Tantra Made Easy

Introduction

‘The Tantric way is open to all the richness of human nature, which it accepts without a single restriction.’ --DANIEL ODIER

Tantra is often defined as ‘to weave’, and can be compared to weaving fabric. Tantra is therefore a path that weaves together. But what exactly is it that is being woven and why?

We experience a lot of pain when we feel a split in our lives. Whenever we feel torn two ways we feel an inner conflict, and it can also manifest as outer conflict too. Often we don’t even realize that our challenges in life are due to this underlying split. For example, we may think and say that we want a relationship, but inside we fear commitment and can’t understand why we aren’t attracting a stable relationship. Or maybe you know you are torn, and suffer: part of you wants a stable job and structure, and another part wants to travel free.

Tantra is about merging. It is about uniting. It is about making love.

Tantra is about uniting all that has become split apart – creating wholeness, healing and totality – so at last your life can flow with ease and with a sense of ‘choicelessness’. There is one way, one truth. Life becomes a river that you can flow along with, rather than a complex planning strategy, a confusing chaos or a painful battlefield.

One of the big places in which our lives can be divided is between everyday life and spiritual reality. In the metaphysics of Tantra, however, the world can be understood to have two dimensions: horizontal and vertical.

The horizontal dimension is the world we see around us: our friends, family, relationships and experiences. The objects we handle on a daily basis, the physical location where we live, and so on. For most people this is reality.

The vertical dimension is the pole that runs between heaven and earth and is, in general, much less familiar. This aspect of reality highlights that we can, at times, experience a very physical solid reality – bodies, objects, etc. – but at other times we experience a much less tangible universe – thoughts, emotions, energies and even states of consciousness. Think of a time you felt extreme joy or ecstasy and felt as though you were being lifted into the skies – this is the lift upwards in the vertical reality.

Tantra 101

Horizontal reality: The life around you – your relationships, your surroundings and your experiences.
Vertical reality: Life between the solid physical level of awareness and higher states of expanded consciousness.

Ultimately, Tantra points us to the highest level of consciousness in which we merge into what is often called ‘oneness’, in which we no longer feel like a separate physical entity. This is sometimes called ‘heaven’, as opposed to the more tangible experience of ‘earth’ (physical reality). In Tantra, orgasm is one of the key ways to move from a physical solid experience of reality into the lighter more ethereal experience. In other words, orgasm can take us from earth to heaven.

However Tantra also invites us onto the path of creativity, in which we bring the heavenly vibrations back down into this earthly experience. A lot of music, poetry and dance are examples of this. In Tantra you can also channel the divine into your touch, and give healing or loving to another person through your body. So Tantra invites us to move from sex to spirit and from spirit to sex as a creative dance of life.

Now this can be quite startling, if you were raised with any conventional religion, as most of the world’s religions give the message that sexuality is a non-spiritual phenomenon, or even anti-spiritual; at best used to create babies and at worst a vehicle to take you to damnation and hell. Tantra does not teach that all sexual experiences take you to higher consciousness, but it does give step-by-step guidance to help put you on the path to sacred sexuality.

This metaphysical theory also explains why Tantra is so often the ‘black sheep’ of spiritual systems. On many spiritual and religious paths we are faced with a choice: sexuality OR spirituality. Tantra gives a different invitation: choose sexuality AND spirituality, and bring the two together to create a wholeness and completion within your life. This is the weaving of Tantra.
So Tantra is a path that unites apparent opposites into totality or oneness, including:

• Sexuality with spirituality
• Masculine with feminine
• Playfulness with depth
• Dark, shadowy parts of ourselves with the light of conscious awareness
• Relaxation with stimulation
• Meditation with experience

In fact the list is inexhaustible, as Tantra invites any apparently separate aspects of life to be brought together in union.

The catalyst for this union is love.

The path of worshipping the Divine Feminine

As you enter the world of Tantra, you will find a balance and union of opposites. Yet, in spite of this, some definitions of Tantra are actually about honouring the feminine aspect. Pandit Rajmani Tigunait, author of Tantra Unveiled, was the son of a practising Tantric in India. When he asked his father what Tantra was, he usually received this reply, ‘Tantra means worshipping the Divine Mother. Tantrics are her blessed children. Whatever they have is by the grace of the Divine Mother.’

Does this mean that Tantra has a female deity in place of the usual masculine God? It is not so simple, although there are Tantric lineages that make rituals to feminine deities, and the famous Mahavidyas – the 10 goddesses of Adi Parashakti in Hinduism, often worshipped in classical Tantric practice.

However, Tantra is not about replacing the idea of a man on a cloud with a long white beard with a woman on a cloud with long flowing hair! In fact, once you start delving into Tantra, you’ll discover that it has a unique way of honouring the energy of life, and finding the divine within it. This energy is Shakti and its divine vibration within each human is called ‘Kundalini Shakti’.

