Tantra is the art and science of living consciously and joyously. It teaches to fully accept and expand sexual pleasure as a gift and celebrate it to go deeper into love.
Most people’s perception of Tantra is limited to controlling sex so you can have it for hours and hours in strange positions. Tantra is much more than that. It includes 64 arts that support you to be the most sensitive and accomplished lover of life and of another person. It includes the art of understanding the energy flow, of communicating deeply from your feelings, the art of romance, of setting up a root that will encourage you to create a mood that takes you higher into your fullest potential of vitality and passion, and more….
l embraced Tantra fully and I teach it passionately because it has helped me to free myself from limiting emotional conclusions about sexuality and to accept on all levels of my being that sex is a powerful force that amplifies any intention I hold. So if you intend to increase your love vitality or abundance your sexual _expression is doing that. If you have the intention of connecting deeply with another and experiencing bliss together, sexuality becomes a very high _expression of love and learning to become the best lover you can becomes very important. Tantra encourages you to become the ultimate lover on all levels.
Tantra is a path that successfully unites sexuality with spirituality. It is the only spiritual approach I know that faces the sexual challenges directly and teaches how to use sex in a safe, powerful way. It is a path to enlightenment, which can be reached by transcending our dualistic state of mind. Often we think one thing and feel another. Tantra uses our natural sexual energy to heal the split between body and spirit, between thinking and feeling and helps you feel whole and fulfilled.
It is not about how many hours you spend on sexual activities, although it helps with that too if you so desire. Tantra guides you to generate, heighten and transform sexual energy to more subtle energies as you channel it up to a higher energy centre in the body (chakras). To transform this powerful energy, you can create a new you.
Chakras are wheels of energy. The Hindu tradition believes that seven energy wheels need to spin freely to be fully healthy and move the maximum amount of energy. The first chakra is situated at the base of our spine. It connects us with earth and when it is open and balanced we feel safe. The second chakra is about sex, fluidity, and juiciness, the third –the solar plexus – is about the expression of willpower and self-esteem, the fourth –at the heart level –is about love and compassion, the fifth–at the throat level — is about free and honest communication, the sixth –at the forehead level – is about intuition and the seventh– in the middle of the brain –is about connection with the part of us that is beyond our personality and reaches into the spirit.
The idea of Tantra is to balance these energy centres and to raise the vibrations of pleasure from the first and second chakras to the higher chakras to express self-esteem, love, honest communication, intuition, and finally to merge with your ultimate transcendent reality. It transforms the sexual energy that is coiled in the lower chakras into love and light.
Tantra is also a path to complete intimacy with oneself and with another being. Many find it easier to be physically intimate than to share true emotional intimacy. We hold back on letting others see us as we are, especially the parts of us that we judge as bad. Many are more interested in learning love-making techniques, which Tantra offers in abundance than in committing to emotional and spiritual intimacy and absolute honesty with a partner. It seems logical that, to achieve the highest state of union with All That Is, we must first be willing to be fully open with at least one human being.
Furthermore, even on a less cosmic level, to fully heal ourselves from the shame of our imperfect state of being human, we long for a person who loves us as we are. However, to be able to allow that love to penetrate us and heal us, we must first be willing to fully accept ourselves with all our desirable and undesirable qualities.
Tantra gives us plenty of suggestions about how self-acceptance can be reached and guides us gently to go beyond self-acceptance to honour our true God self.
Sex is very important in our lives. It is a powerful creative force and it leads to orgasm. Orgasm is probably the closest some of us get to the experience of enlightenment. For a more- -or-less brief moment, we get to forget ourselves, our problems, our egos, and just be with pure energy, with God.
Tantra guides you gradually to lengthen the peak experience of sexual ecstasy so that, in a way, we get to “hang out” with God longer. This expands our consciousness so that, when you come down to the dualistic plane, you see yourself and life in a new way. You can experience the love that supports the whole cosmos. It is awesome.
When I started playing with the idea of making Tantra my path, I was surprised to notice my resistance to practising it, finding “plausible” excuses not to find time for it. I remember feeling a similar resistance to my meditation practices. My resistance was confusing to me because here I had found a path that allowed me to use pleasure to reach God and I was avoiding it. Why? After some inner search, I realized that this pleasure was different from the previously felt pleasure, which was mixed with pain and guilt. This, however, was pure pleasure, and I did not know how to be with it. Slowly, with a lot of patience and practice, I have started to build up my capacity to sustain pure pleasure. I also had to overcome the voice of my internalized mother, who condemned me for feeling sexual pleasure in the first place.
With practice, I was able to relax my body while being at the same time in a highly aroused state. Somehow these two states are not mutually exclusive, as one might be tempted to think. In Tantra, one can relax because there is no issue of performance. The process itself is the reward. Only through being fully in the process can one reach the highest orgasm.
To do Tantra love, it takes the willingness to become the other. Using the breath to go back and forth between you and the other until you forget who you are and relax into just being. This moment of transcending your personality is very energizing for both partners and harmonizes the relationship.
Any tantric love session starts with preparing with care a sacred space for the encounter and honouring the partner with a heart salutation. This opens you up to new feelings of relaxation, self-acceptance, and self-esteem. Then you proceed by looking lovingly into each other’s eyes and doing some breathing together to harmonize your energies. Now you are ready to make any communication you have in your heart at that moment. You can confide some of your fears, and you can express how much you love your partner, both communications being equally important. Tantra love is based on total honesty. Any secret, anything withheld, any mind stuff you keep from the other, becomes a wall that separates you. So before you exchange sexual energy, you make a declaration of the intention to honour the spark of God in the other and put on the altar as an offer to the fire of love anything that isn’t love, such as jealousy, manipulation, anger, dishonesty and other love-denying emotions. Thus, detached from such lower energies, you get to experience the purity of sex. At this level, you exchange subtle energies of acceptance, love, and light.
The four keys to tantric love are intention, breathing, movement and sound. They are used to harmonize your inner man and your inner woman and to transform your body into a stream of vibrating energy that cleanses all the built-up tensions, turning them into highly pleasurable sensations. By staying relaxed in states of high arousal, you permit orgasmic energy to flow through your whole body. Then you can channel orgasmic energy up the chakras toward the brain, where it can be experienced as ecstasy.
Do you necessarily need a partner for Tantra love? No. Many tantric exercises can be done alone. Learning to love and honour your own body is an important step toward the tantric experience with a partner.