The Serious Play of Relationship Skill
I’m writing with a heart full and soul satisfied…
For many years I have been seeking and healing myself, pursuing an internal sense of capability you might call potential or destiny. For me, it was a strong calling, urging me onwards, relentlessly!
Perhaps you have your own version of this inner urge, or perhaps not… (soul calls in different ways to different people)
In recent times, I have found myself in a place of peace, no more striving and seeking; Dare I say it, a sense of arrival, achievement, realisation even… with great gratitude, after decades of the striving, I could rest and feel really well in myself. An amazing relief!
It doesn’t mean the work stops, but it has meant that the striving has stopped. I Here Now felt real. I am here right now. Life is real!
Teaching Tantra
And it is into this landscape of internal peace that my life purpose has crystallised… It turns out that I’m a Teacher of Tantra… teaching the deep art and craft of intimacy, heart connection and sexual attraction… teaching a form of embodied inquiry that softens the soul and body so that the inner radiance can shine right through with less occlusion…. I do love it!
For those who don’t know me, I am a therapist working professionally for 25 years with individual clients using The Grinberg Method of Bodywork, Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy and Family Constellations. In the last several years I began offering small group workshops about relationships and a women’s circle. I felt then that I was preparing, getting ready…
Workshops
The workshops I am now delighted to be offering come from the Indian tantric lineage of Kashmiri Shaivism. It is a lineage that is passed from woman to woman orally. And each woman can choose how she transmits the teachings on…
It is indeed a transmission. Something communicated from body to body… from soul to soul…
I learnt it through immersion over the last 8 years and training. I am an authorised teacher of the work of Michaela Boehm.
Tantra
Tantra is an inclusive path. It is a welcoming of everything, sadness and happiness, frustration and contentment, special and ordinary: attention to the material world, sweeping, washing-up and making tea, aswell as the transcendent moments of joy, pleasure and ecstasy…
For myself I have found this way of Tantra to be different to that of Neo-Tantra. The subject matter is similar, but the practical method, level addressed, lineage and transmission are distinctly different…
Love and Light
Over the years, I received many large compliments from several Spiritual Teachers. At times I found that a relief to be ‘seen’ and at other times it felt like a burden while I struggled and trudged along… But inside I have felt a tremendous something, a something that wants to out… I ‘knew’ that in a previous life I was a temple priestess practicing the sacred arts of love… and that I cared passionately about ‘the light within the darkness’, without knowing what these hints from my soul meant in practical terms… or how to talk about such things!
As my 8 year old daughter spontaneously said recently, “You can’t capture light…”
Indeed! Radiance cannot be easily defined, articulated, expressed.
But it can be seen and can be felt.
At a recent dance class, a stranger caught my eye during the dance and afterwards remarked on my radiance. I felt, in the dance, myself as love. These days I’m used to having a mostly wide open heart, a heart with many dimensions, depths and aspects, a heart that can expand hugely and contract tightly closed. As I write this I feel the warm glow in my chest…
And that, for me, is what Tantra is about.
A communication of our deep internal radiance out into everyday ordinary life.
We often hear words like love and light. Easily said but not in my experience so easily felt. It takes a certain commitment, a dedication, a decision to uncover what is below the immediate presenting surface of life. To uncover what is below our own presentations and habits.
Expressing Our Love
The Intimacy and Attraction® workshop contains practical exercises and opportunities to experiment, play and learn – to refine your offering of love in relationships. No concepts and not a lesson in technique, but an experiential opportunity to learn about being you, expressing yourself as fully as possible, in practice, in relationship with another.
Children express love easily without inhibition. Adults, hurt from life experience, stressful modern life or shocking trauma, are much more protective of their hearts. We hide and protect ourselves to be safe, to survive.
The story of what happened to us is in the past, as one of my spiritual teachers said, is irrelevant!
What matters is who we are now! The exercises in the Intimacy and Attraction® workshop are an opportunity to try something new. A chance to rewire our nervous systems. A way to renew ourselves without needing to think or talk or revisit the old. It is a playground for serious play!!!
Practicing Skills
Practice makes perfect. We are practicing becoming a clear vessel of the true love light of our souls to be expressed through our animal bodies. Allowing the full range of that love to be expressed – exactly as it is – mess, anger, tears, tiredness, jealousy, boredom, delight, fuss, etc.
We are all of the time in relationship with each other, with the earth, with objects…. we are never really alone or isolated… we are never separate at the same time as always begin separate…
It is through relationship that we discover who we are, and how we are in the world. It is through relationship that we heal… everything is in relationship… From the world of Quantum Physics we know two atoms once in contact, are forever in relationship, even if at vast physical distance. Everything has/is soul!
Being In Relationship
Children perceive themselves as love. They just are, offering, expressing their love in the world.
The tantric spiritual work we as adults want and need to do, is to get our personal stuff out of the way, so we can be embodied channels of love – erotic, devotional, profound and ordinary love.
Who are you and how are you in relationship?
I hope you will join me for the Intimacy and Attraction® Workshops at The Arc Centre, in Islington, London every month. Next events Saturday February 17th, March 18th, April 29th. First workshop at no cost. £30 for each person. Bursaries available.
http://universeofdeliciousness.com/authentic-power-wisdom-and-pleasure/
