Kitabı oku: «Tantric Sex: Making love last»

Why Choose Tantra?

Tantra is a path of sensual celebration as a spiritual discipline, which uses the erotic charge of sex to help us to connect with the divine. It is this openness to sexuality as a means of spiritual development that has led to Tantra’s current popularity in the West – where we tend to focus on sex and self-development rather than the more radical message of transcendence.

The essence of Tantra is a relishing of earthly experience for the experience of divine bliss it can bring us. Sexual pleasure is used as a gateway to divine bliss, and sexual relationship is considered one of the fastest ways of reaching enlightenment. It’s certainly the most enjoyable!

If your passion for life has been stifled within a stagnating relationship, an over-focus on mundane necessities or too much work, Tantra can help you to regain your zest for life, as well as take your relationship to new levels of love and connection. Tantra is a potent means of transforming your relationship – although, if your relationship has cracks in it, putting more energy into it will only expose the weaknesses! Tantra can make your relationship more alive and vibrant, more fun and sensual, and move you out of stagnation by showing you where and how to put energy in. The starting point of this process is to reaffirm the place of spirit in your life, and embrace spirituality in your sexual relationship.

Essentially, Tantra encourages you to honour your relationship as a mirror of the divine relationship between Shakti and Shiva, the primordial couple in Hinduism, and to honour your partner as a mirror of yourself. Both you and your partner are divine, and seeing 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.

What is Tantra?

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.

ROOTS OF TANTRA

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 practices were drawn into a system around 1500 years ago, although its roots go back much further. It developed out of early matriarchal Indian culture, whose early goddess worship can be traced right through to today’s popular Shakti cults. Different groups arose around different teachers, and cultivated their own practices.

Tantra is best understood as a group of texts and practices geared towards direct experience, rather than a spiritual system. The texts, called Tantras, outline methods for self-realization. Many of the Sanskrit texts take the form of question and answer dialogues between divine lovers, in which ritual practices and philosophy are discussed. Like all mystical paths that emphasize inner development, many Tantric teachings are esoteric – their spiritual meanings obscure to the uninitiated.

These methods were handed down orally, and practised by teachers and their followers. Tantra wasn’t institutionalized, and there were no rules or hierarchies to limit access to the teachings. All that was required was the will to learn and the persistence needed to actually track down a teacher – since they didn’t advertise themselves.

With the development of the Vedic system, based on a group of texts called the Vedas, introduced by Aryan invaders and subsequently favoured by Hindus, Tantric practitioners were marginalized. Asceticism, or physical renunciation, gradually gained ascendancy amongst Indians. The philosophy of learning through suffering, or working through suffering and hardship in this lifetime in order to earn future rewards in the next was regarded by Tantra teachers as a misapprehension of reality. Tantra says you don’t need to suffer to attain enlightenment. Paradise is not in the next world, but here and now, if we can only see it.

Tantra developed partially in revolt against the proscriptive and caste-bound hierarchy of orthodox Hinduism. Some of the practices used by Tantrics were clearly conceived as blatant affronts to orthodox sensibilities. The central Tantric rite, called the five Ms, involved the use of five items considered taboo by Hindus. Mady (alcohol), mamsa (meat), matsya (fish), mudra (kidney beans – an aphrodisiac) and maithuna (ritual intercourse) are all used in Indian Tantric rituals as part of the core practice of invoking and identifying with divine Shakti energy. Tantric methods were concerned with challenging conventional taboos and restrictions – viewed as examples of limited, and limiting, thought patterns. Within Tantra, the process of achieving enlightenment was accelerated by confronting fixed ideas about caste, ritual cleanliness and gender. Taboos were broken as a way of developing non-judgement. These were ways of developing awareness that every experience, and every individual, was intrinsically pure. Rather than attempting to master the flesh by punishing it, or attempting to control sexual impulses through celibacy, sex and the body were used as a vehicle for spirituality.

Although the caste system has been in place for thousands of years in India, Tantra was always open to people of all castes. Tantric texts taught that all men and all women had equal capacities for enlightenment within themselves. In contrast to orthodox Hinduism, many early teachers were among the lower castes. Tantrics came from a wide range of backgrounds. Tantric meditations were designed to be adapted to any situation or occupation – a wine maker could distill bliss from the grapes of experience, while a weaver could weave passion using threads of freedom to produce a rug of enlightenment.

