Working with Wild Energy
Here’s the place of building a more conscious relationship with power and appetite.
And oh my how this can be difficult, nuanced work. It's easy to get burnt in this. Which is why the work is envisioned in a temple built inside a Dragon's mouth... Walking up his tongue like a drawbridge. Taking a seat on an inner fang. Sitting in uncertainty that goes far beyond some mental abstraction: the unknown as something inspiring real terror. (sitting quiet on your cushion, little tufts of dragon smoke winding around you like a flame-tinged cloud). But then also - treasure troves are usually hidden in the darkest, most heavily guarded places. In the depths of the unknown, we find out who we are. The misplaced jewels of our own soul gleam in the dark.
Freedom through Desire
“The world is bound by passion, and by passion it is released”. This thought was recorded as part of the Hevajra Tantra in eighth century India. It’s a radical thought: to reject the approach taken by so many spiritual traditions, of trying to control, fix, suppress or fight desire. What would it look like to have the realm of desire be the place in which one finds spiritual freedom? And - given that we are born into animal bodies with endless wild impulses that don't at all match our manufactured ideas of purity...is there any choice other than finding freedom in the realm of desire? Try as we might, there doesn't seem to be a way to levitate ourselves into heaven while still carrying around our body of bones and hormones.
Most spiritual and religious paths seem to offer prescriptions for cultivating the good and weeding out the bad. Perhaps this works for a while. It could be said that the ongoing catastrophe of Catholic priests sexually abusing children shows there's limits to how well repression works.
