Vajrayogini's iconography and practice are closely linked, through a wrathful black form called Troma Nagmo, to one of the most historically significant female teachers in Tibetan Buddhist history, Machig Labdron, who lived in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and is credited as the founder of Chod, a distinctive Tibetan meditative practice in which the practitioner visualizes offering their own body, symbolically dismembered and transformed into an abundance of nourishment, to all beings, including hostile or demonic forces, as a radical method for cutting through ego-clinging and fear.
Machig Labdron is one of the relatively few women in Tibetan Buddhist history whose teaching activity, students and textual legacy are extensively documented and whose lineage, rather than fading into obscurity, spread widely and continues to be actively practised across all the major schools of Tibetan Buddhism down to the present day, an unusual degree of durable, cross-sectarian influence for any teacher, male or female, and especially notable given the generally more limited institutional visibility afforded to women elsewhere in the tradition's history. Her close association with wrathful female tantric forms related to Vajrayogini reflects a broader pattern in which Chod and Vajrayogini-related Highest Yoga Tantra practice share overlapping symbolic material, cutting through delusion and confronting fear directly, and Machig Labdron's own hagiography presents her authority as arising from direct realization and vision rather than solely from institutional transmission, a detail later tradition has cited as part of what made her teaching accessible across gender and social lines.