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.