spirituality

Ep. 08 What is Tantra? (Tantra Talks #1)

What if the ancient tradition of Tantra is actually much deeper, richer, and more relevant to your modern life than you've been led to believe? In this episode, Katie dives into the true meaning and purpose of Tantra and answers the question - What is Tantra?

This is Part 1 of our Tantra Talks! Listen to other Tantra Talks below:

To answer the question, "What is Tantra?" we discuss:

~ My personal journey with Tantra

~ The principal beliefs of Tantra

~ Enlightenment per Tantra

~ Sacredness and getting WOKE

~ Our paths through the darkness

~ Biology learns through strife and adaption

~ What’s Power got to do with it?

~ Everyday ecstasy

~ Importance of our bones

~ Divine Will

~ Sensuality and Spirituality

~ This is not “just a bridge”, can it be heaven on Earth?

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From my heart to your screen,

Katie

What is Enlightenment?

There is a lot of talk about Enlightenment in the yoga & meditation milieu. If you haven’t experience enlightenment or a ‘spiritual awakening’, you may think of it as some disembodied state, or something too mythical, an unavailable state for us mere householders.

While popular discourse makes it seem like enlightened individuals have something others don’t (like some magic download from the cosmos), it’s actually the opposite. Enlightenment comes from a shedding, an unveiling and a losing of our Shadow and patterning, and a great changing of these patterns as we start to see ourselves more and more clearly in-the-light.⠀
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Unwinding Karma, Shadow and en-Lightening ourselves, this is the work we’re doing and teaching in Shakti School. We have two options for online learning that I’ve poured my heart into because I want to make these technologies available to YOU:

) Lineage of Love, a super affordable yoga and Ayurveda subscription platform where you get to study with me every month and join at any time for the cost of 1 yoga class per month, and

) Ayurveda School! our groundbreaking year-long online 300hr Ayurveda health coaching certification program, the next school year starts in January 2019.⠀
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The true path is one of learning and awareness. We can all do and be this.

3 Steps Toward Divine Feminine Ayurveda

A Movement Towards True Ayurveda and Healing

Feminine form Ayurveda is the true Ayurveda of ancient India. You might wonder—what does it mean for something to be the true Ayurveda? There are two answers to that question.

The first is that before India came under British rule, Ayurveda flourished not only as a system of medicine, but as a spiritual practice. Healing was known to be a spiritual affair, medicine and spirit were one. The influence of the West in India changed India’s approach to medicine. The wisdom of Ayurveda was all but lost under British rule. For Ayurveda to have legitimacy as a healing system, it needed to conform to allopathic (Western) medicine’s approach. Thus, it was stripped of its spiritual and feminine roots.

Second, it was the women of India who continued to practice the Ayurveda of pre-colonial times. There are two reasons for this: i) woman had always been the communities’ healers, both in the West and in the East. Their knowledge was passed down orally; and ii) In the age of modernization and patriarchy, women were excluded from the healing arts, medicine became institutionalized and one had to study for many years in order to “practice medicine”. This excluded woman who were mostly kept out of higher education and the sciences.

In the West, the eradication of feminine form healing arts was exhaustive due to the millions of women killed during the witch hunts that cycled through Europe and the Americas. We have of our Indian sisters to thank for keeping the flame of feminine form medicine lit for us.

That is why I refer to feminine form Ayurveda, and why my students have now come to call it Divine Feminine Ayurveda. It’s an approach to health that is radically different from the “traditional medicine” that we are familiar with in the West. It even differs from what Indians of the last few hundred years have known due to the Westernization of Ayurveda in India.

Begin Now: Divine Feminine Ayurveda

1. Intentionally cultivate and expand your community. The human Ātman, soul, desperately wants to be seen. Not necessarily fixed or saved, but simply witnessed and loved unconditionally. Organize a potluck and extend the invitation to your outer circle of acquaintances, plan a community activism meeting and get in the habit of regularly volunteering your time to a nonprofit. Feminine medicine comes through the oral tradition, through community, and through relationships. It’s not entirely taught and learned through a textbook, it’s learned through direct experience and relationship.

