insight arising

In 2012, the summer before our graduate program started, we took a dream trip to Asia. We witnessed a teaching by the Dalai Lama in his exiled home and had fresh grilled fish by a river in India. We saw the  sacred temple ruins of Angkor Wat and experienced a sobering visit to the Land Mine Museum. We had the world's best boat noodles for 25 cents and drunkenly roamed the narrow shopping aisles of Siam in Thailand. We visited our parents' motherland and spent time with family eating delicious home cooked Vietnamese food. We visited my dear old nanny and second mother to my dad, an elderly nun who was living in a Catholic convent and died a year later.  In between these beautiful experiences with the world around us, the world between us was breaking down. We did our best to hide the tumult away from the friends we traveled with and visited but I'm sure the hardened distance between us was not difficult to sense. So many of the cracks in our relationship were already present...

The photo of myself represents my feminine, when I was tenderly rubbing my dear friend's feet, she had just given birth at home. The piece represents my masculine, called vajra, a thunderbolt symbol in Tibetan Buddhism that cuts through ignorance.  I committed to a new conscious partnership, within myself, and to myself.  This past weekend, my inner feminine and masculine made vows to each other to create a loving, expansive, and conscious partnership within me. We had a ceremony, made offerings to an altar, and celebrated in dance with sacred community. No other partnership in this lifetime has ever felt more clear and available to me.  From masterful teachers, I've been learning about the energetics within my body. This field of study has given me a new lens for deeper self understanding. We all have a mix of feminine and masculine energies within us, regardless of our sex and gender. From a young age, our energies are developed and shaped by our conditioning within our...