From Anandatandava

[anandatandava]

Prison Girls(With your pencil-dusked eyes and KoolAid-kissed lips!)
You don't know me, but I'm a devotee of tantric yoga. Perhaps you've heard of the concept and felt intrigued. Well, although I may not be your direct lover, I can point to instruction in the art and spirituality of love itself.

There are pleasures in this world more rich, intense, and prolonged than any you have previously experienced with drugs or shallow Western sex, and they come with no health, legal, or financial risk. Are you tired of getting in trouble? Tantra will free you in ways you cannot currently imagine.

A major use of tantra is between partners, where each is seen as a representative of the divine, but most particularly the female, who remains in charge of lovemaking until the male is properly trained. (In tantra, the women is considered superior to man from birth- are you ready to pick up your birthright?)

Tantra also allows a solitary practitioner to reach the greatest heights of ecstasy, all without disrobing or tying one's body into knots. And it is instantly available, even in the midst of a busy prison dayspace, with no one suspecting that fountains of divine pleasure are pulsing to-and-fro within you. (Be careful to not topple over from the intense rapture!)

You may not think any of this possible, and will not act on it now. But the seed of tantra is planted within you, and will begin to germinate. Your spirit and body will become alert when the word appears on TV or magazines, and your interest will grow.

In tantra, the woman comes first in every fashion. By one definition, it means "two fullnesses in one", and trust that this fullness brings a flood tide of sensation and satisfaction. Yes, tantra is truly the woman's way, and it’s high time you started having things your way in life, don't you think?

So come selfish and become transformed, for whatever your spiritual tradition, tantra will strengthen your experience of it 100-fold. That's how it works.

But I am only a loving fool with limited resources, so for comprehensive instruction I recommend the teacher Yogani, of Advanced Yoga Practices, whose lessons are freely available online (aypsite.org) but also in book, ebook and audio format. Start with the first volume of Easy Lessons for Ecstatic Lessons. Have fun!

Anandatandava


Postscript:
Influenced by the intended prison audience, I think I again went excessively far with a posting. I'm sure it is because I too am love-starved, and thus driven to snatch a tasty double-entendre from its burrow when I can. I need to find a guiding hand for entries, for it seems that no matter how I twist and stir my workmanship, I feel no impassioned rise in response. I don’t seem to fit in anywhere!
Am I just too scandalously much? Well, give me another outlet, for I have nothing but tantra in this hot house cell, and we can see where that leads.

I think I'll forego tormenting those prison girls with this. I don't want to be an embarrassment to Yogani.

[anandatandava]

Ode to Tantra
Incarcerated tantric yogi seeks friendship with anyone interested in exploring the path of endlessly pulsating ecstasy, regardless of religion, race, disfigurements, or heck, even species! (Social mammals preferred.) Gotcha covered! As you see, I celebrate the diversity between us, and the only conformity I ask is that you love to love.

Do you take delight in the most intense pleasure? Would you like to hold and draw it out like a warm taffy? Does your heart crave the sensation of melting, soul-filling love, and your crown the palpable touch of God? Tantra will make you a believer. Do you want to turn love-making into a sacred act, and see the divine in your partner?

These blessings come also to those on a solitary path, for overt sex is optional in tantra. I myself can sit alone and fully clothed, yet savor sheets of celestial pleasure so sharp I writhe and gasp in excess rapture- all from no externally obvious cause. (Wanna provide the highlight of your next business meeting?) Does all this sound impossible? When tantra rise in you, it crushes all skepticism!

Yes, tantra can deliver transcendent experience at a moment's notice in any loving direction you desire. My only wish is to help deliver this consummate gift to those whose hearts, minds, and bodies are open to, indeed thirst for, the most exciting and inwardly resonating spiritual practices. And pure nonsectarian tantra doesn't tell you what to believe, it helps you experience what to believe in surpassing intensity, and by the lights of your own current religion.

So come, fond lover, it is time for you to claim your secret birthright, the profound depth of which will only open to your understanding as you dive into the path. The delight that awaits you cannot be adequately described, but simply must be directly tasted. Therefore, waste not a moment more, for you have everything to gain and nothing to lose.

Every journey begins with the first step, and here is yours:
www.AdvancedYogaPractices.com
or look for books by Yogani, available everywhere.

[anandatandava]

The Fawn
(Grown too gentle to live among wolves)

A common horror movie theme has a person trapped in a murky swirling pit of howling and clutching ghouls. Picture me there. In the dark, and alone, I've struggled to the surface, taken countless desperate spinal breaths, and sunrise finally came. But this radiance originates distinctly from within my own crown, and plays its scintillating rays throughout my body. Quick, someone pinch me or tell me you feel something similar! For, still immersed in the pit. I'm surrounded by a spiritual vacuum where no one understands words that matter. Do you, Dear Heart! Do you?

