2. An Intro to Tantra

Transcript

Episode 2 Tantra, A Journey Within For me, Tantra has been a long and deep journey of healing and transformation. I found myself very much up in my mind, split between many desires, some of them even opposing each other. There was an inner conflict happening inside.

I believe we all have this tendency inside to desire opposites. We want both freedom and stability. For example, we want to be in a relationship but fearing not to have the possibility to have the freedom to flirt and go out with friends.

Or we desire to be a successful businesswoman or follow our heart and backpack the world. We want too many things at the same time so our desires become blurred and it becomes hard to make decisions. Or we lean too much towards one comfortable end of the split and put the other end into our shadow, the place where fears exist.

A fear being a negative desire. If we place too much attention on one side of the split, it makes us feel that we are missing out on something, a feeling of not fulfilling ourselves. These inner conflicts then show up on the outside, in our relationships.

Because if we lean too much towards one end of the duality, we tend to seek the other end to fulfill us in our relationships, from the outside. So how do you choose and how do you deal with these splits? Tantra is about looking in how to merge our splits inside and create a totality in order to live life more complete and authentically.

I was for example very scared of intimacy to the point I judged that quality in others. As soon as someone showed affection and intimacy, I freezed. Even though I secretly desired someone to be intimate with, it scared me to death.

In other words, there was a big split inside of me and I was seeking someone to fulfill my lack of being intimate. Instead of healing the split inside, I looked for an object outside of myself to heal the split. It led me to be very attracted to men who showed intimacy.

So this looking out, projecting onto others what we are lacking inside is called projection. In tantra, this is the first step on our path towards healing. Understand our splits, our polarities.

To look in what we are attached to in others can actually give us a hint to what is lacking within. If we do not understand this polarity and how we tend to be in our comfort zone, leaning towards one side of the split, sort of on one side of the spectrum, in relationships it can cause us to blame the other person for being one way or the other, wanting to change the person and bring the partner over towards our preferred side of the spectrum of the polarity, a place where we feel safe and familiar. This separation can cause many relationships to fail and to fall apart, become dysfunctional and we can easily hurt one another as we project onto each other.

If we instead can train ourselves to understand and know how to complete ourselves, to unite our internal splits, then we can shift conflict back into love with ease. We take ownership of our own thoughts, feelings and reactions instead of blaming others. In tantra it all comes down to personal responsibility, to be able to self-soothe, to come back to ourself when we feel the outer world is not in tune with our own inner world.

So I invite you to take a moment to look into where you find your own splits. First look at the inside splits, how your thoughts keep on moving from one desire to another. Then look at where they oppose each other, where they polarize, where is there a conflict, for example freedom vs stability, single vs in a relationship, etc.

Then identify splits showing up outside of yourself, in your life, for example you wanting to have children and your partner not. When you feel you have a few things to work with, I invite you to share it, speak it out loud. My recommendation is that you choose someone close to you, someone you trust and who is able to listen without giving you too much advice or feedback to share your splits with.

Bringing parts of you that you've been hiding away back into the light is a big part of the healing process. You can also choose to talk with a professional who can offer you further guidance. What is important is that you do this process with love and compassion towards yourself and paying close attention not to judge.

The process is more about being honest. So take a moment, bring out a pen and a paper and first see if you can find desires within you that are polarized. Put a plus sign on one side of the paper and a minus sign on the other.

Not because it is positive and negative, but because one side is loaded with energy and the other lacking energy. It's like seeing it as a compromise. Doing wanting and desiring one thing makes you have to give up on something else.

Then map out where your energy is drawn to. Where do you put your energy? See if you can find patterns.

Let's say you want like I once did, more intimacy in your life, but you do not know where to find it or how to get it. Nor can you find a man that will live up to your desire. Then look at the opposite side of that, where platonic relationships exist.

So much commitment is needed and feelings not so much valued. What is it that makes this side of the polarization more comfortable to you? And then close your eyes and open your mind and take a deep breath.

Listen to hear your soul reveal why this side is more comfortable to you. Is there a pattern, a history of events that has placed you there? Then look at intimacy.

