Transforming the Knots That Bind Us

Hi everyone—my yogis, bhaktas, and fellow explorers of this wild, beautiful experience of being human— I’m traveling from a rich stretch of time in Mexico back to the farm in Hawai’i, where we’ll soon be hosting groups through November and early December. I’ll be there with the global kirtan artist Adam Bauer and other luminous humans. The farm is in wild place that invites deep connection with self and with nature. Living fully off-grid in the tropics (and at the point on Earth farthest from any other landmass) is an adventure, and for those who come on retreat, it’s entirely magical. Come if you’re called!

On another note, our family company, Rosebud, is now in its seventh year. We began with beautiful, plant-based intimate balms, arousal supports, and luxurious body care, all designed as vehicles for a message of no shame. This business, this labor of love, is a living expression of the tantric worldview: everything in our embodied existence is wholly holy. If you aren’t there, if you (or anyone you know) experience any form of body denial, pleasure resistance, or sexual shame, you might find the Body Love Journal helpful. It’s a nine-week inquiry guided that many people also use as a framework for group conversations.

On to this week’s writing. This is the third of three essays on this topic. In the previous essay, we explored vāsanā — the subtle residues of past experience that hum beneath the surface of consciousness, shaping our reality without our conscious consent. Vāsanā operates in the rooparoopa realm, the vibrational blueprint between formless potential and manifest form. It sponsors the patterns we keep living out": the repeating conflicts, the persistent scarcity, the familiar emotional storms.

I hope you find it helpful.

Christine

Working with “Negative” Emotions from a Tantric Worldview

Someone gets the recognition you wanted, and your chest tightens. A situation unfolds differently than you planned, and you feel a flash of rage. You make a mistake in front of others, and there’s a flood of shame. A loved one pulls away, and a small fear grabs ahold of you. These moments arrive uninvited, seemingly out of nowhere. Suddenly you’re smaller, denser, caught in a story you didn’t choose.

Every spiritual tradition, across vastly different cultures and centuries, points to the same fundamental contractions of human consciousness. The Yoga Sutras number the kleshas: ignorance, egoism, attachment, aversion, and clinging to life as the root causes of all suffering. Buddhism catalogs five poisons (ignorance, attachment, aversion, pride, and jealousy) as the core afflictions that bind us to suffering. Christianity names pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth. Islam identifies the diseases of the heart as arrogance, envy, greed, hatred - calling them spiritual illnesses that obscure our natural devotion. Taoism teaches about the entanglements that disturb our natural harmony. Even ancient Greek philosophy warned against the destructive passions.

The testimony is universal and astonishingly consistent: these patterns obstruct our clarity, our freedom, our connection to what’s sacred. Jealousy contracts. Anger blinds. Pride separates. Fear paralyzes. Shame collapses. Human beings, across all times and places, experience these same fundamental ways of suffering.

But here’s where the paths diverge, and the difference is profound.

Many religious and moral systems teach resistance as the primary remedy. Suppress the anger before it arises. Dominate the jealousy with willpower. Mortify the flesh to master desire. Confess your wrathful thoughts and repent. The underlying logic is that these emotions are fundamentally sinful, that feeling them makes you spiritually deficient, that the goal is to never experience them at all. The contraction itself becomes evidence of your failure, a proof that you’re not pure enough, devoted enough, surrendered enough.

The result is often a double bind: because these states are not optional (they are human and they arise as part of having a body, a nervous system, and a conditioned history) resistance leads either to bypassing or shame. Bypassing is pretending not to feel what you feel, and creates elaborate defenses to maintain the illusion of purity. Chronic shame would have you believe that you are fundamentally unworthy because you keep “failing” to be emotionless.

So you add a second layer of contraction on top of the first: now you’re jealous and ashamed of being jealous. You’re angry and guilty about your anger. You’re afraid and afraid of your fear. Neither path leads to awakening. Both obscure the raw truth of what is. And awakening, above all, requires radical honesty. It requires the capacity to see clearly, and we can’t see clearly what we’re busy repressing or denying.

From the yogic view, when life force or prana flows freely through the instrument of your being, you experience ease, clarity, spaciousness. When it meets resistance (old conditioning, undigested experience, the grip of separateness) it contracts, and shows up as what we sometimes think of as the “negative” emotions. What we call jealousy, anger, fear, and shame are simply these contractions: prana in a knot, consciousness forgetting its nature, the field collapsing around a story of threat or lack. The yogic path doesn’t seek to eliminate these contractions but to work with them skillfully, to see them clearly, and to learn how they can become doorways rather than traps.

The tantric view (and by tantra I mean the broader non-dual recognition traditions, including Kashmir Shaivism, Dzogchen, Zen, and certain streams of mystical Christianity and Sufism) takes a completely different approach. These contractions are not obstacles to awakening but rather the material of awakening. They are concentrated pockets of energy that have become frozen, stuck, identified with.

When met without warfare or suppression, but rather with clear seeing and skillful engagement, they reveal themselves as doorways.

