just a little bit further. It’s not just the cake, it’s the taste.
There’s no sense hain ving a cake if you don’t eat it. So they sometimes talk about the one taste and circling back on itself. The one taste is that experience of this exact particular moment in your mind that just is by itself without concept, without thinking, without feeling, without even necessarily sensation. Just the field of the mind itself. And so in a sense, buddha dharma isn’t all about the teachings and all about the methods and all about the concepts. It’s about that one taste of resting peacefully in this moment without worrying about you. And the easiest way to do that is to drop dead. In other words, drop dead to yourself, Let yourself be dead now and appreciate the next moment that arises because with the death of you will go, all those things get into trouble. I’d like to emphasize what was said before that this is very easy and to prove it.
I’d like to point out that we have all had this experience of just being in the moment, of the sense of me passing away, and of that being very blissful. Well, that’s the only thing you ever have. I mean in truth, the only thing you ever have is this moment, and all you’re thinking and feeling and sensations and so on about it are constructs. They’re built around ideas, thoughts, beliefs, attitudes, etcetera etcetera. So in a way, if your ego is butter, buddha nature is milk, and butter is just a form of milk in a way. Or you could say the same way that a seed is permeated with oil. When you have a seed you think oh I’m going to use the seed for this, that, or the other. But the essence of the seed is oil.
So these are kinds of metaphors, these are metaphors for Buddha nature. So we all have this access to Buddha nature just because everything is permeated with Buddha nature the same way that as Doug sensei says, milk is permeated with butter or seeds are permeated with oil, it’s there all the time in its potential and just could use a little help to emerge. And that’s what the methodologies are for the methodologies of Buddhism. These are the methodologies to allow the oil to emerge from the seed or to allow our Buddha nature to bake up more and more of our awareness or our day. It’s an allowance, it’s a permission, it’s a surrender. It’s an opening and that’s why we talk about it metaphorically is like dropping dead because if you’re just quiet, if you can just find that quiet space where nothing has to happen particularly, then that’s Buddha nature.
Now, the difficulty is that we live in our bodies and we have lives and jobs and careers and so on and and egos. So the difficulty is taking that realization, which is very simple, and remembering to apply it in our day-to-day lives and our interactions and what we do, and that’s where we tend to lose it again because as soon as we get back out into the so-called real world of the material we get caught up in agendas and desires and likes and dislikes and then we forget this buddha nature and that’s where our suffering tends to kick in because fundamentally whatever we’re trying to create or manifest or hold or hang on to or have in our relative worlds is obscuring the buddha nature and in the process of obscuring it, our struggles start because we’ve mistaken the appearance for the reality and to be fair part of the challenge of a spiritual being today is navigating this spending time in Buda nature together simultaneously with living in the contemporary world, which we all do.
So if someone says Greg, what is your opinion, it’s probably not very skillful to say I don’t have an opinion because I am dwelling in such nous, I’m at one with the universe that is probably not gonna help the way that we’re trying to skillfully navigate contemporary society, right, your employer or your colleagues might not find that interesting or amusing or profound and yet we want to keep one ft in that space at all times because that’s where our natural vitality comes from. That’s where our insights come from, That’s where wisdom comes from. That’s where our compassion comes from and we need to walk that balance, live that balance. So the other aspect of this is no obstructions two worlds aren’t in conflict, you don’t have a problem being in Buda nature insofar as you can do that.
And also go about your day-to-day life and your job, you just have to recognize that your day-to-day life and your job is theatre. It’s a production, it’s a movie, it’s a kind of dance that you’re doing, and where we get stuck isn’t in the production of the movie or the dance or whatever it is we’re doing, where we get stuck in is when we measure or start to evaluate how we’re doing good, bad, better worse winning, losing ahead behind love, noon-love working You know, all those things are just constructs of the mind, their theater. And if you’re dwelling in Buddha nature, then you start to see life in particular but everybody’s life as theatre. It’s a, it’s a dance when we get into trouble with people, it’s because they’re refusing to play their role in our dance and we’re not playing the role they want us to play in their dance.
And again, this is where the obscuration of Buddha nature arises. The entire path of teaching all the practices, everything you do for the practices and the teaching is simply to help you see through the theatre of your own life and see the Buddha nature within. That is a great analogy because a truly great actress or actor can play any kind of role And if you’re really good, you can improvise any kind of role depending on the other players on the stage And that’s what can be challenging for us as our ego gives shape to preferences and then we don’t want to play that role, and we don’t want you to play this other role. And that’s where our suffering comes from. Yeah. So, of course, it’s always a great challenge as a teacher to remember that you’re playing the role of a teacher inherently.
You don’t need a teacher, no teacher is necessary. Life is the teacher. There’s no teacher anyway because teachers a concept, and teacher means something has been taught and nothing has to be taught because you already know this nature is what you already are. It’s already the core of what you move from. So where we get caught and our greatest perhaps our greatest obscuration in this process is kind of a belief in substantiality that there’s a thing in front of you. There’s a thing called an idea. There’s a thing called an object and so on. And science is founded on substantiality and they say, well, consciousness is a result of mind and matter. But the truth is the reverse consciousness Mind is the constructor of materiality, substantiality And it does that through karmic tendencies. So let’s take a look at this again.
In Buddhism in particular, we hear a lot about obscuration. So what that’s referring to basically is anything that is obscuring our true Buddha nature, which is there all the time, And then obscure actions cover that up and get in the way of that. And so the spiritual path is really about either removing these obscure actions or allowing the obscuration to fall away because it doesn’t need to be done. You know when I say removing the obscuration we just need to allow it to happen and that’s what every spiritual practice is designed to set up those supporting conditions. So when we talk about the spiritual path, we talk about it sometimes in three phases The first is purification. So that allows a lot of impurities, we could say or obscure attractions sometimes called the file mints to fall away and the realization we realize Buddha nature, oh this has been there all the time and beautification.
Then we get shiny. That’s where the halos come from. Right. The darkness falls away and our true nature is we are beings of light and that’s why in paintings and so on. Holy beings, beings who are whole, who have been reintegrated with their Buddha nature have halos or auras of Buddha nature. Again, enlightenment and liberation are understanding insubstantiality, 90% of the masses are from virtual particles We emerge from nothingness. How do you mean virtual particles? Well, virtual particles aren’t reel in quantum physics. There’s no such thing as a particle for instance, in a vacuum, in space, a Geiger counter will still take. What does that mean? This means that it’s measuring something even though there’s nothing there, what we’re saying is that even in a vacuum there’s consciousness, there’s a consciousness that is ticking and it’s ticking when gathering enough momentum of consciousness itself starts to produce form and from there it starts to create virtual particles.
