Students often express the fear that following a Tantrik path will separate them from friends and family. This is actually what will happen if you surrender to the stream of sadhana. The process of Self-realization will tear you away from your attachments. And what most people think of as intimacy is 90% compulsion. As the compulsions of “normal” life are relaxed, it is easy to feel out of synch with others.

For instance, if you commit to arising and practicing during the hours between night and day, what is called the sandhi, you will likely lose the habit of eating dinner at 8 pm, or going to late movies with friends. This is often the first level at which committed students experience loss.

What replaces these “normal” habits? Enjoyment of the turning of the night. Attentiveness to the spacious qualities of those quiet hours. A growing sensitivity to the open, communicative quality of the world. Relaxation. And better digestion!

Most people seek out a few people to love intensely. Our cultures teach us to do this. We cling to our families of birth and create new families and small circles of “best” friends. Everyone else is a stranger.

But in fixating on a few relationships, we still may experience deep loneliness. We have defined our world through the lens of our root sense of separation: Us and Them. Our search for intimacy has reinforced exactly what it was meant to cure. Many people are not even aware of this until a loved one dies or leaves, and the feelings of loneliness and separation they had been defending themselves against come rushing in through the open gates of loss.

Practitioners try hard to bring their reactivity and feelings of separation onto the path. They work with this energy and take responsibility for its effects because they know that in allowing their fixations to govern their lives, they will miss a precious opportunity to realize a more expansive form of love and intimacy, one that encompasses all of life.

Surrender does not come easily. For a long, long time, perhaps many lifetimes, people try to keep old pleasures and patterns going alongside the new habits and patterns emerging due to sadhana. This is the condition of most students. They are benefiting from teachings and have reserved some time for practice, but much of life goes on as usual.

Anandamayi MA was often asked why she traveled incessantly around India, visiting and sitting with people who had little aptitude or appetite for sustained spiritual practice. She replied that such people experienced peace in her presence, and this is why she went to them. She knew that everyone is on the path, and she had the capacity and great compassion to meet each person at his or her own level.

Even those who have consciously recognized Self-realization as the one aim of all life will experience many times of going back and forth between spacious presence and contraction. MA said: Coming and going, the thing will be done. And this is how it is done for most of us.

However, the fruit of all sadhana is coming into intimacy with the world. Whatever we felt we lost along the way, we rediscover in the fullness of nondual consciousness. As we become more established in the direct perception of nondifference, we come to enjoy the experience of difference, or duality, without clinging attachment. We are finally free to love.

In Matriseva,
Shambhavi

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