"What is the role of a woman in tantra?"

TANTRA FAQ: "What is the role of a woman in Tantric meditation?"
I thought I would share a very good question that was emailed to me this morning:

Q:
in one of your talks, you mentioned "playing roles". 
within the context of a tantra partner meditation, is there a role that a woman plays?
or is it a crapshoot of experiences?  or both?

or when a woman softens to the energy of her partner, 
is her experience that of his energy and how that energy flows and what it needs?  
the sit then becomes a cutting through all the external structures to
a deeper understanding of how your energy interacts 
with the energy in front of you.
I woke up today wondering ;)

A:

well...the masculine and feminine dynamics are fluid in both males and females
some sits with a man i find they move more towards the shakti feminine energy expression and i sit in the grounding shiva masculine position
think of the male/female sacred energy dynamic like the positive/ negative ends of a battery
and then think of that range as being fluid, no one is entirely feminine or masculine energy

the "role" of a woman in the sit, i think is to be in self-enquiry of the experience happening inside herself and awareness of the play and exchange of energy with her partner

when i have sat with a very solid "base" male partner, i find that the serpentine energy really begins to flow and move because it is grounded in safety, and i really enjoy this feeling of flow in my body and appreciate being based to have that experience

there is a lot to look at here, when we think of the "role" of a woman both in tantra sitting partner meditation and in how we live in the world...
in relationships, i think that the feminine needs to be able to surrender to the masculine, but that it is difficult as a woman to surrender to men who are not stable or safe
of course we are all evolving, so there is no "perfect partner" who makes us feel perfectly safe
but as i travel the world and see so many communities where the women have become the bread winners and the mothers, and there is a wounding in the masculine causing alcoholism and abuse, i see a deep pain in the soul of the world
a deep pain in the sacred masculine soul and the sacred feminine soul
i hope we are finding ways to mend this deep soul pain mirrored in the masculine and feminine

the "role" of a woman in these tantra practices is not the old idea of woman= passivity
i have been told before that i can be masculine, because i can be very directed and dominant
but look at the tantric goddesses, they are very powerful, so i think there is a place for a very powerful woman to meet with a very powerful man
and both give and take the dominant position in a natural flow
this dynamic calls both partners to be in their power, to face their weak places and to be humbled and grow
but what do i know?

punk rock yoga

february 6

auroville, india

the graveyard

all he wanted was to get some pot, so he had to go to the graveyard, because that's where you get pot in india, and now he was watching a body burn before his eyes. the skinny, dark, dirty little man who was one of the keepers at the smashan, graveyard, had recognized him from when he came with my group of yoga students to meditate the week before. gabe said the keeper got the pot and put it in the clay chillum pipe and motioned for him to say a prayer and take a hit and then watch the body in flames as the plant hit his brain. he said he saw waves of energy coming off the burning corpse. the arms shot up and had to be pushed back into the fire. where does our spirit live?

"bom bom bole, ah key uh kolay" means "great lord shiva, open my eyes".
the shaivites, worshippers of shiva say this prayer before they take a hit of hash off their chillum pipe. they say life is maya, illusion of shakti, the primal feminine force of creation. the hash is a strong dose of shakti. they smoke the maya to see through the maya.

there is a statue of shiva in the smashan, bright blue with a leopard loincloth, his lips rosebud pink and his dreadlocks piled on top of his head with a crescent moon in his hair. he is painted as bright as a disneyland attraction and when i pointed him out to gabe, he thought it was a woman god at first. trani- shiva. god of the graveyards because he is a corpse himself, he represents awareness watching the dance of his female partner shakti as she dances the lila of maya, weaving the filmy sheets of illusion before our eyes like a great bellydancer, keeping us enticed but never revealing too much at once.

after that day, gabe said everything started moving. when he would sit and stare, energy would start moving off the trees. the southern jungle can swallow you up like a technicolor malaria dream, time slows down until it eats itself and you half expect a dinosaur to come walking through the dusty red earth and green palm trees. i guess if you are used to using drugs to escape the suffering of reality, it is a strange day when they start waking you up to a bigger reality. i was worried he wouldn't like india, but he loves it. he walks around the ashram skipping my yoga classes with the village girls following him around like a movie star. he slept through and missed dinner one night, so the girls brought him dinner to his room the next night. one of them peeled his hard boiled egg once when is was too hot for him to touch, now that's admiration. he hasn't had a haircut since we left america, so his brown hair is puffed up like a pompadour. mostly he has been hanging out, getting stoned and meditating sitting under the trees like a nineteen year old cross between james dean, sid vicious and the buddha.

that's my son, a son of shiva. the god of the low caste, outcast and the original punk rocker. shiva sits in the formless void watching the world dance, the world burn, the world of form shifting forms. through death we are born. the tantriks say "die before you die" to exceed the power of other mortals who fear death and so only half live.

i have missed my son for years. for the six years i have been coming to india, most of my prayers have been for god, for the creator, to watch over him when we have been apart. i came to india the first time right after he moved in with his dad at fourteen, we had always been together before that, like a mama kangaroo with her baby in her pouch. i had been such a young mother, pregnant at seventeen, that i had struggled to survive and to scratch and fight in this world for a place to keep us. i made a lot of mistakes. i had a lot of regrets. there is nothing more painful than being a parent looking at your childs pain that you know comes from your choices. after he moved in with his dad he stopped talking to me for a year. i circled holy temples and mountains repeating my prayers. on the outside i was halfway around the world. on the inside, i was circling the innermost sanctuary of my heart.

god help me to heal the pain i carry from my family. god help me to not cause my son the same pain. sandwiched between fate and free will, the things i can change and the things i cannot. i close the distance between the two with prayer and acceptance. just a little over a month ago i wasn't sure he would come. i picked him up drunk drinking bottles of cheap alcohol with his friends in a bad part of town when a few gang members pulled up. for a minute, it looked like things could have gone horribly wrong. god get us out of here alive, i prayed. and here we are, in india together.