My partner is also a natural Tantric; a very sensual man whose ability to love and connect continues to amaze me, in spite of other problems we have. Like all the men I’ve met on the Tantric path, he loves and honours women.

      This honouring of women tends to run through the men who are attracted to, and stay on the Tantric path. They are usually more in touch with their feminine side, which makes it easier for women to express themselves more completely. Of course this doesn’t mean that all relationship problems are automatically solved, but it’s an important foundation for a couple who choose the Tantric path together.

      Tantra means celebrating the love between you, and keeping it nourished and alive in a variety of ways, which this book will explore. It’s all about being spontaneous and playing together, as well as nurturing a sense of your spiritual connection. Tantric practices are a way of finding or creating a path together that is filled with a sense of the sacred.

      The key practice is to see your lover as truly divine.

      When you accept that your lover is divine you can use the model of a divine relationship as an inspired template for your own. Even if you don’t manage this challenging task you can experience a lot of joy and pleasure trying. And usually your sex-life improves greatly.

      I was dissatisfied with my sex life before starting on the Tantra training. I felt that the full potential of my capacity for sexual pleasure had barely been explored, and that traditional sex therapy and self-help approaches had nothing to offer me. It wasn’t that I had a sexual ‘problem’, or that I couldn’t reach orgasm, but I felt a deep post-coital emptiness in spite of the love I felt for my partner. The models in our culture for a satisfying sexual relationship have more to do with ideas of stress-release and notching up orgasms than they do with our deepest desires for connection and intimacy. When I embarked on my first Tantra weekend workshop I had no idea that Tantric ideas and practices would resonate so strongly with me – it seemed like good fun at the time, and after several years of doing Egyptian dance, I wasn’t shy about dancing and ‘getting in touch with the sensual goddess within’.

      But by the end of a weekend of ritual exercises, and yogic breathing with my partner I was on a literal high for the whole of the next week – it was so intense I wasn’t sure I could put my serious hat back on and lecture abroad as I was scheduled to do.

      As we drove back to London, through the spectacular fireworks of November 5th, I was filled with exuberance and an excitement with the discovery that getting in touch with my own passion could fire up my passion for life. My Tantric journey is not completed yet, and hopefully never will be. Working on a Tantric relationship, and incorporating Tantra into daily life are challenges that make life