the true meaning of tantra
I was first introduced to tantra when my husband and I were approached to act in an instructional video about sacred sex. We declined that somewhat tantalising offer but were then approached to write the soundtrack instead. The video featured the practice of special breathing techniques, eye contact and artfully filmed actual sex. The Secrets of Sacred Sex has sold some 200,000 copies worldwide.
It was almost ten years later that I discovered what the word Tantra meant and the depth and legacy of this profound yogic practice. Ironically the tools and techniques of tantra are the foundation of both my life and my work and it is rare for me to equate the word sex with tantra. The type of tantra I experienced in my twenties is termed “ neo tantra” and recently I read a quote by Dharmanidhi Sarasvati that encapsulated my understanding and experience of tantric practice “ Neo-Tantra ritualises sex. Authentic Tantra sexualises ritual”
So what is Tantra?
The word tantra comes from two words, tanoti, which means expansion, and trayati, which means liberation. It also means to stretch or to weave and is also the word for an ancient scripture or text. The premise of Tantra is that life is a tapestry of a thousand individual and colourful threads. The two master weavers are Shakti and Shiva. Shakti is energy (the feminine) and Shiva (the masculine) is consciousness. Energy and consciousness pervade every aspect of the known universe. Therefore tantric practitioners don’t negate reality for spirituality. They live in the world enjoying its many pleasures and use those pleasures as a doorway to the divine. My favourite example is the experience of doing the dishes. If you are totally in the moment, the sensual moment, feeling the water, smelling the soap, seeing the colour of the plate, hearing the clink of the dishes, then that too is Tantra. It’s that mundane, on one hand.
Tantra is also, however, a very serious and ritualised practice, which looks at various tools and techniques to draw the practitioner into the moment. As humans it’s pretty challenging to really “ Be “ with the dishes as the mind is always jumping to the next best thing. In Tantra you must learn to harness the senses, to control, direct and then use them for enhanced sensual experience. This is called bringing Shakti back to Shiva, or the union of energy and consciousness.
Tools for liberation
The tools in Tantra for mastering the senses are yantra (form) and mantra ( sound) Everything that we experience with our senses has a form and a name. Tantric practitioners visualise yantras (mandalas) and deities, the concrete forms of goddesses and gods and chant mantras, specific sounds that represent either a deity or a yantra. The yantra is a grosser form of concentration and the mantra is subtler. Tantricas also use mudras (seals of energy) which are even more subtle, to lead them to infinite and unbound consciousness.
To acquire these tools it is said that you need a guru (teacher), someone who has already mastered his or her senses and experienced some degree of liberation. The guru passes on to the student through direct transmission, the tools and techniques that are suited to them as individuals. There are many different tantric schools, and practices can be as diverse as meditating in burial grounds, the eating of the dead, ritualised sex or complete abstinence from sex. Tantra embraces all paths and ways as valid and part of the whole. As such it is a holistic practice.
Ritual Sex
One of the more obscure parts of tantra is the practice of maithuna. Maithuna is one of the five panchamakaras of the left hand path of Tantra. The other four are madya (liquor), mudra (bean), mamsa (flesh) and matsya (fish). In order to be ready for maithuna the practitioners must purify their being for years by practicing specific mantras and yantras as handed down by a guru from a specific lineage. The practitioner, if they are male, must also practice certain mudras to retain their semen during the height of orgasm. This enables them to reabsorb their semen and transform it in to Ojas (pure life essence) and Kundalini Shakti (awakened life force).) Women must also practice mudras to learn to regulate the hormones secreted from the ovaries. Men and women prepare for and practice this sacred ritual under the strict guidance of a guru. In this form of Tantra celibacy is out of the question because the human body and its sexuality are a part of the natural world and therefore the healthy control and absorption of sexual energy is said to prolong life and tap its practitioners into the divine.
Tantra as every day ritual
Tantra encourages the individual to find the preciousness in every moment. In that sense the western take on Tantra as a sexual ritual is relevant. If we approach our lover with reverence and respect and bring meaning and presence into the sexual act it is a powerful tool for learning to love the self. On the other hand authentic tantra says that there needs to be more than just love and respect during intercourse. Both man and the woman need some degree of purity and awareness, a degree of enlightenment, if they wish to use sexuality to liberate them. The following quote from the Kularnava Tantra, II, 116-118 says it all " If merely by drinking wine, men were to attain fulfillment, all addicted to liquor would reach perfection. If mere partaking of flesh were to lead to the high state, all the carnivores in the world would become eligible to immense merit. If liberation were to be ensured by sexual intercourse with a Shakti, all creatures would become liberated by female companionship."
The Tantric Warp and weft
Tantra is about learning to live with what is; the intense, frightening and blissful weaving of life, every moment a ritual, an opportunity to escape or a chance to fall more in love. Tantra teaches that even questioning the practice is a part of the whole experience of life and therefore of the divine. In its essence it is a profound awareness of the activity of being, where the journey is the destination.
