Tantric Love And Transcending The Physical

Every experienced meditator will tell you: there's a world that lays behind the thick curtain of physical reality that we rarely peek at when our thoughts go unnoticed.

I clearly remember the first time the full force of Tantra came rushing into my being. The lights were dimmed to perfection in my apartment in the quiet part of Kvarnholmen in Stockholm. The barely-closed curtain that stood between us and the wet mountain in which my patio was carved into left very little to the imagination of the breathtaking view.

With the sound of raindrops splashing on the rocks outside, I stared into her eyes as the sounds began to fade along with everything in the picture except her.

For the first time in my life, I wasn't looking for anything in particular. I wasn't trying to decipher the color of her eyes nor read her mind. I felt the rhythm of my heartbeats slowly introduce itself as my thoughts started to vanish.

I barely knew her. In fact, I had just met the young lady hours before the thought of sitting her down in front of me came to realization.

She was a policewoman from Berlin who had taken some time off after her long relationship ended to roam and discover herself and the world. She struggled to remember the last time such a magnetic event barged into her life without as much as a single knock. I sensed her worries dissipate as her whole existence began to lose its sharply-defined edges and merge into mine.

The analytically-minded, logical me realized that I had been utilizing my intellect as a defense mechanism aimed at translating every event and thought into formulas that gave me a false sense of safety by eliminating unpredictability from my life.

Just like how a cornered animal begins to growl and show its claws, we tend to recruit our intelligence to fend off perceived threats. The threat, more often than not, is nothing but a mere imagination—a pessimistic calculation of all the bumps we'll run into 10 miles down the road extending beyond the viewable horizon.

Unbeknownst to the cornered animals within us, all of our fellow humans are walking around with wounds, some as scars that serve as mere reminders of a time we wandered off to strange territories, and some so fresh that they scare us off from anyone that might be harboring a handful of salt in their pocket.

To let our guards melt and welcome the presence of another being sifting through our pages is akin to staring into the abyss and greeting the chaos with a warm smile. It's frightening to be alone in this world, but it's a lot scarier not to be.

Tantric love, with all of its misunderstood purposes in the West, is our closest attempt yet to take that courageous leap into a meeting ground where the borders between us and others slowly diminish. The flight to that ground is bumpy from the moment we take off to the moment the landing gear touches down.

Sit still, fellow wandering soul. Sit still.