Attempting to flee a netherworld, and seeking a better world, I now seem to belong to neither, my own personal ghost-realm. Cut off from external contact, I have only my ink-soaked papers to keep me afloat. Someone please throw me a line of communication, if only to drag me to shore! There, no longer surrounded by the deafening outcry, I might learn the language and customs of a more hospitable realm. I possess few societal skills as yet, having grown to physical maturity in the company of wolves. But I do so want to be housebroken! I want to please, to obey, anything to lay near a yoga-warmed hearth and have my fur smoothed down properly.

Yes, I know the circumstances of "free" life may appear to pose obstacles to helping me, but are those obstacles real? Don't automatically assume I ask too much. I wont eat your food or take up your space. I just want a little of your inner voice by paper or phone, and each time you give it, my gratitude and enthusiasm will warmly within you for a week. An indirect route can even be arranged, especially once I find online support again.

Please don't judge my nature from outer circumstances, for inwardly I am a fawn, with gentle muzzle, Anime eyes, and softly dappled coat. But you might, if standing from afar and drowning an unfairly long bow, mistake my pattern for a leopard's and shoot me down. I feel something akin to impaling shots each time I open my empty mailbox or phone book-*thunk* to the heart- and my spirit sadly wonders: "I shaved my legs for this?"

But I won't return to wolfish ways, or allow my head to be resubmerged, for the scent of lotus fills my senses now. And if you watch prison TV, don't confuse my own past with present or prologue. Anyone's life can be hard, but none of us need be hard in response. Yes, by delivering the wisdom of the body, yoga taught me well, and now though I may yet be in this topsy-turvy world, I am no longer of it. The yogi can never fall fully away either, for he has known the Truth within himself, and life off the path rings hollow.

But this is also how it is that yoga has left me so isolated and lonely. It has colored me throughout, leaving little in common with anyone I previously knew on the streets, and only the shallowest commonalities with those in here. There has been so much abandonment, I feel like a bag lady - can you fault me for paraphrasing: "Without a family, a man alone in the world, trembles from the cold." I understand being advised to turn to my practices, but I'm in silence almost all the time as it is, and this can't be all that healthy. Besides, love and community are like air - you don't realize its importance until it runs out (kumbhaka notwithstanding.)

I'm sure its easier living a balanced life out there, where every conversation isn't about drugs, crime, judging others, or being proudly uneducated. I'd feel like a yoga poseur, and untrue to the precepts, to hang around and dissipate energies better spent on the path. So no card games, sports, or frivolous books for this kid, and I only watch TV while eating. (I resent time spend on either, so double them up!) People think I take it too far, but then I've had a long way to go. Plus, these are non-practioners, so don't know the internal payoff, like right now, whole-body mudra pulsing divine heat lightning into my crown as I sit here writing. In the name of all that is holy in you, find a way to tell me I am not alone in feeling things like this! Don't leave me completely alone on these unholy burning grounds!

*ahem* No poseur here. And I trained with your very same methods to bubble with what I can only assume is your ecstasy. Do you judge me that my primary option for expressing that ecstasy is through writing? Well, educate me. Push me in this deep and show me what comes out. You don't dare be that publically uninhibited, you say? See, that's all that really separates us inside, that I have no reputation to protect. To you I am already the savage, body glistening as I dance nakid around the sacrificial fire. With anthropological curiosity, you watch me wrestle with my invisible Goddess. But those jungle drums are in you too, my Friend. When you undress your lover, the fabric of modern civilization also falls away. You don't stand so missionary sober now either, do you? Welcome to my tribe!

So don't judge as I swallow the Flame, and no regard for appearances display every inch of my Passion and even Agony.You may shrink wide-eyed behind the Land Rovers now and then, but can you truly look away from full-cry Natl. Geographic flow of ecstatic consciousness? That's me being free and flying on the inside. You know this feeling. Would you ever willingly give it up? You make love to your partner. I make love to the paper. We each have our tantra, and divine enters both. Vive la difference! Do you better understand the nature of my motivations now? I am here before you now, heart on my sleeve. Help me to speak.

