Tantra is a Path of Gratitude

Happy Thanksgiving.

A friend recently told me “tantra is a path of gratitude”. I had never looked at like that before. Not that I would disagree with this statement but I had never phrased it that way. It made me pause and  nod my head while I took it in and digested that remark.

I have chosen to adopt this phrase. Especially today on the day of thanks and giving. Been a day of solitude for me, having been invited a few places, but finding that I am enjoying the quiet of NYC and the alone time in a quiet apartment with a quiet cat. Today I am grateful for quiet and solitude, on a day when most people are probably busy and celebrating. I will attend desert at a friend’s house so as  not to miss out on the energy of celebration and togetherness, but for right now, solitude is aweome.

Tantra IS a path of gratitude. Not just today. But every day. So easily in this modern-day world that stresses all the things we need to have in order to be happy, and uses the power of the emotional hook to sell product after product (just watch tv for 5 minutes after yoga class and you will be amazed at how much clearer you see the advertising worlds manipulation of our heart-strings to sell their stuff) we often can get tricked into thinking and feeling as if what we have is not enough. Let me rephrase. I get tricked into thinking this way and then acting from a place of scarcity and lack.…running around trying to get the next thing or make something happen.

Of course we want to create wonderful lives and that does often include things in the practical 3rd dimension like healthy food, technology, beautiful clothes and delicious entertainment. For sure we should enjoy living in the world and participating in it. But when it becomes an energy of constantly needing more, needing better, a sense of striving that never gets satiated, we know we are missing the true joy inherent in life. To run after things that just lead to another need and more running, keeps us in a cycle of unfulfilled desires. Which just creates more desire. It an endless cycle that really leads nowhere except to the realization of our futile attempts.

Today after I went to the gym I sat on the porch and I just watched the sky. The steam coming up from the building across from me, somebody probably cooking something wonderful, the sounds of children and families coming thru the windows around the Manhattan neighborhood. The sun was bright and all I had to do was watch how the steam billowed up to the sky. And it was enough. There was contentment in a way that I have not been affording myself, as I have been too caught up to really sit tight and just be.  I have been too busy running around trying to make life happen. Today it was a holiday and this gave me permission I wish I would remember to afford myself more often. Because, there was joy in that steam and peace in my sitting.  The silent, sweet soft cat by my side reminding me to slow down and let life in. What a gift.

In that moment a great gratitude extended thru my bones and soul with a certainty. I am so grateful for knowing that silent space exists and is there for me whenever I choose to drop my ideas of how life should look, or what I think I need, or what I think I have to do to get there. Wherever “there” is.  It was a tantric moment. The moment I am attempting to create for my clients. The moment that all prayer/practice/breath/yoga/massage stroke is attempting to deliver people to. Unity. And in that unity a natural gratitude extends so that one can only say thank you. Because it’s just awesome. And feels so right. Thank you life for being this awesome for no reason. Thank you for opening to me.

So today, I would suggest to you to take some time to just sit silently, amongst the food and people and festivities, and just feel your self in the presence of life. Offer yourself to this gratitude, offer yourself and your actions and your time and money to this place of unity. This is tantra. When everything comes together into one cosmic love affair. Just you, the porch and the steam. Just you, the couch and the smells from the oven. Just you and some Uncle you have nothing to say to. Just you and your kid nephew throwing popcorn everywhere. Just you and your girlfriend whose talking about something you have no interest in. Just you and the night sky. Just you and the grocery clerk 5 minutes before the store closes for that last onion you probably won’t need but just maybe. Just pause there.

Today I am grateful to remember that this unity is happening all the time, that this inner peace is but a prayer away, that even when it feels like “it leaves” it is only a moment away from returning, reinventing itself, re configuring how it chooses to express itself. Today I am grateful for the beings in my life, that continue to challenge me to remember this, for the opportunity to even touch this, to free myself from the compulsive need to think I can control anything, or that I have somewhere I have to get to. Today I am grateful for that steam and that crisp afternoon on a Manhattan porch with nowhere to go and nothing to do but let it in, let it out, and make my way over to the place where the good people live, dancing and eating turkey and telling stories that go all night. I am grateful to have both.

Thank you thank you thank you.

God bless.

This is Tantra….

The Power of Breathing

TO BREATHE OR NOT TO BREATH::

I just got off the phone with a prospective client.  He wanted to know if my sessions included “a bunch of breathing”. He didn’t want that, he said. It was annoying to constantly be told to breathe. He wasn’t a breather.

I smiled silently on the other end. Suppressing a chuckle. He wasn’t a breather? Really? 🙂

He also said he wanted to really let go of stress and learn to expand his energy and grow his capacity for pleasure. He spent a lot of time in an office and felt he was in his head too much. He wanted out of the daily grind, to escape into an alternate world.

These desires are quite common and I hear them alot from people interested in working with me. And I have to tell them:: The only way out of the head and into the body is thru the breath. Because the breath is what connects us, anchors us to our physical reality. It’s literally the thing that keeps us here, alive, as human beings. Without it….we stop living.

Something happens when we consciously breathe, and when we open up deeper to breath. When we allow oxygen and life force in. We become more ALIVE. We feel more. We create space in our bodies where there was previous tension and tightness, we literally live longer, deeper, fuller lives. In order to feel the capacity of your entire being, you must breathe. Usually we don’t even realize how little and shallow we are breathing until somebody puts our attention on it. “Breathe” they say. Yes, I am, I am alive, right? Well yes and no. You will breathe, but it’s not that simple.

