A Contemporary Approach to Deity Yoga and the Play of Identity
Taught in a modern, pragmatic style, this course guides you through a progressive series of practices that work with breath, visualization, and the always-available field of open awareness. Whether you’re new to these methods or a seasoned practitioner, you’ll learn to integrate them into daily life in ways that support greater presence, authenticity, and compassion across your relationships, work, and sense of purpose.
At the heart of deity yoga is a radical gesture: generating a luminous form in place of the familiar self. This isn’t self-improvement. It’s ritual displacement. The body and mind are trained to recognize form as empty and emptiness as radiant. In Mahayoga, appearances and emptiness are recognized as the seamless and dynamic expression of open mind. It's there, but it's not there.
This course is for those who have tasted awakening, or at least glimpsed the view, but still feel subtly exiled inside the body. You may know yourself as open, luminous awareness, yet feel bound by a localized sense of self. Meditation may offer perspective, but your mind and body continue to echo old scripts. Deity yoga targets this felt discrepancy. These aren’t visualizations for escape. They are precision rituals for dissolving the illusion of fixity.
Where early Buddhist methods like jhāna refine awareness through stillness and withdrawal from coarse form, this training turns toward sensation and identity. It becomes a translucent choreography of cognition and appearance. You are not visualizing an idealized self. You are rehearsing a workable one, more tolerant of openness, more curious about mystery, more able to meet life without bracing.
Western therapeutic models offer powerful tools: parts work, Ideal Parent protocols, attachment theory. Deity yoga offers something different. Rather than resolving identity drama, it restages it.
In this course, we explore how to integrate developmental insight without becoming beholden to fruitional or relative views. Therapeutic clarity and tantric play are not at odds. Held together, they invite a deeper, more creative intimacy with both self and world.
Course Details
Radiant Forms, Empty Reflections begins Wednesday, July 23, 2025. This is an experiential 8-week training in deity yoga—a choreography of form and emptiness, staged identity and luminous reality. We’ll meet live on Zoom every Wednesday at 5pm Pacific, and offer optional Saturday office hours to support European time zones. These labs are an opportunity to bring your questions, deepen your grasp of the practices, and metabolize the paradoxes they evoke.
All sessions are recorded and shared via the course platform. Pre-recorded tutorials and print materials accompany the live teachings.
Discover how to safely harness the transformative potential of Mahayoga while grounding your practice in the non-dual view of Dzogchen.
Operating Deity Practice
Many practitioners receive initiations into deity yoga, but lack direct guidance on how to operate the practice day-to-day. This course addresses that gap.
We will break down the structure of a sādhana—step by step—and offer live commentary and instruction on each component.
This is not just about receiving transmission; it’s about developing the confidence and fluency to practice with clarity and ease.
This course will draw from two foundational texts and living threads of practice:
༄༅། །དགོངས་གཏེར་སྒྲོལ་མའི་ཟབ་ཏིག་ལས། ཕྱི་སྒྲུབ་རྒྱས་པའི་ཆོ་ག་ཚོགས་གཉིས་སྙིང་པོ་ཞེས་བྱ་བ་བཞུགས་སོ།།
Essence of the Two Accumulations: The Ritual for the Elaborate Outer Practice, from the Mind Treasure Tārā’s Profound Essence, revealed by Tertön Chokgyur Dechen Lingpa and arranged by Jamgön Kongtrul Lodrö Thayé.
༄༅། །རྩ་གསུམ་དྲིལ་སྒྲུབ་ཀྱི་ཕྲིན་ལས་སྙིང་གི་ནོར་བུ།
The Heart Jewel: The Sādhana Practice of the Three Roots Combined into One (Tsasum Drildrub) by Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo
The View
Deity yoga is not escapism. It’s not self-affirmation with incense. It’s a method for inviting open awareness into the scene of your life, precisely as it is. The goal is not transcendence but full-spectrum coherence: to hold spaciousness and appearance, tenderness and precision, embodiment and unreality, without flinching.
We use the symbolic form of the deity as a kind of anti-escape, a deliberate replacement of our habitual, tight identity with one that is more porous, more alive, and more attuned to the mysterious field of awareness itself.
This is not about becoming divine. It is about recognizing that you already are—and learning to tolerate the implications.
TRADITIONAL RESOURCES
This course draws from traditional methods within the Nyingma lineage, weaving Dzogchen instructions and Generation Stage techniques from the Longchen Nyingthik. These methods are not ornamental; they are engineered to deconstruct fixation while training the subtle body to serve realization. Visualization is not escapism, but a form of internal choreography that reconfigures perception from the inside out. Identity is not healed or erased, but staged as fluid, radiant, and ungraspable. Through the ritual artistry of form and the view of empty appearance, we learn to inhabit experience more fully, without reference points.
In this course, we will train to be present with immediate, embodied, sensation-level experience, aiming to cultivate more frequent moments of open-heartedness and presence. This is not about achieving a permanent state, but about refining our capacity to stay in contact—especially when the nervous system is activated or when familiar identity strategies resurface. We’ll explore how deity yoga and nervous system regulation can support one another, building the stability required to hold complexity without collapse and relate to intensity without retreat.
Practitioner's Path
For those returning or ready to deepen their path. This tier includes a private session, lifetime access to updated materials, and continued presence in Discord across cohorts. Designed for practitioners who value sustained contact over time and understand that depth comes not from novelty, but from renewed intimacy with the view.
1 × private 60-minute coaching session
50% discount on one future full enrollment in any course
Practitioner
An entry into the vivid grammar of deity yoga; structured, alive, and imaginal. This course helps practitioners cultivate somatic immediacy and nervous system stability while examining the historical dramas that shape identity. These patterns are not bypassed; they are made workable. Reactive architecture becomes ritual display. What once felt personal becomes expressive, pliable, and free.
8 live teachings + 8 lab sessions
Access to The Field Discord for community dialogue, and Circle for all recorded sessions and course materials.
All materials and recordings hosted on Circle
VIP Mentorship Container
For practitioners ready for close guidance and tailored refinement. This is a high-contact container for those who wish to stabilize visualization practice, fine-tune energetic posture, or garner personal feedback and nuanced pacing. 4 seats available
Includes everything in Practitioner, plus:
3 × private 60-minute mentorship sessions
Personalized Notion board with session notes, reflections, and tailored practices
Private channel access in The Field Discord for direct contact. Ongoing voice memo dialogue
Scholarships
$600
For students with genuine financial need. Includes full access to the course, all recordings, and community support via The Field Discord and Circle. Private sessions and direct messaging are not included. Designed to offer dignity, not discount.
Join Us For Radiant Forms, Empty Reflections
The instruction is structured for practitioners who want a daily practice that supports open-hearted awareness and unconditional embodiment.