Tantra works through action. You DO tantra. It evokes psychosomatic forces (interactions between the mind and the body) through the doing of things like breathwork, meditation, visualisations and sexual energy, becoming ‘spiritual rocket-fuel’.
I’ve been trying to clarify in my head what tantra practices actually mean to me, and so to try and articulate this;
For me, tantra works through action, through technologies / practices that are prescriptions for action. This is important for people like me who spend so much time in their heads. You DO tantra. It evokes psychosomatic forces (interactions between the mind and the body) through the doing of things like breathwork, meditation, visualisations and sexual interactions. We do this through tapping into our life force (sexual energy within the body) as ‘spiritual rocket-fuel’ as I think Jason has described it.
Tantra therefore is fundamentally about change, where we experience the truth of who we are, beyond our socialisation and constructed selves. And the most effective way to enact change is to connect and associate the change we want to last and embed with powerful sensations and emotions. This is important because we tend to see the present moment through an accumulation of our memories. Tantra, though, asks us to see the past as projections of the present. This is the symbolism of the Shri Yantra. Practically, what this means is, things don’t just happen to us, we create (or co-create) our experiences and knowledge, usually symbolised through the interplay of creative energies (feminine / masculine).
All of existence then is no more than fields of energy, which manifest as things (us, solid objects), which as noted above, emerge through psychosomatic forces (the mind-body interplay). This is usually referred to as feminine and masculine energy interplay;
· Feminine - yoni, being vulva shaped, creative energy, Shakti, seen as generative, ever changing between creation and destruction.
· Masculine - lingam, male organ shaped, circle and dot, Shiva, seen as static and distant.
It is important to note that this is not female / male, woman / man, we are referring to the feminine / masculine energies within us all. Indeed, it might be more useful replacing these terms with energy and consciousness to remove the gendered (and often loaded) connotations feminine and masculine terms hold.
From a tantric perspective then, if we tie our powerful sensations and emotions to our sexual / life energy through sexual interactions we can start to bring wholeness (healing). Pleasure is the raw material for our transformation. The trick, however, is to recognise the difference between transformative pleasure that leads to positive change and un-transformative indulgence. To support this recognition we utilise rituals and devotion, while incorporating things like mantras and sound to encourage patters of vibration, and yantras to enhance our visualisation that can help produce ‘fields of energy’, as well as body movement to enhance physical sensations.
Our subtle body (our energetic body) then becomes a central tool or mechanism for working with and through. This is often referred to as working with our kundalini energy. Awakening our kundalini is undertaken through working up the various central chakras (energy centres) and the three main channels, as a form of meditation and devotional activity, aligned to our mantra and visualisation work to vibrate from the Root to the Crown, utilising our sexual energy as the fuel.
Awakening kundalini and then making this awakening a permanent state, is a key aim of tantra and forms a central part of my personal practice and my Naked Practice sessions on the TLA App.
Big hugs and love to you all, Pink
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Email me direct if you are interested in mindful, trauma-informed, intimacy or spiritual coaching, or if you would like to join my new Pink Tantra Towards Awakening group for chat rooms, video channels and in-person workshops around tantra and intimacy practices robert.pinktantra@gmail.com
See my personal development / personality profiling book DISCover the Power of You published through John Hunt Publishing Ltd, 2017. ISBN: 978-1-78535-591-2
And for a bit of light reading, see my first historical fictional novel Fermented Spirits published through Austin Macauley Publishers, 2022. ISBN-13: 978-1398437159