Virtual atoms! In other words, it’s just another way of saying insubstantiality, nowhere in the universe are you going to find a thing. So when Catherine and I do this it seems like a thing. But what you’re getting is you’re getting a law of relative densities. The density of the vibrational energies of the Catherine Sensei meet the vibrational energies of the Doug Sensei and those gravitational energetic forms bounce against each other and that creates matter and from matter comes everything that we hang on to and care about And so while you’re out in your life, living your life going about, your job, etcetera, etcetera. You need to remember in terms of Buddha-nature that you’re not there there is no Maya to be found There are vibrational energies held together by thought patterns, emotional patterns, karma, and nutrients form, and then it’s the attachment or clinging that Maya frank, for example, has to this that creates her whole life and therefore her suffering and her joys and happiness is because in buddha nature there is neither joy nor happiness, there just is less nous to target the garba buddha nature, whatever you wanna call it, which is inherently blissful.
So just a contemporary note about remembering that we’re not there that were in substantial, the spiritual realization is embodied in this lifetime. Right? And it’s very important that we also be embodied in good physical health and being grounded is very, very important for contemporary spiritual awakening. I think North Americans particular, want a very Western culture, in general, which can very appear and unenergetic we can be a very intellectual lot of spiritual seekers who also explore wings and other substances and must stay grounded on the earth, and experience the spiritualization through the vehicle of this body. So we don’t fly off into yeah into never, never land and this is why some spiritual crisis can happen that way if we’re not embodied, if we’re not grounded that can lead to spiritual crisis which we do not wish for you so grounded in the body please So one way to demonstrate this is a pile of beans.
So you’ve got a pile of beans. Now imagine a pile of beans in front of you and I think you’ll all say there’s a pile of beans. So the pile seems very real. Nobody’s gonna argue. I suppose I hope that there’s a pile of beans there. So let’s take away one bean, let’s take away another bean, we take another bean away until we’ve taken all the beans away. What happened to the pile? We thought the pile was a substantial thing but the pile is a concept. There is nothing called the pile except the concept used to describe reality. You take the beans away, the beans are still there but where did the pile go? So when we talk about our suffering and our struggles in our life and our ungrounded nous, it’s because we don’t recognize the relationship between beans in this case buddha nature and the pile which is a concept and when you apply that to your personal life, you understand your job, your career etcetera etcetera are piles, there are piles of things made up of these insubstantial moments called buddha nature.
So the ego is a construct and that’s what they call the grand delusion or the grand illusion is that the ego is a thing, but it’s a pile of beans. So we all have this Buddha nature and we all have the potential for enlightenment. So according to the classical texts potential may be switched off. However, through the spiritual practices, through the meditative methodologies offered by buBuddhismnd other their wish traditions, it is completely within our power to switch on this potential. And we do this through the cultivation of virtue and that includes things like the Eightfold Noble Path and the pyramids. That’s why we practice those things. We are practicing wholesome habits. That will lead us to a clearer space where we can have, where we can connect with Buddha, realizing this understanding of totality or the nature of reality the true nature of reality.
So imagine a mirror and your mind is a mirror. The mirror by itself is empty of an image until you put something in front of it Now, of course, you know, if a mirror is facing the wall, you’re gonna see the wall, but for a minute just imagine a mirror with nothing in front of it. And then you go stand in front of it. So the mirror generates that image. You see yourself in the mirror and then you walk away and now there’s nothing in the mirror anymore. So your Buddha nature is like a mirror, it reflects or demonstrates whatever’s put in front of it. So if you put soccer in front of the mirror reality will be the soccer game. And if you remove the soccer and you put it in ballet, then ballet will be in front of this mirror. So the nature of Buddha nature is like a mirror, it reflects whatever is put in front of it, and what gets put in front of it is based on karma it’s based on habitual patterns and habitual tendencies of you or me or Catherine or anyone to put something in front of that mirror and then get attached and cling to that image in front of the mirror when it’s still the mirror itself stains clear.
So life, your ego, and your being are like designs drawn on water and as long as you keep drawing your designs on the water you have you a, and if you rest just in the water you have the spaciousness. Now from that point of view go draw whatever design you want. And this is why we cultivate virtue. We developed these habits of say mindfulness but didn’t because it feels better to be in the present moment. So we have all different kinds of methodologies to cultivate that habit of being mindful of being aware, which feels better and allows us to have better contact with our true Buddha nature. We hope you enjoyed this episode. Please rate and review dharma if you dare on your favorite podcast app to help more people find and benefit from these teachings and don’t forget to subscribe to get episodes and bonus content sent directly to your device.
If you’re looking to incorporate more activities into your life to support contemplation and introspection I recommend our weekly reflection series called 52 Reflections. Sign up for free and once a week you’ll receive a short passage and follow-up that you can use to frame your day, your week, or a meditation session. You can learn more and sign up for free by visiting planetdharma.com/52-reflections See you next time and may all our efforts benefit all beings.
BONUS Chakras and the Shadow Before Psychology
We hope you enjoy this soundbite from Doug ‘Qapel’ Duncan and Catherine Pawasarat Sensei on how Buddhism worked with the shadow before modern psychology existed to name this aspect of our psyche.
And a note of clarification: In the talk, you’ll hear Qapel and Sensei reference Passionate Enlightenment, which is a book by Miranda Shaw on the history of women in Tantric Buddhism.
Today’s bonus recording covers ideas that Qapel and Sensei explore in detail in their bestselling book, Wasteland to Pureland: Reflections on the Path to Awakening. The third section of the book is entitled ‘Crazy Wisdom’ and covers a wide variety of topics, including The Shadow, Tantra, Money, Sex & Power. Podcast listeners can download a free chapter from this section of the book by visiting planetdharma.com/crazywisdom.
Podcast Transcription:
Chris: Welcome to this Dharma if you Dare bonus episode. We hope you enjoy this Soundbite from Doug Qapel Duncan and Catherine Pawasarat Sensei on how Buddhism worked with the shadow before modern psychology existed, to name this aspect of our psyche. And a note of clarification, in the talk you’ll hear them reference passionate enlightenment. This is a book by Miranda Shaw on the history of women in tantric Buddhism.
