Tantra and Happiness

This time of the year is a good time to think about happiness as we celebrate the beginning of a new solar cycle (solstice) in the southern hemisphere and the peak of it in the north. It is vacation time in the north and the season of depression for many in the south when it should be a time for preparing for the new year (if we weren't limited by our attachment to the European based calendars). As you'd expect in Tantra and it turns out in the scientific studies of it there are two aspects of happiness - the intense happiness of the moment and the longer term happiness of contentment.

A lot of people in Tantra are focussed on the temporary ecstasies measured by orgasm and intensity of sensation. There are also many people who turn to Tantra because of dissatisfaction with those temporary happinesses. The idea of contentment can also seem like you have sold out on passion and intensity, like you are willing to settle for mediocrity. but there is a different ooint of view.

In Buddhism the absence of suffering is the aim and many people interpret this as detachment from all emotion, as a sort of dissociation from life - an absence of passion and the presence of a blissful state of nirvana, a different state of being that doesn't exist for the average Joe. You get it as a reward for your moral righteousness, your skilful meditation, and profound contemplation, not to mention overcoming the hardships of serious disciplines like isolation, silence, fasting, and intense physical yogas and other cleanses. All of these are part of the Hindu versions of Tantra, and many other mystical preparations, too.

Then there is the role of the sexual disciplines if you are walking that path. You reach into a part of your being that you were taught was immoral and scary, that confronts you with vulnerability and helplessness because it is a shared experience that is between and
includes two or more subjective experiences, you and your beloveds. It is the most complex and exciting experience we can have. Fantasy meets reality and transcendence is possible. But what the f%#k is transcendence? (that's a technical Tantric term you know... being the most meaningful word in English proving its importance, and besides after all you are using sex to touch the Goddess/God to answer profoundly important questions)

People throw the word "Transcendence" around, like "Nirvana", "love" and "happiness" without pointing to what they really mean. The long term happiness that is contentment, the deep connection that is love, the transcendent experience that is nirvana are all interconnected, at minimum through metaphor. They are also connected by being natural states of being that everyone experiences daily in moments. They are not special. Some are going to be ticked off by this last statement.

If you haven't heard about the "Ahah" moment then you will now. When you search for an answer to a problem and get very frustrated, feel angry and bitter because you just can't find it and you should be able to solve it then suddenly after a sleep, coffee, conversation on a
completely unrelated topic and/or some meditation you suddenly are hit by the answer and it seems obvious - that is an "Ahah" moment and is an everyday experience of transcendence. And you feel Happy, for a while. The great thing is that those experiences also add to your long
term contentment because they usually add to your self esteem and your store of useful life knowledge.

Tantric Contentment is transcendental contentment, rather than selling out to passion and romance. The Warrior's approach to Happiness means the absence of unhappiness, of suffering. Transcendence is not the absence of everyday difficulties, of the pain of everyday romance (when the lovers are not of one mind, when there is conflict). Many people define it in this warrior way when it is really a sideways step to a big picture perspective and feel of life.

Lets use an everyday metaphor with a long history in the Mystery Journey.

A Master Trades person versus an apprentice. When you are first learning something every blockage is a pain, every mistake is a source of self-recrimination and a matter for hard work. As you become confident in your skills and able either to make less mistakes or to spot them quickly and fix them then you start looking for difficulties to develop your skills, expect mistakes and plan for them, you see conflict as an opportunity for learning and growth. In the first case, the apprentice's uncertainties and low self esteem expands every success into intense ecstasy and every problem into a profound judgment on themselves, resulting in depression. For the master tradesperson, problems are par for the course, you simply take care of them and move on. Your
confidence isn't shaken by your own mistakes or by the issues presented by the environment, by the unexpected and unknown (the Goddess/God if you like).

The master tradesperson when making a plan takes into account a realistic appraisal of the problems likely and unlikely, and allows for his or her limitations. Thinking about the best case scenario and the worst and makes an experience guess at what is likely with allowances for what is not. So many approaches to spirituality and life (including coaching it) take the warriors approach to positive thinking,that it is the absence of negative thinking. It caters to your
insecurity rather than taking a realistic Master Tradesperson's approach of looking at all the possibilities with the knowledge that your strength, self trust, your experience, will get you through the tough times.This is practical transcendence.