Tantra 101

Sexual energy is generally referred to as Shakti, though this term can be very broad and include anything that is part of life! There is a specific Shakti of each element: a water Shakti, a fire Shakti and so on.

Kundalini Shakti, or just kundalini, is a more specific term to refer to the stream of creative life force that runs through each individual. It may be dormant, but once awakened it brings an animation to a person that might be called spirited. If we say a person has a lot of spirit, we may be seeing their kundalini. It is so alive that it is often described as an ‘intelligence’. Some see this energy as the Goddess, though it can also animate a man’s body so this can be confusing. One way or another, it is seen as a living manifestation of God or Consciousness.

So rather than looking for the divine beyond life, we look within life – within energy. When you walk in lush nature you may feel this divine presence, as many people feel interconnected to all that is when they are in the natural world. Tantrics would say this sense of oneness is due to the flow of Shakti energy. If you were to sit in a park of plastic plants, you wouldn’t feel that same presence because this divine energy comes from living things.

So while the ascetic lives out of the flow of life – perhaps in a cave, desert or monastery – and abstains from sensual pleasures and relationships in order to find God. The Tantric path goes into the flow of life to find God, through the Goddess. The Goddess is the flow of life force and the God is the source of that flow. The Goddess is the divine manifest and the God is the divine unmanifest.

So the worship of the Divine Feminine is about finding pure flows of energy and honouring them. Not all of life is made of this pure flow, as much of what we experience is distorted. If it doesn’t feel like love, then it is probably distorted energy! So as we worship and honour the pure flow, we awaken that pure flow within us.

The Tantric path is a path of healing those
distorted places and freeing the pure
life-force energy so that we become pure
manifestations of our true divine Self.

Some Tantrics like to do that by personifying the Divine Feminine as a Goddess or the Divine Mother, while others like to work more with energy flow. Both ways will lead to the same result: an awakening of the life-force energy; to become an interconnected part of all that is through the network of energy in this universe; to become embodiments of the Divine.

Tantra 101

Any system or teacher that abuses the feminine aspect in any way cannot be truly called ‘Tantric’, as it would be violating this core principle. We live in a world that often tries to own, possess and control the feminine aspect, and this aspect needs to be healed in order to enter Tantra. This distortion could take many forms including: coercing women into sex, taking advantage of someone when they are vulnerable (male or female: vulnerability is the ‘feminine’ side of all of us), violating the Earth’s resources on our path and so on. To heal this is to move from trying to have power over the feminine into a place of honouring the feminine. This is not just about women, but the feminine aspect in all of us. It is about holding space for vulnerability, so that we can open up without harm.

The path of love

An open heart is the essential requirement for union to occur and for this reason Tantra is often described as the ‘path of love’ or ‘the way of the heart’. Take Tantric techniques and use them without love, and the Tantra is gone.

An open heart is essential for the unification of opposites. It is the alchemical basis for healing to occur. In Tantra there are meditations and practices to help open the heart and create a space wide enough, vast enough, to allow both sides of duality to coexist. Anything that has felt split, cut off, separate or in conflict can heal in the space of the open heart.

Tantric texts

Tantra is also used to mean ‘doctrine’, ‘framework’ or ‘system’, and thus can be used to refer directly to the texts written in the original Tantric systems. These texts are often a conversation between the Hindu god Shiva and the goddess Shakti. They are embodiments of consciousness and energy. The paradox, however, is that these two can actually never be separated. Just as we cannot separate the meaning from the word, consciousness and energy are one; formlessness and form are one. So the texts use a kind of dualism that points back to non-dualism. In this way, Tantra helps us to grasp the paradox of life.

I am not offering Tantra here as an academic, and there are several good books that can do this (see Bibliography and Recommended Reading), rather as one who has found both spiritual revelation and harmony in life through my journey of the many different facets and teachings of Tantra. I wish to share what has been enlightening and healing for me, in the hope that it may also support you in your journey of life, as well as an understanding of the term Tantra and its core principles, including:

• An outline of the history of Tantra.
• The types of Tantra and Tantric practice.
• An understanding of the Tantric approach to sexuality.
• Practices to explore your own Tantric sexuality.
• Practices to explore Tantric sexuality with a partner.
• Practices to guide Tantric energetic awakening.
• A Tantric understanding of relationship, love and intimacy.
• Practices to open your heart.
• Practices to open your heart with your partner.
• An understanding of Tantra as a spiritual path.
• Practices for creating spiritual experiences and higher states of consciousness.

Like Tantra itself, this book will take you on a journey: back in time to the history and myths of a Tantra past; within to find your rich inner world; along the river of energy flow, releasing some blocks along the way and becoming fully alive again; and into higher states of consciousness. Along the way you will discover who you really are within and then share it with a beloved if you so choose. And you will learn how to open up to love, the love that is the expression and manifestation of your true nature.