Student: Yeah. Before we had psychology, for example, 500 years ago, how did practitioners clear or understand the shadow with regard to money, sex, and power?
Qapel: They didn’t. There was no psychology. So let’s be clear, awakening is not a static process. The fundamental aspect of awakening is that you see through the illusion of the self. Now every generation gets richer, and it gets fuller. So the awakening itself doesn’t change but it gets more full. So think about it as a balloon.
So before psychology and all this stuff, the balloon of awakening was like this. Now psychology comes in and changes the game. Quantum physics changes the game, right? Science changes the game, the arts, change the game, changes social-cultural social patterns, and changes the game. And psychology changes the game and in the next generation, it will change the game again, awakening balloons, But its essence doesn’t change. Does that answer your question?
Student: What I mean is how did they work with the lower three chakras before we had psychology, through ritual or meditation only?
Qapel: Yeah
Sensei: Well, and through things like renunciation or through its opposite. So the Buddha had a harem and then gave up sex.
Qapel: Supposedly
Sensei: Supposedly in his lifetime. That’s, that’s how the story goes. And he had a fortune, he had a kingdom and he gave all of that up. So that’s definitely working with those three chakras and you know, people were begging him to stay and everything.
So that’s the renunciation path. And then if you look at the stories of the Vajrayana practitioners, especially the Maha cities Oh, they’re just flying in the face of the status quo at that time. So, you know, mothers walking out on their husbands and Children for example, or I think that was just one story. There are just two female Maha cities I think in the classic 87.
Qapel: In the classic. But as we go back to passionate enlightenment, we’re all these tantric male gurus that you hear about, in the 82, Maha cities all had female guru concerts. So these were people breaking all the traditions and all the cultural taboos of their society. Yes, that’s another reason.
Sensei: That’s a great book because she found original texts that had not yet been translated and that’s where some of the stories of these women who are wisdom holders came from. So a lot of it’s about who has the text who wrote the text, who’s translating the text. Another form of power.
Qapel: You also have to remember that our Western culture is very much about power and control Eastern culture doesn’t have the same orientation. Eastern cultures. Great constrictions on its people are about agreeing with the social malu, fitting into the social fabric, right? They don’t have the same issues about sex and money necessarily, but they do have it about fitting into the social fabric. So a lot of the Buddhist and tantric and Hindu practitioners were breaking the sadhus in Hindu culture, right? We’re breaking the fabric of their cultural paradigm. They did it by going outside.
Sensei: So that would be, for example having sex with somebody from a lower caste than you. That’s another common theme. Or having a teacher from a lower caste, social caste, than you.
Qapel: Yes, there’s still a cult. If you want to call it that in India, which is non-monogamous, they don’t marry. They get together occasionally, they wander around. They are nomadic, they don’t get married, they take the kids, and raise the kids cooperatively. They don’t fit into the fabric of the Hindu framework of values and culture in society. So awakening isn’t about breaking the rules of your society, awakening is about transcending the rules of your society, and in some ways, it makes you an outcast, but from a skill and means point of view, right? You have to be in the world, but not of it, you have to know how to give unto caesar, what is caesar’s, and still do what you need to do to break free.
Sensei: So, I think the short answer is these are ways that they worked with those three chakras are all the issues with three chakras. So self-identity, Power and control, sexuality, and security. I think the big differences are that because there wasn’t psychology, they didn’t spend a lot of time talking about it and processing it or narrating it. We spent a lot of time narrating our processes. Which can be good and it can be another kind of Eddie that we get lost in, depending on how we use it.
Qapel: I can’t say for sure, but I think the swollen balloon if you want to call it that in the coming millennium in the Aquarian Age, is going to be a large part of how we organize around human relations: gender, careers, etcetera. So, the Piscean Age identified successes as kind of like hierarchical colon fixed and relationships are nuclear and all that kind of stuff. I think the swollen balloon in the future is going to be undefined human relationships and undefined identities based on what you do.
Sensei: Not so fixed,
Qapel: Not so fixed. It’s gonna blow that out.
Chris: We hope you enjoyed today’s sound bite. Today’s bonus recording covers ideas that Doug and Catherine explore in detail in their best-selling book Wasteland to Pure Land. The third section of the book is titled “Crazy Wisdom” and covers a wide variety of topics, including the shadow tantra and Money, Sex, and Power. Podcast listeners can download a free chapter from this section of the book by visiting Planetdharma.com/crazy wisdom.
Consciousness Continues: Navigating Death, Rebirth & the Bardos
Today’s recording is a talk that Doug ‘Qapel’ Duncan gave recently on the topic of death, dying and the bardos. In the talk, he explores how we really experience a death in every moment, and describes in detail the steps in the death process and how consciousness finds its way to its next rebirth.
If you are looking to incorporate more activities into your life to support contemplation and introspection, we recommend our weekly reflection series called ‘52 Reflections’. Sign up for free and once a week you’ll receive a short passage and follow-up prompt that you can use to frame your day, your week or a meditation session. You can learn more and sign up for free by visiting planetdharma.com/52reflections.
BONUS Integrating the Lower 3 Chakras
We hope you enjoy this soundbite from Doug ‘Qapel’ Duncan and Catherine Pawasarat Sensei on how to access higher states of consciousness through clearing the lower 3 chakras.
Today’s bonus recording covers ideas that Qapel and Sensei explore in detail in their bestselling book, Wasteland to Pureland. The third section of the book is entitled ‘Crazy Wisdom’ and covers a wide variety of topics, including The Shadow, Tantra, and Money, Sex & Power. Podcast listeners can download a free chapter from this section of the book by visiting planetdharma.com/crazywisdom.
INTERVIEW Ecology + Spirituality: Connecting with the Universe
In this interview, Catherine Pawasarat Sensei talks about the impact our views of connection with – or disconnection from – our natural environment have on the quality of our lives moment to moment. She highlights the centrality of natural laws in the very essence of the meaning of ‘dharma’. She also talks about her own journey of fully connecting with her ecosystem and reflects on what we can do as practitioners to help us do the same.
If these teachings resonate with you, we recommend you check out Planet Dharma’s library of articles on the website. There are over 100 blog posts offering dharmic perspectives on all sorts of issues of interest to awakening beings. You can check them out at planetdharma.com/articles.
