Some time ago I came across an amusing article written by ‘serious’ spiritual practitioners, castigating modern day tantrikas for “cheating” – taking shortcuts to spirituality and doubting their spiritual sincerity. Apparently, what typically takes ‘serious’ meditators years of intense spiritual discipline to achieve is available to a Tantrika in just a few months.

Therefore, they questioned whether something might be amiss, as you certainly couldn’t have all those grand cosmic experiences simply by just ‘indulging’ in extended pleasure time! You need to seriously meditate ‘the proper way’, in order to achieve these fruits of hard labor and concentration!

Well, I’m here to say that God is not always serious, and enlightenment is not the exclusive domain of hard workers or the intellectual elite… if so, the world would have collapsed long ago. Instead, I believe that we are ALL innately equipped to experience our divinity through doing what we enjoy, realizing our true essence – love – by making love. And I mean that literally – when consciousness penetrates… energy love is the result. Read more

Tantra is not the yoga of sex. Tantra is the yoga of everything.

On some yogic and spiritual paths, the attitude to life is via negativa, and the world is seen as a cause for suffering, as giving us a sense of false identity when we are attached to it. So the yogi’s task becomes to disengage, to free ourselves from suffering or from the attachment, to become a witness to it all.

But that is not the attitude of Tantra. In Tantra we actually want to get engaged, tangled up in the world with our spirit still shining.

The attitude of Tantra is that even our suffering, even our attachment is our yoga, our spirituality. In Tantra all problems are potential friends, allies, a support system for deeper understanding, deeper love.

The key to being a Tantric yogi or yogini is to embrace duality and then go deep into and then beyond it. Why? Because duality is just another expression of nonduality. In other words, there is, according to Tantra, Spirit, God, Awareness, Consciousness in everything. Even in suffering. Even in pleasure.

This knowledge, this wisdom is called Madhuvidya, or honey knowledge, the idea that the bees of Sprit can turn everything we do and feel, even failure, into nectar.

Here are 7 unique ways of Tantric spirituality: Read more

My website, tantra.com, contains lots of sacred iconography: pictures of gods and goddesses, candles, and other archetypal imagery. I’ve had people tell me that they can’t relate because they’re not Hindu, or they don’t like religion. They ask me, what does all this god and goddess stuff have to do with sex? And why should sex have to be “sacred” anyway? Can’t it just be simple and good?

Here’s the thing: I don’t think sex should be simple! I think it should be a profound experience. The laissez-faire attitude we have about sex today is liberating in some ways but limiting in others. One of the reasons that the ancient tantrics and Taoists devised methods to prolong orgasm is that they realized orgasm takes us to a sometimes mystical, wholly different place, but only momentarily. So the idea was to extend that ecstatic moment and make it a portal into higher states of consciousness.  Read more

… Tantra opens and activates the chakras and, by moving sexual energy through them, brings up whatever blocks true passion. My workshop leaders and dakinis (assistants who come to support sexual healing) created a sacred temple in which I felt safe to explore the pain of being sexually violated as a child, breathing through it to the pleasure beneath. In the exercises I could explode in rage, shake out the blocks, and reclaim a body ravaged by incest and years of reenactment through casual sex. It was amazing to be so accepted with all of my pain, respected and supported for my deep commitment to heal. Read more

Have you ever wondered why so many self-proclaimed “yoga practitioners,” “meditators,” and “new-age tantrics” are unappealingly unhealthy and spaced-out? Or why these people who live a supposedly healthy, “spiritual” lifestyle, often feel insecure and seem disconnected from their family and fellow human beings? Sometimes they’re unable able to hold down a job, maintain real relationships, much less create a prosperous life for themselves and their loved ones… Read more