Something that was quite confusing to me as I became more serious on the path of yoga was a pervasive message indicating that the spiritual path required renouncing all worldly desire. The images I had of being a yogi was of swamis in robes who lived apart from society so as not to be sullied by impurity.
As well, the practice and lineage I first landed in required harsh discipline of body and mind, and commitment to the method, further confirming the notion that to be a yogi required great effort and negation of any individuality. Together, all of this did not sit well, in my body and in my heart, and I kept searching until I found a path in the Tantric tradition that honored the journey of embodiment and living as a householder.
I learned there were different paths in the tradition. There was a renunciate path for those whose destiny was to withdraw from the world (and note that many of the early proponents of yoga in the west were in fact renunciates). But in addition, there is a path for those committed to living fully embodied in the world.
A wonderful teaching about these paths is that of the ocean and the wave, which is used in the tradition in different ways. For example, in the Classical Yoga of Patanjali, the definition of yoga is the calming of the fluctuations of the mind. From this perspective, our individual awareness can be thought of as an ocean or lake, and the waves are the vrittis, the fluctuations, all the thoughts and emotions that inhabit our awareness. Here the goal of yoga is to calm the waves of our thoughts and emotions so the lake is smooth and clear.
In my Tantric lineage, the ocean is often considered to symbolize Consciousness, the underlying ground of being, also called Shiva, or Shiva-Shakti. In this view, we as individuals are each a wave that emerges from that ocean of Consciousness. As our individual wave arises from that ocean, we look around and see the other waves of manifestation, and we tend to think that is all there is. This represents a forgetting, a lack of recognition of the source from which our individual life arises.
Here the path of yoga, especially meditation, is the means to remembering and recognizing that we are nothing but the ocean of consciousness, manifested as our particular individual life wave. Everything manifest is an expression of the absolute Consciousness, including each of us. But we have forgotten this.
Traditions that are renunciatory have as the goal to subside back into the ocean. The goal is to merge back into the ocean of consciousness. There is an associated withdrawal from society to help alleviate anything that creates waves in our individual consciousness.
From the Tantric perspective, instead, we want to resource the energy of the ocean to support the activities of our individual wave. We are successful to the degree we are able to clarify our awareness such that the ocean of consciousness is revealed to us. The means to this understanding is our practice of yoga, particularly meditation. In this way we recognize that we are nothing but the Consciousness ocean.
This connection then allows us to harness the energy of the ocean. We utilize that connection as householders to live to the fullest in a way that is aligned with our highest desires. Our work and our relationships are positively impacted. We become channels, if you will, for all the attributes of yoga we hear about: nonharming, truth, compassion, and so on. As well, it allows us to bring forth our own unique gifts. In this way we can be of greatest service, whether it is through something we bring into the world, or simply shifting the energy in our everyday realm through our demeanor and actions.
