I just wanted to start by saying thank you to Ācārya Sthaneshwar Timalsina and the team for providing this helpful and peaceful online space, and to the others before me who’ve participated in the forums and courses and who’ve made the first steps towards creating a meaningful online community.

Some basics: I’m a guy in my late 30s, working as a real estate mapmaker and graphic designer, and transitioning to becoming a stingless-beekeeper and dabbler in agroforestry in México with my partner and two cats. A few years ago, thanks to listening to both my partner and my chronic illness, I turned to Advaita Vedanta. While that path, plus meditation, has proven fruitful, I’ve continued to find it difficult to bring its teachings down to earth, in a sense, or to find a permanence in the realizations I’ve had over the years. Through Christopher Wallis’s books I was finally able to see that the Tantrik path, which seemed far too arcane via Dzogchen (which I’d looked into earlier), was a potential way forward for me, and through searching scholarly works on the Tantras I ended up here.

I feel lucky to have found this path, whose origins partially stem from transgressive ritual activities set within cremation grounds, during this time of COVID and endless war (on terror, on drugs, against enemies near and far). I feel like the whole of society has become a cremation ground of lifeless values and ways of living that no longer serve us (if they ever did), just waiting to be burned, and we will all have to transgress our internalized comfort-seeking social patterning and burn those familiar-yet-decaying values away if we are to be able to meaningfully navigate this time and find something deeper on which to anchor ourselves. I’m looking forward to exploring what that process looks like with you.