What does it mean to you? How can you become more intimate with yourself? How can you bring more intimacy in your already existing relationships and start small? Is there maybe a friend you can open up to and share more of yourself with? Is there a forum online where you can find others more compatible with your own set of likes and dislikes and with whom you can share more freely with?

The work starts with taking small steps. So see if there is any apparent opposites and start noticing where they show up in your life. As we go through the coming episodes, you can keep these conflicts and splits in mind and maybe you will be able to bring something into the light to become more aware of something you've been hiding away in the shadow.

Please also know that this can be done all on your own. You need not share it with someone, even though there is so much more potency to heal if you do. What happens when we start to understand our polarization is that we also start to own our lives.

Instead of reacting towards others as they touch parts of us that we are not comfortable with, we act out of our own wholeness and completeness and bring the totality of who we are into our life. We can from this place, from this center of our being, meet life in a sense of flexibility and authenticity. We can meet life with open arms, whatever it brings us, good or bad, we welcome it with love.

In this sense, tantra brings us so much freedom. Much of the symbols and tools we see and use in the tantric tradition is this unification of opposites. Kundalini, the life force energy, is depicted as two intertwining snakes swirling together to become one.

Then we have the yantra, which are powerful visual diagrams, allows the viewer to return to their primordial center. Then there is the statue called Yapyum, where Shakti is sitting in the lap of Shiva, with the crown of their head facing the heavens in deep meditative union. It's not a sexual act, but an act of merging, symbolizing that when the opposites energies fully merge, they reach an enlightened state of realization.

The most powerful of all symbols for me is the heart chakra symbol, the five pointed star, one triangle facing up towards the eternal and one triangle facing down towards the gross, the physical. In the heart, in our center, is where we find the balance, the wholeness that we all seek. A more spiritual way of looking at these symbols is about merging not only the horizontal but also the vertical axis of our being.

The horizontal represents the worldly plane of existence, our everyday life, of time and space, ourselves, our bodies, our relationships, our jobs, everything that exists around us. The vertical symbolizes our spiritual axis of existence, our altered state of consciousness. The split in our spiritual vertical beings is not as obvious as we tend to give it very little attention while caught up in our modern day lives, living in the horizontal plane, playing the role of a doer and a sleeper.

In awakened state, our senses are constantly being attached to and or longing for objects outside of ourselves to fulfill wants, needs and desires. Very seldom do we stop and look around for a moment to question and contemplate on our consumption in form of news, information, food, clothes, people and places. To understand how it affects our being energetically.

Even if you haven't noticed it, you have experienced it. Sometimes you feel more low and heavy. The energy tends to move inside and your inner world becomes very vivid.

The energy descends and contracts. Then there are times the energy ascends and expands. It opens up to vibrating on higher notes.

You feel more uplifted, lighter and more outward going. Just like the earth below, compact, heavy, edgy and gross, is present, so is the sky above, limitless, vast and expansive. As humans walking this earth, we are vessels that connect both.

We are vertical beings just as much as we are horizontal, operating our everyday life. If our entire being is too much in the gross, then one tends to forget one's divinity, the oneness of this magical manifest world we live in. So if our connection to the divine is questioned, or even totally lost, then there is a split here as well.

The manifest lifeless energy taking its form as nature needs to find a balanced union with a vast spacious consciousness above. So Tantra wants to look at both of these two poles, the horizontal axis of existence as well as the vertical. Who we are in the world around us, but also who we are energetically as we move from a more contracted and narrow way of living life to a more expanded and inclusive way of interacting with the world.

Think of it as an alchemy. As we merge the horizontal with the vertical to create a more whole and balanced version of our being, we start to interact with the world with more sensitivity as our energy affects and is affected by our environment around us. We don't live in a vacuum, no, we live in a space where everything is connected and affected by one another.

Things might seem to be divided, but if you think about it, the molecules of my skin connects with the molecules of the air that connects with the molecules of the flowers. It's all one big sea of atoms, dancing, connecting in a sharing space. You might not be able to see the air with your eyes, our senses are limited to only take in what is needed in this very dimension we live in, but we are all connected with one another.