This article is my own experience on the journey of life. At the end of the article we have attached a video in which Ma Anada Sarita talks in detail about the chakra system and how this system affects our life and the intimate togetherness of a man and a woman.
I can confirm her words from my own experience.
7 x 7 = 49 or a deeper look at our life cycles.
Today is the moment. At the time of writing these lines, I have about 5 hours left before one major life cycle of my life comes to a close. Seven yearly cycles, each lasting seven years. My 49th birthday is here. I will complete this life cycle and would like to share my experience with you.
The magical number 7 is found in various forms of our existence, from fairy tales (beyond the seven mountains… the seven thrones… the seven headed dragon…) to the system of 7 energy centers, the chakras of our body. In addition to various qualities such as stones, colors, scents and various other common items that can be purchased in esoteric stores, the chakras also bring very important lessons into our lives.
Every seven years a theme dominates our lives that accompanies our evolution and we have the opportunity to learn, encompass and process that area of life. How we manage to do this, how we experience the period directly affects the aftermath as well as our life overall.
However, if we don’t have the opportunity to fully experience a topic, it will secretly bubble up in our subconscious and sooner or later manifest directly or indirectly in our lives.
Age 0 – 6 years.
The period of the first years of life where I only vaguely remember events. Thematically, this period is associated with security, anchoring oneself in existence. With our instinct. We are fully dependent on the care of others, ideally our two parents, of whom we become an extension. As children at this age, we need constant attention. Parents are literally our deity to us. However, when the attention doesn’t come, we are often looking for our survival strategies, looking for ways to draw attention to ourselves.
If trust is not built, it brings fear. If we don’t have the opportunity to be spontaneous, it slowly begins to build inner anger. There are many strategies for attracting attention. My favorite was to tighten up and be aloof, to “pout” and passively manipulate, but make it clear, “Here I am, notice me.” This strategy worked so well that I made it a lifelong unconscious game that has profoundly influenced my life.
At this age, I also became aware of the differences between boys and girls, looking for opportunities to explore them. Of course the popular game of “Show Me and I’ll Show You Too” found its way to me as well.
Age 7-13.
A period of discovering the world – connecting with same-sex peers. School came, it went easily and a period began where we as boys began to establish our positions. First it started with games, getting together in cliques. Also on the street and in various sports and leisure activities. The school started to divide us in gym class – which made our boyhood circles even more intertwined and in turn made the attraction of the opposite sex much more attractive.
School went easily and so I was able to explore different areas of life and look for what I would enjoy in life. Many thanks to my parents for not wanting to raise me to be a pianist, hockey player or any other …ist and I had the opportunity to experience this adolescence by cycling, in the woods and throwing clay with my friends with archetypes like Winetou and Old Shatterhand who was later complemented by Tarzan.
The breakthrough, however, was the discovery of sexual energy, masturbation and …… porn. I remember three other classmates and I staring in amazement as 10-year-olds at a porn magazine discovered somewhere in a closet under our parents’ clothes. Our jaws dropped. What followed was the discovery of masturbation and the first sexual experiences that, from a little boy’s point of view, remained unshared, hidden and misunderstood.
Age 14-20.
A big change came. A period of bonding with the opposite sex. A new world began to open up. To rebel against anything. Defining your world and proving things to yourself in unbelievable ways. Sports competitions in primary school in the first grade progressed to street fights, which although I always lost, the knowledge of the senselessness of physical violence has remained grafted into me to this day. Came the first cigarette, evenings spent outside in all weathers.
In seventh grade, although the then science teacher did give us 2 lessons on the genitals and their function, much to my disappointment, I was sick and absent from school. And so, unprepared and uninstructed, I staggered into the period when the field of interactions opened up between young maturing males and the powerfully appealing world of girls entering into their femininity and sexuality. The attraction was so strong that it seeped into every minute of life. The gradual falling in love with every female classmate during 7th and 8th grade was just irresistibly strong.
But school ended and I found myself in junior high. And in an all-boys group to boot. It had its undeniable advantages, we didn’t experience rivalry for our female classmates there and built a strong cohesion between us, but the world of the opposite sex became even more distant. Moreover, our female peers were attracted to the older ones for some unknown reason. So for a time, life outside school was filled with computer games and pornography. This time, however, the resources expanded and we began to experience, at least virtually, what is so natural to experience in reality. Connecting, discovering different energies. Discovering how each woman is different, unique, interesting… And most importantly, what is the secret that is much talked about, but even more silent. What is sex?
Yes we were taught about its reproductive function, but what about all the excitement around it, the showing off, the hunting sometimes ending with fights? It all started to revolve around one thing. Experience it. Well when it happened, expecting a miracle, I ended up with a feeling of dumbfounded amazement “This is it? My lack of education about sexuality and related realities plunged me into a period of several years of blindly groping in an unknown world.
