The longer I am walking the spiritual path, the less I feel I know what to say about it, about me, about anything. In the end, I think, there is nothing. Or everything. Or Love. Or whatever. It doesn’t matter.
So it’s difficult to write about myself, since I’m in the middle of unravelling myself, undoing myself, letting go of everything, surrendering to everything, to become … nothing, no-one. But it seems that this is what I’ve gotten myself into. How it came about?
Depressed Teen
I guess it started when I was a depressed, infatuated, decidedly uncool teenager. I was the odd one out in school for as long as I can remember – a great student, but always uneasy around the other kids. I wanted more than parties, sports, and good grades at school. The latter was easy, the former I missed dearly, and yet, it was irrelevant because the only true question I ever had was, what is this all about? What’s the point to life? Why live? Why do I exist? Why?
Shortly after that, in my early 20s, depression fully kicked in because I couldn’t find an answer to that question. And for a long time, I didn’t even know where to start looking.
A Reason to Live
The turning point came in the middle of one dark night when I was very seriously and deeply contemplating ways to kill myself. This was easy.
The problem was that for every way I found, my mind came up with at least two reasons why it wouldn’t work, why I’d end up alive instead of dead. When you’re really depressed and want to end life, the worst thing that can happen is that it doesn’t work, that your attempt at ending life is unsuccessful. So this was really bad news.
Now, the main story in my head at that time was, “I’m useless, I’m worthless”. It was running in my head all the time. That night too. I still don’t know exactly how it happened, but at some point, that night, I came to a surprising conclusion: I’m so useless I can’t even find a good way to kill myself. THEREFORE: There must be a reason to live.
I mean, I’d tried everything to die, and had failed. Rule out all the false options and, logically, what remains must be true. No way to die, so there must be a reason to live. And now all I’ve got to do is to find that reason.
Which is a very bad outlook for someone who doesn’t want to live at all.
Life Goes On…
But it’s what I ended up doing. Searching for a reason to live. Along the way, all sorts of things happened. Degrees (one), travels (lots), jobs (many), partners (some), even marriage (one), kids (two), divorce (one). The one constant was my search for myself.
I never put it into words until very recently, but through all those years, I was trying to find out who I am, what I am, who we as humans truly are. I learnt a lot about personal growth, took all sorts of training, coaching and therapy, but never once was my question addressed, let alone answered.
Accidental Turning Point
Until, by accident (or miracle?), a book fell out of my bookshelf on the day I told my husband I wanted a divorce. “Tantric Quest: An Encounter With Absolute Love” by Daniel Odier. I had bought the book a few years earlier but found it boring at the time.
We had looked into (neo)Tantra to revive our challenging marriage, with little success. We’d tried all sorts of therapy and counselling and things were getting to a point where I was clear (at least to me) that someone was going to be killed sooner or later (probably sooner).
The only thing we hadn’t tried was divorce. My husband was not at all happy to hear this, but over the next months we figured out it would indeed be worth a try. (And the try, it must be said, was an excellent decision for all four of us. We now get along very well and flourish, as do our children. Phew.)
Shortly after this (not very fun) talk, I walked past my bookshelf, and the book fell out, into my hands. More to take my mind off the conversation earlier and the bleak outlook for my future, I opened it and started reading. I didn’t stop until I’d finished it, in the early morning hours the next day.
The book tells the story of how a man meets an Indian yogini who teaches him everything he needs so he can reach enlightenment, which he achieves towards the end of the book. It is a true story, as far as I know.
Reading it, I *knew* it was true, because I felt She, the yogini, was me. I was Her, we were one and the same. It was very weird and came with a distinctive felt-sense of “I remember this”.
The next day I checked google to find out if the author was still alive (yes) and gives retreats (yes) and booked the next possible one later that year (yay).
Exploring a New World
Six months later, one day after our divorce, I went on my first-ever spiritual retreat. I had no clue what I was getting myself into. I had never meditated or done yoga or been involved in any kind of religion or spirituality.
In all my self-exploration and personal growth, I had avoided Tantra because the “sex-stuff” seemed suspicious to me. Something seemed off, and strange, and I wanted to be seen as a serious, trustworthy, no-nonsense type of person, not someone who’s into esoteric, psychedelic stuff with angels and ayahuasca and other weird things going on. I didn’t know then that Classical Tantra and Neo-Tantra have different goals. I didn’t know anything.
It's a good thing I didn’t. If I had known I’d be meditating that morning, and receiving a massage that night, I wouldn’t have gone there. As it was, I stumbled into a big hall that day only to find 50 people seated, in silence, on yoga cushions. I was lost.
I sat down and pretended to do what everyone else was doing. I closed my eyes, almost, and peeked out at people and imitated what I saw as well as I could. Later, the teacher explained what we were to do, and guided us into meditation. I couldn’t do it (failed! of course) and decided to leave at lunchtime.
We were led into another meditation, a standing, dancing type of meditation, and something inside me turned off, and I was the dance, the dancing, the dancer. I became everything, and all there was, was me, the dance, dancing. It was the most natural, beautiful, simple thing ever to have happened in my life.
