Tantric Sex: Making love last. Cassandra Lorius
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is not a no-holds-barred excuse for sexual experimentation – it assumes that any work on sexual development is grounded in an egalitarian, committed and loving relationship. Within a relationship with a strong heart connection you can do the work of transforming sexuality into a more integrated way of being.
Tantra changes one’s view of relationships. Couples become less dependent, jealous or neurotic. They tend to be more harmonious, fun and energy-filled. In the way of Tantra, you also discover that the relationship you seek outside is already within you. You simply need to learn about and cultivate the Tantric vision: a vital, bliss-filled approach to sex, love and life in general.
Sylvie, 50: I have to say no to casual sex now, even if I’m feeling turned on. I know that sex won’t be satisfying because anyone who is not initiated into Tantra can’t meet me at the level I can meet them. Every love-making is an experience of the sacred marriage for me – a deep connection of all the chakras. It helps for me to connect when I have my eyes open, when I can really look at my lover and be looked at.
When I experience love-making to that degree of merging I find it very difficult to separate afterwards. It’s difficult to share these experiences with people who don’t see love-making in this way. I call it paradise lost, when I’m aware of the many hours in my life when I feel unmet and as if I’m not connecting with people. Most of the time I have to sit in silence about my experience.
Tony 52: My sexuality has changed. I’m more relaxed and I have no sense of needing to achieve something. I’m not striving to make something happen anymore in my love-making. We’ve experimented with vetoing orgasms, both of ours and just mine. These days we have fewer orgasms, and we can stay in that feeling of excitement. Going to work with that feeling of excitement after love-making means that I feel alive. People at work comment on how good I look. I feel more open and that encourages others to be open. I find it easier to listen without being judgmental.
I also find I don’t have to give advice – but if people do ask me my opinion, I’m more creative in thinking about solutions. I have more of a sense of humour, and generally have more fun. I can see the funny side of things as well as being serious – and that helps defuse situations I would have found embarrassing. This is my goal in working with Tantra over a period of time – to incorporate it more and more into my daily life. To have that sense of ease and flowingness in whatever I am doing. It’s a combination of being more alive and full of energy, but being relaxed at the same time.
Tantra literally means a tool for expansion. In spite of the Eastern terminology, Tantra is an easy concept to grasp. At its heart is the knowledge that a powerful current of energy flows through us all, which needs to be harmonized.
The word tan translates as expansion and tra means tool. Tantras, the texts outlining Tantric practices, are literally tools for expansion. Tantra involves expansion on an energetic, psychological and physical level, and the teachings have been used for thousands of years as a tool to expand the boundaries of consciousness. Like all Hindu paths, it is primarily concerned with self-realization and enlightenment. Not through the usual route of suppressing desire and renouncing worldliness, but through harnessing the potency of desire, and pursuing bliss here and now. Tantra aims to harmonize life energies and resolve contradictions and conflicts in order to experience life as a flow of intense energy.
The word also connotes embracing. Tantra involves embracing all aspects of yourself. As long as you split off aspects of yourself that you don’t like and hold them at a distance, you have no chance to integrate them and no chance of achieving wholeness. It is a heart-centred path, and invites its followers to embrace all of creation, in the name of love. You and your partner are both manifestations of love.
Tantra aims at total surrender – letting go of mental, emotional and cultural conditioning – so that universal life energy can flow through us as effortlessly as a stream. It’s finding our way back to our existential roots, letting go into a sense of wonder and oneness with the universe, which spiritual teachers of all paths describe simply as love. On a more prosaic level, Tantric techniques aim to rekindle a lust for life through encouraging a more vibrant sense of self. Tantra is not a matter of rules and rituals: although it has its fair share of these, they are just structures to enable us to access what’s really important – the direct experience of life.
The essence of Tantra is a non-hierarchical, non-judgmental, all-accepting approach toward experience. Tantra is an esoteric and magical tradition, which views everything that exists as part of the spiritual realm. In the words of the gnostic Hermes Trigemestus ‘as above, so below’. The Tantric approach to the interconnectedness of everything is reflected in the saying ‘everything is the essence of everything else’.
The roots of Tantra are somewhere in the pre-history of Indian religions: Hinduism, Buddhism and also Jainism. Tantric practices were drawn into a system around 1500 years ago, although its roots go back much further. It developed out of early matriarchal Indian culture, whose early goddess worship can be traced right through to today’s popular Shakti cults. Different groups arose around different teachers, and cultivated their own practices.
Tantra is best understood as a group of texts and practices geared towards direct experience, rather than a spiritual system. The texts, called Tantras, outline methods for self-realization. Many of the Sanskrit texts take the form of question and answer dialogues between divine lovers, in which ritual practices and philosophy are discussed. Like all mystical paths that emphasize inner development, many Tantric teachings are esoteric – their spiritual meanings obscure to the uninitiated.
These methods were handed down orally, and practised by teachers and their followers. Tantra wasn’t institutionalized, and there were no rules or hierarchies to limit access to the teachings. All that was required was the will to learn and the persistence needed to actually track down a teacher – since they didn’t advertise themselves.
With the development of the Vedic system, based on a group of texts called the Vedas, introduced by Aryan invaders and subsequently favoured by Hindus, Tantric practitioners were marginalized. Asceticism, or physical renunciation, gradually gained ascendancy amongst Indians. The philosophy of learning through suffering, or working through suffering and hardship in this lifetime in order to earn future rewards in the next was regarded by Tantra teachers as a misapprehension of reality. Tantra says you don’t need to suffer to attain enlightenment. Paradise is not in the next world, but here and now, if we can only see it.
Tantra developed partially in revolt against the proscriptive and caste-bound hierarchy of orthodox Hinduism. Some of the practices used by Tantrics were clearly conceived as blatant affronts to orthodox sensibilities. The central Tantric rite, called the five Ms, involved the use of five items considered taboo by Hindus. Mady (alcohol), mamsa (meat), matsya (fish), mudra (kidney beans – an aphrodisiac) and maithuna (ritual intercourse) are all used in Indian Tantric rituals as part of the core practice of invoking and identifying with divine Shakti energy. Tantric methods were concerned with challenging conventional taboos and restrictions – viewed as examples of limited, and limiting, thought patterns. Within Tantra, the process of achieving enlightenment was accelerated by confronting fixed ideas about caste, ritual cleanliness and gender. Taboos were broken as a way of developing non-judgement. These were ways of developing awareness that every experience, and every individual, was intrinsically pure. Rather than attempting to master the flesh by punishing it, or attempting to control sexual impulses through celibacy, sex and the body were used as a vehicle for spirituality.
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