According to the traditional Tarot system, in which you find your “soul card” based on your astrology and numerology, my card is The Empress. But here’s a fun sight where your card is based more on your personality at the moment. Apparently, mine is The Star. For now. Who might you be?
I was at an amazing retreat last week with the teacher Kali Ma, where she told this story about Saraha, a Buddhist monk in the 8th century from Bengal, eastern India. I was first told this story when I was living in India studying Tibetan Buddhism, but hearing it again, many red-filled years later, I had a brand spanking new appreciation for it.
Saraha was a renunciate. He lived in a monastery, shut away from work, family, women, sex, chocolate and so on. He couldn’t talk, touch, or even look at women - they were forbidden to encounter in anyway as they were seen as distractions on the Buddhist path. At this time in Buddhist history, women were thought to be incapable of achieving enlightenment, they had to wait to be reincarnated as men in order to go for the gold.
But, as we know in the red realm, “religious traditions” while wonderful and helpful and wise, represent just one view of reality. They do not necessarily reflect reality itself. They do not represent the whole divine cherry pie.
So the story goes that one day perfectly spiritually-studious, always on time, robes always ironed, mind always clean, majorly meditative Saraha was outside of the monastery running some basic errands in town for his fellow monks, when suddenly, a group of wild women surrounded him as he walked and started teasing him about his Buddhist practice, touching him, calling him pet names, giggling, rubbing themselves up against him and getting all sorts of close encounters with him.
This event was beyond awful for poor Saraha, and as mentioned, downright forbidden in his tradition (and not just his tradition - many conservative Christians would refer to this event as “sinful,” many orthodox Hindus and Jews would see it as most definitely “impure,”) and something that could for sure get his lily-white pure Buddhist ass kicked out of the monastery. Saraha begged the crazy women to stop harassing him, he said he would do anything if they would go away and let him go back to his monastery and life in peace.
The sexy troublemakers told him they would only leave him alone for good if he spent one night with them in the jungle. He thought: “hey, this can’t be so bad. One night in a jungle teaching the dharma to these strange, undisciplined, unspiritual women and then I can go back to my life as a simple Buddhist monk”. Yeah. Uh huh. That’s what makes for a good story.
So off Saraha went into the deep dark jungle with the seductive women who were actually tantric dakinis – female beings who manifest enlightened activity free from conventional perceptions, attitudes, and beliefs. They often show up in red. These enlightened feminine beings usually pay a man a visit when he’s become stuck in his spiritual reality. Dakinis like to shake things up and set our previous existence on fire in order for us to taste “true” enlightenment.
In the jungle, Saraha soon found himself drinking wine and dancing and getting it on with the ladies in a manner he never, ever, expected of himself. He felt honey-soaked, electric, intoxicated, like he was in some sort of alternate reality, a dream, and participating in some very unorthodox “spiritual” practices. As Kali Ma oh so beautifully commented about these “inner” Tantric traditions: “Welcome to the Jungle”.
At one point in the heated tangly evening Saraha had a powerfully vivid vision of a woman in red who gave him an address of a place in a nearby town and told him that was where his Teacher could be found. The next morning Saraha left his passionate playmates and went to the address the red lady of his vision had given. When he arrived at the address there was no temple or monastery or house with ornaments or flags or ceremony or pomp that announced a great teacher lived there. There was nuthin’ but a rambly old hut with a lower caste woman outside making arrows (btw, “lower caste” back in Saraha’s day was equated with trash, impurity, karmic over-load. Although the caste system is illegal nowadays in India, there is still a great deal of prejudice practiced).
Saraha assumed the red goddess who had danced through his visions the night before had been wrong, dead wrong, so he asked the poor lowly woman where he could find an esteemed Teacher of the dharma that lived nearby. The woman’s profound answer caused him to fall on the floor at her feet and beg to be her disciple. The woman agreed to take him on as her student, and later she took him on as her consort (tantric sexual partner). While these two were quite unorthodox and wild and even considered dangerous to the Buddhist traditionalists, the government, and local wine-merchants, they are now known as two of the greatest teachers of Tantric Buddhism.
