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"Ownership destroys, guardianship nourishes."  He walked into the Shakti Temple. There was a priestess in there pouring tea. She looked up at him expectantly as he entered.
He sat down and took the tea cup she passed to him "What brings your here, dear soul?" she asks. With a deep sigh he said "I need some time with a tantric priestess. My wife and I...it is finished...we love each other but the spark has died...you know how it is..." "Dear one," she replied, "I can of course bring you a priestess trained in the arts who could massage you into bliss. But let me tell you, at heart your wife is no different from a priestess." He laughed and spluttered some tea. "Do you know how many years it has been since we had any passion?" rolling his eyes. "Do you want to know why?" she said, topping up his tea cup with the thick dark liquid.  We tend to take more time to make careful agreements to keep our money safe by way of business contracts than we take to consider the safety of our own heart. In relationship, many people stumble into relating without giving much conscious thought about how to make it work or make it safe. This means that often patterns are taken on from family conditioning or cultural ideals, and may not actually be what you want or need. Many of our habits in relating actually make it unsafe to keep our hearts open, both our and our partner's...and we start wondering where the love went.
By becoming conscious about how our actions affect one another, and also the hurts we have accumulated from the past, we can start to make a Relationship Agreement Field together. This is about co-creating a safe space to expand into love together. Read on to find out how... 
Love. One would think we all just want to be in love. But the aftermath of heartbreak and betrayal can actually make us wary to open our hearts again. From the first rejection during high-school dating to marriage break-ups, heart breaks can hit us hard. It is no wonder that many people try to find ways to get their intimacy needs met without venturing into the dangerous waters of love.
Yet...intimacy rarely fulfills without love, and love is at our very core as human beings. So how can we return to love after heartbreak or betrayal?  Written after a darkness retreat of 7 full days and nights in pitch darkness...
I have written several articles about how the experience is to be in pure darkness for a solid week. However, I have not yet written about how the experience is to come out into the light after such a week. It is, yet again, another opportunity to write about non-sexual orgasmic experiences!  Which comes first? Do we need to learn to love ourselves before we can love another? OR is being loved by someone else the best way to learn self-love? It becomes a but like the chicken and the egg conundrum...
We are all familiar with the phrase: “You must first love yourself before you can love another”. There seems to be a lot of sense in it. Yet, we also know that being loved by another helps you to love yourself. The feeling of being loved validates that we are indeed lovable. There is also an overwhelming amount of evidence that people who were well-loved as children tend to more easily move into loving relationships as adults. And likewise, those abused as children are more likely to attract abuse as adults.  One thing that is coming to the public awareness right now is abuse.
Abuse is when someone takes advantage of another person who is in a more vulnerable position. They abuse their power over someone else. There are many forms of misuse of power in our world. Sadly it appears to be endemic to humanity. Wherever you see people using a position of authority to their own benefit, this is a form of abuse. They may be gaining money, influence, power, sex or some other desire. But to take advantage of others to fulfill our own needs is an abuse of power, no matter what form it takes.  I used to think Tantric Massage was only for professionals who want to offer sexological bodywork to clients for a living.
However, then I discovered it has another incredible potential that not so many people consider. It is an absolutely amazing tool for couples to learn together to upgrade their love life!  Tantric massage is becoming a big thing.
For men, the ubiquitous “happy ending massage” has been around in many societies for a long time, though mostly for relief of built-up sexual tension rather than any kind of tantric experience. So for men to go for a tantric massage is not a big leap of the imagination. It’s simply the next step. But on the other hand… for a woman to go and receive a massage for her sexual pleasure from a therapist she doesn’t know is a pretty new concept in most places.  There seems to be a part within all of us that longs to open up more. Whether we desire a more open and flexible body, or to feel more courageous and do new things. Possibly you wish you took more risks to reach out and make connections. Or maybe you yearn to express yourself in public.
Tantra is a life path that gives many methods to help people overcome fears and resistances and find ways to open up more. This is not just in modern neo-Tantra. In ancient days we hear of wild “dakinis" and “aghoris”: These were tantriks who walked around naked and lived in graveyards, made love in public and generally flaunted all cultural taboos. OK, so these are perhaps not forms of being open that you find yourself longing for, but they show that this history of Tantra was to find ways to embody freedom within this human life. |
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© 2014. Shashi Solluna. All rights reserved.
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