Love is not the absence of conflict and pain. It is when your feelings for each other are bigger than the moment to moment pains of being really human. The conflict of difference is a source of growth and a natural part of the process of connecting deeply. Trusting yourself is the source of contentment, long term happiness, based on realistic self-knowledge, self expressed as a balanced intelligent emotional analysis of the real possibilities without shying away from the negative. Relationships are the lesson plan, but... and it is a big "BUT", relationship not lived as if they are lessons. Seeing life as a lesson lets you cop out on being really vulnerable and involved. It is a strategy for dissociation from the pains and caters to perfectionist self-judgment. All these stand in the way on long term happiness.

Short term happiness is the absence of suffering, long term contentment means being realistic about who you are, including your limitations and embracing all the feelings of life as a full and complete experience. It is realistic optimism. The integration of transcendence into life begins with transforming your value system to allow contentment.

I've just realised how easy it would be to take this as condescending and all knowing. My knowledge of these things comes out of my struggles to embrace them which is by no means complete... I keep working on it.

"Live to Work or Work Live"

When I first heard this saying long ago its meaning seemed pretty clear. Work was the enemy, something you did for survival and to finance your real life. Your hobbies, your relationships, your pleasures were your life, work was what you did to pay for them. If you worked so hard it took up all your time and energy leaving you no room for these real life things then you were living to work. This is true for many. If you lack skills and/or motivation, passions that align your intelligence, your emotions, your actions and for some their destiny, then this point of view works. This approach also works if your passions are attached to or expressed in a way that is a minority pursuit or just in a way that doesn't inspire monetary value.

For example, an artist does a painting. It is bought by one person who loves it, so she gets what it's worth to that single person. Let's say all her friends love it but can't afford to buy their own painting so their love does not translate into value for the artist, only into kudos for the new owner. Big corporations in the entertainment industry are very aware of this and work hard to ensure they stick with activities that can capture value from the appreciation and pleasure of the arts they support – music performed gets little until recording gets behind it, theatre earns little but recorded as movies is very valuable, graphic design original aren't worth much on their own until printed. Thus they put an enormous amount of effort into copyright and other intellectual property law.

If you do have a serious passion it transforms work into an lover, an ally, turning this approach inside out, especially if you find a way to gain value for your efforts. Value in a form that is easy to communicate and allows many people to express it in a way that isn't too great a tax on them and builds up into enough to help you live life in a way that doesn't separate your pleasures, your bliss from your way of contributing to society. Sadly our society has lost the concept that just existing, being is of value, although in the past it was limited to that small group the aristocracy. It may always have been rare that you find people who value you for simply existing – your parents, your lover/partner (if you are lucky and able to accept it), and most especially your kids – more often your value comes from what you do.

Some of us have been conditioned so deeply to struggle, to value ourselves for what we do, not for who we are, and so find simply being, let alone being loved for who they are, very confronting. The balance between life and work, being and doing, has been screwed up. If you live to work I still think it is imbalanced even if driven by the monomania of passion. Wholeness means catering to and expressing all of who you are - actions, relationships, emotions, feelings, insecurities, fears and individuality. Simply being is the ground of self-love, not self-aggrandisement, from which all these grow. What happens when you sit in silence? This is a good diagnostic for your relationship with life for its own sake, for letting yourself to be, accepting who you are as you are warts and all.

Simple Acts Of Love

By Christopher Michaels © 2006

Love is when two rainforests meet in all their lush luxury with differences remaining yet they merge

Sit quietly with yourself, allowing yourself to be who you are in all your shame, rage, fear, weakness, strength and beauty

Wait for the silence

Be comfortable with your silence and your voice

Leave room for the stories of others

Feel yourself part of your relationships – you are affects and affecting, you are effects and effecting

Act in ways that enlarge everyone

Resist acting to enlarge yourself at the cost of others

Your ambition is good if it takes your friends and enemies with you to the top

Breath

Let yourself breath with your whole body

Relax

Relax your shoulders, relax your hips, relax your legs, relax your back, relax the drive to be other than who you are… now, relax the drive to push others to be… anything

Feel tall

Feel comfortable in your skin

Leave room for them to feel comfortable in their skin

Turn off your mobile phone

Listen

Listen with your ears, listen with your eyes, listen with your body, listen with your mind and your wholeness

Listen from the silence within, the silence between and under your drive to show yourself, to prove your point

Show your Self in a way that encourages them to show themselves, let them feel your interest in finding out who they are, now, and were, then and want to be

Enjoy the struggle to share an exposed moment free of fear

Stand in your integrity while supporting theirs

Their fears and imperfections, and their defences against them, deserve your love just as yours do

Let them feel held, allow yourself to feel held

Let them feel the absence of shame, let yourself feel its absence too

Let them know you understand their vulnerabilities by showing yours

Let them feel their strength by showing yours

Let them feel your respect by giving yours

Imagine what it would feel like to have no fear, no need for strength, to be emotionally naked

