ABOUT
Me
Hi, I’m Jamie Ananda McConochie
I’m a spiritual life coach, blogger, and podcaster.
My passion is living a spiritual life, following the path of Tantra, and universal or multi-faith spirituality.
Spirituality has always been my life, since around the age of 7 years old.
By my teens I was deep into the study of yoga philosophy, and went on to travel around India in search of answers to life’s big questions.
I studied psychology at university, as a way of understanding myself and others.
After university, I met my Guru and became a Swami (a hindu monk) in his monastery, taking the spiritual name Ananda (bliss).
I lived as a monk there for 11 years. That is where I really established my connection with the Divine, and learnt many things from my Guru about true spirituality.
When I felt a calling to follow my path in the outside world, I left the monastery and my spiritual family with their blessing.
In this crazy mad jungle of a world I struggled to keep my inner centre. I had a really hard time living my spiritual purpose. I had to learn how to survive, how to make money, how to fall in love, how to live, with all the crazy shit that happens out here.
I trained as a life coach, and also separately as an English teacher, both professions which I still have ongoing.
My spiritual path really became clear when I discovered Tantra.
My background as a monk had trained me in spiritual practice, and to some extent, Tantric practice. Although my Guru wasn’t ostensibly a Tantra teacher, as monks we learned about some Tantric principles for channelling sexual energy, awakening Kundalini, and connecting with the Divine.
At the time I had no idea what Tantra was, as we didn’t use that terminology.
In the outside world, I found it much harder to balance my spiritual practice with my sexual desires. I have always been a very sensual man with a strong sex drive… something that is actually quite typical for spiritual aspirants, due to the awakened Kundalini.
But I found that many of techniques that had worked in the monastery were much more difficult out here in the outside world.
So my sexuality and spirituality were very disconnected, and caused me quite some inner conflict.
When I came across Tantra, I realised that this was the ideal path for me to bring these two aspects of myself together in harmony and balance.
The more I learned and practiced with Tantra, the more integrated and balanced I became.
As humans we have the capacity to experience the highest states of spiritual consciousness, and this is reflected in the increased awakening of the human race occurring in this age.
On the other hand we still have a physical body. And with this body we have the opportunity to enjoy our desires, sensations, and feelings.
The Tantric path gives us the possibility of integrating these two facets together, free from guilt or shame. Through Tantra we can heal the traumas of our past, and use the power of our sexual and sensual energies to expand our spiritual consciousness into dimensions that we’ve never dreamed of.