is crucial to sexual satisfaction. For men, learning to defer gratification develops the potential for much greater orgasmic pleasure.
Step 7 makes sex sacred by incorporating the powerful Tantric techniques of breathing and visualization to move energy through your being during lovemaking. Together, you create a joint body of energy united in sexual bliss – an experience that opens you to the Tantric awareness that bliss is the nature of life itself.
What is Tantric meditation?
In Eastern traditions, meditation is seen as the royal road to nurturing the soul. The secret wisdom of Tantra shows you how to forge a meditative approach to sex, which gives it transcendent power. Soulful sex becomes a pathway to direct experience of the divine realm of love, which Tantra describes as joyful bliss. In weaving the lover’s path with your partner, you make connections between heart, spirit and body to bring the spiritual dimension firmly into your life.
You unite your two beings in divine love and align this love with the natural flow of love in the universe during lovemaking.
Tantric meditation induces a state of deep, dynamic relaxation in which you remain very engaged with the world around you. Relaxation involves letting go of struggle in life and surrendering to the flow of energy through your being. In dynamic relaxation, you recover a life-affirming attitude – joy, spontaneity and the sensual pleasure of life.
This dynamic state is also passionate; it’s full of lust for life and love for others, a deep expression of your core eroticism rather than a superficial sexual orientation. It is not about tarting up your relationship with exotic stimulation, but about going more deeply into the loving connection that already exists. As you tune into your partner, so your relationship deepens. You affirm your lover’s inner beauty by loving them as much as yourself. Through Tantric meditation, you also rediscover the innocence and playfulness in your partnership.
Develop awareness
Meditation is the heart of the Tantric journey. Through meditation you become sensitive to the movements of energy in your own body and learn to see others as energy-beings. Ultimately, the awareness that grows through meditation, visualization and energy practices enables you to feel the vast energy flow that physicists describe as our fundamental reality. Through surrendering the belief that you are separate from other living beings, you can join in the dance of creation.
Take time every day to meditate. Meditation can be described as letting ‘doing’ fall away. One of the key practices that this book constantly emphasizes is simply paying full attention to whatever is occurring in the present moment. (That is why Tantric Secrets doesn’t encourage sexual fantasies that take your concentration away from your partner and from what is happening between you.) Paying careful attention makes you more sensitive in your interactions and deepens the connections between you and your deeper self, as well as with others. Being more alive to your own experience helps you to fully immerse yourself in it, rather than stand outside your own life as a detached observer.
Become a witness
Meditation also encourages you to become more of a witness to your own life, so that you can perceive more clearly what is happening to you at the same time as being absorbed in it. As a witness to your own life you develop insight into how you relate, rather than hold yourself back from others because of a critical or judgmental attitude. In order to let go of such attitudes you need to open up to the transpersonal nature of love, which is unconditional. Let love flow through you.
Get closer to your partner
To create a nurturing and loving environment twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, try to make time to touch base with your inner self each day through meditation or yoga. These practices help you to connect with your partner and activate your loving energy.
Many of us feel the need for greater closeness, yet with our busy lives we can find it almost impossible to dedicate time to relate with the degree of attention that real communication requires. Yet you can make time – it is the degree of connection with each other that is important, rather than the length of time spent together.
You can also make time by letting go of a sense of hurry; be fully present and emotionally available in the here and now. Reluctance to make time for closeness can arise from a feeling of resistance or fear about intimacy. This book offers techniques for breaking down defences against closeness and going to the heart of intimacy, both sexually and emotionally.
Think of a period in your life when the world sparkled with promise, suffused with sensuality. Do you recall the delicious rush of anticipation you felt on seeing your lover walk towards you, feeling the warm thrill of their touch on your arm, or the elation of gazing directly into their eyes? If your erotic aliveness is more or less shut down, such sensations may only come in unexpected moments, when you’re startled by undercurrents in a friendship or with a stranger. The tingling promise of eroticism is a reminder of our true nature, filling us with a surge of energy and delight – the original meaning of the word lust. You can allow this erotic electricity to remain subdued, or you can consciously choose to ignite it, both alone and with your partner.
A Tantric model for loving
Tantra has a sophisticated concept of love. In Western culture, love is often clichéd as romantic attraction built on fantasies and projections. In Tantra, you use love to connect with the essence of your partner.
A Tantric model has a lot to teach us about relationships. It sees relationships as a flow of energy and emotions as a form of energy. This approach offers you a radically different way of dealing with difficult emotions in your relationship. Tantra says that you are not your emotions or your mind – this is your false self. You are really an energy-field composed of dancing atoms. This understanding encourages you to drop your false self, no longer identifying yourself as the sum total of all your problems and emotions. As these negativities fall away, your true nature is revealed and you regain your natural state of presence, or ‘being’. You can fully engage in the moment, rather than be withdrawn or preoccupied with old hurts, disappointments or insecurities that sap your energy. Just as children drop the past as soon as it is over and deal with what is right in front of them, you too can relearn the ability to constantly let go.
By letting go of inappropriate emotions and impossible expectations, we accept that we cannot determine our relationships with other people. Relationships are mysterious and ultimately unknowable. If you surrender to the greater power of the universe that is glimpsed in the heart of this mystery, you open your hearts to each other.
Tantra is all about dissolving your ego, learning to be receptive, opening your heart – letting love dissolve any emotional negativity – and seeing the divine in every aspect of your life, including the divinity in your partner. It’s about seeing the nature of the world as love, and making your relationship central to your life.
Body knowledge
A great way to side-step all the emotional problems that a relationship often activates is to encourage the wisdom of your body, allowing yourself to feel love and express it physically.
Traditional spiritual paths advocate cutting off from the body and disowning bodily experience, but Tantra regards your body as the gateway to your deepest self. A Tantric perspective invites you to abandon yourself to life, to enjoy your body and take pleasure in daily life. This means acknowledging the beauty of your sensory experience – attuning to nature,
