I’ve been spending time recently with some long-held knots in my mind — regrets from early in life that never quite resolved, patterns that still carry a charge even after years of practice.

That led me back to a teaching I first encountered through Vajrayana practice: the Four Opponent Powers. Traditionally, they’re embedded in ritual and visualization practices like the Vajrasattva sadhana. What interests me now is something simpler — working with the heart of the practice in a way that doesn’t require tantric initiation, just honesty, attention, and care.

The Four Opponent Powers are a method that uses clarity and care to release clinging and confusion.

If you’ve ever tried to will yourself to change, you already know that letting go doesn’t happen just because we want it to. Forgiveness and release don’t come from effort alone.

The mind and body are conditioned. Habit has momentum. It has to be met directly — felt, allowed, and gradually reconditioned. In Vajrayana, this process is called purification: not punishment, but cleansing, untangling, and un-enmeshing from confusion.

The Four Opponent Powers offer a way to do this — a way to clean the heart.

Here’s how they may show up in lived experience.

1. Regret: honesty without shame

You notice a familiar feeling — shame, anxiety, or a sense of having caused harm. Instead of minimizing it, explaining it away, or turning against yourself, you pause.

You look honestly:
What actions or patterns contributed to this?
How is it showing up right now — in thought, in the body, in emotion?

Regret is often felt first in the body: tightness, heat, collapse, agitation. Staying present with that — without self-attack — is already a shift. Blame has never worked. Regret here means caring enough to see clearly and to keep looking.

2. Reliance: turning toward trust

Clear seeing includes recognizing interdependence — and letting go of the false sense that we are isolated or solely responsible.

Reliance, in this context, is releasing the belief that you must fix yourself through effort or self-blame. It’s remembering that you are supported: by breath, by the body, by practice, by other living beings, by basic goodness, and by the simple truth that actions have consequences.

In the mind, reliance feels like surrender — trusting a larger field of goodwill, interdependence, and cause and effect, rather than the narrow story of a separate self.

In the body, reliance feels like grounding. Feeling the floor. Letting the breath move naturally. Allowing the body to hold you rather than gripping it.

Shame thrives in isolation. Reliance reintroduces support and safety.

3. Remedy: careful attention in action

With honesty and support in place, something can now be done.

A remedy doesn’t have to be elaborate. It might be a mantra, an affirmation, a visualization, or an act of repair. What matters most here is careful attention — returning again and again to direct experience rather than story.

Instead of replaying the narrative of failure, attention is placed into the sensations of the present moment. Placing and sensing. Placing and sensing. Again and again.

Rather than pushing feelings away, you allow them to move, integrate, and settle. This interrupts passivity and automatic reaction. Something begins to unwind.

4. Resolve: orientation, not perfection

Even after this work, the old feeling may return. That’s not a failure.

Resolve is the commitment to keep showing up — to not drift, collapse, or resign yourself to “this is just how I am.” Resolve establishes presence.

Rather than waiting for a future where no unpleasant feelings arise, we orient toward meeting experience as it is, with honesty and care. Again and again.

The Four Opponent Powers are meant to be returned to repeatedly. They don’t erase the past, but they change our relationship to it. Over time, what once felt tangled begins to soften and straighten.

In the mind, its effects are experienced as a deepening sanity.

In the body, the practice develops suppleness and ease.

Traditionally, the Four Opponent Powers are described in terms of what they oppose — the conditions that allow karmic patterns to continue and strengthen. The accompanying handout presents this framework clearly and concisely, outlining each power alongside its ethical, relational, and somatic dimensions.

You’re welcome to download it and use it as a worksheet for reflection and practice.

If you’re curious to experience this practice in community, you’re welcome to join our Yoga for Life series.

Heather Finlayson Fenton combines 25 years of Buddhist meditation training with a lifelong interest in mental and physical health. She takes joy in community practice and teaches from the heart with warmth, compassion and humour.

Heather offers regular meditation sessions, workshops and retreats in the Niagara region and online. She and her husband, Michael Fenton, established Stream Yoga + Meditation in 2018 in Port Colborne, Ontario.

Heather’s main interests are introducing and supporting simple meditation and mindfulness practices and encouraging others — whatever their background or beliefs — to build and sustain a daily (or daily-ish) practice of stillness and inner reflection.

Heather is the author of 100 Days of Care: Cultivating Curiosity & Kindness, an ‘at-home’ meditation retreat workbook designed to integrate meditation in daily life.

In addition to offering regular weekly sessions, workshop and retreats, Heather is available for one-on-one meditation mentoring and support. Please reach out at hello@gentlydownthestream.org.