Green Tara: Three Things I Learned after a Year of Pandemic Practice
A year ago, I wrote a piece about the Dalai Lama’s advice to a group of Chinese Buddhists who wanted to know what specific practice they might undertake to negotiate the pandemic.
He recommended Green Tara, particularly the mantra, and at that moment, Tara probably noticed an uptick in the world’s attention to her profile. Although I had done the practice previously, I hadn’t done it regularly. That changed in April, 2020, and I have been doing it on a daily basis over the past year.
Three observations, then, on what I’ve learned over that year, as a kind of addendum to the original essay. My comments fall into three categories: Visualization, Presence, and Practice.
- Visualization. First, I learned that visualizing myself as a deity is really no different from visualizing myself as a university professor, or a father, or a husband, or a runner, or a lover of Indian food, all of which I’d claim to be in various proportions on various days. We are always seeing ourselves as one thing or another. It can be exhausting. Plus, none of these identities survive serious scrutiny — they are self-made concoctions, and not all of them are helpful, as when we think of ourselves as losers, or unattractive, or slow, or stupid. So why not add to this gallery of identities that we create for ourselves a celestial being who is capable of extraordinary and compassionate realizations that might well transform our own behavior? And help those around us in the process as well? I learned, in short, over the past year to take responsibility for my visualizations and to monitor how my culture encouraged me to see myself in destructive, corrosive ways.
- Presence.The Tibetan practice of visualizing a given deity can be difficult at first. One of my teachers told me something that I found very helpful. He said that it wasn’t necessary to be able to picture the deity in great detail; it was more important, he said, to create the feeling within me that I might normally experience whenever I saw a revered teacher and felt the power of his or her presence. This “feeling” is the essence of the deity anyway, and it’s important to learn how to cultivate it during a meditation session. Once we’ve generated this transformative feeling, we can then gradually cultivate it within the image of the deity, in this case, Tara. Soon, if we do this regularly, simply seeing the image will generate the feeling.
- Practice. I found myself focusing on Tara’s right foot, which is extended as if she is coming out of the lotus position to bring us the help we need to understand the joys and sorrows of our lives. She breaks the lotus to help those in need. An iconoclastic move, for sure, and over the course of the year, something significant happened in my own practice: as I stood up to leave the cushion at the end of a meditation session, extending my own right foot, I gradually carried more of Tara’s teaching into my daily life. I don’t know why or how this happened. When I became most distressed about COVID19, I would find myself remembering my capacity to step into the breach and to heal my own worries. And with my right foot extended—it finally became a metaphor for me—I was able to help those around me who were also experiencing the anxieties and worries that the pandemic brought with it. Tara’s posture, with her right foot in motion, reminds me to use the ups and downs of my life as energy to propel forward motion. Both grief and joy, and all of the intermediate emotions, are fuel for progress. Tara taught me that. And even more importantly, she showed me that.
I could say more about what I learned over the past year as I sat with Tara, but these are the three categories under which any of those things would fall. So I’ll leave it there, knowing that those who are doing this practice will have their own reports from the frontier, reports that I’d love to hear more about.
