Welcome to Wonder Cabinet.

I'm Anne Strange Champs.

And I'm Steve Paulson.

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to grow up picturing the face of God as female.

Singing hymns and saying prayers not only to a Holy Father, but to a great mother, the source of all life.

Many religious traditions have language for a divine feminine, sometimes in plain sight,

sometimes in forgotten scriptures and teachings, in names like Gaia, Sophia, Shakti.

Shikina, Prajna Paramita.

Whatever she's called, there's often a sense that she embodies the deep wisdom of the earth.

So what would it be like to grow up with her?

Because I heard it talked about and taught at a young age, for me as a child, the visualization of that was always that she is feminine, right?

She's the great mother,

and that she's the earth, you know, that ultimately everything springs from the earth.

Meet Dekila Chung Yalpa, an environmental scientist and conservationist who grew up in one of the

most beautiful and sacred landscapes in the world, in the high Himalayan mountains, an area famous for Buddhist monasteries,

and Dekela herself is the daughter and granddaughter of a spiritual lineage of Tibetan Buddhist nuns.

So I want to hear more about tequila, but first, I think you should talk a bit about this concept of the divine feminine.

I mean, we have visited churches

and art museums all over Europe, and you always gravitate to images of women. Christian saints,

Greek, and Roman goddesses, there's something about sacred women that just seems to pull you in.

Well, they're powerful. True, yes.

Spiritually powerful, I mean.

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