So sequester my crazy-aunt words in some cyber attic if you must, but allow them to live. They are my outlet, my catharsis, my solace, in an otherwise empty wasteland. The flow must continue 'til death do I depart. It is my bindu visarga, the "falling of the drop", with isolation's depth dictating what mix of amrita, tears or my own life's blood it feels to be at that moment. It appears this grape must suffer in order that a noteable vintage be expressed but, please, someone steady the decanter's mouth! And then one day some exotic-tongued epicurean will select me for the wine cellar and blend me to personal taste. But will I then disappear from public view? I doubt it, for ecstasy always finds a way of kicking the covers aside!

Anandatandava

[Swan]

Your posts are excellent... thanks.

Just wanted to share that some of your experiences remind me of Sri Aurovindo, a yogi who advanced along spiritul path under trial.

Lots of love...

[anandatandava]

RING YOUR BELL

A prisoner often needs to hear distant temple bells to bring him back to his true self.  The temple is in you, your voice is its spell.  Technology can now bring it to me, wherever you are in the world  Please fill my cell with the scent of satsang.

Anandandava

[anandatandava]

The Ghost Ship

I've been writing some painful stuff lately, but even in the midst of the ache and the angst, the slightest touch of tantra brings a powerful influx of divine ecstasy thundering in...

I feel like a ghost ship awash with shadow pirates while many decks below the engines keep throbbing ceaselessly away in complete unconcern. Without that subterranean power source, this ship would surely scuttle itself on the nearest rock. But does that really even matter?

For how fortunate is it to have a life preserver if one remains doomed to float alone in an empty sea? I can tell you with certitude that no matter how luminous and electric the water, it doesn't compensate for endless solitude. An internal island must be reinforced from the outside periodically or the waves of life begin to erode is bulwarks. I've floated too long like this, and bitterness is starting to prune my skin. This is not a good melting. Send a little driftwood over, will you please?

It has come to pass that whether my eyes are open or closed, and whether I find myself in the ship of human discourse or the sea of meditation, a phantom shape has taken residence within me - a ghost ship in a bottle. Such is the nature of unbroken loneliness.

Is there no one to break the glass and breathe away the spirits? It seems such a small act of mercy. What am I missing? How does one gain it?

Do you believe in melting spiritual love?

Embrace me and become saturated in its purest form, unembroidered, for I have no designs on you other than to hear your voice, say, once a month? Is it in you to provide that key anchor-point in a raging sea?

[Steve]

Dear Anandatandava,

I know not what to say other than my heart is with you as is Love.  You are not alone dear brother.

Much love to you always,
Steve

[AYPmod]

The Testing of the CrowsOriginally posted by anandatandava

"The testing of the crows," is what an Ojibwe friend calls a blizzard that comes after spring is already well underway. Now I, deep into my spiritual spring, survey the world and find no external heart-sustenance. It is my own time of testing
Forced to draw excluseively on my own internal resources, my own bodily reserves, I've become a feathered bag of bones. And this tantra-born hunger is far worse than mere physical pangs-it is thee existential extremity that accompanies the sudden and irretrievable loss of one's lifelong soul-mate. How can I so sharply feel the daily loss of someone I never knew?
It's that cursed tantra, filling my head with whispered promises, painting the silhouette of a spiritual Betrothed in my heart. Who is there now to fill and replace that aching shadow? Ah! I am filled with such longing for a temporal love of spiritual nature and depth, a focal point and avatar for the divine melting love I now cannot escape. It has proven a curse, dogging my steps, pursuing me thru the clouds like a crow angel, folding its softly persistent wings around me at every turn!
I drop to the ground in exhausted supplication. I refuse to regrow fangs and fur and become earthbound again. A heart grown ten times bigger can only soar; I cannot bear being anchored here. Unfair, so unfair, to become a tender and weightless spirit with no flock in which to fly, no button-eyed lovebird with which to nestle and coo. How do I survive this withering vacuum? Only echos answer my calls. Solitude stretches out like a spectre's shadow before me.
In mad despair, I furrow my tear-streak beak thru the sand, seeking the Beloved here, there, everywhere. Tell me, have you seen trace of the Beloved? If so, I beg of you, cast a bread-trail that I may follow!

[Etherfish]

Nicely put, A. The plight of all people who don't practice yoga (and some who do): Searching for something outside themselves that is inside all along. Don't expect to find it in one little lifetime.
One illusion that tends to prolong the process is finding someone to love.

Reminds me of the drunk crawling around under the street light at night looking for his lost dollar. Someone asked where he lost it, and he points over there, beyond the light, where he couldn't see to look for it.

[whippoorwill]

quote:Originally posted by anandatandava

The Ghost Ship

... Is it in you to provide that key anchor-point in a raging sea?

You use metaphor to paint such vivid pictures!  