ACHIEVING BLISS

The goal of Tantra is to merge the phenomenal world with the divine, in one integrated, unified reality. Tantrics believe that in order to fully experience this reality all that is needed is a change of awareness. You are already divine, you just have to wake up to that fact. You don’t need to change anything about yourself or work to achieve anything – you are innately divine.

Robin, 37: I thought it was normal to lose interest in sex as you got older. But I’ve discovered that my sexuality had just been put in a box to be brought out now and again. From childhood I’d been indoctrinated with the idea that sex is something good girls shouldn’t do.

Now it feels like a natural part of life. I can experience things sexually and it doesn’t have to involve sex. Sexual energy is just like any other quality produced by the different centres in the body – like the heart – but we don’t allow the sexual feelings out. I realized it’s always been part of me. If I hadn’t learnt to hide it, it would be such a natural thing. Just to touch each other more. Sexual energy isn’t just about sex – it’s about aliveness.

On the workshop I got in touch with the more sensual side of sexuality – through touch and movement. We did some wild dancing, and afterwards standing still, someone touched me. Waves of intense sensation passed through my body. We don’t know half of what we can experience, if we only just allowed ourselves.

Like all spiritual paths, Tantra is a philosophy with core values, which can be a problem for Westerners who are attracted to the open sexuality and the aura of permissiveness around Tantric practices. It is a spiritual path, which means that the search for bliss is not about pleasure for its own sake, since that is always transient and ultimately unsatisfying. It is about using worldly experience as a gateway to another perspective on our existence. A perspective that allows us to realize that we are already in a state of bliss – if we can only open ourselves up to that awareness. Paradise is here and now.

Unlike religions that separate existence into the earthly and the divine, Tantrics believe that our own reality is inseparable from the divine, and that you can’t split them into two realms. Christian, Judaic, Islamic and Hindu traditions all split existence into a polarised duality of good and evil, heaven and hell, above and below. The path of Tantra is a direct path that cuts through dualism, not judging things as either good or bad.

We so often view our world as split into polar opposites, such as male/female, solar/lunar, heat/cold. Sexual union is considered to epitomize the essential unity of all things by the joining of male and female energies. Sexual ecstasy is the perfect example of the ways in which our experience of dualism can be transcended through experience – the experience of two bodies and souls merging into one.

Catherine, 43: I no longer feel Tantra is something I need to do with my partner, or that it’s just through sex. Ecstasy is very simple. It’s not that intense, cathartic experience people think of, it’s something very simple.

Ecstasy feels cool and still to me, and I can access it easily. I get into very ecstatic states through dancing, through pleasuring myself, or through simply looking at a flower. It’s more a state of being. I feel it’s about relaxing and opening up to that life force, that sexual energy.

It’s a feeling of being at one with myself, and very much in my body. It’s a sense of aliveness in my body. I can feel energy streaming inside me, little pulsations here and there. There’s a warm feeling around my heart, a free and open feeling in my chest, and in my mind – the area around my third eye.

I find I’m accessing intuition more and more, and opening up to inspiration. There’s a sense of unflappability, which comes from a deep sense of trust that I’ll be able to deal with whatever comes my way. At the same time I’m much clearer about what I choose to do, how I choose to do it, and where I’m coming from in making that choice. I don’t have to worry around in my head wondering what’s right for me, I know it. Tantra has changed the way I am in life. I won’t agree to do things that don’t feel good anymore, whether in relation to work, or other people. I also just get on with what needs to be done – the boring, mundane things – without struggling against them.

Life isn’t easier, but it’s better. It feels richer, more meaningful, and I feel more in tune with myself. I feel heartful – more compassionate, but also more discriminating. There’s a paradox between going with the flow, and somehow knowing that the flow is already chosen. All this is a conscious discipline. In every moment I can choose whether to deal with things in the old way, or with the consciousness I’ve developed through Tantra.

All humans are divine, and it is the discovery of and identification with the divine essence within that inspires seekers to follow the Tantric path.

SHAKTI – THE FEMININE ENERGY

Hilary Spenceley, Tantra teacher: I love working with women, seeing the great healing that takes place with Tantra. I love seeing them step into their own unique beauty, which is totally independent of outside approval – that’s what we call the place of the Goddess.

