Lama Palden Drolma – The Awakened Feminine of Tara

In this opening session, you’ll explore how to engage with the dance of form and formlessness through a meditation on Tara. This practice is designed to nourish you, help you release anxiety, heal emotional and physical wounds, and open you to your awakened nature. You’ll connect with yourself and Tara in loving, open awareness, and learn to do this on your own so that Tara is always accessible to you.

All the great Tibetan masters call upon and meditate extensively on Tara. Over many centuries, this meditation has proven to be as valuable for men as it is for women, who all report that their lives completely changed through their Tara practice.

In this module, you’ll:

• Discover Tara’s origin and her embodiment of the awakened full-spectrum feminine
• Learn how each part of you is essentially sacred, and how Tara mirrors this for you
• Become familiar with both formless and form meditations
• Explore how to maintain wakefulness and clarity of mind while letting go and relaxing into the boundless compassion and love inherent in non-dual awareness
• Find sanctuary within by opening to the buddhas’ and dakinis’ awakened presence of wisdom and love
• Learn Step 1 of the Tara Meditation

Receive a healing and transmission of the awakened feminine body, speech, and mind from Tara, who represents the full-spectrum embodiment of the awakened feminine. You’ll discover how this type of meditation can activate healing and transformation.

You’ll also learn about how Tara’s essence is manifest as her seed syllable, which serves as her “cosmic texting address,” and as her mantra, which can be likened to an instant email address. And you’ll explore how to navigate working with a buddha — an awakened being.

In this module, you’ll:

• Discover the profound meaning of Tara’s seed syllable and mantra, and how to meditate on these to instantly connect with her
• Receive the nourishing, soothing, healing grace of Tara’s divine blessing
• Explore how to let go of your negative thoughts about yourself, and open to the innate goodness of who you truly are
• With Tara as your model, find out how to work with your ego self or human self with an awakened mind
• Be given an inquiry practice that can unlock your blocks to spiritual development and awakening

Discover how to converse with Tara as a trusted mentor, deepening your personal connection with this fully awakened deity, and discovering how this connection can help you turn your challenges and difficult emotions into a path of awakening. You’ll also experience practices for liberating your conflictual emotions into wisdom.

In this module, you’ll:

• Discover how to develop a personal connection with Tara through meditation
• Explore how your connection with Tara helps you let go of hurt, frustration, overwhelm, anxiety, and fear
• Gain insights and tools to help you with challenging situations and circumstances
• Find out how Tara can help you eliminate inner obstacles and create a supportive inner foundation — and how to cultivate this transformation through meditation
• Discover how to allow difficult emotions to liberate into their essence, which is wisdom

In this module, you’ll be guided through a meditative process to experience what it feels like to become one with Tara. This serves to help you transform your limited idea of who you are, and to unlock your innate awakened presence. You’ll discover how Tara meditation opens you to your pure being and the blossoming of your own unique qualities.

You’ll also discover how this type of transformative meditation can help you shift your identity from ego-centered to one of awakened awareness and compassion, and to the union of awareness and emptiness.

In this module, you’ll:

• Begin opening to your inherent awakened presence
• Experience what it feels like to become one with Tara
• Find out how working with Tara can help you both in meditation and in your moment-to-moment everyday awareness
• Discover how to help the immature, scared, young parts of yourself grow and mature
• Explore how a connection with Tara can improve your relationships and deepen your engagement with the world

In this session, you’ll be invited to step fully into becoming one with the enlightened being of Tara, which can greatly accelerate your awakening. You’ll open to her power through your heart chakra, working with her seed syllable and her mantra to offer gratitude to the awakened beings of all times and all places, and to radiate cleansing, healing, and liberating blessings to all.

You’ll also work with the subtle body, consisting of channels (nadis in Sanskrit), movement (prana in Sanskrit), and essential energy (bindu in Sanskrit).

In this module, you’ll:

• Open to natural awakening, awareness, and presence
• Inhabit your individual Sacred Mandala
• Discover how to work with your heart chakra
• Radiate love and thankfulness to all awakened beings from the seed syllable in the center of your heart chakra
• Radiate healing, universal love, and awakening to all sentient beings

In this session, you’ll explore the meaning of your true nature, which is the genuine truth of reality — the union of awakened wisdom and love. And, you’ll discover what obscures your understanding of this.

You’ll also experience the powerful liberation of transitioning from meditation with form to meditation without form, and explore the benefits of both. And, you’ll experience letting go into openness and love, and resting in open awareness.

In this module, you’ll:

• Notice the difference between resting in open awareness at the beginning and at the end of a meditation
• Become comfortable with being in form and formlessness, which helps dissolve your fixations that arise from not realizing who you truly are
• Understand how transitioning from form to formlessness in meditation allows you to be more accepting of and comfortable with death
• Feel the innate luminosity and clarity of your own mind
• Open into non-duality, and your actual lack of separation from all that is

In the last session, you’ll discover practices for incorporating Tara into your daily life — as a friend, mentor, and awakened mother. You’ll retrace the steps of the Tara Meditation to help you access her healing blessings to soothe anxiety, fear, depression, and other challenges.

You’ll find out how to access — and stay in touch with — your inherent wellbeing, goodness, kindness, and wisdom. And you’ll participate in a group dedication of these teachings to benefit all.

In this last module, you’ll:

• Appear as Tara arising out of the void — the union of clarity, luminosity, and emptiness, inseparable with all that is, yet distinctly unique
• Discover how to share these teachings with others
• Explore more ways to bring Tara, as a mentor and friend, into the moment-to-moment awareness of daily life
• Discover how dedicating your meditations to all beings spreads Tara’s blessings out into the world, and also enhances these meditations

In this audio teaching, Lama Palden leads an opening meditation for people who have never meditated before. The audio begins with an opening prayer, followed by some basic and detailed meditation instructions as well as an actual meditation. She completes the talk with a discussion about the various hallmarks of the spiritual path.

In this talk from Lama Palden, she describes her love for spirituality and how she came to Buddhism as a student and teacher. As a teen, she noticed the lack of “meaning” in the culture and in people’s lives — having grown up in an upper-middle-class family where everything looked perfect and everyone was miserable. She noticed something didn’t quite add up for her as far as this lifestyle being the achievement of “the American Dream.” As a teen, she was exposed to many progressive ideas, which allowed her to go deeply into studying and seeing to the heart of the religions she studied. There she began her journey of looking for something to connect with, which really began to get interesting when she realized the conflict was also within herself…

When we dedicate our meditation to others, says Lama Palden, we make our practice more open and beneficial. This article discusses how dedicating this value — this wholesomeness — to all sentient beings expands our meditation beyond ourselves. Many forms of Buddhist practice conclude with dedicating the benefit of our practice to relieving the suffering of sentient beings and helping them awaken. The English word “merit” is defined as being or doing something that is worthy and creates value. It’s said that when we meditate or engage in another form of spiritual practice, such as yoga, chanting, praying, or singing songs of realization, we are accumulating merit.