We had lunch. I stayed (“I’ll leave after dinner”). In the afternoon, the teacher encouraged me to move to the front instead of hanging out in the back rows. I did. There were questions, answers, more meditation, more dance.
We had dinner. I stayed (“I’ll leave tomorrow”). I received a massage that night, by some other student. Again, something inside me turned off, surrendered fully to become everything. It wasn’t in the least erotic, but it was the most orgasmic, intense experience I’d ever had. In the hands of this student, I became love, making love with the entire universe, loving itself into existence and beyond. It was a magical experience that left us both speechless for several hours afterwards.
An Answer
I stayed the next morning and had no memory of my intention to leave by the next afternoon. I was a fish returned to the ocean from its glass bowl, a bird freed from its cage. This was me. Everything. I was the entire universe, and the universe was me and This was the answer to Why?
Finally, the answer.
But better still, the answer came with a path of how to get there, how to become the entire universe, your true self, essence nature, God(dess). There were practices, meditations, visualisations to do, a philosophical background to understand and embody.
There followed two, three, four years of intense practice with my first teacher, Daniel Odier. I had incredible experiences, met wonderful people and dived deep into a philosophy I had never heard of: Non-Dual Shaiva Tantra (NST).
Why?
And yet, after some time I felt I wasn’t getting anywhere. There were lots of amazing experiences, transcendental stuff, energetic experiences, encounters with Gods and Goddesses, lucid dreams, and more.
While all these experiences “made sense” in a very intuitive way, I felt it was possible to go deeper, know more, understand better. I seemed like I was being distracted by these experiences from seeing the actual “thing” going on.
A diversion. Maya, “illusion”, at play. And so my question returned. Why? Why all these experiences? Why are we not the entire universe all the time? And: what exactly are humans? What is this all about? What exactly is going on?
Discovering the True Goal
Then, in the space of a few weeks, two interesting things happened. I was reading a book on Kundalini by Lilian Silburn, an renowned French scholar of Classical Tantra. It was a dense book and honestly, I didn’t really understand half of what I was reading.
However, one chapter turned out to be fascinating. There, black on white, quoted from original Sanskrit texts, were described several of the experiences I had only recently had. Precisely the same ones. Word for word. I couldn’t have explained them any better.
To me, it was incredible, because apparently, my own experiences weren’t uncommon. There appeared to be common enough for someone to have written them down some 1500 years ago. This made me see all these experiences in a different light, gave them context. Other people had – and probably were still having? – these same experiences too. They weren’t just weird random events.
And there was method to it (Tantra), and a goal (Awakening/Enlightenment).
All of a sudden, “Enlightenment” moved from something that happens only in remote monasteries in the Himalayas right into my living room. Previously, it hadn’t existed as a possibility. Now, it suddenly became what life all was about.
Waking Up.
Shortly after this, a mutual friend introduced me to an American scholar who had a youtube channel where he posted weekly videos on the Vijñāna-Bhairava-Tantra, one of the main texts of NST.
I watched one of the videos and was home. Christopher Hareesh Wallis was explaining, in depth and in everyday English, this main text in a way that made it instantly relatable and applicable to my daily life. I had read several translations of this text previously, but it had never really “clicked”.
Some translations were very good, but dry, scholarly works. Others were very poetic but seemed to have little to do with what I was practicing or experiencing. Hareesh somehow managed to combine both: excellent translations with explanations of the Sanskrit terms and grammar involved, and beautiful yet simple renditions of the texts that immediately helped me understand not only how to do a certain practice, but also why.
Deep-Dive into Spirituality
I joined his community, Tantrik Yoga Now, and worked my way through the abundant material there. After having done little else but practice for three years, I was catching up fast on the theory, understanding the background, the philosophy, bringing words to my experiences and experiences to words.
It was a deep dive made possible by the multiple lockdowns during the pandemic, where online connection and community flourished. I began to have fewer “experiences”, but my meditation was deepening, and I felt deep shifts taking place in the way I saw and approached my life and the people in it.
This all led to me getting clearer on my question and finally reformulating it. It was no longer “what is going on?” or “why?”, but:
What Is The Truth?
This is what I want to know. To know what it true for all beings in all times, places and circumstances. Not just to understand the words written by enlightened beings long ago, but to truly know, feel, live this. Awakening – true, full awakening – is possible, I now know. It is possible in this life, for everyone who seeks it. I know people, personally, who are awake, fully. I know people who are in the process of awakening. And I am one of them.
So this is where I am now: in the middle of dissolving who I think I was/am/will be, letting go of everything I’m still holding on to, surrendering to life and pure presence and love. Not only accepting but embracing and surrendering to whatever life wants to do through me.
Sometimes I meditate and practice, sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I have an “experience”, sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I feel I’ve come a long way, sometimes I feel I’m a beginner. Sometimes I feel special, sometimes I feel very boring and normal. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t make a difference. Or maybe it does, I don’t know. But it’s not important.
The important thing, for me, is the question: “what is always true?”
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