Everything Is the Path
On noticing the signs, trusting the dance, and saying yes to what is
Most of us move through time and space half asleep. Numb to our utter existence. To the systemic pressures priming our actions, the subtle ways our food and environment shape how we show up. We’ve become passengers in our own lives, following grooves we never chose, mistaking the well-worn path for the only possibility.
And yet, this does not need to be the case.
If you’re reading this, you’re likely on a different path. One of greater connection, of waking up to your true nature, of cultivating an intimate relationship with reality itself.
This intimacy with reality is, in many ways, the essence of Tantra.
Most people, when they hear “Tantra,” immediately think of sexual practices. The Western marketing machine having done its work. But this is like confusing a single brushstroke for the entire painting. What the West calls Tantra is actually Neo-Tantra, a modern interpretation that emerged in the 1960s, focusing primarily on sacred sexuality. Classical Tantra? That’s an entirely different cosmos.
When Tantric texts began appearing around 500-600 CE, they carried a radical proposition for their time. By 800-1200 CE, Tantra had become one of the most influential spiritual systems in South Asia, shaping everything from art to yoga, from mantra practice to temple ritual. Its revolutionary insight was this: everything, including the body, desire, emotion, and the mundane details of everyday life, can be used as a path to awakening.
The ancients weren’t just philosophizing. They were mapping technology. Subtle-body cartography with its chakras and nadis, kundalini as the dormant creative force. Mantra as vibrational medicine, each sound carrying specific frequencies of transformation. Ritual use of breath, visualization, and energy work. The cosmic dance between Shiva (pure consciousness) and Shakti (creative power), not as metaphor but as the fundamental architecture of existence.
Classical Tantra is a comprehensive spiritual technology. Sexual practice? Yes, but a tiny fraction of the whole. And even then, mostly symbolic or reserved for advanced practitioners who had already spent years preparing their consciousness for such intensity.
The Permission to Notice
What studying both Hindu and Buddhist Tantric lineages has revealed to me is something profound: they provide a direct path where everything in one’s experience becomes a doorway to awakening. Not despite the messiness of life, but being with it, fully. Not by transcending the body, but by fully inhabiting it.
When everything in our life can be used as a pathway, as a doorway, as a portal, we begin to live with a different quality of attention. There’s suddenly permission to notice the signs. To see the patterns. To connect the dots that were always there, waiting.
Last week, I was rushing to a meeting, stressed about being late, when I noticed a hummingbird hovering directly in my path. It stayed there, suspended, wings invisible in their speed, forcing me to stop. In that pause, something shifted. The meeting I was rushing to? It got canceled moments later. The pause the hummingbird created? That’s when the insight I’d been searching for finally arrived.
This isn’t magical thinking. It’s recognizing that when we orient through time and space with awakened awareness, life begins expressing itself through us in ways we couldn’t have orchestrated. The universe doesn’t suddenly start sending us messages. We finally start receiving what was always being transmitted.
The Dance of Co-Creation
Here’s what the traditions understood that we’ve forgotten: awareness changes everything. Not metaphorically. Literally. When you shift from sleepwalking through your days to conscious participation, you enter into co-creation with existence itself.
This requires something most spiritual paths don’t mention: radical ownership.
Not the ego’s version of ownership, which is about control and credit. But the soul’s recognition of its creative responsibility. You’re not separate from the dance. You are the dance, dancing itself into existence. Every choice, every breath, every moment of attention is you participating in the creation of reality.
The Kashmiri Shaivites refer to this as svatantrya, or absolute freedom that arises from recognizing your identity with the creative principle itself. You’re not a puppet of circumstance. You’re not even the puppeteer. You’re the consciousness in which both puppet and puppeteer arise.
This is why Tantra includes everything. The messy kitchen sink moment when you’re overwhelmed with dishes and deadlines. The sublime sunset that stops you mid-thought. The difficult conversation with your partner. The ecstatic breakthrough in your creative work. All of it, every texture, every temperature, every sensation, is consciousness knowing itself through infinite forms.
A Full Yes to What Is
But here’s the challenging part: this path requires a full yes to life as it is. Not as you wish it were. Not as it should be according to your spiritual ideals. But as it actually is, showing up in this moment, with all its contradictions and complexities.
This, yes, isn’t passive acceptance. It’s not spiritual bypassing dressed in Sanskrit terms. It’s the yes of the artist who sees beauty in the broken. The yes of the lover who remains present even when the beloved is difficult. The yes of consciousness recognizing itself in every appearance, no matter how it shows up.
I learned this the hard way. After my initial awakening experiences, I spent months trying to maintain some elevated state, to keep the mundane world from intruding on my spiritual clarity. It was exhausting. And more importantly, it was a fundamental misunderstanding of what awakening actually is.
Awakening isn’t an escape from the human experience. It’s the recognition that the human experience itself is sacred technology. Your triggered nervous system? That’s the path. Your creative blocks? That’s the path. Your longing, your resistance, your forgetting, and remembering? All of it. Path.
The signs are everywhere, but we only see them when we’re present. The synchronicities, the patterns, the perfect timing of that friend’s call or that book falling off the shelf. These aren’t rewards for good spiritual behavior. They’re what reality looks like when you stop sleepwalking through it.
This is the revolution hidden in plain sight: not transcendence but presence. Not perfection but wholeness. Not light without shadow but light that knows its shadow, dances with it, draws strength from the tension between what’s visible and what’s hidden, what’s said and what’s felt, what we know and what we’re still discovering.
So notice the signs. Trust the connections. Let yourself be lived by something greater while taking full responsibility for your participation in it. The path isn’t somewhere else. It’s here, in this breath, in this choice, in this willingness to meet reality exactly as it presents itself.
Say yes. Not to what you think should be, but to what actually is.
That’s where the magic lives. That’s where consciousness recognizes itself. That’s where you discover that you’ve always been the very thing you were seeking.
The invitation is always here, always now.
Will you accept it?
Emergence with Rachel Weissman is a weekly exploration of the interconnections between consciousness, technology, and planetary flourishing.
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