Wednesday 12 February 2020

Life and Death

At the beginning of this week, as a psychotherapist, I was giving support to staff at an organisation where two members of staff had committed suicide within a few hours of each other. They had an affair, left their families, and moved in together. She was unstable and admitted herself to psychiatric hospital where she killed herself; he killed himself when he learnt this. I am sure this shocking tragedy would not have happened in a culture that supported open and multiple relationships and diverse styles of family life. Essentially, they were victims of toxic monogamy and a rigid model of what families are supposed to look like.

The next day, I spent the whole day at an Adjudication Panel with all the formality of barristers and clerks because someone at my former professional organisation UK Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP) had the idea that I should have separate mobile phone numbers for my work with psychotherapy and with tantra. Both of which I have been doing for more than thirty years. At best this can be thought of as a rigidity of “how things should be” or an attempt to guard the boundaries of "pure" psychotherapy from contamination by other forms of growth, healing and change. If this was successful, it would be goodbye to Buddhist psychotherapy, yoga psychotherapy, shamanic psychotherapy and an end to the exciting developments in plant medicines like psilocybin for use in therapy. After several hours they decided that there was “No Case to Answer”!  😀🙏. This fiasco will have cost the organisation several thousands of pounds. I would advise any aspiring therapists to join the Independent Practitioners Network http://ipnetwork.org.uk/  instead.

Voluntary organisations are always vulnerable to being taken over by psychopaths and that happened in 2014 to my professional organisation for many years UKHAPP, which produced bizarre accusation against 13 of its most senior members. Click for details. The last few years we have seen how countries can be taken over by those with personality disorders such as Donald Trump and Boris Johnson. Rigidity and lack of dialogue kills people and organisations. In a time of massive irreversible climate and ecological catastrophes giving rise to anxiety and despair, the role of psychotherapist is to empower people to turn dread and despair into heart-based community and action. Join Extinction Rebellion !


Psychotherapy continues to evolve and flourish and I hope my book on tantric psychotherapy will be available next year. My website www.tantricpsychotherapy.com is just a placeholder at the moment for my work in this area.

Saturday 28 September 2019

Tonight is the New Moon and the start of Navaratri

Tonight is the start of Navaratri, a ten day festival to celebrate the feminine, Shakti and the forms of her wisdom and virtue in our lives.  It starts with the goddess Durga which can be seen as a form of Kali who destroys impurities and things that no longer serve us. The first three  nights are in honour of Kali, the “terrible” form of the goddess who destroys the demons of ignorance, disease, ego and selfishness.  She gives strength and motivation, and empowers us towards spiritual growth she has weapons like a bow and arrow and spear riding on a tiger to ruthlessly seek out what is not serving us any longer.



For the second part of the festival the goddess is Lakshmi who is seen as the Mother and connected to spiritual wealth.  She is often depicted on a fountain of milk holding symbols of wealth and abundance.  She gives abundance, good health and opens the heart to gratitude and generosity. She grants clarity to envision our future goals.


The last three nights are for Saraswati, the goddess of knowledge and art.  She inspires us through science, art, music and education.  She is generally shown playing a rudra vina a stringed instrument  She expands the ability to understand systems and to create beauty. She dispels ignorance and grants wisdom.

On the tenth day all forms are worshipped. They are the consorts of Shiva, Vishnu and Brahma.

In some parts of India and Nepal it starts with Saraswati and ends with Kali. There are also goddesses for each of the nine nights.

So, find a woman, and the goddess inside yourself (men and women) and honour and revere her. Everything is born of woman. Celebrate the feminine it all its forms.

Wednesday 28 August 2019

Tantra



Tantra is really very simple; but not necessarily easy to practice.

It is just the application of methods for living and loving the whole of life exactly as it is.  


One of the oldest meanings of the word “tantra” is simply “methods” and some ancient texts are just a list of methods of practice. Most of the practices are varieties of meditation on the very ordinary experiences of life; such as breathing, eating, seeing a flower, feeling a strong emotion etc.


How does it get to be so complicated? Some forms tantra has been around for a very long time. At least 5,000years. The cultures that developed tantra included methods such as complex rituals and many deities. The rituals are just methods of developing a meditative state of mind and the deities are images of specific energies.  In the West, we have the added complication of having linked tantra to Western energy practices that mostly come from the world of therapy and then connected it to sexuality by mistaking sexual union for oneness. The Kama Sutra is not a tantric text!


