We make mistakes in our lives and in our relationships. We do our best not to, but we do cause pain sometimes. We also do things that enable people to experience great happiness. The point of practice is to apply in the best way you can what you know of the goodness of being, to learn from it and let it inform you and keep informing you. The truth is that people are going to have reactions to you regardless of how you appear. You can’t avoid that. The more important question is about your own inner integrity. How do you feel in relation to yourself? How do you feel in relation to your inner nature, whether you perceive it as emptiness or the Beloved? And how do you feel in relationship to your Being and the energy that is your life? Are you making yourself available? Your Beloved is trying to seduce you at every moment. The natural seduction of the Beloved wants to take you inward. Within every experience is the Beloved, ready to awaken you, saying, “Here I am—just listen, look . . . and follow me.” Every reaction has within it the original pure energy that will optimize our evolution and our corporeal life. That pure energy is beckoning us. And the more we allow ourselves to be pulled by the One we love, the more that two people can meet as expressions of the One—two organs of perception peering into the vastness of each other’s being. What is possible for one’s individual consciousness is also possible for the blended consciousness of two individuals—but with an amplified and intensified potentiality. Two as one can bring more variation of depth and breadth to the process of realization than is possible on one’s own. You are able to see the Beloved in your partner and see your partner in yourself, like a hall of mirrors into the infinity of the infinite. You become a field of one, sensitive presence with the appearance of two, peering into the endless openness within one another.

One of the main tenets of the tantric approach as it is taught in our work is to feel whatever we are feeling in any given moment. It is not necessary to either act a feeling out or suppress it. We don’t try to change either our feelings or ourselves; instead, we let the energy change us. Not acting out an emotion will eventually lead to the pure energy within it. And understanding the charge that we carry about the feeling will allow the energy to be cleansed of the fixed content of the charged emotion from the past, leaving it pure and clean, simply itself. This energy opens us to the realm of Being where we experience the essence of our being as flowing, dynamic, alive, intelligent presence. Frequently, the liberated energy opens up to a dimension of experience where the explosive and dazzling pulsing thrill becomes foreground, manifesting as the fully alive energy of spirit and life. In this process, we see that the spiritual journey need not be a choice between the various parts of ourselves but, rather, through embracing the totality of our experience, the realization of a personal life of nonattachment without renunciation. Nothing has to be excluded. Then we can know ourselves as our unencumbered essence while enjoying a life of fulfillment.

Desire, on any level you feel it, has a real energy to it, doesn’t it? It is not something you are blasé about. No, when you want something, you feel an urgency, an intensity: “I really, really want this, even though I may not let anyone see that.” You want it so much that you want to grab it fully, completely. If you really allow those feelings, you feel your whole body full of desire, and you want to eat up that object of your wanting—“It’s mine!” Our wanting usually is quite self-centered to begin with, which is one reason why we might resist feeling it. But we need to allow ourselves to be in the condition in which our desire initially arises. It always begins with somebody wanting something. Good! There’s a self that wants something! Feel it. Don’t push it away. We are not pursuing some spiritual ideal of becoming a selfless being who doesn’t want anything. It is the truth we are after. If this is what is there, we must confront it and understand it. We don’t yet know that our wanting can be transformed into the pure energy of desire, but if we suppress our feelings at any point along the way, we lose the opportunity to focus on the truth of our experience, to find out more about what it means.

Desire can lead us to the distillation of itself, as an energy that we reconnect to. Desire in the human being can be felt as instinctual or emotional. Instinctually, it can arise as the sexual drive or as a drive toward self-preservation of the physical body. But the pure energy that is the origin of this force can blend with the purity of essential love, so that we can rise to another level of experience that combines the love of the heart and the drive of the life force. The driven power of the energy that was once focused on procreation combines with the love that melts boundaries between our own soul and the Beloved to become one powerful force that culminates in a drive for union. This is the type of feeling we have for or with another person when we are in love. It can arise in a way that is fortified by union with our true nature, in which both of us are deeply in touch with the infinite nature of Being and are bursting into existence together with the power of life. We are born afresh and new—full, rounded, beautiful beings of divine nature within the field of the relationship. We are united with the depth of Being, the depth of our nature, and with each other, all as one unity. The Beloved that lives in our heart is the core of this type of relating. In this unity, we know that we are that and can never be separated from it or from each other.

When we allow ourselves to fully experience our wanting, and we trust that the wanting itself has the intelligence to reveal the pure energy of desire that underlies it, we get a taste of what it’s like to feel love and desire as a unified force. We experience both the feeling of love and the power that is in it. And we don’t even have to fall in love for that to happen. Falling in love is one condition that helps us to experience love and desire as a unified force, one of the main ways of experiencing divine eros. But the capacity to experience divine eros is a potential that lives in all of us, whether or not we are sharing love with another person. This loving desire, which is often first ignited by our human relationships, is a characteristic of all real love relationships, including our relationship to true nature. When we feel the desire to know our nature, we may not conceptualize that desire in those words. A flame is lit, and we experience the wish to know more, see more, be more, feel more. We want to become more consciously aware of what we internally sense to be our potential. We want to discover the depth and meaning in life and existence. As the presence of something beyond awakens in us, a desire to be close to that something also awakens; a wanting to find out about it arises. It might begin as an interest, but some sort of desire is present even in an intellectual interest. A little intellectual desire can open us up and become a draw toward experiencing what is beyond our conventional perspective.

Shakti energy is the raw energy of the emotional realm, for emotions are basically shakti with some conceptual coloration. By freeing oneself from identification with these emotions, their issues, and the concepts that underlie them, the energy is liberated and appears as the vital pure energy of shakti. This can activate the kundalini, which becomes pure vital energy that goes up through the spine activating the various chakras. Each chakra has, associated with its mode of functioning, psychological issues that must be worked through. The energy can become strong enough to penetrate to the head centers, appearing as the bejeweled, hooded cobra around the head. When we experience this energy coemergent with essential presence, the presence attains new characteristics. Besides the increased vitality and vigor, the main difference is that the quiet blissfulness of essence becomes an intense ecstasy. The sense of pleasure intensifies, and can even be overpowering. It is similar to the pleasure of sexual orgasm, but felt as the affect of the essential presence. In complete coemergence, Reality includes not only the boundless dimensions of true nature, but also the dimension of shakti energy and that of physicality.