As part of our studies in Buddhist and Western Psychology, my graduate school class spent three months in a Rocky Mountain retreat, personally experiencing the transformative power of the ‘five buddha families’. We were exploring the radical teachings of Tibetan Buddhist master, Chogyam Trungpa. He pointed out that, rather than rejecting them, our confused states of mind can be pathways to inner peace and wisdom.
How is this possible? In our retreat, we combined daily sitting meditation with an embodied practice called “Maitri Space Awareness.” The word ‘maitri’ translates as ‘loving kindness’. The practice of loving kindness joins with physical postures and environments. There are five different rooms, each with a shape and colour that will intensify one of the reactive patterns that habitually lead us away from our inborn wisdom. These five patterns are known in buddhism as the five toxic emotions: ignorance, craving, aggression, arrogance and jealousy.
In the three month retreat we spent many hours a week lying still in a prescribed posture that matched each of these five rooms. This intensification highlighted the relationship between our inner sense of embodiment and the environment around us. The five buddha families were no longer an abstract concept, they were vivid displays of our habitual defence mechanisms. But along with the confusion there were glimpses of a more trustworthy state of mind, an underlying sanity that we could learn to trust.
The Wheel of Life is a buddhist iconography that depicts realms of suffering that seem hopelessly cyclic. But within each realm there is a wisdom figure, offering a pathway out that realm. In my career as a couples and family therapist, I applied what I had learned in our retreat to the communication patterns that trap us in particular ‘realms’ or environments we live in. These patterns shape the intergenerational trauma in our families, our work places and our larger communities.
My book ” The Five Keys To Mindful Communication” offers examples of this approach. Now, in the coming year, I’m moving this work forward to explore the symbolism of the five wisdom mothers, the elemental qualities that speak to us in our physical world and the more subtle energies of our body.
I will be teaching workshops on this subject starting in September 2026.