Tantra is a way to explore our sexuality and unite with the divine. It’s not about achieving the big ‘O’ – it’s about connecting to to your sacred pleasure, power & divinity by understanding and exploring your body, expanding your connection with yourself and others, learning to be comfortable in expressing and owning your own pleasure, awakening dormant energy within you that allows for deep healing, sharing intimate moments of love-making sacredly and creating an overall sensuous journey of self-discovery.
Rooted in Hinduism and Buddhism, Tantra emerged in the 6th century A.D. as a mantra-based practice of ‘right-living.’ It taught balance between different spheres of our lives, such as physicality and spirituality as well as individual needs with collective gains. Over the centuries, it’s evolved into a practice to deepen intimacy, pleasure, and divine connection through harnessing sexual energy.
Tantra is more than orgasmic sensation, it’s a way to divine union
Tantra helps couples rediscover their sexual exchanges as soul-merging opportunities. Together, sexual partners can learn to harness both theirs and their partner’s sexual energy for their mutual benefit – allowing them to climb to ecstatically higher heights than either could alone.
Tantra enables us to connect spiritually with ourselves on a much more profound level than before, creating incredibly powerful experiences of emotional bliss and physical ecstasy.
Beginner/advanced tantric practices:
If you are just getting started with this practice, start with your own body. Take time to become present. Feel your body and then touch your body. Explore and discover what feels good.
In partnership, begin with eye-gazing, which initiates deep connection. Then add some slow sensuous touch, exploring where you find and feel pleasure without the goal to reach orgasm.
- Feel your partner’s energy.
- Breathe together.
- Take time to explore your partner’s body with a light and loving touch.
The Evolution of Tantra: From Ancient Roots to Modern Practice
Pierre Bernard and the now-infamous Osho imported this esoteric spirituality into the West as a sexual practice. Osho’s practice incorporated breath work, yoga, bio-energy, and massage to harness the power of sexual energy for self-actualization. Often called Neo-Tantra, Osho’s version of tantra elevated sex as a sacred practice, and liberated it from religious shame.
Neo-Tantra offers energetic regeneration and self-mastery with heightened pleasure. By shining a light onto their darker shadows while creating space for the love that resides within all of us, Neo-Tantra offers experiences of profound control over those energy points in our physical and energetic bodies that gives us access to a more pleasurable way of living. It helps practitioners reconnect with their innermost truth – physically, emotionally, spiritually and energetically – diving deep into the sacred realms of mind, body, heart and soul. Neo-Tantra celebrates the shared exploration of deepened intimacy through sensory awareness and deeply connecting with oneself, one’s partner, and the universe around us.
In Neo-Tantric theory, sexual energy and spiritual connection are one; sexual energy is viewed as a conduit for chi, or life force energy, while kundalini, the dormant sexual energy found in the base of the spine, is thought to be the key to unlocking higher states of consciousness.
More resources on tantra:
If you want more information before jumping in, we recommend starting with Margot Anand’s “The Art of Sexual Ecstasy.” There are also many great tantra events, workshops, classes , and retreats.
