What if the darkest corners of ourselves, the places we most want to avoid, are actually lighting a path to greater freedom?
In the 11th century, the Tibetan Buddhist nun Machig Labdrön offered a radical teaching: The way beyond fear is not to escape it, but to turn toward it. Her practice of Chöd, or “cutting through,” invites us to turn toward what we habitually avoid. The demons, in Machig’s teachings, are not only external forces but also the fears, attachments, and fixed identities that keep us from recognizing our innate freedom.
The upcoming Skymind: Meeting Our World with a Vast Mind & Fierce Heart retreat from October 28-31 draws on this living lineage. The retreat invites participants to approach fear not as an obstacle to awakening, but as its very path. Rather than turning away from what is difficult, we are encouraged to “go to the places that scare you” with curiosity and compassion.
Key to this practice is Dzogchen, the Tibetan Buddhist tradition of recognizing the mind’s innate openness and clarity. This open awareness is often likened to the sky: vast enough to hold every passing cloud without being changed by it. Thoughts, emotions, memories, and fears like clouds in the sky are not problems to solve or enemies to defeat; they arise and dissolve within a boundless spaciousness that is inherently unobstructed.
This invitation resonates in a fascinating way with a seemingly different tradition: Carl Jung’s depth psychology. Jung described the shadow as the aspects of ourselves we unconsciously reject or suppress—our vulnerabilities, grief, anger, and desires that we learned to disown in order to adapt to family, culture, or society. Shadow work is not about eliminating these qualities; rather, it is the practice of coming into a conscious relationship with them, so they no longer shape our lives from the unconscious. By bringing these hidden parts into awareness without fear, we gain greater freedom in how we respond to them.
Shadow work even teaches us how to reclaim hidden gifts. In recovering our anger, we may discover healthy assertiveness; in allowing ourselves to feel vulnerable, we often find deeper compassion for ourselves and for others. Contemporary psychological research echoes this insight. Across evidence-based therapies, researchers have found that avoiding painful thoughts and emotions tends to reinforce suffering, while cultivating a more open, accepting relationship to difficult experiences is associated with greater resilience, emotional flexibility, and well-being.
Where Jung sought the integration of the personality, the Buddhist path ultimately points beyond identification with the personality itself. Yet both begin with the same insight: Transformation comes from meeting experience directly rather than resisting it. In both traditions, freedom arises when we stop rejecting parts of ourselves and learn to regard them with awareness.
The Skymind approach also offers a meaningful foundation for the work of authentic community. The more we become familiar with our own inner landscape, the more available we become for genuine connections with others. The less we reject the parts of ourselves we find frightening, the less likely we are to reject those same qualities in others. Personal transformation and collective belonging are not separate journeys; each makes the other possible.
Perhaps the most radical promise of both Jungian shadow work and the Skymind path is that nothing essential about us is broken. Beneath our habits of avoidance and self-protection lies an awareness spacious enough to welcome every part of our humanity. And from that spaciousness, fear itself can become a teacher, inspiring the courage to meet our world with wisdom, tenderness, and a fiercely open heart.
The Skymind: Meeting Our World with a Vast Mind & Fierce Heart retreat from October 28-31 will be led by Charlotte Rotterdam and Pieter Oosthuizen, senior teachers at Tara Mandala Retreat Center, founded by Lama Tsultrim Allione. Their new book, Skymind: The Radical Path of Open Awareness highlights the nature of mind teachings of the 11th century Tibetan yogini Machig Labdrön and their application to modern life.