2. Honor your desires—spring is when we are intuitively most attuned to our deepest driving desires. We learn Divine Feminine Ayurveda not through the pre-frontal cortex alone, but through the back of the brain and body as well. This is foundational because it means that we first heal ourselves and learn the healing arts through our own practice of self-love and self-healing. It means digesting the material IN and WITH the body, not just the intellect.

There exists a culturally imposed need to be very masculine about our approach to health: What pills, what herbs, what’s wrong with me? With a feminine approach to health, we’re not adding anything, instead we are subtracting what isn’t real anymore, what’s not serving us. Divine Feminine Ayurveda ask us to find the place within our being that is already balanced, that needs nothing else, and begin the process of healing from there first.

A practice to connect with your subconscious self:

For 40 days, first thing every morning, write down your dreams. The more you practice this the more you will remember from your dreams. Our beloved Ayurveda father, Dr. Vasant Lad, explains in our Shakti Ayurveda School textbook: "Dreams are a discharge of the nerve cells, the drainage of incomplete thoughts, actions, and feelings. In a dream, you finish unfinished business and the brain is able to restore order”[1].

According to Ayurveda, dreams are classified as vata, pitta, kapha. Vata dreams are very active, includes: flying, death, autumn and are sometimes fearful; pitta dreams are fiery, includes: feeling of having arrived too late, being embarrassed, problem solving, summer; and kapha dreams are often romantic, includes: doing something slowly, eating, spring or winter. Dr. Lad says “Classify the dreams, then treat the dosha and you will have good results”.⠀

Many times, studying our dreams gives us a window into the subconscious—our deepest anxieties and dreams.

3. Adaptability as health. The adaptability of our nervous and immune system is directly linked to the strength of our Ojas, the subtle energetic honey of our body. Think of Ojas as your psychophysical container or shield. When Ojas is strong, we have abundant energy, strong immunity and can adapt to the ever-changing circumstances of life with ease.

My go-to super ojas building plant is Shatavari (Asparagus racemosus). It’s a staple in my kitchen and I always recommend a student on the path of Ayurveda befriend this unctuous plant. Shatavari builds the tissues and fluids of the body. It’s a nutritive tonic, powerful adaptogen and a wonderful demulcent for vata-type bodies that struggle to retain water. It’s especially recommended for regulating and rejuvenating the female reproductive system. To stay hydrated, strong and lubricated, use Shatavari to make a tea. Let it steep as long as you like (a whole day even!) and then sip it warm, little by little, throughout the day.

Divine Feminine Ayurveda understands that there is no ideal health. That the mind/body complex is never in perfect balance, but always in flux. When we study Shakti, Life Force, we see that she is always shifting and changing. For that reason, she is not reaching for a standard of perfection, but instead concentrating on her own resources of adaptability. Feminine form medicine understands health as your ability to adapt to the changing environment and circumstances of your life. Divine Feminine Ayurveda is subtle.

The Laws of Nature

Divine Feminine Ayurveda is the ancient wisdom of the body and the cosmos. It reminds us of what we have forgotten--it asks us to remember, Smarana, our ancient knowing. Divine Feminine Ayurveda is deeply connected to nature. It awakens the deep knowing: You Are Nature. You are Already Connected to Nature.

Our society has confused scientific opinions, social media, and advertising, with the limitless knowledge that lives in our hearts. Instead, feminine form medicine asks us to trust ourselves and our bodies. It’s a practice of radical trust, creativity and insight in ourselves: radical self-sovereignty. It asks us to claim our power, our experience and our understanding of our bodies.

Divine Feminine Ayurveda asks us to trust in OWN bodies, as our bodies contain the intelligence of the cosmos, the intelligence of nature. Nothing external can help us if we are not in conscious communion with our body. It posits that we can find balance through our OWN resources.

Divine Feminine Ayurveda bows to nature as the eternal feminine, the most creative and nourishing channel of this world. It is not static or idealistic. It has no preconceived notions of what our body should look like or our minds should be like. It is not authoritarian structures, it is not statistical averages and standards. It is fluid and adaptable.

With this self-sovereignty and trust in nature, feminine form medicine stresses the importance of asking—What do I need now?

