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Who
We Are |
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by Robert |
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Marta and I met in
Boulder, Colorado, 30 years ago. I was a visiting
lecturer from Lancaster University in England. Marta
had freshly graduated from the University of
Colorado. We spent a month together in the mountains, and
she came back with me to England. We lived in Oxford
for the 25 years,
and have three children, now grown up. We have now
moved to South Brent in Devon, where we have grandchildren
nearby. |
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Marta is an American with Native American
and Jewish as well as UK roots; I am English. I come from an
academic background in the English Romantics,
literature and psychology, and subsequently Drama Therapy
and Theatre Studies. Marta's background is in Literature and
Creative Writing, and the women's movement. She is a
recognized playwright and a published poet. I had first
became involved with the personal Growth Movement in the
early 1970s, and was drawn especially to neo-Reichian bodywork, Bioenergetics, and
the Rajneesh movement. As we began working together, we began to
weave these interests more and more into our working as well
as our personal lives. We ran creative workshops
together for many years, working with both adults and young people,
before we found Tantra. |
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Osho |
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My first encounters with Tantra had been through the teachings of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (later called Osho), and
with a
tantric Master I encountered in Boulder called Nityananda, whose
disciples taught me tantric meditation, and who asked me to help him
edit the book he was writing on the philosophy of tantra.
Later, in the early 1980s, Marta and I both took sanyas and joined the Rajneesh movement.
For me, the language of tantra gives greater depth to what I had
experienced in the Growth Movement, and connects very
powerfully with the language of the poets of the
Romantic movement I have been
inspired by (Blake, Wordsworth), and the landscapes I love. |
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It was not until some fifteen years or so after my
experiences in Boulder that we discovered Margot Anand's
SkyDancing
Tantra as a practical path into tantra for Westerners, and joined
the Sacred Couple Training that John Hawken and his former
partner, Monika, then led together. |
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John Hawken's teaching has been
inspirational, life-changing, for both Marta and
myself. Tantra began to irradiate every corner of our lives -- not only our
personal growth and our marriage, but every aspect of our
working, teaching, creative, and family life. Gradually, we
were drawn more and more into organizing peer groups where we
could practice what we had been taught together. In 1998 we
became organizers for John, and in 2000 we launched Tantra
Laboratory with him. We became his apprentices as well as
his organizers, and began assisting and leading introductory workshops for him.
We worked with John until 2009, when we decided it was time to
retire from organizing to concentrate on our own teaching. |
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During
our time with Tantra Laboratory, our friend Alan Heeks, Steward
of Hazel Hill Wood, gave us the gift of an invitation to
celebrate Beltane there. Alan Heeks is a visionary of new
ways of living in community, and with the natural world. As our
workshops evolved, we were also inspired by the wisdom of Agatha
Manouche, Medicine Woman at Hazel Hill Wood. Out of this has been born the full cycle of
our Celtic Tantra
celebrations of these key eight
gateways in the Celtic year -- from Samhain in the autumn to Lammas in
the summer. |
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