"There is healing through lineage. Sometimes I cannot describe what I mean by lineage. Yet my experience of lineage is about being received and held within a field of continuous loving-warmth, kindness, and compassion. It is about the trans–historical gifting of unconditional acceptance. It is the inheritance of permission to transcend the silliness of living out of the confinement of the ego–bound self. It is the permission to sprout wings and take to the sky as others have before me. Their example becomes the heart of the legacy you will leave behind.
"My lineage is also intersectionality. It is evoking and honoring all the little pieces of who I am, which inform the way I show up. I summon my identities like I summon the ancestors and demand that they speak truth to me because if they do not, I am a living lie. To be a lie is to go against my purpose as a body who holds and shares dharma.
"Before giving a dharma talk I am usually in silence for some period of time, feeling into the community, leaning into what those present are projecting, trying to hold the space for my fears and anxieties. It is a tender period for me. I need to know that I am being held by lineage. I need to know that before I open my mouth, I am speaking lineage. I take the time to call upon my dharma lineage, evoking the names of the great masters such as Tilopa, Naropa, Milarepa as well as the living-flesh teachers I am devoted to in this life.
I also evoke the blessing of Tara, the female Buddha of compassion, to support me as I lean into my own discomfort so that I can lean into the suffering I sense around me. … Through the blessing of Tara and my lineage, I am there, with people, in my body, being with and loving all the parts of my identity because these parts have taught me how to be kind, passionate, fierce, and tender at the same time."