Tantra celebrates sexuality as a path to ecstasy. Tantric couples consciously honour the powerful sexual charge of the connection between them, which Tantrics consider to be a manifestation of the primal energy of the universe, called Shakti. Shakti is considered to be especially concentrated in a woman, and for this reason women are particularly venerated. Shakti, the energy of creation, and Kundalini, the individual powerhouse of energy that we all possess, are both thought of as feminine – and sometimes described as one and the same Shakti-Kundalini. Kundalini is also referred to as our inner woman, regardless of our actual gender. Each woman is honoured as an embodiment of divine Shakti, and each man recognizes and honours the feminine energies contained within him: the Kundalini. Tantra regards the powerful Shakti energy as innate. It’s not something you need to build up or create, it’s something you merely need to uncover in order to access.

Tantras creation myth pictures the goddess Shakti making love with her consort Shiva. From this ecstatic union rains down a golden nectar which bathes the created world in bliss. Tantric writings describe the Hindu goddess Shakti as achieving seven peaks of ecstasy, each peak higher, stronger, and more powerful than the preceding one, until at the topmost she releases her nectar (female ejaculation). This nectar, amrita, is considered spiritual food for the universe, a pure joy, which radiates into the hearts of mortals.

Divine couple in yab-yom. The image of divine love-making evokes associations of unity and complementarity; two interdependent aspects of existence.

The Tantric concept of oneness with the divine is often shown as Shakti-Shiva together in sexual ecstasy, a unification of both energy and consciousness. This image of divine unification is mirrored in what happens during mortal conception. During love-making a spark of bliss unites with the female and male generative fluids, and then creates a body in which to experience the true nature of reality – which is bliss. Bliss stays in the heart of each individual throughout life. In Tantra, this bliss is most easily realized through making love just as the original Shakti and Shiva did.

As part of the Tantric idea that God is in everything and everybody, you are encouraged to recognize the God and Goddess within yourself and your partner. In Tantra, this is the goddess Shakti and the god Shiva. Tantra also embraces the alchemical idea that each of us has an inner man and an inner woman, and that our sexual partners are external reflections of this inner marriage. When we unite with our partner, we unite with the other half of ourselves, becoming whole.

In fact, Shakti is not so much a goddess, as the creative force behind existence, who manifests in different forms. That’s why she’s not depicted as a single deity, but as a number of goddesses who represent the various qualities of this primal energy. So the wide range of local goddesses and gods revered by the Indians can be considered different aspects of primordial Shakti energy. Shakti is as changeable as the phenomenal world she has brought into being:

 As the divine seductress who initiated the act of love-making responsible for creation, Shakti is represented as Mohini – the temptress.

 As the maternal principle, Shakti is represented as Lakshmi, depicted holding a lotus flower, symbol of spiritual development.

 In her creative aspect, Shakti is depicted as Saraswati, who plays a musical instrument called the vina, and is regarded as the patron of the 64 arts one should cultivate in life – especially the arts of love.

 As in the cycle of birth, death and rebirth, all Shakti brings into existence returns to its original essence. In her destructive aspect she is depicted as Kali, the sabre-rattling goddess who wears a necklace of human skulls. She is depicted dancing on the corpse of her lover, the god Shiva. Shiva is often described as the footstool, or mattress of Kali – and if she’s not dancing on him, she’s mounting the erect phallus which is the only thing that animates his corpse.

Shakti depicted as Mohini, the temptress.

Tantrics regard Shiva as a corpse without the energy of Shakti to bring him to life.

Shiva is the masculine equivalent of Shakti, the generic term for the male energy of consciousness, which needs Shakti to give him form. Shakti, the feminine creative energy is considered to be pure energy, and as pure energy is formless and flowing, she needs Shiva to give her consciousness. Each aspect complements and provides the identity for the other, as a means of becoming whole.

Shakti is often depicted dancing on her lover’s chest, showing that she is the active principle without which Shiva would be nothing – quite literally a corpse.

The kundalini energy is often depicted as a snake. In this popular image of Shiva, his personal kundalini energy has come to fruition at the crown of his head – the traditional site of his sexual union with Shakti.