To listen to more podcasts or to subscribe, check out our podcast page here: https://www.planetdharma.com/podcast/
Podcast Transcription:
Welcome to Dharma If You Dare.. I’m Christopher Lawley, Planet Dharma team member and producer of the podcast. I’m very excited to be bringing you our second ever interview with Planet Dharma’s teachers. This time it’s a conversation with Catherine Pawasarat Sensei on the intersection between spiritual awakening and ecology. One of the goals of these interviews is to highlight a particular area of engagement that Qapel and Sensei have that inform who they are as teachers since both have a wide variety of areas of interest and expertise that inform the fields and modalities that they integrate into their teaching. For Cata Sensei had an early career as an environmental journalist. She is very interested in issues of sustainability and as she describes in the interview, the split humanity has created between itself and the natural world. During our conversation, Sensei talks about the impact that our views of a connection with, or disconnection from, our natural environment have on the quality of our lives from moment to moment. She highlights the centrality of natural laws in the very essence of the meaning of dharma. She also talks about her own journey of fully connecting with her ecosystem and reflects on what we can do as practitioners to help us do the same.
I wanted to also mention if you enjoy hearing Sensei and the Qapel’s thoughts on various topics, I suggest you check out Planet Dharma’s library of articles on the website. There are over 100 blog posts offering dharmic perspectives on all sorts of issues of interest to awakening beings. You can check them out at planetdharma.com/articles.
And now here’s the interview:
Christopher Lawley (CL): Well, thanks for making time for this.
Catherine Sensei (CS): My pleasure.
May it benefit all beings.
CL: So before we get started with the interview in earnest, I’m wondering how things are at Clear Sky right now. How’s the weather? what’s life like out there?
CS: It’s really good. Qapel and I, we took a short holiday, we did a drive around the Okanagan. I’m not sure if that’s geographically accurate to say that’s what we did, but we drove over to Nelson and over to a Osoyoos and up to the Similkameen and Penticton and Revelstoke, and then down the other side through Nakusp down to Creston. Yeah, it’s a lot of beautiful scenery and nice to have a change of pace. We just got back last night and it’s great here. We have five karma yogis on-site: Jenai as you know and then two from the summer, and two new ones just arrived, just the day before we left. And so it’s really exciting. They’re all really keen and bright and talented and hungry for dharma and it’s really great, and beautiful weather, beautiful autumn day. How is it there in Calgary?
CL; Yes, also beautiful autumn definitely. It goes up and down. So like a yo-yo here it’s always interesting. You never know what you’re gonna get in the morning but the skies here are just always gorgeous. It’s interesting when you were talking about going on your visit to B.C., and it sounds like visiting nature – we’ve talked so many times that I’ve heard you speak in different classes and with other teachers, the beauty of nature and how nourishing it is and how important it is to be in nature, to have moments of connection like that. And when I was thinking about what to ask you about ecology and spirituality, I was struck by my memory of how our sangha had difficulty understanding why the ecological restoration projects that we undertook that you initiated and led happened. And now in retrospect you know a decade later it seems much more integrated into our sangha psyche. But at the time there really did seem like a large number of us were kind of questioning what this has to do with spiritual liberation. And I was wondering if you could speak to how you see that dynamic either how that showed up in our sangha or in society at large.
CS: Yeah, that’s a great line of inquiry, Chris. Yeah you’re right. I remember when we first started the ecological restoration effort, we could say, I was talking about native plants and the importance of native plants and someone said just very honestly, “what’s the big deal about native plants?” And I was so stunned by that question and I thought it was so self-evident, and yet I really didn’t have an answer to that question, so it really was a good one for me to realize that we need to be able to speak to all the different places that people are coming from, and to help people – we can say help people understand – and I don’t want to make too much of, you know, healing the split that we suffer from – but there really is a – let me speak for myself – I realized one day that I thought of the ecosystem as something separate from myself, and I didn’t consider myself part of the ecosystem. And this was especially surprising and alarming for me, because I’ve worked in different aspects of environmentalism and I worked as an environmental journalist and I lived in the Brazilian rainforest and I’ve been doing that kind of stuff for my whole adult life and I thought, ‘wow, if I’m not part of the ecosystem then what am I doing and what have I been doing all this time and what is everyone else doing?’ So that was a great turning point for me to just take that as meditation is reflecting on myself as part of the ecosystem wherever I happen to be. And that feeling of connection has been so rich and so nourishing, and such a constant source of inspiration and revitalization, it’s kind of like – you know – ‘Catherine before that moment and Catherine after that moment’ kind of experience.
And so I wish that for everyone. It speaks really deeply to the Buddhist philosophy of non-duality. We often – usually when we talk about nonduality, we talk about ourselves and another person or other people. And of course, that’s true. And of course that’s also very important. And then there’s also this bigger ‘us’ and the entire ecosystem ‘us’ in the entire planet or this organism, this organism and all the organisms that are living inside this organism. And then of course the entire universe and life are so much more interesting and easy with that point of view, because, in a sense the entire universe is on our side, we’re all on the same team, the whole planet is on the same team as me and all the plants and I are on the same team. So like, stuff isn’t that hard.
And this accords really well with the truth that dharma, as you know, the root of the Sanskrit word, dharma or dhamma in Pali means law. And we often say the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Noble Path. And of course, of course, that’s true. Those are kinds of laws that the historical Buddha pointed out to us, and what it’s helpful to remember is that those laws have always existed. Those are really natural laws which Taoism also draws on very profoundly. So, really what we’re doing as practitioners of dharma is aligning ourselves ever more deeply, ever ever in a more integrated way, with the natural laws of the universe. And so there is this beauty and effortlessness that comes with that, and energy. Right? Well the sun has all this energy and I have access to the same energy that the sun does, because I’m a part of the same system, for example.
CL: Thank you for that. What was coming up for me while you were speaking, Was that ancient times?Or certainly maybe even a few 100 years ago earlier, this connection to nature would have been more a part of regular life For sure. And I’m wondering whether you see this split that modern life has created as being healed through a return to those earlier ways of relating or do you see us moving into a new way of relating?
CS: You mean relating with one another as human beings or relating with everything with the ecosystem?
