Tantra and social change

by Wavedavis

Transcript

This question is really dear to my heart and relate to another project that I’m doing called organizing from elsewhere. You’re really welcome to to read more about that on our website.

The practices that I share. I’ve learned.

Europe is the first colonized people. We killed the pagans. We killed the witches. We have no memory. Of our own non dualistic understanding of how the world works. You know, we’re all post-enlightenment here. We’re all zeros and ones and binary and separation and Descartes, you know the spirit from the body and from that.

And I’m deeply grateful for my own healing.

To the people that we massacred and slaughtered and culturally killed, you know, the indigenous peoples who somehow, despite hundreds of years of annihilation. Held on to this non dualistic understanding. In a previous video, I talked about assimilating. So they have managed to whisper back to us these other ways of understanding the world and these practices that can give us this non dualistic experience of reality.

And we assimilate it. So at the moment we’re only allowed to practice this. Within the framework of self-improvement. I’m fucked up. It’s my responsibility as I’m separate from everybody else and everything else, to sort out my fucked up. This, to be a better person, to be a healthier person, to be a better worker, to be able to achieve and be successful and worthy.

And then we move to plant medicine, to therapy, to tantra, to heal my trauma, to. I don’t know.

But these practices, they weren’t self-improvement tools. They existed within a web of meaning, a way of understanding the world, and a way of living with each other. In relation. In relationship. In relationship with all that I am now, that means my children, my partner, my family, my community, my society, my ancestors.

The land that I’m on. The nature that I’m part of.

These practices came from how we move and decide and live in relation. A felt experience of non dualism. I believe that we need to take these practices out of the box, that step one is to work with trauma. Step one is to decolonize, to understand our ways of thinking, our colonial mindset of separation, a patriarchal racist mindset of separation.

Become aware of it so that we can look at it. To work with trauma, to learn practices so that our resting point of consciousness can be one in which we experience the world much more as both separate and part of, and then to look at how we can move and live and decide together from that place.

I believe these practices, and many indigenous and wise communities. Have much to say and to show us. About how we can learn to make decisions together and act together from a fundamental assumption of interconnectedness. There isn’t time in this video to explore that more, but I would encourage you to explore our website organizing from elsewhere, which is looking to support social movements to use these principles and understandings and practices to organize for social change more effectively, and how we can support those that are moving to intentional community living to really take a decolonial attitude towards it, and to avoid replicating the very cultures that they’re trying to change, amongst other things.

What is a chakra?

What is the chakra? We have a physical body and we have an energetic body. And we have ways that energy, sexual energy, life, energy circulates around the body. Its physical manifestation might be understood or conceptualized as how? Nervous system. Yeah, but energy also circulates in particular ways around the body. And there are various maps that are of how that happens and how that works, linked to various traditions. So in the Taoist tradition, you would use the microcosmic orbit as a map to try and understand how energy would circulate. And in the tantric tradition, you would use a map called the chat cross system. There are many chakras in the body, okay? But generally when people talk about chakras in the West, at least we’re talking about several points in the body, sort of the root chakra, the sacral chakra around the solar plexus and the heart and the throat. And the third eye and the crown, which if we just go back to your nerve system analogy, there are places in the body where lots of nerves gather. So the chakras system could be understood as points where energy, so. Can plug in and plug out. So another really interesting thing to understand about the the chakra system is it’s. How energy circulates within our body, but it’s also how our energetic system plugs in and plugs out of receiving and giving energy or receiving and giving information. And I would argue that energy and information are very, you know, consciousness or really wrapped up in, in one concept. So. Each chakra system can move in a plus or a minus. We can learn how to receive energy in that chakra or send our sexual energy, our life energy through that chakra. I think that for this video, that’s enough.

What is a Yoni and what is a Lingam?

I wonder if this clip is going to get past the censors or our big right wing tech billionaires. Again, I think it’s important to define because these terms are used often, and for a lot of people off. Yoni and lingam can be translated literally to penis and vagina, but it has another quality. So it’s talking not just of the physical vagina and the physical penis, but of the energetic vagina and the energetic penis that exists in the energy body. Now, again, this is a bit confusing because they don’t look or quite operate like the physical vagina or the physical penis in some sense. And this is important because I have. An energetic vagina located around where my penis is. The picture that as, energetically, my and I also have an energetic penis as well as my physical penis. So conceptualize that that I can both energetically send energy out a picture, a plus sign. Yeah, polarity was energy out. Now that would be through my energetic penis or my lingam. But I can also pull energy in, through my energetic yoni here. And that’s regardless of my physical penis being that because there is a relationship between the physical body and the energetic body, because I have a penis and because I’m used to when I have sex, you’re not sort of giving energy thrusting, penetrating. I generally find it easier to send energy out of this lower chakra. And, you know, somebody who’s got a vagina, who’s more used to sort of taking things in their will, find it easier to receive energy that but that does not mean that with that, just even a little bit of training and intention, I can’t learn to receive. And, you know, someone with a, a physical vagina continent to give that, and that’s important. We’ll explore more of that if you come and do work with me about how we work with the chakra system for for circular energy. But in short, yoni and lingam is a word for penis and vagina that incorporates the energetic aspect, not just the physical aspect of that chakra.

What is a ritual?

What is a ritual? A ritual is guided by some principles. The first is that there is ritual space and ordinary space that are delineated. The second is that rituals always have a beginning and an end. The third is that there is a clear intention for a ritual. And the fourth is that a ritual is done with presence. And. The clearer the intention. And the more presence that a ritual is undertaken with. The more clearly a ritual is marked with a beginning and an end and ritual space and ordinary space delineated. The more powerful the ritual. Now, that may sound quite woowoo to a lot of you, but we’ve been using ritual, I think, for as long as human beings have been around, because it works and we use them every day. Now, a meeting, for example, is a really good example of a ritual that we all know well, and we all know that declare the intention of a meeting. And the more present we are in the meeting, the more clearly the meeting has boundaries around it, the more effective a meeting is. And okay, we don’t know how ritual works, but we know that it does. And we use many technologies that we don’t understand. You know, anti-depressants, some serotonin, some reduce serotonin. We use it because they work. And what can be achieved when done ritualistically is far more effective than when the very same thing is done outside of a ritual. So in my work and in my life, I use the technology of ritual, to move more wisely and more effectively in life. And I think that when ritual is understood that way, and once you practice it and you start to see that it actually is supportive. It’s interesting to see how we can bring those principles of ritual into different practices, quite simply, in our everyday life.