Shakti is considered to be especially concentrated in a woman, and for this reason women are particularly venerated. The sexual energy is also thought of as Shakti energy, in both women and men.

Tantra is unique in that it celebrates the power of sexuality, acknowledged in many cultures as the creative force behind existence. As a spiritual path it embodies a feminine awareness, since the divine principle underlying reality is feminine in nature. Just as all of reality is a manifestation of the divine, so too are women and men the embodiment of divinity. Men as well as women are honoured as god-like manifestations of the divine. Tantra advocates gaining knowledge of the divine through practical experience. Ritual sexual practices are considered the key to balancing the polarity in women and men, by unifying female and male energies in the body and aligning them with the cosmos.

SACRED SEX

Learning Tantra involves learning the art of spiritualizing sexuality.

Simon, 33: I’ve learnt to really slow down in sex. I can choose to go for it, or to make love another way. There’s a choice about how to be. I spend hours making love, penetrating and then stopping to explore each other’s bodies and cuddling and talking. Sex is no longer a one-off thing where you go for it and stop when you ejaculate. Now I can choose whether to ejaculate or not, now it’s half and half. Tantric sex is more conscious. You’re more conscious of what you’re choosing to do, and conscious of exploring other things: exploring different feelings and physical sensations which you become aware of when you move away from bonking. For instance I hated being tickled, but now I love it.

John Hawken, Tantra teacher: In Tantric practice we learn to relax into excitement, especially with the pelvic floor muscle (love muscle or fire muscle) to allow the sexual excitement to spread, first of all from the genitals into the whole body, then beyond the limitations of the physical body into an expanded energy body, bringing us into connection and melting with our partner as the Other, and through them melting into the whole universe.

By consciously breathing the sexual energy into our higher energy centres, we can make love with our hearts and our spirits, celebrating sexual union as an all-embracing conscious experience of transcending aloneness into All-Oneness. On the level of pure energy, sexuality and spirituality become mutually completing aspects of our being.

Tantric practices involve a meeting on the sexual level. Sex is the beginning rather than the ultimate step in the journey you are taking together. Sexual practices are performed with consciousness of what you’re doing, and why. More important than what you’re doing is how you’re doing it, and the intention you have when you’re making love. Love-making with the intention of exploring real intimacy and connection with your beloved, and allowing yourself to see where that connection takes you, rather than limiting your focus to genital pleasure and orgasm, creates the right space.

Tantrics see sexual union as a means of achieving divine bliss. The pleasures of orgasm can be expanded into a whole body experience that links sex with your hearts and spirit. In developing the spiritual dimension of sex, you can enter the realm of divine ecstasy. You don’t need to believe in Tantric philosophy, or follow its precepts to the letter, all that is needed is the right intention.

Tantra is not just about sex, it’s about the free flow of energy within yourself, as well as with others. It’s more about this flow of energy than about sexual intercourse or fancy postures for love-making. The emphasis in Tantric love-making is on non-doing – relaxing into pleasurable experiences and the energy connection you have with your beloved, rather than trying to build excitement and make something specific happen (orgasm).

You can use tried and tested Tantric techniques to help you explore the connection between sex, heart and spirit. In ‘Tantric sex’, you focus on connecting genital sensations with the heart and the spirit, using breathing and meditation techniques, which connect up the energy centres in your body. Integrating the energy flow within yourself and with another expands your sexual experience. The exercises in the third and fourth part of this book lead to what SkyDancing teacher Margo Anand calls ‘riding the wave of bliss’ – divine sex.

The following is a list of key basic elements that Tantric techniques use to help transform sex into an experience of the divine, which will be developed in Part 3:

 Foreplay starts before you even touch each other.

 The creation of a ‘sacred space’ using subdued lighting, candles and essential oils in burners, and a tray of sensual foods and drinks to feed your partner.

 The creation of a deep heart connection by spending a long time gazing at each other, feeling a sense of connection and harmony between you.

 The sharing of exercises to ‘awaken the senses’: feeding your lover titbits, wafting perfumes or essential oils under their nose, and stroking their skin with feathers or fabrics like fur.

 Tantra involves the whole body – so sex isn’t just focused on your genitals.

 Focusing on the quality of sexual connection, not the quantity of sex.

 Taking time. Sex lasts much longer – instead of a few minutes the whole process lasts hours.

