 Welcome to my Tantric Winter Meditation Journey. So today I want to tell you about a meditation that we do in honor of the Goddess Tara. Tara is the second of the Dasha Mahavidyas and it's known as the Meditation of Bliss where we visualize body parts individually being hacked off and offered over. Now it doesn't sound very blissful and I have to admit that if you look at the paintings that looks even less blissful because they're quite graphic you know with details of blood and bone and animals eating certain some of the body parts and so on and unfortunately the moment people hear about it they automatically think of it as typically tantric you know negative outside social structures deviant black magic and so on. The thing is it isn't anything like that. As I've always said Tantra is about knowledge and you have to understand the reasoning behind a particular meditation because with this one I'm going to explain it to you and you'll notice that as soon as you understand what it's about suddenly it becomes perfectly clear and it makes complete sense and the moment something makes sense to you it becomes a really powerful and effective tool. See the hacking of the body parts symbolizes a conscious move towards detachment. You know we as human beings are far too attached to this material world, to our things, to our ego, to relationships and it's not easy to give any of that up. You know if you think about it we can't even throw away something from our wardrobe without getting stressed about it and generally the only reason people would throw something away is if they can replace it with something new. So it's not easy to give up anything. So you know how when people say you just sit in samadhi, you sit in meditation and you give yourself over to God it doesn't work that way. We can't do it and so in Tantra we believe that if you're going to do it effectively you do it one little step at a time because as we know anything that you do in little steps it just becomes easier to do. So in the meditation of bliss we give ourselves over to God by hacking away one part of your attachment at a time one little body part at a time and this idea of hacking works at two levels. One is of course that you're breaking yourself up into little bits to hand yourself over to make it easier for you but also the act of hacking, the act of cutting something off is a conscious decision that you don't want to come back to it. So it's really very effective. Now you are not ready to do this particular meditation yet. This needs a lot more internal emotional and mental preparation but if you want to try it I'm going to give you a slightly easier version of it. So the rules for this slightly easier version are this meditation has to be done at night last thing at night before you go to sleep. You do it lying down on your right hand side with your body nice and straight make sure that you're warm and comfortable. Focus on one part of your body. So let's say your left hand or even maybe the little finger of your left hand just one part of you and now allocate a material attachment to that part of your body. Make it an emotional attachment for this particular exercise so consider it a relationship that you want to get rid of maybe it's a particularly toxic relationship and for whatever reason you haven't been able to ditch it yet. This is what you want to visualize on your left hand. Okay we're not going to visualize the hand being hacked off we're not there yet. Instead you're going to visualize taking the hand away from the body so you're not going to do it physically you're just visualizing it. Take the hand away from your body away from the warmth of your body. Keep it out there. Feel it getting cold. Keep it there long enough to feel the discomfort building up so it should get really cold. When you've become really uncomfortable with the cold visualize bringing the hand back to you and feel that uncomfortably cold hand against your warm body. Once again keep it over there till you start to feel uncomfortable and then take it out again. Do the same thing again keeping it out there till it feels cold and uncomfortable bring it back do this three times over. Consciously take your time to feel the discomfort and the cold each time. You know this exercise is going to bring you an incredible amount of calm. You're not going to be able to get rid of the toxic relationship immediately. I mean doing it one time or twice or even for seven days in a week is not going to suddenly remove the toxic relationship but what it does do is it sends a message to the brain that the process has started and you will be amazed at the way that your brain suddenly destresses. You know your mental health is literally the only thing that you have. Do not compromise that for remember to like, comment, subscribe see you in the next one.