Why I Work With the Poisons 3: The Love Affair With Emptiness and Form

The Love Affair With Emptiness and Form, part three of four.

November 2026

There is a line I love, from the Nyingma lamas Ngakpa Chögyam and Khandro Déchen: “Every activity becomes the consummation of the love affair with emptiness and form.” They go on to describe being free of reference points as objects of desire, and burning with a wisdom-fire of centrelessness that extends realization to everyone.

What it means is to be deeply rooted in the fact that nothing is solid; it is all empty of any inherent existence. We are like the empty sky. Alive, present, vast, with no beginning or end, and at the same time, here we are, manifesting as this very body, these very appearances. Both are true simultaneously. Ungraspable, wondrous! When, instead of being driven by self-centered desires, we zoom out and realize we are nothing but emptiness and form right now, the heart breaks into a thousand pieces, and there is just awe, love, and more love. Amazing that we are here at all, experiencing this ungraspable presence right now. This eternal moment, in this very body that can feel and think. What a gift. We have no clue why we are here, or what it means not to be here.

So instead of accepting only certain manifestations and dismissing the rest as wrong, we begin to realize that we are all of it. There is nothing outside this very manifestation, right now. Nothing is outside this moment, or the next. This is it. And so it is all me.

That is what the love affair means. The heart cracked wide open. Trungpa called it the cosmic wound.

Why a wound? Because it is so painful to keep holding on to something that is an illusion and cannot be captured. Thereby we suffer unnecessarily. We suffer by holding on to the part we believe is specifically us, and closing down to the parts we think are not. It is exhausting and not real, like trying to hold on to the waves you prefer while refusing the rest of the ocean.

And this holding on is not wrong. It is what we do.

This is what it means to say the poisons are contracted states of awakened qualities. Held on to, they are poison. Released from the contraction, the same energy reveals their awakened qualities.

This is the work I do with people, in silence and in conversation. If you would like to sit with it rather than only read about it, Silence by the Sea meets Fridays 8 to 9 AM and Tuesdays 5 to 6 PM at Fire Rock Ocean Sky in Seal Rock, and I work with people one to one, in person and online.

If you would like to hear about future Deep Sangha Work groups and workshops on the poisons, send me an email and I’ll add you to my list. You can read more about Deep Sangha Work here.

Ngakpa Chögyam with Khandro Déchen, Spectrum of Ecstasy: Embracing the Five Wisdom Emotions of Vajrayana Buddhism, ch. 8, “Red Khandro-Pawo Display” (Shambhala, 2003; first published Aro Books, 1997), p. 149.

Previous: Part 2, Turning Toward What Is Underneath
Next: Part 4, Where We Separate Is Also Where We Meet