Sandra Ehlers is a Self-Integration & Kundalini Awakening Guide, Trauma Informed Yoga Meditation Teacher, Event Facilitator, Reiki Master, and Writer. Her work is dedicated to inner union – not only through expanded awareness, but as a lived, embodied experience of wholeness in the world.
The key to experience yourself as one with life, and to embody divine love, is to deeply understand the role of desire and passion in your life.
What is self-alignment? Uncovering original passion
It's easy to fall into polarities of what self-alignment can be.
Many of us see self-alignment as letting go of all that we are not. The societal conditioning, the trauma, the misconceptions about ourselves and the world. It's the yogic idea of unpeeling the layers: If I am not this, and not that, what is left? Who am I? The more we unpeel, the more we discover our actual freedom and limitlessness.
Others view positive experiential states as aligned. When we feel a natural bubbling joy and excitement about life. When we can hold the people around us with unconditional acceptance. When we can love our own humanness, and feel lovingly connected with our own body. When we feel driven by passion and purpose, and guided by our own inner truth.
Coming into alignment includes the fullness of these polarities of releasing and claiming. Releasing our fears and limiting self-concepts, so that we may own and experience all that we truly do desire.
However, self-alignment also goes beyond these polarities. Fundamentally, it is deeper than our life circumstances, bringing us all the way back to the origin of all life.
True role of desire for self-alignment
In the tantric perspective, desire is the driving force of all life.
If not for desire, what would move you to take another breath?
There is a desire to live. A desire to experience. A desire to become intimate with life, and to love.
And while we connect it to our human body, desire is even more fundamental. It exists beyond the body, just as the experience of consciousness that you call the 'soul'.
In human life, desire comes with tension.
You want something, you don't yet have it.
Even when it's very close, like touching someone you love, desire can appear as the experience that you feel somewhat removed. The more you love someone, the more the desire to touch even more intimately; to merge into another.
If you can release the tension; the feeling of lack or separation; the resistance or inhibitions; and fully allow the present moment experience to flow and be absorbed in it, then we call it pure passion.
We desire to experience the state of passion, because then we feel the most intimate with life.
Desire tugs us back towards pure passion for life – towards love. Towards full intimacy with life as it transcends body and personality; a direct experience of divine love flowing through our body and being.
Passion moves us to experience ourselves as life; no longer separate from its source. It has us embody life force – shakti – our essence. And from then on, we see nothing as separate from love. Passion keeps our devotional fire burning in service of life.
In the body, this passion is felt as the physical experience of our essence. It can be felt and channelled in countless ways – however we channel it, the commonality is an expression of pure loving devotion towards life.
Part of us knows this true intimacy, and constantly yearns to bring our full awareness to it, so that we may experience it again. The tantric path recognizes this original passion, and allows it to be what it always was: our guiding light home.
How to invite passion and embody your essence
In our human experience, desire alerts us to the ways in which we give that power away.
To the ways in which we need a "you" and a "me," a "this" and "that" to experience life.
Crucially, we must recognize that desire is not the villain of the human story. It drives us onward to explore ourselves, to become aware of our lack and our fullness, gradually uncovering true passion within.
In order to allow desire to transform our life experience into one of pure passion, one of pure life embodied, we need to accept and own the entirety of our desire as it is. We are not only allowed to transform our life experience to fit our true needs and joys – we are meant to.
That transformation begins internally, by understanding how worthy you are of what you truly desire.
This involves releasing all that isn’t true aligned desire, in the phase we usually call "healing".
But internal work isn't enough – the transformation can complete only with worldly action.
By owning your desire fully, you can learn to allow the fire of devotion to become unconditional. You learn to act unconditionally, without insisting on any particular outcomes.
Desire has a way of leading us into all kinds of experiences that we need in order to know ourselves. Experiences that may feel sweet or challenging – it’s up to each of us to remember how it all simply shows us more about ourselves and our attachments.
They reveal the truth about our relationship dynamics, our areas of lack, how our natural self-expression may be held back, and many more things. Owning all this fully, along with the choice to continue to act on our desire, is what gradually allows what isn't aligned to fall away.
As you move away from trying to make things work for you, towards allowing the pieces to fall into place as they need to, releasing all clinging, you'll begin to allow pure passion to express through you.
And when you feel in your body and being how passion is the most natural, innocent, pure expression of who you are, you’ve entered your own stream of self-alignment.
Paradoxically, only by surrendering to the innocent truth of your desire and passion, while also surrendering the expectations of how things must be; only then will you become able to see the true power you hold over your experience.
Sandra Ehlers, Self-integration and Awakening Guide
Sandra Ehlers is a Self-Integration & Kundalini Awakening Guide, Trauma Informed Yoga Meditation Teacher, Event Facilitator, Reiki Master, and Writer. Her work is dedicated to inner union – not only through expanded awareness, but as a lived, embodied experience of wholeness in the world. The focus is on transforming and integrating all levels of conscousness; physical, emotional, mental, energetic and spiritual – creating a foundation for deepened present-moment awareness, equanimity, aliveness, and ultimately, bliss. Alongside workshops, classes and retreats, Sandra offers 1:1 support to self-alignment through the Completion Process and other modalities.
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