It’s a meditation on self-love as the very first step in healing. It’s a mentorship with Self. We are in a moment of revitalization of the feminine. We are remembering Her and finding the courage to live from the heart. We are awakening the Divine Feminine Ayurveda.

[1] “Chapter Five Dhātus.” Textbook of Ayurveda, by Vasant Lad, Ayurvedic Press, 2002, pp. 161–162.

A version of this article appeared on Banyan Botanicals blog on June 20, 2018.

Let’s Talk About Sex

I am so happy that as a society we're talking about sexuality. Sexual assault, sexual harassment, weird-awkward-aggressive-sex-we-fled-from, etc. Yes, these are all convos about sex, our society’s relationship with it + with power and the dysfunctional social behaviors that manifest from that disintegrated relationship our society has with human sexuality. ⠀

Let’s rewind: Ayurveda teaches conscious channeling of sexual energy, valuing what they called Bramacharya: the wise use of this vital sexual energy. When we are using our sexual energy in a harmonious way, our whole life is infused with more enthusiasm around creative projects—whether that be a business, an artistic expression, or a baby. We also have better health in general because sexual energy is the most refined aspect of our life energy. The more energy we have, the better we feel. ⠀

But human sexuality is about much more than just “sex”. It’s a major pillar of our overall health and wellbeing (I wrote a book about it for a reason!). How do we use our attention and our body? If we look at one of the meanings of the word Bramacharya, we gain insight into what the ancients understood. One interpretation of the word is “to walk with God”; engaging sexuality intentionality, from the heart (your conscience, intuition, or Higher Self) before decision making.⠀

Having a connection to your physical and energetic sexual centers, is key in boosting your/society's health. As women we need to restore the vitality of our sexual energy center & help engage conscious forms of sexuality. When a woman feels tuned in to her sacred sexual essence, a new aliveness begins to pulse within in her. Her health improves. All of us are more balanced and we can usher in a new era.

You can read more in my book Healthy, Happy, Sexy and in our year-long Ayurveda Program which is all about healing our own and our ancestor's inherited patterns.

Oh, and this is a beautiful photo—also a sex photo, cause sexuality is an integral part of our daily lives, including pregnant and mom lives 😉 Let’s talk about sex more, I think everyone on earth would benefit from it.

Who Am I?

Two big questions that most human beings will ponder at some point in their lives: “Who am I?” and “How can I get more of what I want in my life?”

One of the things I love about the Tantric yoga tradition is its systematic approach to answering both of these inquiries. The Taittiriya Upanishad, one of the most important yogic scriptures, says that if we really want to know who we are, and get more joy and fulfillment in life, we have to get to know our subtle anatomy.

Why? Because we are, according to Tantric anatomy, not one, but a composite of five bodies (pancha koshas): the physical body, the energetic body, the mental/emotional body, the inner-teacher or wisdom body, and the bliss body. When we can bring awareness into the deep layers of each of these bodies, we gain access to our highest, most evolved, powerful Self. This concept shares a lot with what modern day neuroscience and somatic psychology understand about pain and perception.

The teachings go on to explain that what is hidden in these bodies is both our unconscious negative patterning, as well as our greatest gifts and powers. When the patterns that are hidden in the bodies emerge, we are no longer under the pull of the unconscious stuff. We can now get more of what we truly want as we bring the limitations and the latent capacities of the unconscious to the surface. In the end, when we penetrate the last layer of who we are, we are left with an endless power to create, act, and know.

Start to peel back the shadows, join us at our next event: learn more.

Vitality Like A Goddess

The first days of January are associated with the Nativity of Inanna, Pagan Goddess of Sumer (later she appears as Ishtar in Babylon & Asherah in the Levant)

Inanna is a goddess of love, beauty, fertility and war. Graced with a stream of lovers, including the ill-fated Dumuzi, she is cognate to Venus. The celebration of her nativity is done with good food, good sex, and warmth.

This celebration aligns with the Ayurvedic concept of OJAS, one of the three subtle forces in our body. Think of OJAS as the container that holds your abundant energy. It is the ultimate energy reserve of the body and mind. It is the purest essence of Kapha, and physically, it is related to reproductive, hormonal, and cerebrospinal fluids.

