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Who
We Are |
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by Robert |
| We met
in Boulder, Colorado, 30 years ago. I was a visiting lecturer.
Marta had freshly graduated from the University of Colorado. We
spent a month together in the mountains, and she came back with me to
England. We live in Oxford, and have three children, now grown up.
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I come from
an academic background in the English Romantics, literature and
psychology, and subsequently Drama Therapy and Theatre Studies. Marta's background is in Literature and Creative
Writing, and the women's movement. She is a recognized playwright and a published poet. I
had first
became involved with the personal Growth Movement in the early 1970s,
and was drawn especially to neo-Reichian bodywork, Bioenergetics, and
the Rajneesh movement. As we began working together, we began to
weave these interests more and more into our working as well
as our personal lives. We ran creative workshops
together for many years, working with both adults and young people,
before we found Tantra. |
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My first encounters with Tantra were
through the teachings of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (later called Osho), and
with a
tantric Master I found in Boulder called Nityananda, from the Himalayas,
at whose feet I sat awhile, and who taught me tantric meditation.
Marta and I both took sanyas and joined the Rajneesh movement in the
1980s.
For me, the language of tantra gives greater depth to what I had
experienced in the Growth Movement, and connects very powerfully with the language of
the poets I have been inspired by, and the earth I love. |
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John Hawken |
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It was not until some fifteen years or so after my experiences
in Boulder that we discovered Margot Anand's
SkyDancing
Tantra as a practical path into tantra for Westerners, and joined
the Sacred Couple Training that John Hawken and his former
partner, Monika, then led together.
John Hawken's teaching has been inspirational, life-changing, for both of
us. Tantra began to irradiate every corner of our lives -- not only our
personal growth and our marriage, but every aspect of our
working, teaching, creative, and family life. Gradually, we
were drawn more and more into organizing peer groups where we
could practice what we had been taught together. In 1998 we
became organizers for John, and in 2000 we launched Tantra
Laboratory with him. We became his apprentices as well as
his organizers, and began assisting and leading introductory workshops for him.
We worked with John until 2009, when we decided it was time to
retire from organizing to concentrate on our own teaching.
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Alan Heeks |
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Agatha Manouche |
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During
our time with Tantra Laboratory, our friend Alan Heeks, Steward
of Hazel Hill Wood, gave us the gift of an invitation to
celebrate Beltane there. Alan Heeks is a visionary of new
ways of living in community, and with the natural world. As our
workshops evolved, we were also inspired by the wisdom of Agatha
Manouche, Medicine Woman at Hazel Hill Wood. Out of this has been born the full cycle of
our Celtic Tantra
celebrations of these key eight
gateways in the Celtic year -- from Samhain in the autumn to Lammas in
the summer. |
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