What Drives a Tantric Life?
When I travel anywhere, but especially India, my obstacles of the mind are reframed. When I am in my little life of work, family, self-care, and day-to-day living, I think that my self-created reality is real. In some ways it makes me feel comforted, in control, responsible, to think that my lists, responsibilities and obligations are the most important things. It affirms my role when I think that my little world would cease to spin if I wasn't directing it. In that space, it's easy to call the impulses of my soul frivolous, and push them off to some unknown future time when things are better suited for it. But then I leave that reality (even if for just a short period of time), and it becomes radically evident that the small life I strive to manage isn't even a fraction of what is real and true.
This "world" is a dynamic, complex universe of interconnections, intersections, and intuitions. It's a tapestry that is woven, unraveled, and rewoven with every breath. It is the most uncertain, mysterious thing that there is, and that is terrifying. Yet, when I choose to surrender to the mystery, to follow my heart and soul's deepest yearnings, somehow that becomes a path of waymarking all its own. I no longer live my life for my dependencies, and instead I open to receive a life of interconnection, synchronicities, and possibilities that don't require my direct knowing or logical understanding--one that doesn't demand I have it all worked out in my head or that I must prove or justify the deep knowing in order to respond to it. This is a life that centralizes faith in mystery, magic, and above all else, a force that is bigger and more intelligent than anything I alone can orchestrate.
At the end of my Camino de Santiago pilgrimage, at 42 years old, I got my first tattoo.
It is a stanza from an Antonio Machado poem that walked with me for 2 months and it says this:
Caminante, no hay camino.
Se hace camino al andar.
Al andar se hace camino.
It means,
Waymaker, there is no way.
You make the way by walking.
By walking you make the way.
In my life, there was every reason not to go. Finances, family, responsibilities, schedules, you name it. My little life was all encompassing. My father had just passed, my mom needed me, my kids needed me, my intimate relationship was falling apart, my business had been on hiatus for 6 months. There was no way I could leave. People needed me, I needed to be here, to stay, to endure and put myself aside for everyone else. And my soul knew my little life was choking the ability to live out of me. So despite all of the reasons not to, I left, and I walked. And in the leaving, and walking, I remembered the full scope of what it means to be ALIVE. In the going, I returned to myself. I won't lie. It created hardship, change, and challenge, but it also created space, evolution, and liberation. Not just for me, but also for the people in my life. It brought what is true and real and most important back to the center, and two years later, I am still receiving the blessings from that choice.
I feel so grateful that decades of this practice and dedicated Tantric living has taught me that when my body, heart and soul say "YES," I must abide. I no longer let my mind take the wheel (most of the time at least), and instead I surrender (Ishvara Pranidhana) to the guidance that is bigger than me. I trust it fully to guide my feet, to make my path as I walk. Once the YES comes, I trust that the journey has already begun, and that it is about me, but it is also SO MUCH BIGGER THAN ME, and that is how it is meant to be. Not me authoring my way, but me receiving the way that is offered. Some may call this reckless, but I call it HOLY.
