Making Love To Angels and Demons

– The Life of an Advaita Dakini –

The following are my notes for the talk I did at the September 2011 Sexuality and Consciousness Conference in Europe. I post them as is, and hope to have the video up on youtube soon.

In the tradition of Advait Tantra, the dakini’s being is the main tool of her teaching. She becomes the catalyst of awakening that she is through the journey of her own awakening. Advaita means non-duality; that which is beyond the dualistic constructs of ego reality. The more the dakini integrates the dualities in her own ego structure, the more she becomes pure presence, and her presence facilitates the awakening of those who spend time with her.

The Dakini’s task in life is clear: to wake up to ultimate truth, and to facilitate that awakening in sincere seekers. Sometimes such seekers present as angels, and sometimes as demons. She makes love to them all. But the ways she makes love are mysterious, and not to be anticipated. This love may feel like diving into the depths of pain, rejection and betrayal, and it may also feel like rising to the heights of ecstasy.

In this talk, I share about my life and work as a Dakini in the Advaita tradition. Themes I will address are:

My personal spiritual practice as a dakini

Coming into the path of dakini: vision quest, receiving the name shakti (so: you have no more name). Meeting Kali: the stripping of familiar frameworks and social identities. Wilderness years.

Practice of the deep feminine

• letting go structures and forms that no longer serve – making room for the new to be born – yogi nidra
• holding the womb space – living in compassion for self and the world, ahimsa – non-violence
• following bliss in the body: subtle listening as a meditation, no pushing, no doing – being a channel for existence to move through
• skydancing: the woman’s meditation – following energy flows in my body
• deep feminine: embracing the dark, moist earth as my home, welcoming dismemberment not as a state leading to remembering, but as a goddess in her own right, welcoming chaos, allowing the goddess to be unreasonable and irrational.
• fiercely following my intuition and inner guidance

Awakening the heart

• living courageously – embracing desires, facing fears
• welcoming all feelings, feeling them deeply – with the knowing that I am the awareness
• heart meditation – the undivided heart

The path of Advaita

• Leslie Temple-Thurston’s work in training the mind: noticing states arising, identifying the opposite state, processing desires and fears associated with both opposite states.
• Tantric approach to advaita: welcoming all experiences as guests from the beyond. deeply inquiring into all understanding of good and evil, right and wrong that arise. Living life fully, and letting life be the teacher. Asking questions: what is love? what is trust? What is fidelity? What is honesty?
• Consciously entering into opposite experience to what your ego identifies with: being the bitch, the abandoner, the hag, the slut.
• Noticing tendencies to want to change/alter experience.. and staying close to what is.
• Deep inquiry into the perception of separation: Death meditation
• Practicing conscious relationship with the inner beloved: Masculine feminine integration. Pulling back projections.

How I am in the fields of love, sex and relationship

• Dakini is not a career choice – it is a calling one is born into, and it comes through initiation.
• In some ways, it is a path of absolute renunciation. I am married to God (the sexy nun) and my sexuality is a vehicle for consciousness.
• To make love to me is to open your being for radical transformation. I take this responsibility very seriously, and thus only make love when I have received deep permission – from existence, and from the seeker.
• My desire is directed by the dharma – the taste of truth.
• I have a beloved: our commitment to each other is to support each other in the greatest desire we share, which is to wake up, this lifetime. This includes waking up the heart. We are free to love as we are guided, and we leave no opportunity for any avoidance – especially any avoidance of going deep into love with each other.
• Loving the beloved through each other.
• A dakini uses her sexual power as powerfully as any woman, but she does this with one purpose only: your spiritual awakening.
• When I started the journey as dakini, I got possessed by an african medicine woman who wanted me to use my sexual power for my own gain. I chose clearly in that moment that this was not my desire, and that my sexuality would be there for awakening only. I have a ruthless and impeccable practice of never engaging sexually as a way of avoiding states I don’t want to feel, such as insecurity, loneliness, worthlessness, abandonment etc.

Making love to demons: how I dance with body armoring, sexual trauma, contraction, defense and suppressed emotions in seekers who find me

• Much of my daily life is diving into the underworld with the beloveds who come to seek my support as dakini. I call this work Totality Therapy – an approach to awakening that incorporates all aspects of our experience in a non-dual way.
• Making love to demons: First catalyze awareness (go kiss the dragon) – by inviting exploration of eros and desires, lifting taboos and suppressions, facing fears.
• Then processing and integrating what has been catalyzed through
• polarity processing
• male-female integration
• heart meditation, feeling feelings

Elements that arise and how I work with them:

Body armoring, contraction, defense

• body armoring is deeply associative – unraveling associations, becoming present in the moment.
• blissdance: encountering body as weight, others through sensation, the way animals would sense the world around them kinesthetically.
• slow approach encounter with armoring: with stephen
• direct evocation through fantasies (eg. rape fantasies).
• inviting awareness, and choice in the moment.
• encouraging body armoring/contraction – welcoming it: fights, pushing into contraction

Sexual trauma

• Trauma: all experience that has been suppressed or denied
• Return to embodiment: staying with body sensations
• Sympathetic-parasympathetic nervous system unwinding by allowing
• Victim-rescuer-predator triangle
• Identification with trauma… and return to simplicity

Making love to angels: How I use sexual energy as a force for spiritual awakening and opening into unconditional love

• Last two elements of Totality Therapy: embodiment, meditation of deep presence
• Deep relaxation and receptivity in lovemaking – the guidance of the feminine
• Masculine: holding one pointed focus, presence: love in the lingam
• Awakening sexual energy in root, guiding up chakras
• Lovemaking as deep transcendental meditation: This is the natural arising, does not require technique – only the clearing of the unconscious patterning that is in the way. Once we have made love to all our demons, the beloved arrives as an angel, ascending up through our bliss, naturally. No ego involved in the attainment. Only this pure beingness, this open, hollow channel. Nowhere to go, nothing to avoid. Surrendering to the bliss of being one with the great Beloved who has no limits.