It's interesting how, as tantra yoga has crept into the culture of our western world, a perception has crystallized. Most people nowadays believe tantra is more about sex – happier sex, more ecstatic sex, more "spiritual sex." As a result, tantra's call has been, "Gender, sex, sex!" Is it possible that we have one-track minds? It's perfectly normal.
The sex act, especially the intense joy of orgasm, is for most of us the pinnacle experience of our lives. But it's no wonder that we're a sex-obsessed society – generally in favor of it, sometimes against it, and mostly in awe of it. We're both aware that sex connects us to a deeper level of who we are. Sex unites us in marriage, families, and eventually our spiritual lives. So, of course, we are sex-obsessed. It's at the very core of who we are. That is what distinguishes us. We all have a profound urge to forever combine with the pleasure found in this thing called "sex."
We'd be smart to take a limited view of sex in order to solve the ultimate puzzle of it. This is where tantra enters the image.
What if I told you tantra is mostly concerned with yoga, pranayama, bandhas, mudras, and asanas? All of the stuff that we discussed in Advanced Yoga Practices. Real, tantra is mostly concerned with these issues. Yes, it is all about sex, as we have been discussing in the key lessons from the beginning. We haven't avoided the topic of sex in relation to the enlightenment process.
Enlightenment is impossible to achieve until our sexuality is integrated into the yoga phase – the process of union with our own spiritual selves and the outside world. The position of sexual energy must be discussed when nurturing our nervous system in this direction.
Tantra is a Sanskrit word that means "woven together" or "two fullnesses as one." It's essentially the same as meditation, but with an additional element of intimacy. Tantra understands from the beginning that for liberation to exist, two poles must be ecstatically combined – Father heaven and Mother earth, masculine and feminine powers, Shiva and Shakti, yin and yang – and that these two poles are found within us, in our nervous system. In the key lectures, we've already addressed this from a variety of realistic perspectives.
Tantra yoga is the most comprehensive of all yoga systems, since it views life as two truths that must be brought together in the human nervous system. Mantra yoga, kundalini yoga, hatha yoga, ashtanga (eight-limbed) yoga, and other types of tantra yoga are included. The rituals used in these conventional yoga systems are referred to as tantra yoga's "right-handed" side.
And there's tantra yoga's "left-handed" side, which is obsessed with infusing absolute happiness awareness into the sensual pleasures of the natural world. The left-handed personality isn't opposed to sensual pleasures. In reality, it makes use of them for spiritual reasons. The left-handed side of yoga is the underbelly, the aspect of the practice that upstanding people are expected to avoid. That is, after all, the conventional viewpoint. That was before tantra became common with the "hip generation." Left-handed tantra is still considered respectable. It is, at least in the West.
Perhaps Westerners have much to lose because they are too engrossed in material life to begin with. Why not incorporate your metaphysical side into your everyday life? Let's have cake and have it too. It screams left-handed tantra all over it.
As a result, in the tantra classes, we'll focus on left-handed tantra as it relates to sexual methods. You'll see that we'll be connecting topics we've already spoken about in the key lessons. Over there, we've done a full work-up on kundalini (“a code word for sex”) and started inducing sexual energy upward into the nervous system with advanced yoga practises like mulabandha, sambhavi, siddhasana, yoni mudra kumbhaka, nauli, kechari, and bastrika. All of these have been incorporated into the twice-daily practice schedule, which will be completed in steps according to our capacity.
Anything we've done so far has been from the ground up, beyond siddhasana, which is systemic perineal stimulation. We'll now descend below siddhasana, so to speak. It is needed. And if we don't get a handle on the massive flows of prana involved in the sex act, we might find ourselves confined spiritually in our nervous system. This does not imply that we must consider the infamous "C" term (celibacy). It does imply that we will suggest certain clever strategies for aligning our sexual practices with our moral goals. In reality, you might be shocked to learn that intellectual spiritual sex is much more exciting than the standard kind of sex that ends with the words "Wham, bam, thank you Ma'am."
You may also want to read more about Tantra Yoga here.