Learn to ask good questions based on an excitement about who people really are and what they really need including what scares you about them

Take charge when they need it, let them take charge when you need it

Don’t take charge, don’t help, don’t offer solutions when it is the easy way, only do it when it will enlarge all of you, including them

Help them give themselves what they need and want

Resist the temptations of feeling attacked

Resist the temptations of bringing history into the present

Resist the mask of habit with the freedom of joyous spontaneity shared

Resist the shame-filled belief you need to change, without resisting change

Resist the idea that love is simple

A Basic Practice of Tantra

Tantra acknowledged many centuries ago the importance of the senses to our inner life. It also realised that our relationship with our emotions is central. Even though it has other expressions its relationship with Buddhism has been pivotal. It incorporates the core truths at Buddhism - that change is everything, that desire and fear marry to give birth to suffering and ecstasy (in fact most emotions) and that identity/self exists as a product of the history as relationship and vice versa ie karma. Tantra asks us to challenge our inheritance, both personally and in terms of our social and familial setting. Like Buddhism it asks for a radical agnosticism, ie we must operate from our own experience, and that requires intense and real openness and commitment.

So how does this become practical, when facing the world of spirit, work and play.

It means sitting in your own point of view. The first step is being sensitive to your body and its needs and wants. Your body represents your uniqueness, your existence in this particular moment - sitting at a computer reading these words. Even the meaning that you are getting from these words is a product of history interpreted through the sensory gates. Tantra is about insight into the reality of who you are, this means the feeling of the seat under you and the clothing (or not) you are wearing. The air you breath. It means that history that allows you to read this and feel talented or not in whatever you do and feel.

It is about who you are. When we have an ecstatic experience (together or alone) change is inevitable. Trying to holding onto it is what blocks it from staying or coming again. Just as your eyes run along each word on this screen or page, the words go into your eyes as nerve stimulus and your brain turns them into meanings that spread through you. The words coalesce into sentences and depending on the emotions evoked by them your body responds. If it is a sexual fantasy, or a warrior's fantasy, or a romance or an intellectual rant like this one, your body reacts with changes of posture, blood flow, heart rate, ripples of meaning are like the wave a boat makes traveling through a lake. You are the lake. Except that, depending on your particular moment, the words can be like shouting in a cyclone, they can get lost in the roar. To calm the lake we allow the storm, ride it out, this too will change. If we come to believe the storm is all there is of us, then it will become eternal but if change is acknowledged then the picture immediately zooms out to a larger view.

The symptoms are right here as you read this. If you sit with an awareness of your whole body, then you can feel a geography of meaning as each word is welcomed in and your body responds. Many of us are so focused on the meaning, the mental experience, that we don't experience the body's role in making it. Many traditions want to make us into their ideal of who they think a human being should be and so they teach us to avoid focusing on the body, on it as the key to our unique point of view on the world. As the key to the experience of what Zen calls the essence of mind.

To sit with yourself alone and observe the way you are... the thoughts that come to the surface, your body's responses, your emotions, the interaction of mind and body as it really happens - NOW reading this. Then to do it with your partners in life - those you call friends, lovers, work mates and enemies. This is the challenge. This awareness changes your relationships at their core. Tantra as a road to insight, with ecstasy a natural side effect.

Tantra and Celibacy

Celibacy and walking the Way of the Lovers

By Christopher Michaels, a humble practitioner.

We hear a lot about the sexual practices of Tantra. But Tantra is much more than a therapeutic program for people having problems (or bored) with their sex lives. It provides more than a group of psycho-physical techniques to master the vulnerabilities of the erotic. Tantra is the way of the lovers. It's about the way we define ourselves in relation to anything that we experience as outside ourselves, as "other", whether it's spirit versus body, the mind versus the emotions, me versus you, good versus bad, allies versus enemies. As such it does not rely on having a lover and/or sex partner to be an effective part of self development. It is a cosmology based on a symbolic marriage, on embracing all the wondrous complexity of real life relationships. This marriage is about achieving a psychic homeostasis between all the various forces of the inner and outer worlds.

Of course, a sense of sexual mastery is foundational to anyone's self-esteem and personal power, since, after survival, sex is the second most important force within us. I believe you should not take up Tantra until you already understand what good sex is for you and how to give and receive it. However, we have to be careful not to be blinded to the deeper truths at Tantra's core because the sexual accomplishments it makes available are so exciting.

