8 Keys to Liberation - Tantra Illuminated

8 Keys to Liberation & 8 Pitfalls On The Path

Explore the 8 Keys to Actualize the Goal of Your Practice and Embody Your Full Awakening

What’s in the way IS the way. What does this phrase mean? There’s some important history to consider.

In Balinese and South Asian folk culture, the very same spirits who screw you over if you don’t honor them also protect and bless you if you do. In fact, in most traditional cultures, it is understood that if you cultivate a proper relationship with the spirits, they will bless and protect you in myriad ways, but if you neglect or dishonor them, they mess you up in myriad ways. They are neither demons nor angels, just expressions of a central principle of human life: Bring heightened awareness and willingness to grow to any challenge, and the very things you’ve hated become helpers.

In Tantra, we have the central principle: the very things which constitute obstacles in your life, when addressed, become the primary assets and allies on your journey. These ideas are the same in that they express the valuable insight that we do much better not to seek to get rid of obstacles but rather to transform them into their beneficial opposites.

In this 8-part series, Hareesh Wallis explores each of the eight keys to liberation and conversely, how these same eight keys become pitfalls on the path to awakening when misunderstood.