Welcome.
We welcome you exactly as you are.
We welcome all of your...
✿ Questions ✿ Yearnings ✿ Experiences ✿ Prayers ✿ Desires ✿ Dreams ✿ Fears ✿ Wishes ✿ Grief ✿ Gifts
We welcome you exactly as you are and invite you to share, explore, and create with us.
The Tantric Arts Collective is an experiential endeavor and inclusive space grounded in basic principles of tantric and yogic philosophy. Our mission is to offer a space for any practitioner to come and enrich, empower, and embody their own experience.We work with the esoteric Shakta Tantra branch and yoga as codified by Patanjali, but we also integrate other holistic and creative modalities.
At the core of The Tantric Arts Collective is the desire to embody our own wisdom, sovereignty, and lived experience. We believe that the permission to radically embody one's experience, come to know one's own truth, and share this knowing in inclusive, dynamic spaces of mutual honoring and celebration is at the core of tantra.
The Tantric Arts Collective rejects colonized understandings of knowledge which state that a supreme authority contains information and thereby reserves the right to bestow knowing in the form of credentials and permissions. While we respect that guru-parampara, shakti-pat, and lineage are crucial containers for the process of transformation, we also acknowledge that these spiritual concepts have been extracted from their proper contexts, as evidenced by the vast amount of spiritual, sexual, and emotional abuse which has occurred within the yoga community.
We offer an alternative to dogmatic, masculine-centered yogic traditions. The Tantric Arts Collective is a safe, inspiring container to experience your own connected knowing. Our classes incorporate story medicine, creative modalities, meditation, mantra & classical Sanskrit chanting, and therapeutics-informed ashtanga yoga.
We offer these practices in a deeply collaborative, non-dogmatic manner. Our community is post-lineage, a term defined by Theo Wildcroft in the following way:
"Post-lineage yoga moves beyond a single lineage or teacher as the sole authority for yoga, and turns instead to peer networks and sanghas to decide the practice. It overlaps with both commodified, secular yoga and the yoga of lineage."
With this definition in mind, we like to consider our classes and sessions as offerings rather than teachings. We offer invitations, wonderings, choices, and experiences rather than prescriptions, explicit instructions, and strict structures. Our mission is to support your sovereignty and connection to yourself by encouraging you to integrate, participate, and synthesize what feels right for you.
We collectively work together to enter the domain of our own wisdom through Shakta Tantra practices and principles. We believe our medicine, gold, and divinity lies in this deep-dive, and that group work is necessary for the deep-dive to maintain vital sustenance.
We welcome you!
“All states of mind, all emotions or moods, are vibrations of the shakti, manifestations of the one Goddess/power. Therefore the Tantrika experiencing anger, or fear, or desire, acknowledges that this is a vibration of energy, that all energy is a manifestation of the Goddess, and therefore bows to her own emotion (whatever it is) with heartfelt gratitude, saying,
“O Goddess, thank you for coming in this form. What do you have to teach me?”
-Christopher Wallis, Tantra Illuminated
I direct the Tantric Arts Collective, a virtual community that connects individuals with their divine wisdom and sovereignty through experiential and creative tantric practice. I am dedicated to facilitating a space that is inclusive, transformative, and absolutely magical.
Over the last decade, I've studied with indelible teachers and committed to holistic healing modalities. My passion for this work led me to study closely with Manju Jois, son of Patthabi Jois, and the American Sanskrit Institute. I've studied Shakta Tantra in India, learned women-centered practices as a child caregiver to new moms and Marriage & Family Therapist (in training), and wrote fervently into my own wound as a woman whose voice sometimes felt swallowed up by patriarchal structures, including (gasp!) the ashtanga yoga system.
I am a blogger, essayist, poetess, and diarist; I earned my BFA from Goddard College, the school that does not give out grades, for my thesis entitled "The Implacable I: The Case for the Personal, The Call for the Woman Writer." I've also been sober for ten years and have taught extensively in addiction treatment centers. I bring an orientation in trauma-informed care, attachment theory, and humanistic, compassion-driven approaches.
I am committed to holding the space of supporting personal expression, creative endeavor, and spiritual exploration. I am deeply compelled to create safe spaces and containers of connected knowing, or the domain of wisdom we all naturally embody through our intuition and relationship to our personal experience. I find myself drawn to people who value connected knowing over dogma and tradition. I want to work with and learn from people who are hungry to encounter themselves and come to know what is true for them -- that is the truth that I find compelling, poignant, and hauntingly beautiful.
Story-tellers, wound-dwellers, I welcome you.
Practitioners who are tired of the exclusive, dry dogma of yogic tradition, I welcome you.
Women who are sick of learning yoga from the masculine perspective, who are eager to come home to their own womb wisdom and divine feminine power, I welcome you.
Individuals who feel creatively blocked, or creatively alive, I welcome you.
Womxn, queer folks, persons of color, & individuals left out of the conversation in yoga communities, I welcome you.
Human beings, I welcome you. I can't wait to hear your story.
<3
Love, light, and leela,
Sarah
Tantra is an esoteric philosophy that is difficult to properly codify, define, or organize. In Yoni Shakti: A Woman’s Guide to Power and Freedom Through Yoga and Tantra, Uma Dinsmore-Tuli writes, “Practically everybody who writes anything about tantra usually begins by explaining that nobody can really define what it is. The term has a long and complex history that is not confined to a specific single sect or religion.” Though difficult to explain, through my initiation in the Satyananda lineage and Shakta Tantra tradition and personal study of tantric texts such as The Saundarya Lahari, my understanding of tantra was synthesized as follows: there are two main forces at the core of Existence. Shiva, or consciousness, the masculine principle, is the energy of ascent, and Shakti, or creation, the feminine principle, is the energy of descent. Shakti compels Shiva to be conscious of Himself, and Shiva compels Shakti to create through his awareness.
In other words, in tantric philosophy, existence is a dream that is dreamt by the Dreamer so that he can experience Himself, a dream so magical, so provocative, that it compels the Dreamer to dream.
