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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.