This is one of the reasons why celibacy is considered valid in Indian Tantra. When people publish articles and books on Western Tantra, they will talk about the symbolic marriage of complementary and cooperating opposites, yin and yang, female and male, good and bad, etc, but they rarely mention one of central dualities of sex - its presence and absence. In India they talk about the left and right-hand paths. The left-hand path is the path we associate with Western Tantra, its followers have sex, though under very strict circumstances and (believe it or not) in away that is not supposed interfere with their basic celibacy, among many other sometimes confronting rituals and techniques that most Westerner prefer to ignore. Followers of this path are very rare in India.

The right-hand path is much more common and is the path of most ascetic "Tantrikas". The right-hand path is celibate, involves many intense exercises and techniques which are designed to redirect, transform and transcend the power of sexual energy, of desire and craving, in order to fulfil spiritual and magical goals. Sex and desire are often seen as enemies of the spiritual, in away that is familiar to Western ascetic traditions like Christian Monasteries. It is a path away from, beyond and separated from the ordinary world, the world of the senses. It came to the fore after Christian and Muslim moralism was introduced by the British and the Arabs in the 14 th, 15th and 16th centuries.

Since the sixties sexual revolution we have come to think of celibacy as unnatural. Part of Tantra's attraction stems from its mythological, moral and philosophical support for this very modern phenomenon, and also because sex sells. The two paths express the very duality which is central to Tantra by approaching the vulnerability of Sex and desire in opposing ways: Feasting or Fasting.

In Tantra the duality of relationships is symbolised by the Warrior and the Lover. The warrior represents the right-hand path and Lover the left. The way of the warrior is so strong because it uses survival as its central image with fear as its central emotion, usually in terms of conquering it. It pushes us to define our boundaries. The Lovers' central emotional drive is desire and love. It asks us to drop our boundaries. Where survival causes us to contract inwards to gather our resources, sex (desire) pulls us out of ourselves. Desire can push us to expand beyond our capacities. In its negative expression it can cause us to feel we are losing our sense of ourselves. Desire is at its strongest when the object of desire is absent.

Being single is as important an opportunity in Tantra as having a beautiful loving relationship. The central aim of Tantra is an inner marriage between the various forces within the self. Conflict between these internal elements can drain us of our power but can also energise if they are balanced in the right way. Our external relationships are mirrors for that inner world. The intense desire that arises in the absence of the Beloved, when we are lonely or alone, confronts us with the way we compromise our integrity in order to seek fulfilment in other people or even in objects. But that longing can be a confirmation of the depth of your passion, your faith and your willingness to live a life of devotion to love and truth.

One of the central conflicts of life is between the inner and the outer. A powerfully way it plays out is between a desire for something and fulfilling that desire. Where do you look for fulfilment (external or internally)? How do you gain inner fulfilment without being escapist? The practice in Tantric Sex of holding back on the fulfilment of sexual desire, redirecting and transmuting it for other purposes or for achieving greater ecstasy is both real and symbolic.

Symbolic, in that it points to a way of learning to change our relationship with emotion and desire. It can be applied to any emotional reaction or desire turning it into fuel for our greater purposes. It asks us to recognise that we are more than our emotions, more than our desires, more than our body whilst recognising how important they are. Tantra does not ask you to suppress your feelings rather, to choose the path to fulfilling them, and to use them in a way that intensifies your experiences and maintains, promotes and celebrates the integrity of the self.

Celibacy, the ultimate bachelorhood. Celibacy has a role in Tantra but it has to be for the right reasons, with a clear intent. I think it should rarely be a lifetime commitment. Enforced celibacy is a power trip, by saying that you can't achieve your goals without it the enforcers are paying into the idea that "if I own your sex I own you". Celibacy must be a very personal choice. The power of sex in our lives means that if you are truly interested in knowing how it affects the flow of your destiny, your will, your emotions then celibacy has to be considered because choosing not to fulfil such a central desire can be a very empowering choice. However, if we choose it as a reaction against the pain caused by intimacy gone wrong, and we are being escapist, it can be dangerously disempowering. Celibacy, when used in this way can be as addictive as drugs and gambling, it needs to be practiced with clear intent.

There are periods in our lives when we are celibate without feeling that we have made the choice for it. The feelings - rejection, anger, self-loathing, loneliness, even a sense of strength and self-sufficiency - which come up for us in those times can teach us as much, or more, about ourselves as the times when we have a deeply emotional connection with someone. People teaching Tantra are not giving the complete wisdom if they are not showing you how to use loneliness, or aloneness, and frustrated desire, as part of your path to the greater union which sex represents in Tantra.

