AN ECSTATIC LIFE The world needs you to be in love again The world needs you to look at things differently The world needs you in your ecstatic spirit
Tantra: tan = expansion Tra = liberation, freedom
The Feminine is the ground of being. It gives birth to the Masculine, which then holds the space for the Feminine to flow in a more expanded field. The Masculine is then born anew, holding space…and on…spiralling growth into adulthood, parenthood, mentorship, Eldership, into a more expanded awareness...into one's own spirit... What is it to awaken the ecstatic body? All of us remember what it is like to have an ecstatic body, because we have all been children, and all children, you can see they have this joie de vivre, this joy of life. And we seem to lose it as we go along. And as the cultural imperative impinges on us and formulates our character, we lose that openness and that love of life. We become more serious, earning a living and doing those sort of things. But the root of the ecstatic life is something that is always with us. It is a part of our very nature. It is not gone, just conditioned over, covered up by layers. The job is simply to awake to our own true nature...
“People of the greatest achievement Are Those with Highly Developed Sexual Natures and Who Have Learned the Art of Sex Transmutation." ~ Napoleon Hill You know very well what it is like in the morning when you wake up and you have had a good sleep, you wake up in the morning and you give a big stretch and you just feel so good. This is what cats do. This is how cats stretch. There is incredible joy, there is pleasure in it, that feels like a sexual pleasure, and that is because it is. That is exactly what it is ...this is a natural part of sexuality.
When we allow our sexual energy to be internal we get the ability to use it in anything we choose to do. And of course all cultures define how sexuality is to be used and our culture in particular is so repressive, and keeps sexuality at a very young, adolescent level. But when we allow that sexual energy to come into our body, and use it in the moment, and not be sidetracked by needing to have sex or being too excited by the act of fucking, we can use that energy for whatever we want. And that natural joy of living comes back into the body like it happens when we yawn in the morning. What we are doing in awakening the ecstatic body, is learning how to raise our sexual energy and both surrender to it, and control it.
"In the way of the superior lover, sexual energy is circulated through your body in a way to clear out the kinks so your love can flow more freely." David Deida, "The Enlightened Sex Manual" In order to do this, we need to be able to be aware of control of life force, our Ki. And to do that we need to focus on and always be in our Hara. That which the Japanese call Hara; what the Chinese call Lower Dantian; which is that place, a couple of finger widths above the pubic bone which is the physical centre of our being. So if we can raise our sexual energy, move it from our Hara, we can put it to a million uses.
And that surrender can be done by utilizing the breath, the surrender breath. Which is the kind of breath that they call conscious, connected breathing in rebirthing and holotropic breathwork - they all use this very feminine breath which is a surrender breath. And to allow this breath which is like a sigh “ahhhhhhhh”, just relax, surrender. Things can come to the surface, and at the same time we also need to learn how to use it- how to control. You don’t just want to let your sexual energy loose on the world. That’s why cultures control it. You need to be able to both surrender to its rising and control where it goes. Although now YOU choose where to place it rather than obeying cultural conditioning
“Ecstasy is our very nature; not to be ecstatic is simply unnecessary. To be ecstatic is natural, spontaneous. It needs no effort to be ecstatic; it needs great effort to be miserable. That's why you look so tired, because misery is really hard work; to maintain it is really difficult, because you are doing something against nature. “ Osho
So we also use various controlling breaths which bring deep focus and deep concentration. Like that breath where we breathe softly in the back of the throat, and make a small sound like the arch-evil one Darth Vader, who was a master at this controlling breath. We dance with these in the natural Masculine/Feminine dynamic. In awakening the ecstatic body, we will do an exercise, where when we pay attention to our Hara, we raise our sexual energy, we surrender to that sexual energy, using surrender breath and also we control it using a very masculine Ujjai breath...and allow the ecstatic rills to fill the body mind...this is part one..!
So we use these four elements of Ki through the Hara, our sexual energy, the dance of the masculine and feminine breath, and the kind of animal stretching called pandiculation and the release of tremouring. And using these we will, through daily practice, learn to surrender to our own natural state of joy.
So that is the basics of it. then we use our sexual energy throughout the practice of Tanaiki and throughoutthe day...an ecstatic life...
This is how Arnold Schwarzenegger talks about it...