The skanda of feeling. The quality of intelligent expansiveness like tentacles or antennae.

The wisdom of equanimity

The klesha of pride

Energy of richness

Yellow, south, autumn, earth, solidity, fertility,

sense perception: taste

Neurotic expression - pride, hunger, poverty mentality

Awake expression - Expansiveness

Karma - Enriching

Jewel

Notes from Liz’s talk:

Vajra/Dorje: indestructible diamond like. Can’t be destroyed. Endures. Wholeness. Goes lifetime to lifetime. Innate Wholeness, nature, fundamental awareness.

Awareness could sound vacant. But it really has three big qualities:

1. Vast - At some point you discover the universe in your backyard. Anab Thubten.
2. Alive - Not empty, inert, dead space. Alive and awake. Knowing. Dream yoga as training for maintaining knowing through deep sleep and then death.
3. Expressive - Energies, Energetic. This is what we experience in this life. Thoughts, senses, emotions. These are energies pouring up from our core and expressing itself in our experience.

The whole path is returning to, remembering, these core qualities.

The idea that we could work with our emotions is so powerful. Usually, if we like what we are feeling, we try to hold on to it. If we don’t like it, we push it away. Usually when we are not enjoying our emotion, we freeze it, reify it, make it solid. Then we tell ourselves a story about it. Then it’s stuck. It’s an object. We are the subject and we can define ourselves in relationship with it.

But actually, emotions and their energies are not fixed.

There’s something about our emotions that can remind us that everything is sacred. We can feel them so much.

Vajrayana as a training in sacred perception. Seeing ourselves, others, the whole world as sacred.

Five Buddha families are a description, a symbol, of the energy of emotions returned to its essence. Under the story, without the labels, just as they are.