Tantra for Singles
You are love, already, right now.
By Dawn Cartwright
Love is everywhere only we keep thinking it’s somewhere else and that we’re missing out; that there must be some experience more profound, more real, more right than the one we’ve managed to create on our own. That we must travel across country, make sacrifices, change things, do something other than what we’re doing now – in order to find love. When love is all around us.
While traveling in India a few years back, I made a point of visiting Varanasi, the holiest of the seven sacred cities in India. Varanasi is famous for its ghats – steps that lead down to the Ganges river, where spiritual pilgrims come to bathe. Each evening at dusk, rose petals, prayers and thousands of clay lamps are offered to Mother Ganga in a beautiful ritual called aarti. Aarti is a Sanskrit word that means complete love.
One evening sitting on the ghats, feet softly dangling in the Ganga and tiny flame-lit declarations of love floating all around me, I heard a voice say, “Come to the Shiva temple.” It was my friend, Samaroha, working hard at convincing me to tear myself away from sheer perfection and move with haste for a destination not too far away that he assured me was “at least 12 times more spiritually profound” than the sweet moment of bliss I was enjoying. I took the bait.
Two days, three angry rickshaw drivers, one misguided rice cart, a forgotten passport, a handful of flower offerings, two small bribes, three suspicious police, a visit to the pharmacy and a sacred cow later, I found myself just a few meters from the ghats where I’d started, stuck in the doorjamb of the inner sanctum of the – and I quote – “most important Shiva temple in all of India”.
When I say stuck in the doorjamb, I mean hands glued to either side, arms bulging and toes gripping marble, while at least twelve Indian women interlocked their bodies into mine and climbed on my back, pushing me with all their might while my body arched like a bow into the space I’d been warned not to enter until given the okay. (Please see police, bribes and pharmacy above!) It was ecstasy.
The moment word was given, we all fell into the inner sanctum and I was so overcome with the spiritual profundity of the whole situation my eyes rolled back in my head and my knees buckled. I managed to keep it together long enough to touch the Shiva Lingam in the center of the inner sanctum before being tossed out the other side, carried by the momentum of my entourage. The whole experience was a lot like being single.
Tantra for the single is about letting go of waiting, it’s loving right now. It’s letting go of saving all our love up for “the one” – a process where we end up being so keyed up we explode all over anyone shows the slightest interest, and instead, loving anyway, all the time, no matter what. No matter who.
We’ve been taught love is something that has different types – the love we feel for a lover, the love we feel for a friend, the love we feel for a parent, the love we feel for a child – when the truth is, love is always the same, no matter who we feel it for, it’s only the expression that’s different. So why hold back. Open up your heart and love to your fullest potential right now.
Dawn Cartwright is a Tantric visionary, sacred writer, and innovator in bio-energetic Tantra fusion.
