Around 18 years ago I started reading about Tantra and searching for teachers in Buenos Aires to get to the practical part. At that time it was hard. Most were -instead of in a path of personal growth and consciousness expansion- exclusively focused on sexuality, so I couldn’t bring myself to trust them.
Around the year 1999, my father got so terminally sick I practically stopped studying and dedicated myself to care for him. I was alone and searched for help and support everywhere I could think of. One day, reading an “alternative health” magazine I found the small ad of a Tantra instructor that specialized in accompanying the dying. His name was G. (“Mountain” in Sanskrit) and had trained in Puna with Osho. I found that great, if he worked with Death, I knew he approached the path seriously, in its depth, so I contacted him.
He was a man in his late 50’s, had a strong presence and an open heart. He came to La Plata, -the city we were living in-, and accompanied and taught me 2 days per week for months. He would go to the hospitals and pharmacies, visit my father with me. He would listen to my worries, hear me cry and hug me in silence when I most needed it. He was the first to teach me to meditate (Zazen, -so hard for me at the time- and Osho dynamic). He was there, fully, for me and my father. He brought consciousness to the process and helped us SO much.
Some time after my father’s death he said I needed to let go of the father figure in him and started introducing me to conscious touch and sexuality. The new found information was amazing and eye-opening to me. G. said I was a born dakini and wanted me to work with him. But I was not ready to let go of the asexual father-like support. Shortly after the new type of classes had begun, I felt a strong resistance and discomfort and finally put distance with him. Now that I think about it, I have done this with so many people who were authentically appreciative and caring towards me.
Anyway, after entering the Osho tribe, -with my new flashy hindu name-, I tried to find other people in the world of Tantra who would get together to meditate with me. It was almost impossible! The few I found in Argentina at the time were just focused on “liberal sexuality” and psychoactive substances.
Later I found in Brazil a town with the highest amount of Osho Sannyasins in the world after Puna: Alto Paraiso. I actually bought a house and thought I would move there!. This paradise-beautiful town is full of spiritual seekers. Lots of Osho-dynamic meditations, Ayahuasca rituals, fasts, raw vegan, Tarot reading, energy healing, “tantric orgies” an specially: lots and lots and lots of spiritual bypassing.
Osho foresaw the very real need of people to experience their strongly repressed desires first, to be able to surrender to their inner silence later. But so many of his followers stopped their experience and search right there: living the desires of the senses. They never seriously got to the next step: meditation and deep emotional work.
At the end of my medical university year I met Isha Judd. In her seminar she spoke directly to my heart. A strong, humorous, irreverent, bussiness-suit clad woman, from the very western country of Australia. On the second day of the workshop someone told me she was enligthened. Osho was dead and he used to say, “to keep growing, find a teacher who is alive”. I didn’t need to travel to India and filter between hundreds of gurus, (in my mind mostly men, possibly chauvinistic, who spoke languages I didn’t, with a strong influence of cultural / religious rituals I was not interested in). I had found her. And the most important, -because I’ve always been too much of a rebel and a critical thinker to follow anyone other than my heart- I had found a method: the Isha System.
In it, the search for the senses is over. It is taken as a given that is good and healthy to enjoy life at its fullest, and then it goes beyond. The focus is on going inwards, expanding consciousness, being present throughout the day, anchoring constantly in the body and feeling -all- emotions to the fullest. Healthy habits plus authenticity, vulnerability, a commitment to have an eternal student approach, never stepping into the posture of a teacher, and remaining open to life with its abundance of lessons, in its never ending expansion.
My healing and growth keep going. I move and struggle between deep darkness and amazing clarity, and I ask my heart to not wander off the path. The way of pleasure can be wonderful, but quite misleading, the truth is found inside.
Isha System Germany 