The breath can act as a cleanser to your energy systems. Helping to remove literal toxins and also energetic toxins that accumulate in our etheric fields. The breath also helps us open up the subconscious states that help us merge into trance states, to relax, to let go of the usual mental to do lists and over analyzing. That sublime place we are looking for inside of ourselves, really only happens if we can let go of the more superficial layer that we usually operate from in our daily life. When we breathe, we start to submerge into a deeper reality, a reality that is in our cells, in our muscles, our bones, our heart and in sensation and then beyond. By breathing, particularly at the points we don’t want to, we begin to open the stuck places. The frozen places and the protected places.

And that’s exactly what we want to do if we truly want to heal. If we truly want to open up to all that we can experience as human beings on every level: Soul. Sex. Sensual. Emotional. Heart. Body. Each level needs the breath to make it come alive, to allow whatever needs to be cleansed and released it’s time to move. The breath is movement in our physical bodies and in our energetic bodies, it has intelligence, and healing energy in it. To trust it is to trust the divine. It also helps us relax into sensation, so that sensation can expand and reveal its deeper messages. Without the breath there is just a superficial experience of sensation. You might bliss out from the touch, but you won’t necessarily reach down deep into embodying your deepest pleasure. You will just stay on the surface and never really sink in.

For people who really don’t like to breathe, I say:: breathe deep here and now with whatever you are feeling and then forget it after some time. Just breathe how you normally do and just FEEL the effects of breathing deeply. Most people say wow. Because that is just how disconnected we can become in our lives. Living in our heads, thru the computer, the iPhone, the TV, that keeps us in a fantasy illusion of reality, we become so disconnected we don’t even realize. Suddenly you take some breaths, you feel some touch and boom! A whole new reality opens up, you become alive again, human, visceral, embodied. Here and Now. Where all the bliss is hanging out. To really FEEL our lives, we must breathe.

As I go along, having taken yoga, tantra and breath work trainings, I am still on the search for different ways to breathe. Still uncovering the power of this amazing work and its effect on our ability to connect to our sensuality and our feelings and to help cleanse and heal spaces in us that need love and care. Even right now, I notice, as I type, my head immersed in the computer screen, I am not really breathing. So I take a breath. It’s like an ocean of bliss rolls thru and I find the next word….I feel my belly expand, my heart open and lighter feeling when I exhale, making me realize even just sitting and typing, you can be carrying and hanging on to stress…..

So breathe my friends. And welcome the opportunity to have someone reminding you. The journey thru breath is a glorious one and its free to each one of us that has two  lungs and a mouth.

 

Blessings and breath

www.sensualtantrichealing.com

More Mary Oliver:: Sensual Tantric Healing Poetry

Mary Oliver is still rocking my world…

Must add another poem that speaks to me. I find reading these poems puts me in a place of such reminded sensitivity that I instantly start to breathe deeper, listen more, look more intently, notice the colors and the textures of life more readily after I read a few lines. I have been bringing her on to the subway with me, the slim book with the painting on its cover fits neatly into my shoulder bag. Sometimes I forget she is there only to realize it when the ride or the wait is almost over, but I pull her out anyway and grab a few lines.  Even just two lines, soothes my soul, softens me, brings an openess to my day. I love NYC subways for allowing me to read such beauty in the midst of such advertising, humanity and insane beauty. It makes poetry even more dimensional and layered.

Here is another::

MILKWEED

The Milkweed now with their many pods are standing

like a country of dry women.

The wind lifts their flat leaves and drops them.

This is not kind, but they retain a certain kind of crisp glamour;

moreover, it is easy to believe

each one was once young and delicate,also

frightened, also capable

of a certain amount of rough joy.

I wish you would walk with me out into the world.

I wish you could see what has to happen, how

each one crackles like a blessing

over its thin children as the rush away.

-Mary Oliver from her book Dream Work

I hope these poems bring a lift to your step and a flight to your heart….may you soar with angels every step of the day.

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For further information about sensual tantric healing::

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Blessings and thank you for reading and sharing…..

 

Mary Oliver: Poetry

A friend recently gave me a copy of Mary Oliver’s poetry called Dream Work…

It is quite simply a gorgeous book and I had to share a poem here….because….Poetry is always sensual, tantric and healing. Poetry uses words to paint pictures, to tease our senses and to open our hearts. It teaches us to reflect on our lives and to notice the details in our experiences. A good poet with their exsquisite use of words, can pierce your heart on levels you never knew existed. Perhaps didn’t even know you were feeling. All at once it can make you pause and take notice of life happening right before you.

This is truly the intention of Sensual Tantric Healing, to inspire and to reveal. To slow down enough to smell the roses, to walk in the sunlight, to taste the food we eat, the friends we laugh with, to marvel at this amazing existence. And in our most sensual places we find sensitivity and feeling. We find grace. In the inner thigh, in the back of the knees, in the slow way we take a breath, in the way our lover’s hair trickles over our cheek, in the colors in the sky at sunset, in the way a great piece of lingerie feels seductive and exciting to wear and to look at. Life is sensual tantric healing…..so enjoy this poem and feel good about reflecting on it…read it a few times, let it sink in. Read it out loud. Read it to someone near you, read it into your iphone recorder and play it back to listen to your own voice. Mary Oliver is gifted in that, she speaks to the soul of humanity….in the end, we all speak the same language of soul.

WILD GEESE     By: Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

Click here to order a copy of her poems….

Blessings to all ways that you walk your path…..:)