CS: Yeah, that is a really great question. I think we want to be very realistic that more than half the world’s population lives in cities now and a lot of these are megacities, and when we’re in a beautiful natural environment that’s expansive, it’s impressive, it grabs our attention in a way that the tree on the street corner might not be right, We can walk by that maybe without being very aware of it. And I think this is one reason why retreats in nature are so valuable because I think once we have the experience, I find, not only can I take it with me everywhere, but I want to and I need to where that tree on the street corner in a big city is now this being that I’m connecting with. And I think having a kind of mutual appreciation of one another. And if I didn’t have the experiences in nature that I’ve had in this case our retreat center, Clear Sky, I’m not sure how I could get to that, not to say it can’t happen, but it’s hard to envision how it could, and so retreats in nature – because of Covid, we’ve been doing some terrific retreats at home virtually. And it’s wonderful that technology empowers us to do that – and yet if your home’s in a city, then I think when we do a retreat in nature and then we’re surrounded by these natural laws and we are in a city to I don’t and I’m not anti-city by any I means – I love cities – but the layer that humanity has constructed is between us and the natural laws in their original state. I’m using that term a little loosely because I wouldn’t say that the nature of Clear Sky’s in its original state either and probably isn’t that many places on the planet that are in their original state, but that’s how it is and that’s okay, that’s what we have to work with. For myself, it was very profound. We have some meditation cabins here at our retreat center, clear sky. And because of zoning issues, they’re not wired, they don’t have electricity and they don’t have water, and they’re well insulated, but I’ve done most of my retreats in winter and well I really wasn’t prepared for that experience despite the great installation and the, you know, double-paned windows and so on. And that was very challenging. I didn’t know how to build a fire, I didn’t know how to keep a fire going, Get these raging fires that were you know, 35 degrees, which is like 100 in Fahrenheit, I’d have to strip off all my clothes because it was so hot. And then and then it would go out really quick and I’d be really cold. It wasn’t great for my formal meditation. And then one morning I woke up and I was so cold that I actually thought that I had made a mistake moving to Canada and then I was going to have to leave and the water was frozen in the offering bowls and I just thought I really can’t take this. And it was painful. It was a lot of suffering involved in that. And, as you know, a lot of our greatest breakthroughs happened through suffering. Please please don’t take that as a kind of masochistic manifesto. But it was the first time in my life I realized that 99% of humanity has been experiencing those things fairly regularly And how did I make it to.. maybe I was 40 years old at the time, how did I make it so long in life with no experience of that whatsoever? So I felt this very profound connection with all of these human beings throughout space and time who’d had that experience and now I’ve had that experience too and such a greater appreciation for skills and paying attention to what was going on with nature. I never needed to do that. I never needed to think about what the weather gonna be like in the morning so I make sure I’m not caught in a situation where the water, my offering bowls might freeze. Not that that’s so terrible, but it was really hard for me to get out of bed and get dressed because it was so cold – and much greater respect for those skills, the need to develop those skills myself and just be a better a rounded human being and more resilient, right? If I can handle those kinds of things, there are a whole lot of other things that I can handle because of that. And I think that’s something that growing up as I did with central heating and running water and flush toilets and so on, that we, we lose a lot of things that really build character. Again, I’m all for running water, flush toilets, electricity.
Another thing that has become apparent to me as time goes by – for every wongkur initiation that we do, we first ask permission to the deities, the devas, the different kinds of beings that we can’t necessarily see – and that includes elemental beings, and for example, nature spirits. And this has really become much more alive to me, the more I’ve been involved with the ecological restoration and I have a much stronger feeling of connection with those beings, and also a much stronger feeling of mutual support that we’re here at Clear Sky, trying our best to take care of the land and help it to be healthy, and that there’s a very good chance that they’re doing the same for us and for all the beings that come to Clear Sky. This is partly what I think of when we talk about creating a blessed Buddha field through our practice, that all kinds of beings are being restored to health, are becoming healthier, are becoming more integrated, are becoming part of us all being the same community, and that must be what they mean when they talk about this beautiful web of life.
CL: Thanks so much. You’ve really touched on so much. You spoke about the view and you’ve spoken about how it can look integrating the view into well in your experience that retreat example or daily life and I was wondering if you had any thoughts about that for kind of either society at large or for spiritual practitioners, the kind of – from what you see in in the people you meet and the students you work with – what you see, the forefront of this kind of work is going forward for these people, or for us.
CS: Yeah, I’m so glad you asked that question because the really important thing to know is when we first got Clear Sky, we had some specialists come to the land and they said, “oh your land is in really bad shape.” And people told us that they thought we could not bring it back to health, they thought it might not be possible. And we’ve been doing this just over 10 years now and now when people come onto our property, people tell us how beautiful it looks and how healthy it looks. And although I’d been working in the environmental field for a long time, I didn’t have any hands-on experience in knowing how to do ecological restoration. So we met people who did know, we’d ask them questions and just tried our best, and it was a gamble and a lot of guesswork and so on, and a constant learning process and it really speaks to how much can be done by those good intentions, and of course doing due diligence and continuing to learn and so on. But that’s one of the things that I find so inspiring about this work is you don’t have to be a specialist. It doesn’t need to be a huge deal. It doesn’t need to be entirely time and energy consuming. But we just start with some fundamental principles and collect some basic tools – connecting with the local native plants or ecological society is a really great place to start – and we can start with little things like potted plants, if you live in the city, or window boxes or join a local group of park volunteers, it can be small and it can be manageable. When we lived in Japan, we had a very small garden, really small – the size of a 12-person dining room table, and we put native plants there and within a year had a lot of birds and snakes. It’s not as scary as it sounds non-poisonous snakes.. but the point here is I was amazed at how quickly relatively small effort – the rest of nature did most of the work and that’s what’s so great about all being on the same team like I was saying earlier
CL: Thanks very much. Yeah, I’m struck, I think what I’m taking away from this conversation is the reminder of how much more whole my experience is when I am connected to my ecosystem, to my environment, to the other beings that I’m interacting with directly or indirectly. And that also the experience of investigating these aspects of my experience can also be a really fruitful part of my spiritual practice. So not only is my daily life riche, but that I’m also unfolding through the experiences that I’m engaging with when I ask questions about my place in the ecosystem or where is the intersection of spirituality and ecology?
CS: That’s so beautifully put Chris, so agree
CL: I really appreciate your time today. Thanks very much
CS: Thank you. Okay, may it benefit all beings.
CL: We hope you enjoyed this episode. Please rate and review dharma if you dare on your favorite podcast app to help more people find and benefit from these teachings and don’t forget to subscribe to get episodes and bonus content sent directly to your device sharing on social media or telling a friend are also great ways to help us grow among the many areas of interest and expertise.