You need a sea anchor or a drogue to give your ship stability in these heavy seas.  What canvas, spars, and line can you cobble together from your ghost ship?  When you look at your internal compass, which way points north?  Do you have a heading?  I am not an anchor; I am simply a song you might hear through the howling winds.  I sing: "you are not alone."

On a more practical level... Do you do Samyama?  I was thinking it might help...

[anandatandava]

Friends, I find it my immense good fortune to have found others who know ecstasy, tho each surely feels sit in their own unique way. It could be said that we represent an ambrosial spectrum of flavors, from peppery-hot to edgy-tart to vanilla-rich to nectar-sweet. I run hot, as we know, but "vive la difference"!

Call me an unrepentant gastronome, but I'd love to taste you. Oh, don't gasp, for I only seek to grasp, your Bindu Visavga, your "falling of the drop"--just a drip, just a dram, 'til your Sea

I've swam.
So whirl your woolen cloak, Rabi'a, that your slave may be enrapt and silent in its Heaven Scent. For I am a renunciate, a 99 percenter, and the taste of amrita is full in my mouth. What is there left to crave than the ever perfect?
Thus it is that just a kiss to your fingertips, Parvati, as you glow in ecstasy will serve to inform me of your Celestial Nature. You still think this too far? Then relegate me to a single lotus-petal toe. Ahh...you resist even this ticklish playdate, Spanky? Remember we must be like unto little children to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Don't you want to bounce on Shiva's lap?

But if the touch of my lips cannot cede what I seek, then you must part your own and speak. Act not to free the knot of thy soul; what is thy nature, the Deep of thy Abyss? Pierce my jungle canopy, Sun Goddess, and throw a shaft that Golden Love, for this butterfly waits to dance in your warmth. And there's one certainty in all this: "just like a prayer, our voice can take me there."
Ah, such shaktipat! How is it that your influence can thrill and animate me so in this, my life of isolation? Verily, absence makes the heart grow fonder, and in time the seeker finds the object of his search to be carried inward with every breath, every step upon the path. I see your divine profile in the wind, Sweet Zepher, and my sails are raised to catch you. Can you feel my eager tugs on the flowing of thy skirt? Fall to earth and crush me, that I may die unto self and thread the Sacred Needle I am lost in inertness without thee, Shakti, thereby make me the seat of thy Siddhasana, the source of thy Fountain, that together we may fly this world thru the Gates of Enchantment!

[anandatandava]

Are You Experienced?

Countless times, as I sit or stand, my body buzzing like a hive of buzzing pleasure bees, every movement a cataract of electric delight, I think how wonderful it would be to call someone on the spur of the moment to ask, "So tell me, are you experienced?", and know that, yes, you do indeed feel the way I do. How incredible this is. How unfortunate that all do not pursue it.

Most days the ecstasy is effortless from well before dawn into late evening. Just a light touch, a brief and subtle method, "primes the pump", or "spins things up". (It can feel like either, can't it?) Then I relinquish conscious control and let my soul follow the scent of the Rose on its own, a nightingale in whole-body mudra.

 If, other than sambhavi, I relax my body completely, it is as literal a falling into the arms of God as I can imagine or mortally bear - Fire! Fire! The Fire of Love! Every breath a shimmering sheet of Holy Flame, every heartbeat a Sunburst in a suddenly infinite inner sky. Every so often I notice that I'm rocking slowly back and forth in the Heart, the very Heart, of that purifying Crucible. Then the rapture swallows me entire again.

Have I said things of this nature before? Well, does it not bear repeating? This is the liturgy of a spiritual ecstatic, engraved on the soul, and scrolling out as I become haplessly inverted over the pen like a static-charged sock (*crackle*). Like Rumi and Shamsi, let us enter retreat together, where I will entreat you to read from your holy books to me. But take care, lest I eat the pages from your hand out of sheer devotional desire.

Ecstasy often arrives as a complete surprise while my mind is engaged elsewhere. For example, it can come surging up and thru me as a self-existent, living force when I rise from response. (You wait to make love when I awaken, Parvati? Then kick me next time, for I don't want to waste a moment!)

Ecstasy can come when I raise a toothbrush to my mouth. (Shakti, you enjoy mint?!) It can come when I cross my legs (hero's pose is less obvious than siddhasana in public), or when I push/pull against resistance, or step up to a urinal (what a odd tantric shrine that has become *blush*)

But perhaps my favorite moments are when ecstasy arrives as a spreading/melting palm-like pressure or 'touch' on the top of my head, and so demands entrance I cannot resist regardless of circumstance. So I stagger half-blind to a supporting structure, and let the Ocean crash down into me. I so love these, the moments I seem so clearly not alone, and they become a thrilling call-and-response: "God?!" "I'm here." "God?!" "I'm here."