So… do you have any spiritual rituals, practices, beliefs that might need a release? A shake down? A strip tease? A renewal? What might your “dakinis” look like/act like if they showed up for you today? Try inviting these red ladies into your spiritual reality and see what happens. It might be time for an all-night drunken slumber party with hotties in a jungle. It might be time for a silent meditation retreat. After all, one woman’s dakini is another woman’s Catholic nun. They show up in ways that are perfect for each one of us. If they’re doing their job right, they will totally freak us out so we become better at letting Love In.
Set yourself on fire and don’t let anyone put you out.
“Miraculously minty faith-enhancing breath spray.
Surrender yourself to a higher power and never feel alone again”
It happened during my yoga class. The heat was cranked, the poses were fluid and strong, and the sweat was trickling. Suddenly, the teacher asked us to come to the floor, lay down on our stomachs, reach our arms straight out in front of us, extend our legs behind us, and place our forehead to the ground. He pressed an energetic pause button and had us rest here, in full prostration.
There I was, stretched out on my dark red yoga mat - sweaty and hot and totally wiped out from much more than the yoga class, when I finally got why the hell people from certain religious traditions, like Tibetan Buddhism, do these full prostrations.
When I was in Tibet, I met a few pilgrims who wore what looked like enormous knee pads over their pants and over-stuffed oven mitts on their hands. This strange-looking gear was necessary protection because they were making the trip from their village to the holy capital of Tibet, Lhasa, not only on foot, but prostrating each step of the way. They would take a step, and then bend down towards the earth, followed by their knees, belly, head, swing their arms around them on the ground to meet above their head, then swing them back down again like a graceful swan dive, or like they were making a snow angel in the dry earth. Then they would sit back on their knees, and stand back up again only to take another step, and yield to another prostration.
Their prostration/walk /dance/meditation was beautiful to watch, but it felt foreign, outside of my spiritual reality. Something, I’m embarrassed to admit, which seemed to my young western intellectual self at the time, well, a bit remedial, not entirely necessary, and even sort of crazy.
And yet here I was, years later, in a sweaty trendy SF yoga class with sexy electronica playing in the background, laid out like a half-naked Tibetan pilgrim with my pert Irish nose smashed against smelly bamboo rubber. “Gottcha!” I heard from somewhere red and hot and beating right inside my chest. This lanky limbo, this full body smooch with the ground, this simple physical act evoked a sudden, spontaneous spiritual declaration from me:
“Everything…everything I am, everything I do, all that I know and breathe and share and taste and love and despise and worship and desire and delight in and am afraid of and confused by and shy about and sure of and questioning and lying about and struggling with and rejoicing in and dancing with and touching and flirting with and writing and filming and speaking about and exploding with… I offer to You. For You. I am for You. For You. All that I am, All that I can offer… is for You.”
I was, in a very strange and yet authentic way bowing, submitting, surrendering, my self to the divine, my small self to my big Self, my personality to my Buddha Nature, my life to the Universe, my freckles to the stars. I didn’t mean to. It just sort of happened. Organically. Tears mingled with sweat as my yoga mat morphed into Kali’s moist soft warm red tongue, or a thick strong strand of the Magdalene’s red hair, or a sticky red runway strip to All That Is.
My yoga instructor next asked us to sit back on our hips and move into child’s pose, with our arms still forward, hands turned up, forehead still hugging the ground and the rhythmic involuntary inner mantra continued:
“I love You, I love You, I love You…”
And then I suddenly came to. I raised my head, grabbed my SIGG bottle, guzzled some alkaline water and feverishly looked around the room. “Ahem, uh yeah, so whassup?” I mumbled awkwardly, more to myself than to my curious neighbors. I have no idea if this sort of spontaneous volcanic eruption of devotion happened to any of my fellow classmates. They looked, while not altogether cool, definitely collected. Ah well. So go the bizarro tales of the Spiritual Cowgirl.
Word to the wise: You just never know when the Universe is gonna goose ya.
But we can prepare ourselves. So I have a Red suggestion: sometime today, preferably in private and not in your cubicle, Starbucks restroom, or grocery aisle (although these places could most certainly use your red hot divine energy), lay down on the ground in full prostration. That’s right – as strange as this might sound - stretch yer fine sexy self out, face down, arms above your head, and make yourself rest there for a few minutes. Just pay attention to what this pose brings up for you…maybe nada, maybe resistance, maybe a release, maybe a giggle, maybe a thought, maybe an emotion, maybe a question, maybe an answer, maybe an itchy nose, maybe a surrender to all that you are and more. We don’t know until we try.