Dakini Nature

We explore our own nature as dakini; we also explore how interwoven we are with all Nature. The dakini is a wonderful role model, for how to embody enlightened wisdom, and live it from day to day, in our modern westernised lives. 

 

Modern westernised culture is dangerously disconnected from Nature. Yet our nature is the same as all Nature. When we embody the wisdom  which knows this, we won’t just try to fit in with the status quo. The dakini is a challenger, an explorer: she sees where we’re stuck in old habits of mind and culture. She shakes us out of them so we can see new pathways.

 

In our time, climate change and peak oil are bringing on economic collapse, and increasing devastation to Nature and human life. Our culture’s old habits are failing us. We urgently need to find new ways. 

 

Dakini is inspiration, and intuitive wisdom: creative mind that grasps the new. She can help us step onto new pathways.

 

Dakini is also the Great Mother herself: the mysterious presence innate in all that manifests. In the west we have a very similar way of understanding the Great Mother who’s immanent in all Nature. 

 

Dakini practice is part of the Tibetan Buddhist system of meditation called tantra. Tantra means a thread in woven cloth: a thread in the weave of life. 

 

This tantric system is based on the same values and principles we find in Mother Nature’s ecosystems: life-affirming mothering values: creatures are born to live, to thrive on happiness. Everything that supports life is sacred: food, love, sense experience, beauty, sex. Darkness, night and death are also part of the life-supporting cycle. Nothing is excluded. All experience can lead us to enlightenment.

 

Meditating on the dakini, we embody these life-supporting principles. It’s one thing to understand them with our mind. When we embody them, they’re the way we live. Life becomes rich, passionate, compassionate, inspired. And these values and principles must be the basis for our future communities. 

 

Eisler’s partnership system is also based on these life-affiriming values. They’re the values we need, for recognising our connection with Nature, for building community, for building an alternative culture to our present dominator system. This is the paradigm that will take us into a viable future.

 

Our present dominator system values money beyond everything: even when it’s clear we must make deep changes to avoid runaway climate change, still this culture believes we must grab as much money as possible by continuing to ruin Nature in the same way that caused the problem in the first place. It’s a very short-term view. This kind of ‘prosperity’ won’t give us a future: certainly not a prosperous one. 

 

As well as teaching meditation, I’m in a group establishing an ecovillage, and I’m a Transition Towns trainer, especially interested in the inner side of transition. I see the meditation work as providing a basis for creating community life, based on the life-supporting paradigm. 

 

I’m now also involved in our New Zealand campaign to prevent our coal equivalent of the Canadian tar sands from being dug up. Joanna Macy calls that a holding action: stopping further devastation. 

 

All this is Engaged Buddhism. It seems to me crucial to put our meditation wisdom and heart into practical work, to create a new culture, at this time when we could lose our beautiful world altogether if we carry on as we are. 

 

dido