Tantra in India has several roles. Most commonly it is as a path to extraordinary states of ecstasy through understanding, controlling and directing the flow of sexual energy, desire and its physiology. It also provides techniques to help ascetics deal with what they see as the distraction sex represents to their spiritual evolution. Another role is the same as sex magic in the Pagan and shamanic traditions - that is, as a way of focussing your psychic and physical energies for achieving particular goals.

The way of the Lover seeks to treat the self as an integrated whole, thus wholistic (rather than "holistic" from hole or holy as this other spelling suggests), not as a goal to be achieved, but as a reality now, by fostering self-acceptance and self-love. This means every day states of being are as important as the heightened states of meditation, sex and mystical experiences. It is interesting that when talking about spirituality many people are quick to use images of the warrior but still seem to cringe when it comes to the symbolism of sex and the lovers. The sexual techniques of Tantra are important, but the way of the lover is about embracing the greatest challenges rather than conquering them. When Jesus said "turn the other cheek" and Gandhi stood non-violently against oppression their respect of the enemy made them Tantrikas. Multiculturalism and democracy, in their attempts to create a politics of tolerance and inclusion of all points of view, are political expressions of the way of the lover.

More important than the great sex, a little knowledge of Tantra offers, is the courage to continue to risk the pain of passion, vulnerability and love. When we are single, we can discover the meaning of the lessons of our relationships and integrate them. Some people speak of the love of God as if it's separate from the way we love life, family, friends and our partners, as if you could cut a colour out of the rainbow. Love, especially self-love, is a subtle and difficult problem. The way we deal with being alone is as important as how we give ourselves to our external partners. How we treat those partners is a direct reflection of how we treat ourselves in our inner dialogue.

For example, patterns of thought, desire and emotion can have unexpected implications. A case in point is, it is possible to interpret attempts at self-improvement as a form of self-loathing, because you acould be unhappy with yourself as you are, you could be seeking to push yourself to live up to an idealisation of who you should be, could be or identify with. This can lead to the desire to help or fix your partners without respecting their achievements. At the same time personal development can arise from self-love and the desire to build on your strengths rather than to fix your weaknesses. If you do not grow and strive, you stagnate and give up on fulfilling your potential, on the expansive power of desire. So when questioning all other things on the path of self-development it is important to question the reason we seek that development to ensure it is based on true self-respect. And thus rehearsing on yourself the love and respect you want to give your partners, whether they are friends, lovers or enemies. These ideas are central to the esoteric practices of Tantra, as a way of lovers.

The aims of this Blog

This is a new blog to continue my work on spreading the word about the deeper truths available behind the sexy propaganda used by many well-meaning practitioners of Tantra to promote it. The focus on the sexual aspects of Tantra is important but partial. As we go along you'll see that there are profound opportunities for depth that are missed by many because they focus on Tantra as a remedy for sexual boredom, sexual dysfunction, and/or sexual ignorance. This is not a bad thing because people should understand their sexuality if they are to be whole but it is one Chakra and there are many more. Some will be surprised when I say that our modern society and its politics are essentially Tantric because of their focus on desire as it central motivation and emotional organizational force as opposed to fear which is primary in other historical and social moments. And in a truly Tantric way I will say that this is both good and bad.

So here are my aims:

First, and foremost, it is about spreading the word about the deeper secrets and understandings at the core of Tantra as a personal and spiritual development path.

Secondly, I seek to demonstrate that there is more to Tantra than sacred sex, although it is important. Tantra is about the inner life as much as it is about our relationships. In fact Tantra is very important and useful for singles. All our relationships are dependent
on how we treat ourselves, and are expressions of our inner lives - our relationships with ourselves.

Thirdly, I wish to show that Tantra offers very practical contributions to modern living, whether or not you believe in the Goddess/God, and without necessarily talking about sex at all. Tantra offers insight into how our state of mind/being/body affects our
lives. It uses marriage as a metaphor for all relationships, eg a corporation can be thought of as a type of marriage - a marriage is an aggregate identity made up of smaller whole identities who work together for individual and mutual benefit and for the whole.

Fourthly, I want you to know what is going on, in the development of our websites and the details of the workshops on offer. This includes your events and thoughts too. So if you would like to tell us about services you offer and events coming up anything related to personal development, spirituality and the arts (including performance) from any path, that will educate and enlighten ;). Articles and essays about your understandings and thoughts about Tantra are also be welcome. I will be keeping posts down to about
once a week. Use the comments to point to your own posts... and I'll come n say "g'day", as we say here, in what is actually the top of the world - the land of Oz.