Focussing on energy rather than simple awareness practices inevitably releases a “can of worms” of people’s personal issues and desires and needs for connection. Because of this much Western tantra has many exercises that owe much more to therapy and personal development than to the vast and ancient world of tantra.  The West turns everything in to therapy and then sells it as a commodity. The same has happened to yoga (which is not really about trimming your thighs) and even Mindfulness (which is not really a way of reducing anxiety). Sex helps to sell anything.


In all traditional tantra, the foundation practices are awareness and meditation practices. Later, when the mind has become more stable and perhaps through some simple yoga, the body is more stable and open. Then energy and even sexual practices can be added.  


Tantra is about living and loving the whole of life exactly as it is. Our tendancy is to want to pick and choose experiences and have more of the good and less of the bad.  We want purity not impurity; pleasure not discomfort. However, tantra embraces every aspect of life; including sexual experiences and emotions. At its deepest; tantra is nondual. This means that it is about Oneness and the Void which is both empty and full at the same time. By starting with experiences of the nondual state of oneness or presence we can reduce the degree to which we are caught up in the dance of opposites and polarities which is the source of such complexity and pain. 


Essential the practices of tantra are bringing awareness to aliveness to realise Oneness.  It really is simple and follows our true nature. 


Transcendence started nearly 21 years ago and is now developing ways of teaching tantra which honours the traditions whilst keeping the best of modern practices and understandings.Namaste!

Monday 4 March 2019

Tonight is Maha Shivaratri


   
      Maha Shivaratri, the spiritual night of Lord Shiva, is considered to be the most sacred night of the year. There is fasting during the day and the puja goes on all night with mantras to Shiva whilst anointing the shivalingam with water, curd, honey, and flowers.

     Mahashivaratri happens a couple of nights before the New Moon and is a chance to honour Shiva and the masculine principle of consciousness and awareness. Everything is consciousness and it is on this foundation principle that the world is danced into being through the awesome creative power of Shakti.  


     There has probably never been a time in history when the principle of the Divine Masculine needs to be honoured and affirmed as it does now, for it is precisely the qualities of the Divine Masculine that can create the space and the safety for the feminine. Far too often, in many cultures across the world women are trying to hold both poles of masculine and feminine at the same time and be mother and father to their own inner child and to their "outer children". Men are physically absent for many reasons or emotionally absent from their own lack of connection to the Divine Masculine and their historic lack of good enough mothering and fathering. They then end up as wounded, disconnected and dangerous; perpetual teenagers fuelling the cycles violence that are destroying the Earth. Appreciate and celebrate the masculine as the force of awareness, consciousness, presence and the Truth of who we really are. 

Tuesday 9 October 2018

New Moon and the Start of Navaratri


Tonight is the start of Navaratri, a ten day festival to celebrate the feminine, Shakti and the forms of her wisdom and virtue in our lives.  It starts with the goddess Durga which can be seen as a form of Kali who destroys impurities and things that no longer serve us. The first three  nights are in honour of Kali, the “terrible” form of the goddess who destroys the demons of ignorance, disease, ego and selfishness.  She gives strength and motivation, and empowers us towards spiritual growth she has weapons like a bow and arrow and spear riding on a tiger to ruthlessly seek out what is not serving us any longer.



For the second part of the festival the goddess is Lakshmi who is seen as the Mother and connected to spiritual wealth.  She is often depicted on a fountain of milk holding symbols of wealth and abundance.  She gives abundance, good health and opens the heart to gratitude and generosity. She grants clarity to envision our future goals.


The last three nights are for Saraswati, the goddess of knowledge and art.  She inspires us through science, art, music and education.  She is generally shown playing a rudra vina a stringed instrument  She expands the ability to understand systems and to create beauty. She dispels ignorance and grants wisdom.

On the tenth day all forms are worshipped. They are the consorts of Shiva, Vishnu and Brahma.

In some parts of India and Nepal it starts with Saraswati and ends with Kali. There are also goddesses for each of the nine nights.

So, find a woman, and the goddess inside yourself (men and women) and honour and revere her. Everything is born of woman. Celebrate the feminine it all its forms.

Monday 1 October 2018

The UK Landscape of Tantra



As you may know I have been something of a “tantra geek” for decades, trying to figure out what tantra really is. At one level this is simple; Tantra is practices to awaken you to your Essence-nature. However this doesn’t really engage with the range of things that people tend to associate with tantra.

