Book Excerpts
Introduction
The Fertile Darkness
The Naked Heart
First Impressions
Faces in the Mirror
Dismantling Negative Patterns
Shakti
Union
Sexual Communion
The Essence

Articles
- The Secret of the Sexual Dance

Chapter  6

Shakti

Energy is eternal delight.
--William Blake

Most couples who make the journey into conscious relating eventually discover that their relationship has deeply significant spiritual overtones.  The yoga of love can become a potent vehicle by which to transcend our duality, our primal feelings of separateness.  In transcendent love we catch glimpses of the heart as it truly is, unencumbered, complete and whole. Over time, as our spiritual partnership flourishes, we find our love for each other reinforces our love for the Beloved.  Indeed, as duality dissolves we notice that everything we encounter is the Beloved

As we have explored in previous chapters, once the focus on transformation intensifies, our partners become exquisite mirrors through which all the various aspects of our hidden inner selves get revealed, reflected, and contemplated. The dance between these varied facets of ourselves can be fiery yet profoundly liberating.  But it is not only our shadows that dance. We also begin to dance with a highly creative and joyful spiritual force.

At a certain point early in our relationship, the two of us realized that since all of life is about relationship, why not relate with each other in a way that serves our spiritual freedom rather than the perpetuation of our suffering?  Why not strive to become conscious partners?  Why not see our relationship as a path to open the heart for soulful integration?  How might the quality of our daily interactions shift were we to recognize the Beloved not only in a picture of Buddha, Jesus, or some other incarnation but here and now in the eyes of our partner?  Such questioning proved a powerful turning point for us, and a spiritual partnership was born.  Although there was little thought involved, the decision to follow a spiritual path as lovers and partners made itself obvious.

A spiritual partnership is a way of celebrating our love with such intensity and purpose that the binding affect of our separate egos dissolves, and our hearts become gradually infused with the nectar of unity. Devotion to our partner, to what he or she represents spiritually, softens the heart and gradually opens the inner doorway to the Beloved.  We must have a passion for essential truth to walk such a road together.  Spiritual partnership is a choice to realize love and is thus a challenge to anything in life that would cause us to close ourselves off to truth.  Becoming spiritual partners means that we arrive at the understanding that the real Beloved is discovered within our own hearts, not in anything or anyone outside.  However, this is not to diminish the wonder of relationship!  A spiritual partnership—as  we have explored throughout The Invisible Wedding—is a powerful catalyst for this awakening.

What Is Shakti?

The Taoist and Yoga scriptures of the Far East describe a particular vitalizing energy that we tap into as we awaken spiritually. This energy is called shakti.  During sexual intercourse shakti is the heightened creative energy of fusion.  Shakti is what heals and transforms our lives when we engage in spiritual practices such as meditation, chanting, prayer, and yoga.  We also tap into shakti through dance, poetry, painting, music and creative work in general.  When couples have the experience of genuinely falling in love, it is the shakti, the spiritual energy awakened internally, that starts to dance.  This is the incredible ecstasy that lovers describe, the nectar that blissfully intoxicates us and boots us out of our rational minds. Shakti is the unifying spiritual force that flows throughout all creation.  It is received by the heart as we open to life.  We taste it in moments of ecstasy, in meditation or work, when the mind is still, when the tongue praises the Beloved, and anytime duality dissolves.

In many spiritual teachings of the Far East, shakti is the doorway to God, symbolized in the creative spark of womanhood, motherhood and Goddess worship.  This is the Divine Feminine.  Without shakti no creation can exist. Yet it also lives within males.  Shakti is beyond gender, but we must become receptive to embrace it, thus the connection to the feminine principle.  The Indian author Ajit Mookerjee describes it this way in the book Kali

Shakti is the Power that creates and destroys,
the womb from which all things proceed and
to which all things return…Shakti is spontaneous
vibration, the fullness of her blissful state and
the outbursting of her joy compelling her
toward self-unfolding.
Shakti is the basic desire of the universe to create.  It is the shakti that manifests in all varieties of plant, animal and human life, as well as that of planets, stars, solar systems, galaxies, and universes.  Shakti is that which animates existence.  At the basis of all life forms—whether animate or inanimate— is the desire to live and evolve. Mother Shakti (as She is referred to in India) manifests as pure creative desire.  She is the life-force that runs through our veins, pumps our hearts, and inspires our thoughts. Shakti is the spirit of wholeness manifested in all living things. In the Christian charismatic movement shakti manifests as the Holy Spirit.

