Tantric Heart Opening

Greenwoman, a wonderful Spirit who I feel honored to call Friend and Teacher, has asked me if I would be interested in writing on Tantra today and for the next two Thursdays while she is away on a Beautiful Spiritual Journey. I happily agreed. This week, I want to talk about an experience I had before my formal training. It's one of the experiences that guided me to wanting to find a Teacher and study with Masters. Although it was about 17 years ago, I remember it like it was today and can still remember all the sensations and emotions. It also contributes to why I am so fascinated with the power of sex and its potential for us as humans--how it opens us to Spirit when done consciously. It was A...Mazing for me.

I will post two disclaimers here:

1) The rest of this post is a description of a sexual experience, but not graphic. If you are easily offended, I will lovingly invite you to leave now.

2)I can find no other words to use here other than the ones I have used. It was a very intense, dramatic experience that is beyond description with normal words as they cannot begin to touch what the feelings were. If anyone chooses to read this, I will ask that you try to feel the words, not think them.

I love talking about orgasms and finding out from people the various ways they experience Life energy in their bodies. I wish people wrote and shared more about how they experience this amazing ability our bodies have so that we have reference points and don't have concern when we experience them. I know it's not easy talking about this, as I originally had a bit of hesitancy before sharing this on my other blog. I don't really know whether to call this an official "orgasm" or what it was. It began with the Heart, then turned into amazing orgasms, but it's a story primarily about the Heart. It's about life and the healing energy of Presence and Breath. This was the most profound experience I've ever had.

I was with my ex. We had been making love for quite awhile, late at night and I was very tired. We were at one of those lulls in the lovemaking and just lying side by side with him inside me in the scissors position.* We would bring up the energy and then relax. Bring it up, then relax. I started to drift deeper and deeper into my body. I'm not sure how long we were doing this, but it was for a long while. I was floating.

All of a sudden, as I drifted, my heart started to hurt. At first it didn't concern me too much, but then the pain intensified. And kept intensifying. And kept it up. And then I did start to be concerned. And the more concerned I got, the more I tightened and resisted. The more I resisted the more it hurt. When I started to feel pain going down my left arm I freaked out, as I am familiar with the signs of heart attack and my father had just died of one a few years before. As I kept getting more and more frightened, the pain just kept getting stronger. Intense left arm pain.

I really don't know how or why I remembered to do this, I don't know where it came from inside me, except that I had been doing an incredible amount of deep release work on myself for a few years. But I did remember and made the decision to melt into the pain even though I was afraid. I went limp, I let go and breathed as deeply as I could with a restricted, painful chest. All of my consciousness went into the pain in my heart and allowed it to be there, welcoming it, inviting it, asking it to teach me why it was there. At first, with my focus, the pain kept shooting down my arm with increasingly stronger jolts, chest tighter and tighter. I just kept breathing and melting into the pain. It hurt more than anything else I had done besides giving birth. And it was pretty darn close to that intensity. Ouch.

Then...it happened. It was the most amazing feeling/sensation I've ever had. The pain in my heart literally moved. Like a very slow moving undulation, it started at the bottom of my heart and waved it's way up, then moved centimeter by centimeter, up my chest. As it moved out of my heart, Heart Chakra felt completely open....totally free....fwoosh....I felt this huge wave of bliss ecstasy and swirling energy in its place. My arm stopped throbbing immediately.

As it traveled up, everywhere it touched there was intense constriction and pain. When it reached my throat, I thought I wouldn't be able to continue breathing. I was simultaneously alarmed and blissed out with all the different sensations as the continuing but migrating pain kept shifting. I kept putting all my focus on feeling all of it, breathing and melting. It left my throat, slowly traveled up my head into my forehead, leaving that swirling freedom/ecstasy in its place wherever it left and passing the pain on up. As it passed my eyes, tears of release and joy began to flow freely. As it went out the top of my head, I felt a huge pulsing "hole" at my crown and felt huge energies pouring in and out.

I took LSD in my teens, so know what trails are. I saw them everywhere. Everything breathed and flashed like an acid trip. I was connected to/one with/a part of/ creator of everything in the universe. Orgasm after orgasm kept waving over me. I got up and on top of my husband and rode our bodies/souls into oblivion. I was dancing on him, arms floating in space doing mudras of their how accord, as I created the world with my love making, tears of ecstasy flowing. Trails everywhere...I felt the whole universe literally pulsing around me/inside me/ with me.

The ex, was overwhelmed to say the least. I am not sure how long we stayed like that, just rocking to the pulse of the universe. I do know that I went to sleep with my heart still wide open and pulsing/flowing. When I woke up, it was still there. Everything shimmered for days and there were lovely little haloes around people and plants everywhere. I felt like a school girl newly in love with my husband and Life. I giggled lots, feeling innocent, open and full of love for All Beings. Nothing mattered, everything was now, everything hummed and sparkled. It was the most beautiful feeling I've ever experienced, this vibrating, floating world.

On the one hand, I wish I had had more knowledge then so that it might have stayed longer. On the other, I learned that this is one state and that it's no "better" than any other state. It's just a state, and experience. Although it was beautiful, I don't mourn that over the next few days, my body decided to literally shut the heart down again (I felt the heart thunks of the closing down). And I am Blessed to have walked away with a number of gifts of which I am so very grateful for.

I believe I was given a glimpse of the potential we all have of attaining that state. I feel blessed to have experienced it. I know that since I went there once, I can go there again. That my Spirit guided me to open there for some reason and I/We shut it down for some equally important reason. I think I know some of the reasons why, but there may be more I have no conscious idea about. And that's OK.

I re-learned that these experiences often come when we aren't on the Path so intensely. I had no idea what to expect, so Mind did not get in my way. Usually, in Tantra workshops, it's the participants that have the fewest expectations and nongrasping desires that benefit from the processes most. They open to the energy much more easily and organically than those who are intensely "On The Path." I believe it's because they are in more of a position to allow the work, instead of pushing the energy.

Finally I re-learned, first hand, the Breath's power to bring us Present. Tantra is really nothing more than learning Presence: presence with energy, with our senses, our feelings, sensations. It's about presence with EVERYTHING that Is, whether It's light or dark or joyous or painful...as it all transmutes into The One. Tantra's Presence reminds us that we can travel every which way and back, but in the end we find all mysteries answered, all enlightenments in the Breath Right Now.

*Although I didn't know it at the time, I learned later that this is one of the traditional ritualistic positions for the Tantric Maithuna Ritual.

Art:

Open Heart Chakra fractal image from here.

Openheart from here

Cosmic heart image from here