Cata Sensei is involved in the garden festival in Kyoto Japan. Sensei is the world’s foremost English language expert on the festival and has used this position to help reintegrate people’s understanding of the festival as a massive spiritual ritual. If you would like to learn about this fascinating and beautiful 1150-year-old monthlong purification ritual focused on warding off epidemics, check out the Sensei’s book The Gion Festival: Exploring its mysteries. You can find it and some videos on the topic at gionfestival.org/book. See you next time and may all our efforts benefit all beings.
BONUS Happiness is a Byproduct
We hope you enjoy this soundbite from Doug ‘Qapel’ Duncan and Catherine Pawasarat Sensei on the folly of assigning happiness to objects and how happiness is actually a result of being in a good state.
This bonus episode marks the 100th upload to the podcast feed! How many of the recordings have you listened to?
If you’ve benefited from these teachings, one of the best ways to honor that is to pay it forward: introduce the people in your life to the podcast. Word of mouth recommendations are the most meaningful and effective way for others to find these teachings. Post your favorite episode to social media or text a friend a link to some material you think might resonate. It’s a great way to practice generosity and support awakening in our world.
Saturn, Chiron, & Nodes in Your Chart: Unlocking Your Highest Potential
In this episode, Catherine Pawasarat Sensei and Doug ‘Qapel’ Duncan explore parts of our natal charts that are particularly connected to spiritual and personal transformation, including Chiron, Saturn, and North and South Nodes. They explain how these lenses can help us get unstuck, transform challenges into tools, and take things in our lives less personally. This includes how to use astrology to integrate our shadow and realize our fullest potential.
Today’s recording is a continuation of a talk from Season 3 (Episode 11) entitled “Astrology + Buddhism: Introducing AstroDharma”.
Interested in developing a working understanding of astrology as a system of personal and spiritual transformation? Looking to explore the material from today’s talk and look at how it applies to your own life? Catherine Sensei’s self-study course Intro to AstroDharma goes step-by-step through everything you need to know, and includes fun, meaningful and engaging exercises, including analyzing the Dalai Lama’s chart and guided activities to deepen your understanding of your own natal chart. Visit planetdharma.com/astrodharma to learn more about the course and to access some free resources.
Podcast Transcription:
Welcome to Dharma If You Dare. I’m Christopher Lawley, Planet Dharma team member and producer of the podcast. Today’s recording is a continuation of a talk introducing AstroDharma that Catherine Pawasarat Sensei and Doug Qapel Duncan gave during their online course entitled Crazy Wisdom. Part one of this talk can be found in season 3 in the podcast feed episode 11 entitled ‘Astrology and Buddhism: Introducing AstroDharma’. If you are not familiar with this approach to astrology, I recommend you hit pause now and go and listen to that earlier episode. As someone who started as a skeptic and has come to truly value astrology, I have always been impressed by how committed Sensei and Qapel are to using AstroDharma as a tool for transformation. I’ve never seen them use it as an idle pastime or to explain away someone’s behavior. It is always used as a lever for getting underneath patterns and struggle to expose the opportunity for growth or the missing piece in someone’s mandala or view. In today’s talk Sensei and Qapel explore parts of our natal charts that are particularly connected to spiritual and personal transformation including Chiron, Saturn and North and South Nodes.
They explain how these lenses can help us get unstuck, transform challenges into tools and take things in our lives less personally. This includes how to use astrology to integrate our shadow and realize our fullest potential. You will hear them use the term ‘houses’ during the talk – if you don’t know that part of astrology, don’t worry about it. If you want to learn about the houses or any other foundational parts of astrology like ‘aspects’, Catherine Sensei does have a self-study course that covers all 12 signs, along with all the other parts that make up a strong foundational understanding of astrology. You can find some free resources and learn more about that course at www.planetdharma.com/AstroDharma and now here’s today’s recording.
Catherine Sensei: So Qapel’s favorite and one of my favorites too.
Qapel: Well, there are two favorites actually. The Nodes are one of my favorites, my other favorite is Chiron. Chiron is the wounded healer, so it’s where the wound is. So we’re back to the Shadow. So for me, the Chiron, the wounded healer, (where your wound is and how you heal it) and then the two Nodes (which we’re going to talk about now), are for me, key aspects to meeting the Shadow. Along with the 12th house and Pluto (and the other planets, which I don’t think we’re going to get to either).
CS: So just briefly about Chiron, because this I think is really helpful: Chiron’s an asteroid next to Saturn and he was a centaur. He was a great teacher: He taught Apollo and Artemis and Hercules and he was immortal and he taught many of the gods and the great Greek warriors and he was wounded in an accident. Just a pure accident: It was an arrow dipped in the blood of the Hydra. So it was like the worst poison there was and he accidentally got wounded with this arrow, but because he was immortal, he could not die. So he just had this terrible, terrible mortal wound for eternity. And so he tried everything he could to heal that wound, but it was basically unhealable. But through that process, he became a great healer.
Q: And everybody is a Chiron. Being born into this world, you are wounded. It doesn’t matter how good it was or how wonderful it was, you come into the world wounded. And part of your journey is to heal that wound back to the Shadow, back to dharma, back to astrology.
CS: One of the neat things about Chiron is that it is really nobody’s fault. There are other things in our chart that are painful and we can usually trace them to something else or somebody else or to an experience. But Chiron not, it’s just a terrible pain that we just have and it’s through that experience that we have to heal ourselves and then we can offer that healing to other people.
Q: So this is huge when it comes to genealogy and planetary healing and transcendence: Everybody’s been wounded and it is really nobody’s fault. Because whoever wounded you was wounded by somebody else and whoever wounded them wounded somebody before them. So, the nature of the wound and the struggle that you’re working with is that if you spend too much time in an ego way focusing on the person who did that to them, then in a sense you’re missing your liberation, even though yes, it might have been a wound, it might have been a hurt and it wasn’t good. Nevertheless, everybody in some fashion or other has been wounded. So the ego wants to concentrate on where to assign the blame or where to assign the credit. In Astro dharma you’re moving past that, you’re saying, oh here are the patterns, here’s the structure, here’s how this family or tribe or culture or condition got built and this is how you transcend it.
CS: Let’s talk about the Moon’s Nodes, let’s start with the South Node.
Q: South Node, karma.
CS: So the Moon’s nodes are determined also by the time of birth and it’s basically where the orbit of the moon crosses over the orbit of the Earth around the sun. So it’s a little bit techy so we won’t get hung up on that. But there’s a South Node and directly opposite it is the North Node.