When we fall in love our desire is ignited. This extraordinary energy that we feel when we’re in love is an aspect of shakti. Because it manifests as a sense of wholeness, it is akin to the Beloved.
 
Like many new lovers, when we fell in love we hardly slept for weeks.  We were tapping into a source of erotic energy that seemed to have no end; the deeper we let go, the more of it we experienced.  Having engaged in spiritual practices for many years, it became clear that we were connecting with the same shakti that awakens in meditation.  As our relationship evolved, this intensely healing energy began mirroring back to us our various inner states of mind.  We started getting in touch with deeper aspects of ourselves, and at times, as old pain resurfaced, the process was excruciating.  At other times our experience of feeling shakti was sheer off-the-wall joy.  Granted, joyfulness is nothing new in love.  But this time awareness had also come into play.  Somehow, by the grace of this shakti, we began to see that our relationship to each other pointed to a more essential one—with the Beloved. Our relationship to one another was not an end in itself, but a way to God—and a gift from God to help remove the thorn of separation from our hearts.  It was a catalyst for expanding love.  We began opening up not just with each other but to life as a whole.  It was like stepping out of a cocoon, and donning colorful wings.  Our love for one another reinforced our love of God. 

The same Higher Power that years earlier had brought us to eyes-closed meditation now gave us the gift of each other. Our spiritual eyes were opened in a whole new way.  The yoga of relating was at least as potent—if not more so—than that of meditation.  This new path was about integration into life, not retreat from it. Our relationship was the perfect complement to the silence cultivated in eyes-closed meditation. The silence tapped in meditation was finally being integrated in activity, in the realm of relating. The shakti generated by our love was the vehicle for our coming home to the Beloved. 

Through the study of Eastern spiritual texts we learned that there was a traditional teaching that pointed to the path of spiritual partnership on which we now found ourselves. It is called Tantra, and it is thousands of years old.

Everything Is Holy
Tantra—an ancient body of spiritual knowledge from India—teaches that everything in creation is holy.  Western seekers have focused primarily on the sexual aspect of Tantric teachings, but Tantra is really about wholeness.  According to Tantra, sexual communion can be a means of self-realization when approached in a sacred way.

Tantra points to the interconnectedness of opposites. By putting Tantric teachings into practice, we can become attuned to both our inner feminine and inner masculine natures through sexual intimacy. In other words, through Tantric practice, a man unites with his inner female, and a woman joins with her inner male. 

The whole universe is a play of opposites: the dance of electrons and protons; the turning of day into night, of one season into the next; the contrast of earth and sky, fire and water; the delicate balance of sodium and potassium in our bodies; the logical and intuitive hemispheres of the brain. And nowhere is the play of opposites more obvious than in the erotic dance between man and woman. 

Spiritual wholeness can be defined as a co-existence of opposites. Within every male is an inner female archetype, a Venus grounding him to Sacred Earth and Her dark, moist mysteries. Within every woman is an inner male archetype, an Apollo supporting her movement toward Illumined Mind. Tantra teaches us that in the alchemy of intimate relating—which may or may not include sexual intercourse— we become conscious of our inner opposites.  This is the reason we sometimes use the term “yoga of relationship” to describe this process.  Yoga means union.  As we unite sexually, emotionally, physically, and spiritually with our partners, we are actually reconnecting to the opposite archetypes within us that they represent. And in this way we become more balanced, and whole.

It is from this understanding of wholeness that Tantric teachings state that human consciousness contains the entire universe.  The ancient Indian scripture, the Mahanirvana Tantra, declares: In truth, every body is the universe!  This is simply a way of stating that we are whole; we are woven together of both feminine and masculine, yin and yang principles. A man’s unconscious contains the feminine and is reflected in his relationship to his female partner.   A woman’s unconscious contains the masculine and is reflected in her relationship to her male partner.  In this way, the harmony or tension we experience with our partner is a perfect mirror of the harmony or tension we experience inside us.  This is why, during times of conflict, we are first asked to look within for the cause, instead of outward toward our partners.   Our relationship will always reflect the deeper connection to ourselves. 

It is generally recognized that women, by nature, tend to nurture the values of relationship.  Tantra is, at the most practical level, a teaching about relationship and how to live in harmony with our loved ones and the world at large.  Thus, Tantra is traditionally associated with the worship of Shakti, the Goddess.

Tantra and the Divine Feminine