Author's Note

I should tell you why I wrote this book before you read it, because the why is the only honest place to start.

This book is my way of processing what happened at a retreat I attended, led by a teacher in the tradition of nondual Shaiva Tantra. I went because the question of whether there is a ground beneath human value had become unbearable and I had run out of ways to hold it alone. What happened there was not a conversion. It was stranger. The practices worked --- not as belief, but as something the body recognized even when the mind resisted.

I had other experiences after the retreat --- moments when the ground felt unmistakable, when the doubt dissolved and I thought I would never need to ask again. And then the doubt came back. It always comes back. Maybe that is the point. Maybe this book is my way to remember --- to hold what was given so that when the doubt returns, as it will, there is something to return to.

I asked the teacher directly: are the teachings just a construct? The answer was five words that this entire book circles: It is, until you experience it.

I have not fully experienced it. I may never. But something shifted, and the shift was not intellectual. The proof came on an ordinary evening: a system I had been building for months broke apart --- months of architecture, collapsed in an hour --- and I put my daughter to sleep with grace. My husband noticed, because he knows this is not my default state. Something held that I had not built. Whether it was the ground the tradition describes or a useful fiction my nervous system had adopted, I cannot tell you. Both descriptions pass the filter that this book will introduce.

This book is for the people who have the courage to leap from the void. Not as a one-off decision but as an everyday decision. To show up to the cushion, to the child, to the dishes, to the question that will not close --- and to engage in what the tradition calls the mandala of blessings as an experiential ground, even when the ground cannot be proven.

I keep returning to something the teacher said about the temple: it is not the temple itself that raises the energy, but the open-hearted people who inhabit it. I need a container to open my heart. A community of open-hearted people is the best container I have found. But I am writing from the edge of that container --- one foot in, one foot braced against the doorframe, the doubt still present, the body still settling.

This is not a book by someone who has arrived. It is a book by someone who cannot fully get rid of doubt and has chosen to write from inside it.

CC BY-SA 4.0