Today, in solitary ritual, pay attention to Inanna’s role as mediator of the changing themes of a woman's life, and how we might revitalize and nourish our OJAS, which can be easily depleted this time of year by running around instead of taking it easy and practicing pratyahara, as nature does.

Cultivate OJAS with a short meditation:

Close your eyes.

Take a few deep breaths. Relax for a minute, allowing your breath to deepen and smooth out.

Now slowly start to draw your attention away from your thoughts, emotions or aches, and drop it down into your belly, holding it there until you feel sensation. Then, slowly, bring your awareness into your heart.

Remember a moment in your life when you felt very deep love. Maybe it was a time when you let yourself be totally vulnerable. When you add love to your point of focus, it builds your OJAS.

Bring that moment fully to mind and notice where you feel the sensation of love in your body. Allow this sensation to move, to expand and permeate every cell of your being. When you grow the feeling of love inside your body, you boost the power that enables you to remain strong and wise in the face of heartache, disease and change.

Relax into this loving container, watching how, over and over again, you will gain and lose the feeling, and how you can refocus and experience your inherent enduring, sustaining power.

The Four Glorious Goals of Life

When our digestion is good, our sleep is deep and our emotions and sexuality are being channeled properly, we have more energy to engage in our passions and pursuits in life—in Ayurveda, our foremost pursuits are known as the four goals of life.

According to the Vedas (the spiritual root texts of Ayurveda), your soul has four goals or desires, which the texts call the purusharthas, “that which is for the purpose of the soul.” The Ayurvedic tradition takes these four core human motivations and gives us permission to enjoy and pursue them, while not becoming overly attached to any of them. In this way, we can enjoy pleasure, seek success and purpose, strive for material gain, and seek out the practices and mentors that will teach us how to live a more integrated, enlightened, soulful life. By no means will my general overview do justice to the complex tapestry of what these four motivators are or how we can succeed in their fulfillment, but I do hope to give a brief summary, as they are paramount in our sense of total health and happiness.

Life Goal #1: Luscious, Everyday Pleasure

The first goal of life is kama, meaning pleasure or enjoyment. (Surely you’ve heard of the Kama Sutra! A sutra is a teaching, making the Kama Sutra the “pleasure teachings.”) If we are to live life fully, we need life to feel good. There is nothing like the sensory stimulation we get from smelling a baby’s skin, stroking a kitten’s silky fur, seeing a peony in full bloom, or feeling a man’s deltoid dipping down to the nape of his neck. What brings you deep sensory satisfaction?

The great news is that Nature has set it up so that many of the things that feel good to us are also physiologically and emotionally good for us. Science shows that touch (whether a massage therapist’s or a lover’s) increases the hormones in our body that keep our immune system functioning.[EN1] It’s a downright miracle that just the smell of onions simmering in olive oil causes our body to release the very digestive enzymes that it will use to process the food when we eat it. That’s Divine Intelligence, and Mama Nature’s way of saying, “Relish this moment!”

The problem with all this wonderful kama comes when we overindulge. Remember in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory when Augustus Gloop ends up as a piece of fudge after falling into the river of chocolate? Without proper guidance, the out-of-balance, overindulging aspect of our senses can ignore our internal attempts at regulation. If we leave our senses in the driving seat, we run the risk of overdoing it—whether it be booze, chocolate, shopping, sex, TV, or exercise.

The secret to true fulfillment in the realm of pleasure is self-awareness, moderation, and nonattachment. Nonattachment has not always been an easy thing for me to practice. When I enjoy something, I sometimes wanna hold on. Talking to the Divine has helped me build a form of surrender. Whenever I feel myself clinging to pleasures, I will stop and say something like, “Oh, Divine Mama, let me trust in your infinite abundant sources. May I know that this pleasure may rise and fall, but that you are continually dropping your grace into my life.” When we cling, it is as though we don’t believe in all that the Universe offers; it is as if we are saying that we don’t have faith that pleasure (or whatever it is we want to cling to) is abundant and always waiting for us. It helps me to simply pay attention. I know that I don’t need to cling because when I’m paying attention, I see that the beauty is always being dropped down onto me.