Age 21 – 27 years.
A period of intimacy and searching for the love of life. Oh yes… Hollywood and fairy tales are full of stories of how two people meet and live together until they die. A beautiful vision, but no one has brought knowledge, guidance, or even a hint of how to live with someone so that the relationship, intimacy, and sex life will last in the manner of Hollywood and fairy tales for the ages.
My desire for intimacy and relationship (which by the way never lasted more than 3 years in one partnership) was strong but unfulfillable. There were very many beautiful moments, strong, deep but in the end every relationship I had fell apart. It was as if the unlived needs of puberty seeped into this period. As if the lack of experiencing the variety, the colour, the variation of what the world of polarities is all about and especially the irresistible pull of feminine energy. This theme kept coming into my life.
Age 28 – 35.
A period of creativity, self-realization. I managed to make a decent career. I experienced a lot of success backed by work often based on 16/7. 16 hours of work seven days a week. It provided my subsistence needs and housing. But there was still something missing in my life. By this time I had already had many difficult health issues and the hospital and contact with death showed me that life is about something different than what they show on TV. So I erased TV from my life and opened myself up to a new experience. And that was Tantra.
Tantra is mostly perceived in society as something about uninhibited sex, massages with a happy ending, or something like a “play party”. But it was a little different. I found myself at a weekend of Tantra massage for couples. From my perspective as a precocious teenager, I found myself in Paradise. Someone bring knowledge about the body? About sexual energy? About how to handle it? And moreover, not in theory, but in the form of an experience? Well I needed no more and it naturally resulted in a year of tantric training. Long story short. I found that Tantra, while incorporating sexuality into its teachings, goes far beyond it. Tantra has given me tools for living and most importantly, through experience and my own experience, answers to previously unanswered questions.
After a year deeply immersed in Tantra, I was truly happy that we had come to the end of the training. Yes it was powerful, deep, exploratory, exciting, but I didn’t want to see more Tantra in my life. That knowledge showed me that how I live, how I eat, how I work, where I live… all of that needs change and transformation. Well, I wasn’t ready for that change.
I lasted about 9 months in my established way of life, but I couldn’t go on any longer. I came back and knowing that I couldn’t do it all at once but step by step I would give it a go and started bringing the Tantric teachings into every dimension of my life. It shot my career to an international level, I changed housing and moved from the bustling city to the quiet countryside. But most importantly, Tantra helped me to transform my adolescent underdevelopment from 14 – 20 in a safe way. Slowly my rebirth began.
Age 36-41 years.
This period is associated with the awakening to the deeper essence of our being. The turbulence of the previous three cycles has settled down and the world of meditation has opened up to me, and for perhaps the first time in my entire life I have begun to see myself as a priority. Tantra became an integral part of my existence and I began to ask myself all those age-old unanswered questions about the nature of being and existence. I discovered the divine essence within myself and began to recognise that same divinity in every single person. Knowing, how we are powerfully interconnected not just as humans but as a whole, animals, plants, the whole planet, was one of the results of Tantric practice. I took full responsibility for my life and how I live it and how it affects those around me.
Meditation, conscious work with sexual energy penetrated my intimate life. And most importantly, I stopped seeing women as prey, as a goal to be achieved. Awareness of the diversity and knowledge of female sexuality, which is completely different from the male sexuality that I am familiar with, brought a great liberation and I finally had the feeling that it was possible to build a relationship, that would be built on different foundations. On truth and love.
Age 42-48.
The period of the last life cycle. A period of opening to the highest life principle. The meaning of life and our journey. The period of integration of the previous six cycles.
It brought me answers to most of my unanswered questions. Through a severe injury, a broken leg, I had the opportunity to pause, realize the connections and feel the love. To feel the perception of the higher principle of life as a great mystery, where every other moment is an entry into the unknown. Where the only certainty is change. Where everything we do affects the whole universe. With this knowledge, I let go of the work that sufficiently supported me and stopped working for the commercial sphere, the world of business and advertising that pushes on us mostly what cannot be sold otherwise. There came a powerful realization of how beautiful a world we could all build together with a new level of consciousness.
Age 49+
And what’s next? Right now, I stand on the threshold of both an ending and a new beginning. The circle of life cycles will spin again. The first cycle awaits me, but on a higher level of the spiral of life. I feel ready for a new adventure, new insights and most importantly knowing how these cycles work it brings a much deeper dimension. Such a little manual on life. And how I continue to create it as I flow through it, is one big mystery. There is still so much to discover.
Namaste.
author: Martin Ninad Vrabko