Tantra and social change

We’ve covered foundations, technical concepts, practical applications and critical analysis. Now we arrive at INTEGRATION: Tantra and social change.

This question is really dear to my heart and relates to another project that I’m doing called Organizing from Elsewhere. You’re really welcome to read more about that on our website.

Because here’s the thing: these practices weren’t self-improvement tools. They existed within a web of meaning, a way of understanding the world and a way of living with each other—in relation, in relationship.

We are colonized

The practices that I share I’ve learned. Europe is the first colonized people. We killed the pagans, we killed the witches. We have no memory of our own mystic understanding of how the world works. We’re all post-Enlightenment here. We’re all zeros and ones and binary, Descartes and all that followed, separating the spirit from the body.

I’m deeply grateful to these traditions for the healing they have provided me—healing made possible only because animistic, non-dualistic, somatic traditions survived the horrific persecution of indigenous peoples who we massacred and slaughtered in attempts to erase their cultures and rob their resources. Yet despite this, due to immense acts of bravery, sacrifice and resistance, these very different ways of being were remembered.

In a previous video I talked about assimilating. So they have managed to whisper back to us these other ways of understanding the world and these practices that can give us this non-dualistic experience of reality.

The box we’re trapped in

And we assimilate it. So at the moment we’re only allowed to practice this within the framework of self-improvement. “I’m fucked up, it’s my responsibility as I’m separate from everybody else and everything else to sort out my fucked-upness, to be a better person, to be a healthier person, to be a better worker, to be able to achieve and be successful and worthy.”

And then we move to plant medicine, to therapy, to Tantra, to heal my trauma.

But these practices, they weren’t self-improvement tools. They existed within a web of meaning, a way of understanding the world and a way of living with each other—in relation, in relationship. In relationship with all that I am connected to now: my children, my partner, my family, my community, my society, my ancestors, the land that I’m on, the nature that I’m part of.

These practices came from how we move and decide and live in relation.

The work ahead

I believe that we need to take these practices out of the box. That step one is to work with trauma. Step one is to decolonize, to understand our ways of thinking, our Colonial mindset of separation, a patriarchal racist mindset of separation—to become aware of it so that we can look at it, to work with trauma, to learn practices so that our resting point of Consciousness can be one in which we experience the world much more as both separate and part of.

And then to look at how we can move and live and decide together from that place.

I believe these practices and many indigenous and wise communities have much to say and to show us about how we can learn to make decisions together and act together from a fundamental assumption of interconnectedness.

There isn’t time in this video to explore that more, but I would encourage you to explore our website Organizing from Elsewhere, which is looking to support social movements to use these principles and understandings and practices to organize for social change more effectively. And how we can support those that are moving to intentional community living to really take a decolonized attitude towards it and to avoid replicating the very cultures that they’re trying to change.

This is the end of the course

Over these 17 teachings, we’ve explored what Tantra actually is—and crucially, what it is not. We’ve examined the foundations, the technical concepts, the practical applications and the critical problems in how Tantra is practiced in the West.

But this isn’t the end. It’s the beginning.

The understandings you’ve gained over the course of this series are a map. And the path ahead is yours to walk as you choose.

If you’re interested in going deeper, in being part of a community that practices together, in exploring these teachings in an ongoing way—I invite you to explore what we offer.

You can find out more about my tantric work through private sessions and events, or by following me on Instagram.

And if you’re curious about my activist work bridging tantra and social change you can find out more by visiting the Organising from Elsewhere website or following us on Instagram

But whether you continue with me or not, I hope these teachings have given you something valuable: a different way of understanding your body, your energy, your place in this interconnected web of life.

Thank you for being here.