”When you do things from the soul, you feel a river of joy moving in you” Rumi
The soul is not something to believe in or not to believe in, it is a reality to be experienced, to become conscious of, to be felt and to be lived.
In the Tantra Temple we like to say that a tantra massage can “connect you with yourself”, but what does that actually mean? This is not just a vague statement that could mean anything, because of course receiving a tantra massage will make you feel much more relaxed, present in your body and give you a break from the noisy mind, which will make you feel more at home with yourself. But that’s just the beginning of the journey.
The entire atmosphere created during a tantra massage is a safe space, and being embraced with conscious loving touch allows you to surrender to the present moment. You gradually become able to let go of the mind, experiencing a new way of being, a sense of inner freedom and joyful expansion. Often it feels like time disappears and you forget about the outer world and dive into the beauty of your inner world.
A shift happens in us and we move from thinking into feeling, from doing into being, from the mind into the heart and into the soul.
“I have never been touched like that before … My body and soul united on a totally new level for me. It was an out-of-this-world experience”
“The massage helped me land in my body, I entered a meditative state with colors, energies and profound feelings, where sometimes I felt I merged with my masseur, as if I were him and he were me. It was an incredible experience. I was touched deeply in the deepest blockages of my heart, and I was moved and also a little scared, although only for a very short time, scared because it was so incredibly delightful and I didn’t want it to ever end. I feel like something big has happened to me, as if my life started all over today. I now know that this exists, because now I have felt it with my own mind and body. I know that this endless gift of love can be shared and I am looking forward for learning to share”
Tantra massages will also help you to be more in touch with your emotions, desires and your intuitions and this is already a step deeper, but there is a step beyond that which we call the soul. The soul is our connection to our deepest nature, it is our yearning for being one with the source of life, with cosmic consciousness, with the divine.
The reason why the soul is not as normal an experience for us as the experience of having a physical body is because we are not aware of it and because we are not looking for it.
We are not aware of our soul, because we are not very conscious in general, in all our experiences in life. If you’re honest with yourself, you’re also not aware of your physical body all the time. At least you’re not aware your body the way you can be after a tantra massage, feeling every fiber of your being and every cell vibrating.
We often just use our body to get from A to B and to do things, but we’re not necessarily aware of it until it’s sending you signs breaking through the unconsciousness threshold and into your awareness. Ask yourself right now: “Do I have a pinkie toe?” Most of the time you are not aware of it. Of course you can just look down and see that it’s there, but how often do you really do that? Not until you hit accidentally your foot and suddenly you become aware have you have a pinkie toe!
A tantra massage can be a nice and pleasurable experience and it can be an ecstatic experience, it depends how much we are able to be present, how much we take that experience in, how conscious we are.
Take for example the difference between lovers slowly and sensually feeding each other strawberries versus chowing down the whole package while watching TV. If you eat in a conscious way, the food tastes and smells much more nuanced, rich, more intense and more satisfying.
If we go through life without really being present, we will never discover our soul, because we remain at the surface, but once we learn how to access our soul, our life will start to change.
“You receive the touch all over your body, in the beginning your mind is commenting and has all kinds of things to say and then at one point it realizes, there is nothing I can do, actually I just have to stay here and there is nothing I can do, just to be open and receive, and you get overwhelmed by this touch, at one point the mind just gives up. There is no way I can comment on everything. I would get exhausted, I can’t have an opinion on everything and the mind just gives up. And you are there, inside yourself.
I had the experience of entering my heart and from there my soul and in that experience came the activation of mysterious force that was rising through the spine, and then I am becoming this shining love. I must admit at that moment I didn’t understand what was happening, because the mind was out of the picture and I had never experienced something like that. So that was an overwhelming experience of mystical element of my own. I had never heard about chakras or kundalini or the soul, had no relation to the concept of soul. And suddenly I was there, in this state of happiness without any reason, without any object. It’s not very complicated, it’s the simplest thing. The mind makes it complicated and when you come back you make mental concepts about your own experience.”
”After the massage I have had a bubbly feeling of ecstatic joy within for many days, and I feel like the everyday small problems and annoying experiences are totally dissolved when I think about this experience”
In order to access our soul we need to learn to quiet the mind for enough time that we become aware of ourselves through direct experience and not through thoughts. The mind is like the surface of the ocean, but the depths of the ocean is vast and contain an unexpected abundance of life and hidden treasures.
Becoming aware of your soul also means to become aware of a deep sense of meaning and purpose. You realize that what happens in your life is not just random luck or accident, that you are in this life because you have something to learn and something to share. The awakened soul has an insatiable curiosity and courage to leave the comfort zone far behind, to choose being awake, conscious and fully alive over sleepiness, comfort and the prison of the mind.