The illusiveness of happiness!What a rat race to find it and then if you were lucky to get it how do you keep it? Recently, I have been reflecting on my own progression in life to happiness and on the happiness of the hundreds of women I have worked with over the past 13 years as a workshop leader and intimacy and relationship coach.
What’s happiness anyway? The older I have grown the happier I have become. And that does not just have to do with that I now own a business, making a difference in the lives of women and men, and being in the most inspiring relationship with my beloved and business partner. That’s rather a result of something else.
After all happiness is a state of being! And how did I arrive at that state of being? For me this occurred through two major life experiences that awoke me to that state:
One experience had to do with accepting what is at the present moment and declaring that I am happy. This is what I got at a low point in my life from a ten-day mediation retreat at Thich Nhat Hanh’s PlumVillage in the South of France.
The other experience had to do with learning about “weaving” or Tantra which has to do with reintegrating my feminine with my masculine or the yin with the yang that is frequently out of balance for women living in this time and age. Most of us have learned to develop our masculine side that is required to compete and make it in the world. Great capacity to have! However, if my feminine got dwarfed because of the dominant orientation towards achieving in the worldly dimension, I am just not whole any longer.
The human being is a miniature universe. All that is found in the cosmos can be found within each individual, and the same principles that apply to the universe apply in the case of the individual being. The aspects of feminine and masculine show up in women just as they do in men. However, they are not merely to be considered as gender qualifications.
To illuminate the principles further take a look at this chart and locate yourself on the right or left or in between in various areas of your life: family, intimate relationship, work, career, body, hobbies, spirituality, and so forth:
| Masculine / Yang | Feminine / Yin |
| Creative focus | Creative flow |
| Purposeful presence | Open & connected |
| Desire for truth | Desire for sourcing and sustaining |
| Oriented towards vision & goals | Oriented towards love and care |
| In one’s mind & focused | In one’s emotions & flow |
| Emotion of compassion | Emotion of trust & gratitude |
| Looking at life from the outside | Looking at things from within |
| Fear of failure in life | Fear of rejection & loss of love |
| Work before intimacy | Intimacy before work |
| Giving | Receiving |
| Doing | Being |
When we integrate the feminine with the masculine, the spiritual with the sexual, the body with the soul, the giving with the receiving, wholeness shows up. Experiencing wholeness is the source of feeling pleasure, joy and yes, HAPPINESS!!! It’s up to each woman to return to that wholeness. This ‘weaving’ practice provides a guide to wholeness as shown by transformative shifts in my own life and many women who have worked with me at TantraNova over the years.