Q: Always 180° from your South is your North (CS: directly opposite). It’s your karma, it’s your family, it’s your conditioning, it’s your culture, it’s everything from where you came from. It’s where you get stuck.
CS: That’s right. So it represents what we’re born into and that’s usually by family and by tribe and by culture and therefore by conditioning and because we get stuck here usually manifests as… well you’re kind of stuck in your – I mean it is a blessing, but we do feel kind of stuck in our tribes, right? We don’t know, we’re in it unless we leave it, so in that sense, we are quite stuck.
Q: And especially in whatever house it’s in, which house will tell you which part of your life tends to get stuck. I think it’s obvious, but we need to say it. So somebody’s South Node might be in Libra meaning they get kind of stuck in the status quo or something. Somebody else’s North Node might be in Libra which means learning to embrace beauty and balance and culture and harmony and such things.
CS: That’s right so Libra is the balancer and so every sign, every planet has its upsides and its downsides. So where our South Node is, we tend to be aware of the downsides or experience the downsides. And our spiritual path then is about going for our North Node, which when we first learned about that, it usually seems kind of impossible or just outrageous like “Who me?” You know, “I’m gonna manifest that? Really?” because it’s the opposite of how we were raised, conditioned.
Q: So my South Node is in Libra, my mother was a Libra. My guru was a Libra, I got married in Libra, I got divorced at the time of Libra, so that’s all that. The North Node is in Aries. The Aries is that going forward, reaching out… So I never really saw myself as a teacher initially. I kind of felt more that my role was in kind of a community or in or in the family of it all. But my nature just kept going for the reach, for the extension, the reach. So it’s kind of an example.
CS: That’s right. And we have the same Nodes. My South Node is also in Libra. So similarly, out of a family of six, four people are Librans, in my family.
Q: So Catherine and I are not super good on the status quo. We’ve both got South Node status quo, we both have South Node conventionality, we both have South Nodes: Nice house, pleasant environment, take care of all that harmony. That’s how we were raised and for both of us until really, relatively recently, none of that was very important to us. We were going north, she went to Japan for 20 years, she went to Brazil for a year, Ayahuasca, and so on. I traveled the world. So it’s that kind of North Node reach.
CS: So Libra is all about balance, it’s about relationships, it’s about like.. is everybody feeling okay? And the opposite of it is Aries and Aries doesn’t really give a shit what everybody else thinks because it’s just blazing its own trail. It’s not in a mean way, but it’s just like “What, other people? What other people?” Because it really knows where it wants and needs to go and goes for it. And so to someone who’s raised in a Libra environment to say like “Oh it’s your destiny to just go for what YOU want to do and not pay attention to what other people thinking” – That’s a really outrageous thing for someone who’s raised in a Libran, you know, ’you got to check in with everybody first’ kind of environment. So the North Node, we have to really make an effort to manifest those qualities, it’ll feel really unnatural and we have to make that very intentional.
Q: Right. And the nice thing about it is that once you make your North Node intentional, your South Node comes back as a bonus, all the positive elements come back into it. So Catherine I have accumulated fabrics and stones and pottery from around the world and art bringing that back in.
QS: Libra’s about aesthetics.
Q: So it’s not that you’re ever going to lose anything, you don’t lose anything by leaving the South Node. You just have to manifest the North Node in order to bring it around where it belongs. Now, let’s flip it because if your South Node is Aries, what would you say about that?
CS: Let’s see if the South Node was in Aries, it was probably very fiery, maybe. Aries is ruled by Mars so maybe kind of an aggressive home environment, might have been a lot of fighting, you know, like different wills not really getting along possibly in the home environment. And remember the South Node, we experienced the downside of it. And so then the North Node would be about learning to be very harmonious, learning to get along with people, learning to express concern for other people’s feelings, to find balance. These are all Liberan strengths. And then once somebody cultivates those qualities, then they get the upside of The South Node, all those qualities become available to us. We realize like, “Oh well actually there may have been a lot of fighting in my home growing up, but I am really comfortable expressing my opinion and I don’t mind if I have to go it alone, I was raised with that talent” and we get an appreciation for those positive qualities.
Q: Thus the integration and thus the transcendence part.
Should we go to the shadow aspect? Let’s talk about the Shadow, since that’s Saturn, Saturn, Saturn, Saturn, Saturn, and more Saturn. Tell us about Saturn, Catherine.
CS: Okay, so the planet Saturn is the teacher archetype. Really, we could say maybe the authority and what sign does that rule? It rules Capricorn. So Saturn is called the ‘lord of karma’ and it’s also known as the gateway to the outer planets. That’s Uranus, Neptune and Pluto.
Q: Psychological problems, neurosis, anxiety, worry, they’re all pushing you back into the inner planets, it’s self-orientated. Saturn also speaks to discipline and training, discipline and training, discipline and training, training and discipline! Thus it’s the door to the outer planets because the outer planets are where the transformation happens or where the process of transformation happens and you can’t get to the outer planets if you don’t have a very strong Saturn. So in order to get to the outer planets for true transformation to take place, you’ve got to meet this training-discipline-study-teacher motif and our culture and our society has put that Saturn principle a bit in the garbage can, as patriarchal and authoritarian.
So we’re shooting ourselves in the foot by not being able to embrace the positive sides of the patriarchy, and the positive sides of authority and discipline. We’re keeping ourselves in a self-circling victimization and neurotic involvement with overconsumption and over self-indulgence. It’s narcissistic because we need Saturn to get out of it.
CS: That’s right So Saturn, I would say pretty much universally, as younger people, we experience it as oppressive. It’s like an authority that isn’t letting us grow up. It’s often a parent or it can be represented by another authority figure and really it’s about becoming an authority ourselves through discipline and training and in order to do that, we need to be trained by an authority, right? We only get good at something if we learn from a master and that master is represented by Saturn.
Q: Whether it’s ballet or law or medicine or any subject, carpentry or dharma, it’s the same principle, it’s the apprenticeship model, Saturn is about the apprenticeship model. Other planets are about maybe study and learning.
So the problem with our university careers and measuring society in terms of just university learning, it’s just knowledge. But for mastery, you need the application side and that’s where the Saturn part, actual experience, (CS: Actual experience) and Saturn is about meeting that actual experience on the ground. Not just knowledge in the head.