Another way to practice non-attachment is to be deeply aware of the present moment while enjoying pleasure. Think of it as simultaneously relishing and releasing.

Life Goal #2: The Means for Prospering

The second goal of life is artha, or the ways and means of prosperous living. Artha is related to the tools that help us move forward in life. A place to live, enough money to pay the bills, good health, proper clothing, and even our iPhone are all examples of tools that help you move through life with more ease.

Just as we want pleasure, we also love the feeling of abundance and good health. It feels good to rest easy knowing that our basic needs are met. It’s hard to think about the meaning of life when we are pawning our jewelry or arguing with credit-card company minions. And in fact,

Ayurveda encourages us not only to pursue financial abundance, but it also states that without a certain sense of ease around finances, our advancement toward knowing who we are is hindered. Why? Because if we are worried about finances, our mind becomes easily disturbed, fearful and distracted. A similar thing happens with our health. If we are sick, it’s hard to meditate, help our kids with their homework, or launch our dream business.

Imbalance in artha occurs when we become greedy or too focused on materialism. When we have thirteen shades of lip-plumping lipstick and feel we really need just one more, we may have an accumulation problem. I will never forget walking into my neighbor’s house. She had amassed 157 stuffed animals. Shoes (still in their boxes) were stacked from floor to ceiling, wall- to-wall. She had a guest room full of purses (piled on a virtually invisible bed, price tags still attached to many of them). The primary motivating force in her life had become acquiring things. She had slowly built up a safety bubble composed of teddy bears, high heels, and handbags. I think that if we are honest, many of us have a little bit of the crazy-teddy-bear lady inside us. Ayurveda teaches us how to embrace our love for stuffed animals without smothering ourselves with them.

Artha can also be imbalanced when we mistakenly think that we need nothing. I know a few spiritual people who feel wrong or guilty for wanting nice things, like a warm home, soft clothing, or a chocolate bar (even if it’s organic, fair-trade). This is the opposite end of the artha spectrum, and it is just as harmful for our total wellness. The lesson? It’s okay to need things—in moderation and for the purpose of the higher good.

Life Goal #3: Roll Out of Bed With a Purpose

The third goal of life is dharma, or our essential life purpose. In the craziness of daily life, many of us forget what a mind-blowing opportunity it is to be in a human body (as opposed to being born a honey badger). Ayurveda says that every human being comes into this life with a specific dharma, and until we are living that dharma, we will not be happy. My teacher, Rod Stryker, says there is a you-shaped hole in the Universe just waiting to be filled with your full expression as an individual. Until you figure out how to embody your full expression and purpose, you will feel out of sync with what your Higher Self longs to become.

Dharmic pursuits do not necessarily have to fulfill any holier-than-thou requirements, however. Dharma has nothing to do with what we could call “a job,” but is more likened to the unique thing you bring to the table in any of life’s circumstances (be it a job, a relationship or a project). What is more, people working in jobs that may not have cache in society can be quite important on the cosmic scene. For example, have you ever met someone with what our society may consider a lowly or bad job, yet they seem to be totally in love with it? Or they use it to make your day better? That is the embodiment of someone living her dharma.

In order to align with our essential life purpose, we need enough balance to actually hear the inner voice of our intuition. Most people who are fully working in their passion will tell you that they had no choice; their job chose them. They say they feel a kinetic flow of energy when they are working in the realm of what they love. Researchers such as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi are now confirming the existence of a creative psychological flow space that people enter when they are working in their dharma. Time seems to slow, even stop. Energy levels are high, and there is a feeling of aliveness and presence that gives us even more motivation for the work at hand. Feeling this flow space is a good indication that we are aligned with our dharma and in what Csikszentmihalyi calls the optimal experience in his book Flow.

Life Goal #4: Give Me Liberty

The fourth goal of life is moksha, or freedom. Ultimately, behind all of our actions lies the drive to move beyond the recurring cycles of pain/pleasure and birth/death, and to feel the happiness of not being subject to these polarities. Moksha is waking up in the morning and feeling fearless. Moksha is the sense that there is nothing out there that will bring us ultimate happiness—it’s all inside ourselves. Moksha is truly needing nothing and no one to be whole and complete.