 Changing your orgasms from genital experiences to ‘whole body’ orgasms, where you feel energy rushing through your whole body.

 Breathing work: slowing down your breathing and harmonizing your breathing by breathing in and out together.

 Energizing the various energy centres in your body (see here), which is a practice of kundalini yoga, a type of Indian yoga.

 Imagining your breath is going right down to your pelvis, activating your sexual energy and building sexual fire. This is especially good for those who habitually suppress their sexual energy.

 Linking up the sexual energy in your pelvis, with your heart centre (over your heart) to get in touch with your loving feelings, and your third eye area (between brows) which is the energy centre (see here) related to your spiritual vision.

 Transcending the ego-bound aspects of your relationship, by focusing on what is essentially beautiful about the other person.

 Creating a convergence of breath and life-force through the subtle energy exchange taking place, in which the Shakti and Shiva principles unite within themselves and with each other.

According to Barry Long, on his Making Love tapes, the divine alchemy of sex cannot take place unless couples meet in deep love. If a man can open up to love and love his Shakti partner selflessly during love-making, he can express sufficient love in his body to reach the spiritual part of her.

This is how he can connect with the divine energies at her deepest centre. To be able to love woman this deeply is the masculinity man has lost. This is the conscious awareness, which Tantrics would call Shiva energy, that men have lost in this age of commitment phobia. To fully become an integrated man, a man has to be able to assimilate in his body the divine female energies a woman releases during love-making.

Woman cannot exchange her divine energies if neither she nor her lover is not yet integrated or fully aligned with love. The gap of unhappiness can only keep on growing.

Sex on the Tantric path is about exploring making love as the god and the goddess. You call them into your love-making and allow them to do with you as they will. It’s about getting out of the way and allowing yourself to be surprised at what emerges, rather than trying to make something happen. Here, the physical activity is directed by the energy between you, so that love-making becomes a natural flow that is entirely unselfconscious and innocent.

During ritual intercourse women are adored, the inner fire of kundalini is offered up, and the inner female and male principles are united.

THE TANTRIC ENERGY MAP

The key to understanding Tantra is understanding that we have a physical body and an energetic body. The energetic body is what animates our physical body, and permeates it. Sex is really an energetic meeting, a coming together of energy bodies as well as physical bodies. Tantrics visualize the powerhouse of our personal energy as a Kundalini snake, which lies coiled up in the base of the spine, waiting to be awakened and led up through the various energy centres in the body to the crown of the head. Preparation for Tantra involves focusing on this energy and drawing it up through the inner flute (central energy channel) in order to create powerful states of spiritual ecstasy.

Tantra doesn’t assume that the subtle body exists in the same way as our physical body: it seeks to actively create the energy body through practices. It doesn’t matter to the Tantric practitioner whether chakras, wheels of energy, actually exist or not, because in visualizing them, you are in a sense creating them. If they help with the process of attaining a blissful state of consciousness, that’s fine. Choosing to work with the energy body, as opposed to the more usual approach of experiencing sexuality as a purely physical activity, automatically allows you to transform physical experiences into spiritual reality.

CHAKRAS: WHEELS OF LIFE FORCE

Mavis, 30: Nearly four years ago I had what I later realized was a Kundalini experience. It spontaneously happened during a Chi Gong class, with someone who was teaching us beginners very advanced stuff. I felt as if something was crushing down on my back, along my whole spine, and as if it was shaking me. My body was really hot one minute, then really cold. For three days I couldn’t sleep, and after that I felt wonderful; I felt freed up, as if there were no boundaries between me and other people. I could look at people on the street and felt I could see into them, and I knew where their pain was. But it was very disorientating and everything felt blurred. My body and my mind were suddenly having to deal with a new reality, and these feelings kept coming back. I felt the Kundalini had opened me up, and there was no way of getting myself back together. The bodily sensations never stopped, but I can cope with them now, because Tantra has given me a framework for understanding them. Now I can see it’s just energy moving in me.

It is considered dangerous to awaken the Kundalini energy without preparing and purifying the body. Tantra is a path of fire, and the power of the Kundalini energy when it awakens can burn us. Traditionally purification is achieved through a vegetarian diet, yoga postures and breathwork. These practices are then developed through the recitation of sacred sounds (mantras) and meditative visualization.