This weekend I have been at a tantra workshop in London with over 100 people and I only knew two of them. Generally, at workshops I see the same faces, so what was different? I realised that the vast landscape of tantra that I had come to appreciate was unknown to most people in the tantra world I usually inhabit. I was in a different continent. The workshop was at Triyoga in London with Christopher Wallis author of Tantra Illuminated and was mostly the London yoga crowd; youngish women who had some intuition that yoga is about more than tying your body in knots or trimming your thighs; the sense that yoga has its origins in tantra.

For the general public tantra means something to do with Sting and with sex.  For most people, for whom the word “workshop” isn’t a place where practical tools are stored and used; tantra means pleasure, sex, orgasmic states usually some dance and eye-gazing and generally lots of rather yummy things. The rise of tantra festivals tends to support that. Recently some people seem to have got the idea that tantra is in some way connected to kink, BDSM or polyamory.

As tantra embraced all aspects of our being and was generally connected with transgressive practices; none of this is actually wrong. It is however, only a part of a bigger picture of tantra in the UK.  I want to try and give a bigger picture of tantra in UK.

A major factor in distorting the picture of what tantra is comes from the fact that tantra is “packaged” in workshops and sold in the marketplace of events that will make you feel better. Sex sells. The West is great at propagating things through society by turning them in to a commodity and then promoting it. “How to have bigger orgasms” will be an easier workshop to sell than “Facing your own death”! Though the latter is more tantric as far as the traditions of tantra are concerned. Teachings easily get turned in to a form of therapy, so yoga joins the fitness industry, meditation and mindfulness joins the mental health world; and tantra is a form of sex or relationship therapy. As tantra is awakening to your essential nature; it often will be an uncomfortable process. Literally one of dis-illusionment. Waking up to reality. The by-product is deep joy but that, or even pleasure, can never be the aim of tantra. The deepest traditions of tantra are all non-dual so everything must be embraced.

People who attend tantra workshops naturally believe that what happens in a tantra workshop is tantra. The reality is that much of the content of a tantra workshop comes from humanistic personal growth methods from the therapy world. Even things, like the system of seven chakras in the body with comes mostly from Carl Jung, the psychoanalyst, not traditional Indian sources.  

The most visible tantra in the West, often called Neo-Tantra in the last 30 years comes from people connected with; or at least inspired by Osho. Much came via the SkyDancing approach developed by Margot Anand. To those who sat with him; Osho was inspiring, and a great facilitator of a meeting of East and West.  Many amazing people emerged from the Osho world. He however, had little connection to the Indian traditions of tantra; neither by direct lineage, by teaching, by knowledge of Sanskrit or by extensive practice. He was a great orator, showman and reader of books (not writer; he never actually wrote a book). Many of his practices owe more to Western Reichian therapy of the 70’s with an emphasis on energy rather than on consciousness or awareness. His followers embraced these practices - particularly the sex, even though Osho warned that they were getting it wrong and that tantra is based in meditation. Our ideas of tantra as being principally about energy, sexuality, and the feminine come from here with some help from the emerging feminist and goddess-spirituality world.

In this map of the UK tantra landscape; as well as the very visible “continent” of neo-tantra there is another gradually increasing “island” which is more connected to Yoga and its maturation in the West. When yoga was brought to the West about 120 years ago by figures like Vivekananda it was "sanitised" for conservative Westerners. His guru was Ramakrishna a tantric Kali-worshipper but this was played down. Tantra has been around in the West for longer than most realise; The Tantrik Order of America was founded in 1905 and in Britain, via early Orientalists like Sir John Woodroffe, there was some interest in tantra and a great deal of interest in Indian philosophy for the last hundred years.

Generally, in line with the times it was the more conservative, Vedic traditions which dominated yoga; closely connected to notions of purity and health with hatha yoga as a way of purifying the body. Yoga naturally was marketed as healthy for mind, body and spirit and was placed in gyms and health centres. It brings the notion of the discipline of regular practice – whereas neo-tantra is more comfortable with the idea of "Do whatever you feel like whenever you want to". Yoga, connected with the right hand path, is more masculine, more ascetic and renunciate. It easily connects to striving; which can feeds the ego.  Nowadays, some yoga teachers are interested in learning more about yoga's origins within tantra and study Sanskrit or learn more about mantras; an essential component of traditional tantra. Within the broad field of yoga much is from twentieth century inventions like Ashtanga and Iyengar yoga and other practises such as Yogi Bhajan’s Kundalini Yoga.

