Dear Yogis,

What do you WANT?  We are living in a world governed by DESIRE.  From the moment we wake up we are thinking of the next thing – food, clothing, house, sounds.  Our ears want to hear lovely sounds, our eyes want to see beautiful colours, even our nose want to smell expensive beautiful perfumes and aromas.  This sense desire is so strong that if we are deprived for any length of time we begin to imagine them.

Our desire is not limited to the physical.  We can desire knowledge, security, contentment and we do.  We run after them as if we can catch them.  It is desire that drives us to achieve success.  Most people would consider life without desire to be a living death.

Behind each of our desires is our wish to be happy and if only in this regard we are all equal.  We all want to be happy, but in spite of this our life is full of unhappiness, pain and dissatisfaction.  Buddha called this cycle SAMSARA.

We have been taught that liberation or NIRVANA is achieved by completely uprooting cravings from the heart. However, if the only way we know how to deal with the objects of desire is to avoid them, there will be a severe limit as to how far our spiritual practice will take us.

TANTRA moves in a different way.  In Tantra, instead of viewing desires as things to be avoided at all costs, Tantra recognises that the energy stirred by desire can be transformed into a resource for the spiritual path, and seeks to change every experience in this way , even if the doing seems to others to be “unreligious”.

It is because our present life is so rooted in desire that we must learn to use desire’s amazing energy in order to transform our life into the transcendental.  Tantra recognises that we can’t reach our heart’s desire by becoming more and more miserable as we squash one desire after the other.

TANTRA teaches that is only by cultivating SMALL experiences of calm and satisfaction where we are now, that we will have any hope at all of achieving pace and contentment in the future.

SPEAKING OF DESIRE… Ever since I started teaching I have lived for my students remembering some famous words “…I am a river to my people”.  When the candle is burning at both ends, I remember those words and keep going.  During covid my students have been a river to me.  Vegetables, and small gifts left on the porch, cards, letters  and yesterday KNITTED HOUSE SOCKS (in the photo).  Thank you all.  Mostly I don’t know where the gifts originate, who has left them, but I do know who posted the sox, and I have to say they are beautiful – thank you.

Have a beautiful, colourful, SOX’Y DAY

NAMASTE –  JAHNE