"Compassion is Tara’s special quality." Gelek Rimpoche
Tara Meditations for Courage and Healing
Tara is the most beloved female deity of Tibetan Buddhism and she has inspired many different meditation practices through the centuries. Most involve visualizing Tara and then asking her for help.
Gelek Rimpoche puts it this way: "Tara meditations serve a dual purpose. You want to win good results for yourself, and so you ask for Tara’s healing blessings so that your life can be long, healthy, and free from distress. But you also want to serve. You understand that gaining Tara’s blessings for yourself will enable you to share those blessings with others, expanding Tara’s healing energy to those around you and even to all beings in the whole universe."
The Dalai Lama explains: "The practice of Deity Yoga meditation Tantra (like this Tara meditation practice) is primarily to transform how you see yourself, others, the environment, and your activities. By visualizing yourself as having compassionate motivations, a pure body, and conduct that benefits others, like Tara has, you can make this transformation in your outlook." Different Tantric Deities have different qualities, and are used for different purposes. You must know about the deity you choose.
The scholar Martin Wilson describes Tara this way: "She is the karma-devi the Goddess of Action or Queen of the Action family. Her specialty is acting with lightnening swiftness to aid those in distress. In Buddhist Tantra, males represent compassionate skillful means and females represent the wisdom of emptiness. Tara is female by deliberate choice inorder to show that a woman's body is at least as good as a man's for benefiting sentient beings and attaining enlightenment."
You don’t have to be a Buddhist, a woman or a Tibetan to practice Tara meditations. They are specifically designed to help with illness, fear that dominates your life, or other serious life obstacles - or whenever you lose heart. Gelek Rimpoche offers complete instructions for several Tara Meditations in his new book, The Tara Box, which comes with a small statue of the goddess. And the American-born Tibetan Buddhist nun Thubten Chodron teaches several very useful Tara meditations in her book, How to Free Your Mind.
Books Available from Amazon
The Tara Box: Rituals for Protection and Healing From the Female Buddha, by Gelek Rimpoche, Brenda Rosen, ($16). This little book includes several Tara meditations that you can learn on your own. According to the author, this is the first time these meditation practices are available to the general public.
How to Practice: The Way to a Meaningful Life, by the Dalai Lama ($20) A practical explanation of Buddhism and Buddhist meditation techniques that includes instructions for several practices.
Tara The Feminine Divine, by Bokar Rinpoche ($19). Bokar Rinpoche presents the various aspects of Tara and the origin of her tantra, relates contemporary examples of her benevolent activity, provides an explanation of her praise, offers instruction for devotional practice, and discusses remarkable women in Indian and Tibetan Buddism.
In Praise of Tara: Songs to the Saviouress: Source Texts from India and Tibet on Buddhism's Great Goddess, by Martin Willson, ($25). This book is a collection of source texts, poems and songs of devotion.
How to Free Your Mind: Tara The Liberator, by Thubten Chodron, ($11). This book contains practical advice about how to use Tara meditations to develop a calm mind, free from suffering of all kinds.
Links
Gelek Rimpoche has a web site: www.jewelheart.org which gives his biography and teaching schedule.
The Tibetan Government in Exile maintains information about the Dalai Lama at their site:
www.tibet.com Thubten Chodron has a website that describes her other books, her teaching schedule, and her biography: www.thubtenchodron.org
