each other in this light helps you move out of petty squabbles and power struggles into affirming the fundamental strength of your inter-connection.
Tantra sees your connection as a meeting of divine energies, rather than of two ego-bound psyches destined to act out past patterns and ways of relating that stem from your family background. A psychotherapy-based way of looking at relationships can be of limited use, and Tantra replaces it with a more spiritual model. It teaches you how to unlock the energies within yourself and to use them to transform your experience of the world into one of bliss.
This involves becoming more aware of how your attitudes determine the way you experience your own reality, and how your level of awareness affects the quality of your relationships with others.
A strong sense of something missing is often what drives both women and men to explore other approaches to sexuality. The awareness of all the possibilities, all the different levels of experience we could have in love-making, and the knowledge that exquisite, divine sexual feelings are left untapped, are what brings us to Tantra. In orgasm we have a glimpse of eternity; letting go into something far bigger and more spacious than our orgasmic gratification. It’s this experience of something vaster that keeps us fixated on sex, striving to repeat the experience. Tantra is the practice that allows you to attain that state without immediately losing it again. It allows you to maintain and extend it.
According to self-styled New Age guru, Barry Long, women and men are prevented from making love to our full potential, because we have not learnt how to make love with consciousness. Loving consciously involves Shiva (the man) receiving the divine energies of Shakti (the woman) in the act of love-making. Tantra teaches ways to make lovemaking more aware, and techniques for assimilating the energies of your partner in love-making.
Tantra has become increasingly popular in the Western world in recent years as we seek to address this underlying dissatisfaction with our intimate relationships, in spite of the hype about how much more sexual satisfaction we experience post the 60s sexual revolution. Survey after survey shows that we are not happier with our sex lives, nor our relationships, and Tantra offers us methods to work on these problems in a positive way.
Tantra workshops attract an equal number of men and women from a whole range of backgrounds. They tend to be in their thirties, forties and fifties, coming to Tantra as a result of the realization that the area of relationship, and sexual relating in particular, needs more attention.
Tantra is not a no-holds-barred excuse for sexual experimentation – it assumes that any work on sexual development is grounded in an egalitarian, committed and loving relationship. Within a relationship with a strong heart connection you can do the work of transforming sexuality into a more integrated way of being.
Tantra changes one’s view of relationships. Couples become less dependent, jealous or neurotic. They tend to be more harmonious, fun and energy-filled. In the way of Tantra, you also discover that the relationship you seek outside is already within you. You simply need to learn about and cultivate the Tantric vision: a vital, bliss-filled approach to sex, love and life in general.
Sylvie, 50: I have to say no to casual sex now, even if I’m feeling turned on. I know that sex won’t be satisfying because anyone who is not initiated into Tantra can’t meet me at the level I can meet them. Every love-making is an experience of the sacred marriage for me – a deep connection of all the chakras. It helps for me to connect when I have my eyes open, when I can really look at my lover and be looked at.
When I experience love-making to that degree of merging I find it very difficult to separate afterwards. It’s difficult to share these experiences with people who don’t see love-making in this way. I call it paradise lost, when I’m aware of the many hours in my life when I feel unmet and as if I’m not connecting with people. Most of the time I have to sit in silence about my experience.
Tony 52: My sexuality has changed. I’m more relaxed and I have no sense of needing to achieve something. I’m not striving to make something happen anymore in my love-making. We’ve experimented with vetoing orgasms, both of ours and just mine. These days we have fewer orgasms, and we can stay in that feeling of excitement. Going to work with that feeling of excitement after love-making means that I feel alive. People at work comment on how good I look. I feel more open and that encourages others to be open. I find it easier to listen without being judgmental.
I also find I don’t have to give advice – but if people do ask me my opinion, I’m more creative in thinking about solutions. I have more of a sense of humour, and generally have more fun. I can see the funny side of things as well as being serious – and that helps defuse situations I would have found embarrassing. This is my goal in working with Tantra over a period of time – to incorporate it more and more into my daily life. To have that sense of ease and flowingness in whatever I am doing. It’s a combination of being more alive and full of energy, but being relaxed at the same time.
Tantra literally means a tool for expansion. In spite of the Eastern terminology, Tantra is an easy concept to grasp. At its heart is the knowledge that a powerful current of energy flows through us all, which needs to be harmonized.
The word tan translates as expansion and tra means tool. Tantras, the texts outlining Tantric practices, are literally tools for expansion. Tantra involves expansion on an energetic, psychological and physical level, and the teachings have been used for thousands of years as a tool to expand the boundaries of consciousness. Like all Hindu paths, it is primarily concerned with self-realization and enlightenment. Not through the usual route of suppressing desire and renouncing worldliness, but through harnessing the potency of desire, and pursuing bliss here and now. Tantra aims to harmonize life energies and resolve contradictions and conflicts in order to experience life as a flow of intense energy.
The word also connotes embracing. Tantra involves embracing all aspects of yourself. As long as you split off aspects of yourself that you don’t like and hold them at a distance, you have no chance to integrate them and no chance of achieving wholeness. It is a heart-centred path, and invites its followers to embrace all of creation, in the name of love. You and your partner are both manifestations of love.
Tantra aims at total surrender – letting go of mental, emotional and cultural conditioning – so that universal life energy can flow through us as effortlessly as a stream. It’s finding our way back to our existential roots, letting go into a sense of wonder and oneness with the universe, which spiritual teachers of all paths describe simply as love. On a more prosaic level, Tantric techniques aim to rekindle a lust for life through encouraging a more vibrant sense of self. Tantra is not a matter of rules and rituals: although it has its fair share of these, they are just structures to enable us to access what’s really important – the direct experience of life.
The essence of Tantra is a non-hierarchical, non-judgmental, all-accepting approach toward experience. Tantra is an esoteric and magical tradition, which views everything that exists as part of the spiritual realm. In the words of the gnostic Hermes Trigemestus ‘as above, so below’. The Tantric approach to the interconnectedness of everything is reflected in the saying ‘everything is the essence of everything else’.
The roots of Tantra are somewhere in the pre-history of Indian religions: Hinduism, Buddhism and also Jainism. Tantric
