My first Tantra Festival

It is day one of my integration day and WAUW... Wauw.. all I feel and hear when I think back to this amazing, heart-opening and loving festival called Tantricjoyfestival in Amsterdam. This was just wauw.. I want this every day. To feel every emotion and all these energies in my body flowing, to feel safe, to share how I feel and feel understood, to feel seen, to feel accepted by who I really am, my authentic me, to simply be. Full of life and full of love this is how I experienced the festival. I try to describe with words what this festival awakened in me, but not one word can describe how I feel. This is also what I learned on day one of the festival, about what Tantra actually is.

What is Tantra about?

Tantra is about feeling. Different energies are being felt, emotional, sexual, spiritual and physical energy. I did not even know I had all those energies and that I was able to feel them.

Before I went to this festival I heard a lot of different things about tantra. A lot of things about sexual energies but I knew it was more than that because I went to a tantric introduction workshop for women before from blissyourbody in Utrecht. In this workshop, we questioned what sexuality meant to you, where your boundaries lay, and whether you could give yourself the space to feel pleasure. And this has everything to do with who we are as a person, our being.

TantricJoyFestival

This year I felt drawn to this Tantricjoyfestival since I am on my journey to find my authentic self and wishing to heal from my conditioned way of thinking and behaving. I felt there was so much more inside of me to feel, so I went as a spaceholder, part of the volunteer team. This festival was really something else. The people were so kind and warm-hearted! Mark & Anna the organizers of the festival felt like parents in a way, so caring and loving. They also wanted to create a family feeling for everyone at the festival, well they succeeded. I felt like coming home. I felt surrounded by like-minded sisters, brothers, beings. I have often felt like a grey duck in the place where I grew up. I often felt different and now I felt together with all these grey ducks

in one place and we weren't so different after all. This community really made me feel belonging, and that I am good as I am. That there is no 'right way' of being me but to be and to accept myself and others as they are with every emotion we feel, with every boundary we feel. During these five days, I felt so much love, so much caring, so many hugs. I did not hear once 'you are feeling too much' or 'your emotions are not valid'. No, the opposite, I heard: 'Please feel these emotions', 'You are safe', and 'You can express yourself'. I heard the question often 'How do you feel?', 'What do you need right now and how I can help you?'. I feel tears while I am writing this, from happiness. I feel so much gratitude for being able to experience this amount of love and acceptance for who I really am, from myself by the support of others who are on the same journey to loving themselves.

Workshops

Such deep connections I felt in only five days, because of shedding so many layers through the workshops. The workshops were something else too haha I mean, uuh wow.. I could not really prepare myself for the workshops other than being open to whatever arose in me and really listening to my boundaries, which was mentioned often during the festivals by the facilitators and by Mark & Anna. I went to a variety of workshops. Before the festival, I read about all the workshops and decided which ones were probably right for me to go. Once I was at the festival it was explained often how important it is to feel what is right for me instead of to think what is right for me. So I put the list on the side and started to feel every facilitator once they shared what their workshop was going to be like during the morning meetings.

I went to workshops where I felt sisterhood through connection to our sensual womb, awakening our sensual selves through dancing, singing and making music, and releasing our anger. Yes wow, I did anger-release for the first time and it was crazy releasing. The fact that I was allowed to express it and carried so well by the other sisters made me feel so safe, so vulnerable and so not alone. I also went to trauma healing workshops where group sharing was a big part of the workshop. Uuf this was confronting and a reminder of how much I could heal through other people's stories, one of the reasons I started this blog in the first place. To make other people feel less alone in their experiences. Well, someone else's story broke me open and I could not stop my tears. I felt that I was taking the person's spot/moment but this was the point, to break open, to hear this person's story to feel this person, because although we live different lives in different environments, surrounded by different people. We all feel, we all experience, we all have relationships in any form and we all carry pain. And again we share these needs to feel loved, to feel safe to express ourselves. It made me realize again how we can heal through sharing with each other. Awell so only two workshops and one festival day further and my heart was already wide open, vulnerable I felt, and so safe because I felt held by everyone else that was open-hearted and sharing their vulnerabilities too.

There were more workshops I could share about but I feel that Tantra is something you need to experience to feel. I remember someone telling me: 'This what we feel, what we created after five days could be our lives'. I wish everyone to feel this, to meet their authentic selves. I wish everyone to embrace the feelings that arise and to embrace themselves for who they are whole, with all the pain, and the difficulties, which in turn will lead to self-love I believe. To not want to change ourselves into different beings but to be and accept that what we feel is not only light. Thank you TantricjoyFestival, beautiful open-hearted beings for helping me to feel and for holding me <3