Tantric Energy

Painting by Francine Hart

When my analyst first used the word "Tantric" in my recent Archetypal Dreamwork session, I could feel a curiosity rising in me. What was this? I had only a passing western understanding of the word and, I have to say, more than a few judgments about it.

I recently had a reaction to my teacher Marc Bregman's suggestion at one of our retreats that there was work that couples could do to support each other around the healing of sexual trauma through the holding of space for each other in the most intimate moments. He used the word Tantric and I didn't like the idea of sexual healing being associated with my spiritual community.

So now here it was in my own work. And, it's not like it's the first time it's come up.

In this most recent dream, I see a boy, 16, who is in an intense state of arousal. A man is with him. Then we are together and I am touching him. I feel what he feels. It is like seeing and feeling a mirror image of myself,  only with all the feeling and energy of a 16 year old boy. The opening that I feel in my own body is a deeply intense need that is held inside me. The need is so great that it writhes in my body like it wants to be released. It is powerful and in the dream when I press into the boy, he arches back in ecstasy. I feel this ecstasy in me. It is not about ejaculation or release, that's not what happens in the dream. It is about how the energy is moving in me, and what it is like to experience the energy of this 16 year old boy who is me. It is contained and so I am contained, yet powerful in my desire and need.

Still Point in the Turning World

Dream:

I am dancing in some kind of studio with others. I feel young, like pre-adolescent, maybe 8-10. The teacher, who looks like Sue (divine Anima figure), is there helping us get started. I start to spin in one place with my arms out. I feel the immediate disorientation of it. I feel like people are watching me but it's OK. I feel very contained in my body and all my vision is then turned inward. Then I am spinning but I am not moving my feet anymore. Then I shift my body into some kind of position that feels like some kind of yoga pose, like a flower. My arms are entwined with the hands held up. I feel my body become very still into this position as I am spinning around. It is like time has stopped and it feels strange and still. I feel frozen in time or outside of time somehow.

This is a recent dream and one that is a touchstone dream. One I know I will go back to over and over. Every time I touch into the still point, I feel a bloom of fear which, if I stay with it, turns into sensuality. I did not feel this in the dream. I begin my dance with arms outstretched and spin around. When my body settles into the pose in the spinning, it is like there is no tension, even though I can feel how my body is in some kind of pose that should have me straining in some way! There is no tension in my body and I feel it sink deeper into this place of stillness. I look down and see my thin, young girl arms entwining up into the pose, and they are beautiful, smooth and then they become very still. So strange to be spinning and yet so still. I am waiting, but there is nothing that I am waiting for. The world spins beyond me even as I turn and I feel a timeless expansiveness in the stillness of the waiting that is not waiting, in the action that is inaction. I can feel the presence of the Anima somewhere behind me. I can feel her support for me in this new place.

In my session, when we worked this dream, my analyst read me this part of a poem by T.S. Elliot, which describes this dream perfectly:

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;

Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,

But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,

Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,

Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,

There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

Recently, my work is opening me more to this soul girl in me, and even to the warrior soul girl we call the Valkyrie. The girl for me is revelatory.

Repentance

In North of Eden, the dreamwork community I am a part of, we practice a radical way of being in relationship which we call The Glass Bead Game. It’s a reference to the Herman Hess novel called The Glass Bead Game only it is not an esoteric and intellectual obscure association game (a shallow interpretation at best). Instead it is about using the surface area of our mutual work in the NOE organization to practice seeing our pathology, owning our reactions and withdrawing our projections. It’s about learning to be in relationship with the Divine and with others at the same time.

It follows the spiritual axiom that whenever we are emotionally disturbed, no matter what the cause, there is something wrong with us (friends of Bill will be familiar with this)! This is a difficult piece of news to swallow and requires the intense commitment of a warrior to truly embrace it. It requires us to know that in each given moment we are the central bead, whole in the love of the Divine and accept the teaching and correction that the dreams bring for us.

Archimandrite Dionysios, an orthodox monk, states that the greatest thing we can do to combat our demons is repentance.

This is what we do in the glass bead game! We repent. We learn to see our shortcomings, to accept the teachings of our leaders and teachers around the pathology that lives hidden in us that we cannot see, and to commit to being a warrior in our effort to eradicate the effects of the demons that haunt us. It requires an immense amount of faith and willingness to repent in each moment when we encounter the enemy in us.

Return From Esalen

I have recently returned from a North of Eden archetypal dreamwork retreat at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. As always the teachings and learnings were profound. Every moment of it was just for me. The moment I arrived at Esalen from a short visit with friends in Oakland, the energy of the retreat center and the landscape of Big Sur entered my body with ecstatic sensuality.

Each moment was for me, for my work and my journey: the moment when my partner went into reaction because I didn’t call for 12 hours, the moments in my tiny cabin with my sister dreamers as we settled in for the evening, the ancient sulfur bathes on the cliff side, dancing with wild abandon in the Huxley room with other Esalen retreaters, the famous Esalen massage, the 12 Step Tribe meeting, the music of our beloved Trubadors, the food, and of course the deeply moving work that every member of my group participated in during the 5 days we were together perched on the cliff overlooking the western horizon where it disappeared into the vast pacific ocean.

Awakening the Snake-Girl

Snake Rising ~ Laura Smith

What is it like to have the energy channels opened in the body? I have written a lot on this blog about the sensuality as it has manifested in my dreams and in my body. In my work so far, it is a visceral and pleasurable feeling that travels up my spine and diffuses out through my limbs. Sometimes it carries heat. This sensuality is The Snake. I have been bitten by The Snake. This is very Archetypal. The Archetypes who come to us in our dreams are real. They are real entities that can help us with healing and open us to the primal energies that are dormant or blocked in our spiritual and physical bodies.

I had this dream in June of 2012:

I am with some people and they are doing something to me, like maybe stringwork, like at a NOE retreat. I don’t understand what is happening but I am scared. I hear myself telling them, “no, no, no, no, no” like I am pleading with them not to do what they are about to do. Then a woman (the Anima), takes her hands and pulls her fingernails across my lower back at my sacrum. I feel a burning sensation and I feel my body arching and responding in a feeling of sensuality and desire outside of my control.

This is how it can happen. This is a real moment, a real event in my life that carries all the feelings contained in the blocked place at my sacrum, which in the dream have to do with desire and sensuality. In the opening, I feel the energy released and traveling in my body. Some call this place of entry in the body the sacral chakra and refer to this energy as Kundalini. I only know the truth of what I feel in the dream and what I am feeling in my body more and more in my waking life since embarking on this journey.

I had a dream recently where I see a prepubescent girl on a bed.  The Animus is watching her, focused intently upon her. I see her and think that she is coquettish, overly sexual for such a young girl. This is my judgment of The Girl: that she is bad to have this energy in her. This is the judgment that the history of the world has persecuted The Girl for. This is Gnostic knowledge which has been perverted by a world that is run by a terrified collective ego which attempts to suppress this energy. In fact, for most of us, it is so suppressed that we do not even know that it is there.