Tantra is the path of surrender and acceptance.
Acceptance of your sexuality, the unacceptable parts of yourself, of your partner and of what IS.
Especially, of learning to accept all of who your partner is.
Acceptance is the biggest struggle in relationship, and the key to a successful one.
It’s easier to be a holy man (or woman) alone in your cave and believe you’re spiritually enlightened. Just get into a relationship and see what happens when someone has moved in with you and starts telling you to clean up that cave! Tantra is a spiritual discipline that, at some point, requires mucking around in relationship with another – i.e. actually getting out there and actually creating a deeply intimate, blissful reality.
Acceptance requires surrender- not surrender to the other, but surrender of our heads into our hearts. Often when we feel like we most don’t want to. Relationship is definitely not for cowards!
Relationship – no place to hide
So, what are you going to do when your Divine is sitting right in front of you, staring deep into your eyes? There’s no escaping. There’s no place to hide. There’s no putting it off until you die and go to heaven. Intellectualizing is a waste of breath. There’s no ignoring your divine mirror. They know all of your faults, even better than you do. And in spite of these, they still love you.
Now, this is really talking about acceptance. Always, and especially when stuff comes up, honour the Divine in your partner. See more on this in The Art of Relationship.
This is not about tolerating behaviour we shouldn’t, but about remembering our humanity as we deal with it.
Relationship with yourself- your pathway to peace and power
Self acceptance is often the biggest challenge of all.
How long are you going to stay in your limited ‘monkey mind’, telling yourself all of those fear and negativity based stories that may or may not be true, but which create pain and suffering in you? Will you keep being so vigilant about getting it right, about being ‘spiritual’ that you refuse to accept yourself in your humanity?
Can you see and accept yourself in your moments of being f..ked up as readily as you can in your moments of power, potency, love and peacefulness?
Can you see and accept yourself in your moments of power, potency, love and peacefulness as easily as you can in your moments of feeling f..cked up?
Acceptance of yourself, even more importantly acceptance of who you are being in this right here and now moment, allows you to shift into more of who you can be.
It doesn’t mean making it ok for you to stay out of integrity if that’s where you are. This self acceptance means feeling yourself more and so feeling the inner discord that happens when you’re in a place of bullsh…ting yourself. It’s not meant to be a place of Spiritual Bypass, rather a place of recognizing what is then feeling empowered to do something about it.
This is the path to love, pleasure, relationship and life itself. To inner peace. Maybe even world peace…