Why doorways? Because every contraction points to something. Jealousy points to a quality of aliveness or beauty you long to embody. Anger points to a boundary that’s been violated or a value you care deeply about. Shame points to your fundamental vulnerability and the ways you’ve learned to hide it. Fear points to the edge of the known, where growth lives. Each contraction, when investigated with curiosity rather than judgment, shows you exactly where you’re still caught in a story of separation, where prana is bound up, where consciousness has forgotten its nature.

We’ve heard of the alchemical principle that what you resist persists. When you go to war with an emotion, you give it power. You make it solid. You feed it with your attention and your aversion. The anger you try to suppress doesn’t disappear. It goes underground and runs your life from the shadows. The jealousy you shame yourself for doesn’t dissolve. It intensifies and finds more sophisticated ways to justify itself. The fear you deny doesn’t evaporate. It leaks out sideways as anxiety, control, or paralysis.

In contrast, what we bless transforms. When you turn toward the contraction with curiosity, when you feel it fully without becoming it, when you recognize it as a pattern rather than the truth of who you are, space opens. The knot begins to loosen. Not because you’ve forced it to, but because you’ve stopped feeding it with resistance.

This is why the tantric traditions speak of “poison into medicine” or “transmuting the base metal into gold.” There is an actual energetic shift that happens when you stop resisting what is and start working with it skillfully. The same energy that was bound up in jealousy or rage or shame becomes available as clarity, passion, devotion, power.

Not by getting rid of the emotion, but by seeing through the story it’s telling, by loosening your identification with it, by remembering that you are the space in which it arises rather than the contraction itself.

This doesn’t mean spiritual bypassing in the other direction. We don’t pretend everything is fine, slapping a positive attitude on top of genuine suffering, or using “it’s all perfect” as a way to avoid feeling what you feel. The tantric approach is unflinchingly honest: Yes, there’s contraction. Yes, it hurts. Yes, it’s dense and sticky and convincing. And it’s also not the whole truth. It’s not who you are. And it’s pointing you toward something that wants to be seen, felt, released, transformed.

So the work is neither suppression nor indulgence. It’s meeting. It’s the patient, intimate, courageous work of turning toward what contracts you and asking: What are you? What do you need? What are you protecting? What are you pointing to? And then blessing it. Offering it. Opening your field to it rather than closing around it.

The goal isn’t to become someone who never contracts. That’s not liberation: that’s dissociation. The goal is to become someone who can meet contraction with awareness, curiosity, and skill. To see these patterns not as evidence of your spiritual failure but as the raw material of your awakening. To discover that the very thing you’ve been trying to transcend or suppress or fix is actually pointing you home.

On the tantric path, nothing is rejected, everything is workable, and the densest knot of suffering contains within it the brightest possibility of freedom. Not someday, when you’ve finally overcome all your human messiness, but right now, in the middle of the contraction itself.

In the essays that follow, we’ll work with specific contractions one at a time: jealousy, anger, shame, fear, pride, grief. Each one has its own signature, its own story, its own doorway. Each one calls for a slightly different blessing, a particular way of meeting it. But the basic architecture remains the same.

A Guided Meditation with this Method

There is a basic architecture for working with any contraction, a set of moves that applies whether you’re caught in jealousy or rage or shame or fear. This isn’t a process you master once. We cycle through it again and again. Contraction arises, we work with it, it dissolves or softens, and then it arises again. Over time, something changes. The contractions don’t necessarily stop coming, but your relationship to them shifts. They become weather, not identity. Visitors, not tyrants. And more and more often, they become doorways.

Notice the body first. Every contraction has a somatic signature — tightness, clenching, shallow breath, the field shrinking. Before you know what you’re feeling, you feel the contraction itself. Where do you feel the emotion in the body?

See the story. Recognize the frequency. Every contraction comes with a narrative that justifies and perpetuates it. Name the story without believing it. Every story vibrates at a particular frequency and magnetizes matching experiences. Lack attracts more lack. Threat attracts more danger. Notice what you’re tuning to.

Witness any fusion. The trap is believing you are this contraction. Catch the moment you’re being it versus witnessing it.

Ask what it’s protecting or pointing to. Every contraction is trying to protect something or revealing something unlived. Jealousy points to dormant aliveness. Anger points to violated values. Get curious. Inquire: What are you trying to tell me?

Offer and bless. You can’t force a contraction to dissolve, but you can offer it up… to the breath, to spaciousness, to the fire of awareness. Not to get rid of it, but to stop feeding it. Bless what triggered it. This is the key move, the one that shifts the field. Bless the beauty that sparked jealousy. Bless the situation that sparked anger. Bless your humanity that sparked shame.

Rest as the field. After offering and blessing, there’s often space. The contraction may still be present, but you’re not fused with it. You remember you’re larger than this pattern. Rest here, even if just for a few moments and notice.

Thank you Tepotzlan, and all the beautiful people from around the world who made this last week so fantastic.