About Tamal Q'enti
Bhakta | Merlin | Anamchara
We have so much intimately in common.
Like you, I am a child of the Great Spirit and Nature; a beautiful third thing in the middle; a passionate occurrence within the shoreless mystery of being.
And we are both shaped by where we’re coming from, our aches and longings, the relations we hold close, and above all by the Bigger Story our little one is unfolding inside of. Who we are is what we are for - as in: ‘dedicated to’ and also ‘designed to accomplish’ within our ecosystem.
Ultimately, our identity is lit up by the luminous Divine Image we each cherish at the Center of it all, which reflects its life-giving brilliance into the world by agency of our mature gifts of service.
Devotion is at the Sacred Heart of selfhood, and our two arms of Creativity and Compassion extend out from there. Personally, I live for Sophianic Renaissance and nitya-prema-dharma-pratibodhana. That is: revival of feminine ways of knowing (seating Sophia alongside her beloved Logos, to guide us in polarity) and expanding the ‘permaculture’ of divine Love. I live also for your Gift’s fruition, passionately invested in the alchemic gestation and emergence of your golden self.
I am a Bhakta, Merlin, and Anamchara. Bhakti (devotion) is first for me; loving my own God is my Center and essence of being. I also happen to have a hefty toolkit of mystic arts and sciences on hand for forging conscious leaders to their best potential, as the Merlins of olde did. And it is my honor to serve as an Anamchara or ‘soul friend’ - a spiritual advisor and private trainer for the ecstatic, internal life of Prayer.
Where I am coming from...
My youth was aquatic, arboreal, and artistic. I was born on the lap of the warm green Ocean, swimming before I could walk and sailing before I could drive. Ashore, I lay high in the breezy canopy of coastal Banyans like an ocelot, my spots made of dappled sunlight on bare skin. It was easy to hide myself in plain sight because no one looks up. For a pensive climber there is private solace everywhere amidst the urban bustle of Miami, the capital city of tropical botany.
Wet clusters of gardenia and jasmine made the evening air tipsy and flirtatious after summer storms passed over. Warm rain flooded streets poured off into the night-black canals, raising great symphonies of frogs whose songs were aural galaxies in the fragrant dark. I painted all night by the cranked-open window, smelling and listening, so eager for the hypnotic glory of it all to possess me and divulge its secret form across my canvas.
In my motherland I gorged endlessly on fruits off the branch; filled whole car trunks with scavenged mangoes; suffered crime; lost homes and schools to hurricanes; cast vibrant graffiti murals across rooftops and abandoned buildings; slept well to the sound of palm fronds softly rustling, or halyards ringing on masts, or thunder shaking the floorboards loose… and found God out alone in a canoe under a falling star.
At 19 I moved to the Pacific Northwest Rainforest and then kept moving all over the world. My life has been a long pilgrimage of shedding skins; I feel like I’ve been alive for a hundred years already. I was a wilderness guide in the Idaho desert, a monk in India for over a decade, made about 20 world tours teaching bhakti-yoga, trained in Shamanism full time for four years in the Peruvian Andes, and now looped around back to my own green Florida.
Along the way, by extreme fortune I was able to live with and learn from wonderful elders whose influence forged the bones of my spiritual identity. Besides carrying the Sacred Fire of Shamanism, I also have mystic baptism in the lineage of the Sacred Hearts of Christ & Mary, and Dzogchen transmission from Chogyal Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche. The flowering crown on top is Bhakti-yoga initiation from my root Master, Srila Bhaktivedanta Narayan Gosvami, the crest jewel among storyteller-saints and fearless champion of the Goddess’ revival.
It has been a great work to reconcile all that, to tell the truth. Four very powerful currents coming in from four directions and only one heart to hold it. Fate gave me the task of evolving a cohesive identity inside of these four traditions, and it was my blessing and burden - inspiring, exhausting, healing, wounding, mysterious. Now after almost thirty years in this rhapsodic path I feel very comfortably crystalized.
My reconciliation is totemic rather than syncretic [see School / Cosmovision]. Rather than a pasty Frankenstein of dissonant philosophies, my View accommodates a symbiotic ecosystem of distinct species of holiness. These ancestral traditions live together in me and collaborate richly to feed Life, and especially to nourish sacred Individuation. They are a braided rainbow of Wisdom that encircles me and each friend I am blessed to serve.
And this integral Wisdom rests upon a deeply sensual reverence for the embodied present, like a fragrant flower garland draped over sun-warmed shoulders; the sudden visit of a hummingbird, breeze of its wings on your brow; a smile across the Fire at midnight that tells everything you needed to hear growing up and how to die happy, too… A winged serpent, a deer-horned sage - the Wisdom that I serve is a Medicine of Wholeness. It is to live well now and graduate with honors into Eternity.
I do this so that when I die I may retire peacefully knowing that I did not dissociate from the fact of suffering nor clamored against it like a juvenile, but lived bravely as a spiritual adult and answered the task whole-heartedly. I want to help others live and die with that deserved self-respect too—solacing in the fact that we are right in our relationship with Nature and Spirit; that we ornament the world with beauty, genius, and courage; that our presence on this Earth feeds Life far more than it consumes.
I want to stand proud with others whom I am also proud of, knowing together that we are fully showing up to the mystery and miracle of being, wielding our free will with the finest purposes, accomplishing the design of Life. After decades of refining the strategy for facilitating this, I have a good idea what to do and how to do it.
As an eager assistant to the great powers of Wisdom & Compassion, I endeavor to bring societal renewal through the formation of empowered individuals and circles - adulted and united cultural leaders, healers, teachers and creatives. I teach a sacred path that restores wholeness and ripens the necessary Gift that only you can bring forth.
This work is an invocation of Sophianic Renaissance: a return to sacred feminine wisdom, to ceremonial culture, to healthy polarity and holy wholeness.
It is to give people the chance to grow into true adulthood—to become empowered leaders, healers, and creators. To give our children access to sacred culture and rites of passage. To make our Ancestors proud. To win the trust and blessing of Nature. To melt the heart of God. To Self-realize and embody Grace.
This is a Lodge for those called to repair the rupture with Nature, bring forth their Gift to Humanity, and actualize Eternal identity.
