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OUR APPROACH TO TANTRA
     
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    Between World-Negating Asceticism and Commercial Exploitation

    If you want a world-negating, transcendent-only spiritual path, this is not the path for you. Ours is a path of devotion. We embrace the manifest world as the Divine Dance of the Great Goddess.  Ours is a path that honors the full power of Woman and Feminine knowledge.

    Most of Tantra taught and pursued today is a desperate effort by men to maintain sexual control of women – or by women who wish to control their men by allowing them the illusion they were indeed in control of her sexuality. It is not surprising therefore, that  much of Tantra as taught today in the West is based on relationship and intimacy skills, a how-to cookbook style 'enlightenment'.. 

    While the tantric work we do has a profound and positive impact on relationship and intimacy skills, that is not our focus. 

    Ours is a Bhakti (devotional) path focused on the Great Goddess, Self-realization and the benefit of all beings.  Tantra is a path of continually unfolding, self-realizing consciousness.  Our work inevitably informs relationship and intimacy skills, for ecstatic communion with the Power, Beauty and Knowledge of the Goddess liberates our true nature and impacts all aspects of our lives. 

    In keeping with this focus, we create environments (classes, rituals, private sessions) intended to catalyze the spontaneous ‘realization of reality through its bodily expression.’  (Sahajayoginicinta)  We create contexts that enhance deep communion with the Beauty, Power and Knowledge inherent in our bodies.  We guide women and men into a refined, self-referred, awareness of subtle body energies, attuning us to the inner resonance which is the true teacher. As we awaken to our natural, inborn state of freedom, presence and delight in the sensory world, we discover within the Beloved we have sought without.  ‘If that which you seek, you find not within yourself, you shall never find it without.’  (Charge of the Goddess, attributed to Dorien Valiente).

    We work in group because the collective field of energy heightens each person's experience. 

    The eroticism of our work is self-referred, not focused on a partner.  By erotic, we mean the fundamental desire which compels all things to unfold and to connect with all around it.

    We provide separate women and men's classes to eliminate the societal gender conditioning which can hinder each person going deeply and freely into her/his process.  This is especially important since the work engages our sexuality so deeply.

    For women it is especially liberating and profoundly self-empowering to be witnessed in their erotic feelings and beauty free from the male gaze and society's male-identified standards of beauty and sexuality.  For men it is especially beneficial to cultivate direct contact with the Feminine Power within them, independent of a female partner for their projection and to experience the freedom of being heart-centered and vulnerable in the presence of other men.

    Once we have discovered, cultivated, and learned to contain our subtle body awareness, relational partnering becomes a more empowering reflection of who and what we are both as women and as men, as human ego/personalities with strengths and "shortcomings" and as the whole, free and beauty-graced divinities that we are.
     

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    My many years of teaching and facilitating have led me to the conclusion that there is only one authority, that of the inner Self. ~~ Vajra Ma