Honoring the Divine Within: Creating Deeper Intimacy

At TantraNova we have a tradition of celebrating the Holiday Season by inviting our community from near and far to our Holiday Puja Party. It’s this time of year again and we, Dr. E and Freddy Z, want to share with you about this great gathering of guests we had here at the TantraNova Institute in Chicago last night.

You may wonder what a Puja Party is. Puja is a Sanskrit word. Its meaning originates from ancient Buddhism and Hinduism. According to Wikipedia, puja means “expressions of honor, worship, devotional attention. Acts of puja include bowing, making offerings and chanting. These devotional acts are generally performed daily at home (either in the morning or evening or both) as well as during communal festivals.”

We at TantraNova have taken parts of the original idea of the puja traditions and created a Puja Party with the theme of “honoring the Divine within oneself and within another”. Our Puja Party last night was a Holiday celebration and our guests showed up in festive and inspiring clothes. It was a joyous and most delightful occasion since all of us got to connect with old and new friends. We enjoyed aphrodisiac foods that were prepared by raw food chefs Yvonne Washington and Bonita Kindle. It was a most delicious feast.

Freddy Zental created an engaging medley of dance music and we had a blast watching fabulous moves and individual expressive styles on the dance floor.

The center piece of the party constituted a Puja ritual which is a practice with an inner circle facing the outer circle. It’s a kind of musical chair game where the inner circle moves to the left after they connected with a person in the outer circle. Elsbeth and Freddy Zental lead the Puja ritual giving different directions at each station of the circle.

The ritual is designed to support you in becoming more present to the moment and to yourself. This in turn supports you in becoming more present to the person that stands across from you in the Puja circle. When fully present you bring focus to acknowledging the Divine within yourself and within the person you are facing at each of the Puja stations.

You can tell by all of our blog entries over the past few months that everything centers on being and becoming more present. Once you become more present you can connect more deeply with yourself as well as with another. This is at the very core of creating lasting intimacy in your life and relationships.

For further info on TantraNova and to learn more about creating lasting intimacy and love go to http://www.tantranova.com