We talk a lot about practice. If asked, many of us might answer that practice includes activities of mantra repetition, puja, meditation, hatha yoga, and so on.

Within the Tantrik tradition, all of our activities are considered to be practice: waking, sleeping, and dreaming.

This way of considering practice gets right to the heart of Tantrik View.

First, all of our practices, without exception, bear fruit. It is often said with irony that the Divine Mother is generous in always giving us the fruits of our practice.

If our practice is overeating, we will obtain the fruit of excess weight.
If our practice is overworking, we will obtain the fruit of exhaustion.
If our practice is hoarding, we will obtain the fruit of an overcrowded life and a lonely heart.
If our practice is japa (mantra repetition) we will slowly relax and open to a fuller and freer form of existence.

Second, all of our practices, without exception, operate within the domain of karma. What does this mean? It means that any practice, whether it be compulsive sex or puja, participates in the patterning of consciousness and energy in a manner that perpetuates itself in and through time.

The Tantrik View and method of spiritual practice is based on the Tantrik aphorism: We rise by that which we fall.

If we have the capacity to create karma, then we use this capacity to relax karma. We use the tools we have been given. We don’t try to wish them away or suppress them. It’s really very elegant and simple.

So, Tantrik practice takes advantage of our capacity for creating relatively static patterns. The idea is that we redirect the energy that feeds the patterned behavior that creates greater tension, and we use it to engage in patterned behavior that eventually leads to the undoing of karma.

At the end of the human road, we are no longer “practicing” or creating karma. Our activities are now appropriate, responsive, spontaneous, outside of linear time, and they leave no karmic trace. This is what we call “kriya.” Through karma, we graduate to kriya.

Third, all of our practices, without exception, are already expressing our desire for self-realization. This includes our most destructive practices. Human beings are always seeking fulfillment, contentment, equanimity, and to live from within the full experience of interbeing, or shared life.

Think about it. The most needy person you know, the one who is always clinging to relationships, or alcohol, or some other form of self-forgetfulness, is expressing in their own limited way the great desire to escape the suffering of dualistic egoism and to rediscover the pervasive Self.

We do not do anything but this. Ever. This is who we are, our “identity.” No one is ever lost, or found. You are always at home.

Through spiritual practice, we rediscover the original, free desire for Self-recognition. In fact, even the desire to embark on a spiritual path is an expression of this original, pervasive desire.

“Sadhana” (saadhana) is the word we use for spiritual practice. Sadhana has many meanings such as “guiding well,” “to go straight to the goal,” “worship,” “mastery,” “healing,” “summoning,” “accomplishing,” “fulfilling,” and “completing.”

“Sadha” means “heaven and earth.” Heaven and Earth cannot exist without each other. There can be no Heaven without earth and visa-versa. They are one and two at the same time.

Sadhana is first and foremost ritual communication. Self is communicating with Self. Self enjoys that experiencing of twoness and the experiencing of twoness rediscovering oneness.

Just so, the sadhika or sadhaka (female or male practitioner), communicates through sadhana and comes to realize her or himself as nondifferent from the world Self. We enjoy the experiencing of communication from the vantage point of Self-realization.

Heaven and Earth, female and male, wisdom beings and disciples: these are a few of the forms that the Self takes in order to enjoy the many varieties of communication expressed through the sounds, sights, smells, tastes, sensations, insights, and indescribable, infinite aspects of spiritual practice.

When we are learning a language, our first attempts to communicate are clumsy and painstaking. A little later, we are more fluid, but we still must intentionally put sentences together and search for the right word. And we sometimes still make mistakes; we are sometimes inappropriate.

Then comes a time when we begin to dream in the new language. We tell our friends about it. How extraordinary!

Finally, we are fluent. We can communicate effortlessly. We can play in the field of communication with perfect facility. We are no longer “practicing.”

OM Shanti,
Shambhavi

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