Kundalini snake energy emanating from the yoni.

Energy moving along the sushumna, the central energy channel of the body, is thought to pass through different energy centres or chakras (literally ‘wheels’ of energy), each of which have different associated qualities. The energy of the root chakra, at the base of the spine is described as solar energy and associated with the colour red, while the energy of that at the brow is lunar, and associated with the colour white. In fact, the energy of different chakras alternates between solar and lunar. Part of the art of drawing energy up through the central channel is to unite solar and lunar energetic qualities.

The energy body has been documented over thousands of years. In Tantric philosophy the seven layers of cosmic energy are reflected in the seven energy centres in the body – the chakras:

1 Nestled at the base of the spine is a golden egg. Inside this egg is the first chakra, the muladhara. The muladhara (root support) is particularly important because the creative force of the cosmos, the Kundalini, lies sleeping here. Visualized as a serpent, she sleeps with her body coiled into three and a half coils. In this chakra, you are working on the awakening of awareness, by awakening the sleeping kundalini energy.

2 The second chakra, found in the belly below the navel, is called svadisthana, (abode of the self), and is associated with creativity and the fertility of the great mother goddesses. It is associated with desire and sexual desire, as well as the tattva, or principle, of taste – both physical and preferential. As this chakra awakens, you are working on discrimination.

3 The third chakra is called manipura, (to shine like a jewel). It is associated with the element fire and is located in the solar plexus. It is associated with the faculty of digestion, and in a broader sense, assimilation. In this chakra you are working on assimilation.

4 The fourth chakra, called anahata (without sound) is known as the heart chakra, because the heart rather than the head is considered the bridge between the body and consciousness. Energizing this centre leads to the harmonization of the other centres in the body. For this reason it is particularly important to awaken the heart. When the heart centre is awake it gives off a subtle vibration – the sound om, which is the sound of the creative energy of the void. In this chakra you are working on the ability to surrender.

5 In the throat region is the sixth chakra, called vissudha (purified), which is connected with the feminine power of creation. Known as the throat centre, it is connected with sound (mantras) and hearing, speech and silence, inhaling and exhaling, and the divine metabolism of Shiva and Shakti. This is the chakra in which you work on balance.

6 The brow centre is called ajna (command from above), and is represented by two lotus petals connected to a lunar disc, which is positioned to receive the nectar that drips down from the thousand-petal lotus at the crown of the head. It is thought to be the bridge between our higher mind and lower mind. It is the meeting place of the three main energetic channels, and is connected to the life-force. Situated in what we call the third eye, at the root of the nose, it has the function of psychic vision, or clairvoyance.

7 The crown centre is the seventh chakra, called the sahasrara, (thousand-spoked), and is located over the fontanel. It is usually depicted as a thousand-petal lotus, representing the full flowering of the subtle body into enlightenment. Tantric practitioners see this as the seat of the divine couple Shakti and Shiva, whose unification brings about a state of bliss and enlightenment.

Tantra conceptualizes personal Shakti power, or Kundalini, as lying latent at the base of the spine until activated by Tantric practices, when she arises up into the crown chakra and unites with Shiva.

The energy body has been documented over thousands of years. The body’s energy system is considered a microcosm of the macrocosm, which is the universe. In Tantric philosophy the seven layers of cosmic energy are reflected in the seven energy centres in the body – the chakras.

The symbol for the first chakra is a square (standing for the element earth) enclosed by four fiery red petals, inside which is a downward pointing triangle (symbolizing the vulva or yoni, the primordial fount of creation). Inside the yoni is a yoni-lingam (vulva and penis), around which the Kundalini snake is coiled, and which is covered by the crescent moon, (symbol of the divine source of all energy).

Yogis hold that the flow of energy upwards is blocked in a person in whom the Kundalini energy is still sleeping. The aim of Tantric yoga practices is to awaken this Kundalini-Shakti energy and to move it through the energetic blocks within the chakra system.

John Hawken, Tantra teacher: Tantra is about empowering yourself by rejecting external systems of ideas which tell you how you should be opening the heart. The key to real wisdom lies in your heart already. You are always in contact and in harmony with the whole – Tantra is about waking up to that knowledge. It doesn’t happen through the mind, but by building up your energy and opening the chakras.