Friday Night Talk: Reclaiming Feminine Wisdom and Power with Holly Gayley

How do we engage more freely and creatively within the expansive side of ourselves that longs to express its gifts in the world, while bringing greater awareness to the contracted side, driven by unconscious tendencies and unhealed wounds?

The Buddhist teachings on the feminine principle offer tools to hold these polarities in the process of healing on personal, relational, and collective levels. Can we trust our own intuition, the fire in the belly, to imagine and co-create ways to transform ourselves and our communities? This talk explores wisdom and power, delving into the feminine and masculine expression of these based on the five buddha families.

Holly Gayley is a scholar and translator of Buddhist literature in contemporary Tibet and associate professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is author of Love Letters from Golok: A Tantric Couple in Modern Tibet (2016) and editor of Voices from Larung Gar: Shaping Tibetan Buddhism for the Twenty-First Century (2021). Her recent articles on gender and sexuality include “Revisiting the ‘Secret Consort’ (gsang yum) in Tibetan Buddhism” (2018) and “Parody and Pathos: Sexual Transgression by ‘Fake’ Lamas in Tibetan Short Stories,” co-authored with Somtso Bhum (2022). For two decades, she has regularly led meditation workshops and retreats.

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