Opening up
When the map at hand limits our reach
If the response to the latest episode of the Prajna Sparks podcast thus far is any indication, it touched something real.
Self-love powers a longing at the heart of every self-help book and psychotherapy session. Our yearning is genuine, poignant, and worth honoring.
The latest Full Moon Sit episode on the Prajna Sparks podcast starts from there, then opens further. We explore whether the map at hand in everyday contexts aligns with the territory we actually encompass. And we experiment.
What if self-love spanned lifetimes, extending the small scale of the needs and wants of the things of this one life — palliative, useful, and yet inevitably constraining us to less than we are?
What if self-love honored our radical interconnection with all that lives, including care beyond the particular story of a wounded self, encompassing this boundless stream of a consciousness that has been loving and forgetting and surging forward since time without reckoning?
What if self-love’s gaze were to focus directly, honestly, with full attention at this very idea of self that centers samsaric experience, encountering a dynamic stream of being far more open and luminous than the solid, separate, and solitary experience of the rather anxious “I” we typically take ourselves to be?
Explore self-love in panoramic perspective in the latest episode of the Prajna Sparks podcast, using the Buddha’s own time-tested practice of listening, contemplating, and meditating.
If you have not had a chance to listen, I would love for you to give it an ear and let me know what you think.
And then, when you are ready, you might even feel a tickle to go further: what if self-love invites us to something greater still?
The next Prajna Sparks episode drops on Saga Dawa Duchen — the most sacred day in the Tibetan Buddhist calendar, and this year, it is a blue moon to boot.
We will explore together something self-love and all the modalities aimed at embodying it gesture towards, without quite naming — yet. A quality that makes self-love in all its fullness structurally sound. A self-love we can experience as spiritually sane and whole.
The Dharma always points to this quality. The zenith of Buddha’s own life story, celebrated on Saga Dawa Duchen, illuminates it with poetic precision.
Mark the date of Sunday, May 31, 2026 for the next Full Moon Sit episode on the Prajna Sparks podcast.
Everyone is also invited and most welcome to join the Prajna Fire sangha that morning at 8am USA MT to begin this holy of holy days with our customary chanting practice of the Praise of the Twelve Deeds of the Buddha Shakyamuni, online and open to all.
PRAISE OF THE TWELVE DEEDS OF THE BUDDHA
SUNDAY, MAY 31, 2026
8:00 - 9:00 am USA MST
VIA ZOOM ONLINE VIDEO CONFERENCE
Meanwhile, consider — our spiritual sky is bigger than this habitually compartmentalized cell.
What would it be like to revel in the clear, sunlit expanse of mind’s true nature?
Come and see…
Warmly,
Yeshe
PRAJNA FIRE