If real, just imagine the Grace, how great the Touch, to save a wretch like me! If not, consider what loneliness I must contain to begin seeing the Companion everywhere. But if pain is the dynamo that generates this Divine Light, should I really wish to be saved? What happens to the mystic when his cave is unsealed? These matters are beyond my ken. But should you think to become my guide, I offer this, from Hebrews 13:3 "Remember the prisoners as if chained with them...since you yourselves are in the body also." (It feels unseemly to appeal in this fashion, for in truth I am beneath your  station.)

Well, I daren't exhaust my kind scrivener any further. I could use help there as well, as I have no online access.

[whippoorwill]

Hi Roy:

The frank answer to the "are you experienced" question is no.  I've been doing meditation but for a short while (maybe 6 months), and there are no kundalini fireworks for me.  I can feel some energy moving in my body now, which is immensely cool, but mostly I have a little bit of silence and a lot of joy.  I get the little miracles of a happier marriage and happier children.  (Right now, the twins are playing music, jabbering, and dancing around above my room.  I swear that if there was ever an earthquake here, I would not notice.  A modest midwest earthquake cannot compete with those two.)

But what's up with this unbridled loneliness?  Is it that no one there is able to relate to you?  Or are you literally not able to speak to anyone?  Are you in the hole again?  Are you allowed to walk or jog around the yard to get some good grounding in?  I'm just curious about your circumstances.  I know they are what they are, and it doesn't do to dwell on it, but they might provide some context....

and...

quote:
(It feels unseemly to appeal in this fashion, for in truth I am beneath your station.)

Not true.  "There, but for the grace of God, go I."  Who knows where life will lead us or what choices we will make?

[anandatandava]

THE WINDS OF CHANGE

The election of a liberal governor has brought winds of change through Corrections, blowing away a blanket of constraint I'd apparently grown accustomed to.

Now they're trying to shoo me out the door, and things are moving swiftly.  In an effort to "wake me up" to their world and prepare me for parole, I've been steered into spending all day as a GED tutor and in school for Microsoft MOS and optical networking certification.

It's nice having a small income, and I'm excelling at everything, but there's two people in me and the tantra side is stronger.  I've been successful by Western standards before, but still had a lonely ache in me that only drugs and alcohol could momentarily dull, and that led only back to prison.  I'm not lonely in my tantra practice, so which do you think I trust?
Looks like the biggest constraints now are within myself.

Yes, the gravitational pull of love could draw me out, but what with all the legends that have accreted like barnacles to my hull, and the huge web of words I've spun  that search engine spiders will eventually explore, I'm afraid I've braided a noose that throttles off much chance of finding what I need.  But I can't stop, for writing and ecstasy are tightly linked in me at present, and I require both to survive.  What an irony for something to be so internally nurturing but also so eternally isolating.  But I can see how it evolved.

Until now, the system completely restricted me from the productive use of my mind, so I instead learned to use it to escape on a raft of words.  AYP, by providing a sea to float it on, has kept me alive log enough to figure myself out, and for a number of alternative ports to come into view.  But all those I currently see are Western ports, filled with men all trying to scrabble over each other.  I was once  King Rat myself, so know it to be a weighty crown indeed, much different from the buoyant ring that now pulls me up to Heaven.

So I'd rather stay on my raft and meditation seat, where I compete with no one.  But there's risks in that too.  Friends say, "Roy, you're institutionalized.  There's a world out there, and people would benefit by your presence."  But then so many of them get out, get drunk, and come right back!  *laugh*  So their words fall flat.

My only hope is to find another raft to swim toward, or a place to safely moor mine.  I fear open water, open society, and this prison ashram is all I know.  Where is another that will have me?  Seriously!  Where is sanctuary, where is safe harbor?

Further, is physical freedom a moving from the dark to the light, or the light to the dark?  Whose robes will stand as firm as these prison folds?  Will it be a spiritual community, something stabilized by the vigor and warmth of many, or a single magical soul who may see humor or inspiration in an oft-hapless ecstatic?

Anandatandava

[anandatandava]

THE PEARL

Tantra arcs from root divine,
Self-born stone, 'tis that I climb.

To coax Oyster's depth unfurl,
Ocean temps across her Pearl.

Who's moist your folds since waves began?
You must awake to more than clam.

To walk this path it means no sin,
The time has come to breathe...me...in!