It was in the modern yoga world; at Triyoga that I was seated in a large group listening to Christopher Wallis giving a taste through the texts of the last two and a half thousand years of experiences that gave rise to yoga and tantra. Tantra yoga is a householder tradition not renunciate and monastic but embracing of all aspects of life. It is slower and gentler without self-harming or self-negating practices.  Christopher; along with Christopher Tompkins are the most widely known of modern scholar/practitioners who are engaged in the process of translating and understanding the many ancient texts which have never been studied.  They connect to the third continent of tantra. Tantrik Studies.

From the perspective of most neo-tantra with its emphasis on direct experience and the old 70’s humanistic therapy slogan of “Get out of your mind into your feelings/body!”; the study of texts and the traditions of tantra is a waste of time. It is true that one of the meanings of tantra is “practices” or “methods” so doing it is important. It is also true that most spiritual traditions require three things; the correct view; the correct practices and then the correct goals. The generations of practitioners and lineage-holders through history have accumulated a great deal of relevant experiences and information to help and even more, can alert us to the pitfalls and dangers on the path. Therefore the study of the thousands of texts of tantra is important. I am astonished at what a small proportion of the texts have ever been translated and studied. Perhaps only 10% as it is a very long, slow and skilful process to do so. 

As it is intensive of time and resources it is usually connected to universities. In some, like School of African and Oriental Studies (SOAS) in London, it is primarily done by academics who are not practitioners. In other places like Oxford University there are more who are also practitioners including Prof Alexis Sanderson the foremost scholar of Kashmir Shavism.  There are also others who have independently learnt Sanskrit and translated tantric texts for many years such as Mike Magee and the Hindu Tantrik Site. These days, scholars all over the world are linked by the internet. Most neo-tantra is implicitly dualistic as it starts from Shiva-Shakti or feminine-masculine and is therefore coming from a place of separation. The deeper spiritual traditions, including mine; Kashmir Shavism are non-dual, starting from Oneness. There is only Consciousness (or the Divine).

Some of practitioner-scholars of tantra overlap with the yoga world; like the “two Christophers” (though neither are based in UK) . Some of the yoga world overlaps with the neo-tantra world such as the Romanian originated schools based on MISA such as Agama Yoga and, in UK, Tara Yoga who run a London Tantra Festival. Outside of this map and not quite fitting on any of the continents is the world of Tibetan Buddhism which is all tantric. It is strong on ritual and visualisations and has generally derived from the monastic traditions of Tibet and therefore does not fit with modern neo-tantra and its emphasis on sex or yoga or the text-based studies. It has a long history in UK with Samye Ling starting over 50 years ago. Rigpa, as with Agama Yoga has recently been in the forefront of scandal over improper sexual boundaries from teachers. 

Somewhere on the edges of the three circles are things like Sufism - the tantra of Islam. Kabbalah -the tantra of Judaism, Paganism, the remains of the Celtic tantra and Goddess spirituality; the resurrection of ancient women-centred practices.

As tantra embraces all aspects of life we can embrace, or at least be aware of every area of tantra in UK without thinking one is better than the other. Tantra has always evolved but has some core principles that really do not change over time.

I hope this brief map can help give you the wider territory of tantra.  Namaste!


  








Saturday 22 September 2018

Equinox

Today is the Autumn Equinox, the mid-point of day and night. The sun is overhead at the equator at midday travelling further South to give us a winter.


Celebrating this; links us to nature's cycles and a deeper connection to our own cycles, the balancing of darkness and light, the power of letting go, and the acknowledgement that everything changes. 
Tantra as a spiritual practice is always ultimately about Oneness and the skilful use of polarities like Shiva and Shakti  - or consciousness and energy. It is tempting to put the two together and think in terms of a harmonious balance of Shiva and Shakti. This can be misleading. Putting together two different types of qualities can  cause more problems than doing so may solve. The familiar yin yang symbol of a black and white sector whirling together has limitations but it is better than mixing black and white together and getting grey! 

This is true even with the Equinox as a balance of light and darkness. They are not exact opposites - one candle will dispel the darkness, but one bit of darkness doesn't remove all light.... On a planetary level from the perspective of space there isn't day and night just a beautiful blue-green planet spinning in space. 

Whatever the equinox means to you, may you be blessed, may you be loved, and may you be held gently in this golden autumn light.