The further we advance on the path of knowing who we are, the more this goal becomes clear and the more we can align our life choices with things that will support our own true freedom. If we become too attached to the idea of freedom, we run the danger of becoming a holier-than-thou, spiritual egoist. I have seen students and friends attempt freedom through the path of what psycho-spiritual experts call “spiritual bypassing”—basically attempting to run away from the “bad” world by checking out into some flaky spiritual zone where we don’t deal with our issues. The teachings state that this is impossible. We can’t run away from pain or pleasure, birth or death, or even our own internal struggles (karmas). What we can do is learn how to become a loving witness to all of life’s duality.

Real moksha is about tapping in. It’s about seeing the bigger picture, what life looks like beyond our own motivations. You can measure your success in the realm of moksha by how fearlessly and joyfully you live your life in this current, imperfect world, as well as how well you surrender your negative feelings when you don’t get what you want. It’s also about seeing things as they really are and moving beyond the material world. But the stuff that flashes on billboards, the phone calls, the dinner dates, the news, and the warm touch of a loved one are all very real to us, so the more we work toward knowing who we are, the more we can delight in the existence of this illusory, temporary world of the senses, while at the same time experiencing the Divine delight behind it all. In this sense, we become free because we are fully and delightfully engaged with the temporal beauty of life as it is unfolding.

~Katie

Silence Envelopes the Voices of Insecurity

Our culture supports individual effort and perfection. In fact, I recently read about an experiment done on two groups of people, one from the United States, and another group from Japan. Each group was shown an image that included an individual scuba diver sinking into an ocean full of fish and other marine life. The group was given a few minutes to look over the image, and was later asked to recall what was presented there.

The American group had a marvelous recall on the diver. They could remember what color his tank was, his facial expression, and even the type of gear he was wearing. This same group fared very poorly on their remembrance of the fish, the plants, the water, and the general geography of where the diver was located. In strong contrast to the American group’s ability to recall the diver, the Japanese group remembered much less about the individual, but had dramatic recall of the environment in which the diver was swimming. They described, in ardent detail, the schools of fish, the marine layout and the general situation in which in which the diver found himself. The social scientists concluded that this spoke to our cultural value system. Americans group up in a world that values the individual, and takes pride in the perfection of individual efforts. Eastern cultures, on the other hand, are known for valuing cultural context and group identity.

It’s not to say that one way of seeing the world is better or worse than the other, but it does bring up an interesting question regarding focus. Remember, our prana (energy) follows our focus, and much of our prana (remember, that is our energy) goes to focusing in, honing in, even obsessing over, our own individual situation. This is another way of saying that much of our energy goes into mental processing in a push towards personal perfection, a never-ending process that can lead to a deep sense that we can never be fulfilled, that life is never enough, and a deep insecurity and fear.

Why does this happen? According to the wisdom of Ayurveda and Tantra, it happens because we are confused (or experiencing avidya – mis-knowing). We have forgotten. What have we forgotten? That the continual processing towards perfection, a quest to avoid pain and disappointment and gain things that feel good, leads us a false belief that we are not good enough already. We forget that, deep within, lies an bottomless well of support and freedom, and this bottomless pit of ambrosial nectar in our own light – an eternal bridge to freedom from the duality of good and bad, as well as a gateway into peace. It’s what Buddha was so pumped up about. Jesus said it as well when he encouraged us to “let thine two eyes become one” (i.e. our dual thinking line up with Spirit).

All of this beautiful philosophy and ambrosial nectar-speak may have you rolling your eyes. You may feel like freedom and peace are two states of being really far from your current set point. You may be laughing right now. “Yeah, right, sister. I’m an elementary school teacher with two kids and a beer-guzzling husband. My life is as far as you can get from the peaceful gateway.” I totally get it – but we ALL have the ability to tap into the loving, the invincible…

Ok, so what is this secret doorway into the Divine? Its simple. Its profound. And its not always easy to find. Its just silence.

Try it now.

Stop reading.

And take a few deep breaths into your own belly, your own heart. Keep breathing until you taste a tiny drop of silence, and then tell me if you are not, in some way, great or small, closer to heaven.

Here's a short guided meditation you can do whenever you need a moment.