Tantra & Herbalism
I haven’t written for so so so long!
In the process of breaking away from conventions and unlearning the old conditions, I am unbecoming. I sometimes don’t even know who I am.
But plants bring me back. Each walk in the garden to see a new bud unfurling, is a shocking delight to my senses. Am aplomb of sensation, fragrant and surreal. The warm air thickens the perfume of the prostrate Rose.
I mimic the Rose sometimes, all I do is glisten in the Sun, like the Rose has taught me to.
Every urge to hurry melts away, every race is terminated, and I begin to melt into the moment.
The fourth kind of awakening according to Yogic scriptures is through the ingesting of magickal plants, Auṣadhi.
The trick however is to allow these herbs to open the door for you, but you have to step inside and see what’s going on for yourself. You have to come to your senses, inhabit them, take all that is happening in through your body and your cortex.
And pray that they teach you the way, for you have to find it alone.
Solemn walks into the wild, gathering nettle leaves as they push above the Spring Earth, I know this entry is late. So very late. The Nettle flowers are beginning to seed now. It’s nearly Summer Solstice, the energy of Litha is once more amongst us. The Midsummer is coming into its exquisite glory. The Sun King is called upon to rise from his boyhood and enter into the realms of Man. The Goddess is full and pregnant with Child, the Sun God is at the heart of his virility.
You can see this happening in the garden which has transformed so much. Although Foxgloves still bloom, the Lupins are giving way to Seed, the orange of the Calendula flair like flames in the bright sun, the Apples begin to fruit.
“for a breeze of morning moves*
and the planet of Love is on high
Beginning to faint in the light that she loves
on a bed of a daffodil sky,
to faint in the light of the sun that she loves
to faint in his light, and to die.”
Tantra stresses the importance of sensual meditations. Leading your experience of the wold through your sensual faculties. The whole world then becomes vivid and real, radiant rather than dull and lifeless as the one who lives through the mind, only. Or the Insubstantial Shadow World perceived by a transcendental meditator who takes the void as ultimately Real and the world as unreal.
“We all live in duality, we all have to make decisions to better ourselves, Tantra is very practical, Tantra says that we are primarily duality-based creatures and yet the highest reality is non-dual. Without fully weaving back together the fabric of your duality, so it is in harmony with nature, in a way nature intended it to be, than approaching non-duality can be destructive. We need to realise that if we are to be happy, we need to rewire ourselves so that we are in harmony with the weave - the eternal reality” (Yoga Ruga, Brooke Sullivan’s teacher)
Maud, by Alfred Tennyson*