Stepping into Freedom

 Wednesday Evening, 25 - Sunday Afternoon, 29 June, 2008

 At The Field of Dreams, Penzance

     Tantra helps us become aware of both the vertical and the horizontal dimensions of life. The horizontal level is our interaction with the world, how our meetings with others and with society affect us, and how we affect the world with our energy and our consciousness. The vertical level is our self, where we stand, our values, our dreams, and our integrity, our connection downward to our roots and our ground, and upwards to spirit and the expression of our souls.

     One of the sacred laws states that every being has the right to follow and manifest his or her sacred dream.

     Unfortunately, our society disrespects this sacred law, and most of its members feel empowered and obligated to impose their beliefs and morality on others, especially on children, and to judge others by their own standards. Even in a supposedly liberal pluralistic democracy, on the level of personal relationships the sense of one person being right and the other therefore wrong and the urge to convert others to our (right) opinions is the dominant unconscious mode of operation. So we gradually colonize those we were originally attracted to by how excitingly different they were from us. No surprise when such relationships lose their attraction and energy, till we find a new lover – only slowly to turn them into another dull adaptation of ourselves.

     Tantra teaches us a paradigm for relationships that honours, or rather celebrates, the working model that that there is not one truth, and that the task is to seek out this truth against everything else as illusion or delusion, and then proclaim/proselytise/ enforce it; but rather that there are many truths, many realities, and that reality is the dance of these many individual truths, or their weaving together to create the fabric of life. This is a model for the freedom to live and to let live.

     To manifest our sacred dream and to live with integrity we need both of two kinds of freedom: the freedom from imposed limitations to our way of being and expressing ourselves; and the freedom to be able to commit, to care, to get involved, to go deep, or most importantly, the ability to love.

     Again, tantra offers us a spiritual path that teaches us to transcend the duality of attachment and non-attachment, and to show us practically how to live with totality, love and passion on this earth and at the same time let go of the goals and outcomes of our endeavours, surrendering to the flow of life and inviting that to happen which most deeply can be.

     In this training we use an increasing awareness of the energy body to become conscious of the impact of horizontal pressures from outside on the vertical integrity of our standpoint as we live it. This includes past pressures that we have interiorised and project on to the outside. We learn to maintain that integrity not as a rigid, unresponsive structure, but as a flow of aliveness able to dance with and meet life and lifes adventures and gifts appropriately.

     Exploring the tantric map of the chakras as a description of the possible energy resources we have to move forward on our path of manifesting our dream, we explore what energy and what potential in us enables us to step into freedom: to step away from morality and its enforcers shame and guilt, from our parents and our personal history, from adaptedness and societys programming of our expectations and ambitions, and from the unconscious patterns of thought, emotion and behaviour that keep us small, and instead towards the deepest expression of our selves, with the sense of truth that arises as we experience the bliss of fully being ourselves. To step away from being motivated by fear and towards being directed and empowered by our passion.

     We learn to trust conscious pleasure as a golden compass to guide us on our path of coming into alignment with our sacred dream. We also learn to balance the two freedoms in order to expand beyond the dualities of yes and no, selfishness and service, free will and surrender, as we seek to become both fully ourselves and at one with the whole. So we can arrive at the realization that we are both the island and the ocean.

John Hawken, January 2008