CS: So, we have a lot of experience with this transition from experiencing the authority as oppressive to becoming that authority ourselves, because I’d say one place where that shows up really in spades is in dharma training (Q: Karma yoga), because it’s just it’s a very, very challenging kind of scenario where we feel like we’re being controlled and held back and oppressed by our teacher our trainer, when actually what their motivation is to help us become a master.
Q: Yes, so in the sense that you might say that karma yoga is actually the higher discipline. If you look at a monk in say, Tibet, or nun, the young woman goes into a monastery and she learns the prayers and she learns the ritual and she studies and then she learns how to do her job whatever that job in the monastery might be, and then she goes into retreat, right? So at that point, she has enough foundation to meet the relationship between Saturn and the teacher, the guru and the disciple. And this is where the deeper training takes place. So in a sense, the highest practice isn’t meditation. The highest practice is actually karma yoga because meditation is just about you alone. Karma yoga is you with others. And so if you’re going to teach or you’re going to share the teaching, you have to know how to meet those things and you meet those things through the training and the discipline of karma yoga.
CS: So Saturn often is one indicator of the shadow in our charts because often where it’s located by sign and by the house, those are often areas where we feel like there are obstacles or where we feel held back, and then it takes conscious effort. With conscious effort, we can lean into that, it’s not easy, but with the help of teachers and trainers we can lean into that and attain mastery in that area and then we become teachers and of course, the parts of our life that have been the most challenging for us are the parts of our life where we’re the best teachers.
Q: So you don’t get to dharma unless you rebel – that takes you to the gates of Saturn. But in order to go forward, you’ve got to meet the discipline of Saturn. So you got to rebel against your own rebellion and in the process of rebelling against your own rebellion you then go to the outer planets – Uranus Neptune and Pluto to meet the transformations of revolution, dissolution and destruction, which we just briefly mention here.
CS: Right. So Saturn’s the gateway. So these outer planets Neptune, Uranus, and Pluto, move much more slowly, so they affect entire generations. The inner planets up to Saturn move pretty fast, so they’re changing all the time. So they kind of account for all our different personalities. But the outer planets are moving slowly, affecting generations, all at a time. So it’ll be, like, the millennials will all have the outer planets in the same place. The baby boomers all have the outer planets in the same location . Gen X all has those outer planets in the same location but different from each other. Right? This is why the generations are different.
So as Qapel said, those are shadow indicators too, those outer planets, where they are in our charts are going to be areas where we’re going to be prone to: Big things happening to us – seem to be happening to or kind of befalling us. Neptune is ‘transformation through dissolution’. So that often has to do with, let’s see, altered states, it can be fantasy, it can be disillusionment, it can be substances. So if you’re going through a struggle with substances, it’s probably a Neptune issue going on and it’s through mastering Saturn that we can work with these energies skillfully and access the higher vibration of these energies, which is the transcendental.
Q: Uranus is the revolution probably revolting against your family, conditioning your cultural conditioning or you’re programming your revolting against what you’ve been sold by the marketplace.
Pluto’s through destruction. So if you’re actually going to make a spiritual breakthrough, you’ve got to take it apart and get down to the brass tacks. But there is a flipside positive, which I think I’ll mention briefly, which is: If these three come together… So, through the Saturn, through your discipline, you’ve gone through revolution, dissolution and destruction. That doesn’t sound very appealing. But when these three come together, you’ve completely unraveled the knot or the matrix of the ‘me’. And as soon as that happens they flip. So revolution becomes the ability to work in community and carry on a stable and cooperative and healthy environment. Dissolution becomes creativity. You actually touch into the tap stone of your own creativity and you’re instantly self-creative in the moment, or cosmic creativity. And now Pluto’s destruction becomes the great ability to build and create things and monasteries or temples or retreat centers or performances – whatever happens to be your particular thing, right?
CS: Because Shiva, for example, is the great destroyer, we know that it’s a very necessary force in order for new things to be creative.
Q: And just to repeat. You can’t get to the other planets and real transformational change unless you meet the discipline of standing alone by yourself in your own world as your own person. Astrologically not putting it off on someone else, not getting someone else to carry it, not figuring out the community will carry you or take care of you. This is a personal private journey that you must make for yourself. And when you go through the transformational process, you actually become capable of being useful to others and working with others in a way that isn’t the blind leading the blind. So this is why astrology is so powerful.
CS: And AstroDharma, our horoscope, is a map for how we can do this. A lot of it is universal and, depending on our individual horoscope, of when we are born, is the personalized. You know: “ This is why I’m here on the planet for this lifetime.”
Q: There’s another aspect of the Shadow element that we should talk about which is the 12th house.
CS: Yes, so the 12th house is super interesting. It represents the period of time we were in our mother’s womb. So what an important nine months, right? Everything that our mother experienced was having this profound effect on us before we knew we were ‘us’.
Q: It’s the house of the unconscious, but you could also say it’s the House of the pre-conscious. It’s in the Shadow. You don’t quite know what it is yet. It’s unconscious to the ego, but in some ways, it is also pre-conscious in the sense that you don’t know what’s happening. (CS: That’s right). So it’s also with great effort that it takes us into the transcendental or what is called the superconscious. Where the 12th house is, usually is an unconscious resource.
CS: That’s right. So it’s usually part of our being that we’re not very aware of and an important part of our journey to the transcendental.
Q: It can be disowned. You might disown being aggressive: positive aggression, to move towards.
CS: That would be Mars, to step in. So someone with Mars in the 12th house might be quite unaware of their own aggression but encounter aggression in other people around them. So that’s a typical 12 house.
Q: So by learning to bring the Shadow of your Mars out into the light and taking it on yourself as your own energy, then that’s the power for your transformation.
CS: The 12th House we access and integrate with a lot, a lot, a lot of meditation because that’s how we make our unconscious conscious and that takes a serious commitment and that’s really a lifetime of work.
CL: We hope you enjoyed this episode. Please rate and review Dharma If You Dare on your favorite podcast app to help more people find and benefit from these teachings, and don’t forget to subscribe to get episodes and bonus content sent directly to your device. Interested in developing a working understanding of astrology as a system of personal and spiritual transformation? Looking to explore the material from today’s talk and look at how it applies to your own life? Catherine Sensei’s self-study course ‘Intro to AstroDharma’ goes step by step through everything you need to know and includes fun, meaningful, and engaging exercises, including analyzing the Dalai Lama’s chart and guided activities to deepen your understanding of your own natal chart. Visit www.planetdharma.com/astrodharma to learn more about the course and to access some free resources.
See you next time, and may all our efforts benefit all beings.
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