I have often battled with concept of spiritual practice, particularly of the eastern variety that puts forward the notion that true freedom or “enlightenment” is attained through detachment.

At a very rudimentary level, it would seem questionable as to why our very being and nature affords such a susceptibility to attachment via our senses, our fascination to seek pleasure, and furthermore our obsession with capturing all of this experience for us to reminisce over.

Our sense of “self” is defined by a combination of this remembered experience, that is, we only know who we are through memory, or to put it another way, our reality only exists because of resonance.

There are schools of thought that suggest the process of detachment is to cultivate a way of being that remains “in the now”, neither clinging to the past, nore longing for a particular outcome in the future. Could we say that even our memories of the past or projections of future actually only occur ‘in the eternal now’?

If so, could it be possible to ascertain a state of being that could, rather than denounce the game of memory and aspiration, actually strike some kind attachment/detachment balance that allows us to fully embrace our senses, desires and pleasures, as “spiritual practice”?

Having discovered Tantra two years ago I have started to wonder whether the concept of detachment is only one side of the complete picture. If we are here as incarnations or facets of the divine as almost all spiritual systems would have us believe, is it not our very purpose to experience this life through all the apertures of our being to allow “God/The Universe” to be able to have an complete experience of “itself”?

Why label some elements of our life experience as outside of “spiritual practice”?
My personal experience of Tantra is that sex, sexuality and sensuality can be a more that just gratification of desire but a practise of self enquiry, understanding of others and even meditative states of bliss.

I feel that true spiritual living must be all inclusive, an ebb and flow of attachment and detachment, and wonder whether there could be a more perfect practise or physical metaphor for this than the union of masculine and feminine energy in the “sexual now”.