sun and breeze

I am sitting on a rock in the afternoon sun. I am naked, as I like to be when I am far from the madding crowd. And the sun is warming my body, but at the same time there's a breeze, a cooling breeze. And this combination seems idyllic: the warmth and the cool, the sun and the breeze.

And feeling this, sensing it directly in my skin, I am reminded of the yin and yang of existence, at least in its manifest forms, these opposites, the warming and the cooling.

But this particular yin yang combination is also reminding me of the two classes of spiritual discipline. There is tantra, which works with stirring up energy, enjoying sensations, allowing them to overwhelm us. This is like the heat of the sun warming us. And the other class of discipline, the cool methods: meditation, sitting silently, reducing the energy in the system, allowing everything to settle, to cool.

So the tantric methods are rather like the sun, and the meditative methods are rather like this cool breeze. We can work with them both, and it's great to combine both, sometimes using tantric methods, and sometimes meditation. Just as this combination of the sun and the breeze is so idyllic, so our spiritual practice can be idyllic, by combining these two classes of discipline, the hot and the cold, the sun and the breeze.