In 2011, I was bursting at the seams of discomfort in my 9-5 remote project management job. I had just traversed the multi-dimensional realms of Mt Shasta in a week-long spiritual retreat and when I came back to my former life I felt too “big” for it. This acknowledgment spurred me into a job search on Craigslist and what to my delight there was a posting for a full-time Tantrika position. I felt so much Yesness, I quit the 9-5 and entered the realm of Tantra head-on.
When I was in Mt Shasta the prior week, I interfaced with a man who called himself, “IAM”. I still succinctly remember his constant chantings of, “I AM God all there is,” “I AM God all there is,” “I AM God all there is.” He felt like this magical character who landed out of nowhere into our retreat. There was a moment during the retreat where I was massaging someone’s legs to help them ground and “IAM” was observing this and said nonchalantly, “Oh you’re a Tantrika, usually they come in fairy form.”
This little announcement of my “Tantrika-ness” maybe was the spark that led me into manifesting it deeper into my world, yet I had been practicing Tantra the year prior and I had already gotten an initial sense that this was an offering I was meant to cultivate and share with the world.
And so as I entered into the new Tantrika job, I immersed myself in the concept of Tantra with all of its brightness and all of its shadows. So much beauty and so much darkness. So many dark games of Tantra came to the surface to play out and to reintegrate into my wholeness. This took several years.
In this experience, I learned that Tantra is not inherently about sexuality. Tantra is about the infinite, and sexuality can show up in the space because our sexuality is part of our infinite nature. Our sexuality holds the biggest wounds and shadows we have as a collective. Tantra simply opens the space for our infinite nature to be, which often brings our biggest wounds to the surface. Within that infinite space, there is then an opportunity to integrate these wounds back into our wholeness.
There is a plethora of misperception in the world about what Tantra is. I think the very purpose of this is to never give you the keys to unlock yourself, yet once you start to find your own keys, you realize you never needed to read anything about it anyway (including this text, hehe).
To me, Tantra is a space to discover your own keys, to unlock yourself with those keys, and to integrate those codings into the vessel (the body).
