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Cassandra Lorius
Copyright
Thorsons
An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
Published in the UK by Thorsons 1999
© Cassandra Lorius 1999
Cassandra Lorius asserts her moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780722538869
Ebook Edition © JUNE 2016 ISBN: 9780007469284
Version: 2016-07-21
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Foreword
Part 1: Introducing Tantra
How to use this book
Why choose Tantra?
What is Tantra?
ROOTS OF TANTRA
ACHIEVING BLISS
SHAKTI – THE FEMININE ENERGY
SACRED SEX
THE TANTRIC ENERGY MAP
CHAKRAS: WHEELS OF LIFE FORCE
TANTRIC PRACTICES
SACRED TOOLS: MANTRAS AND YANTRAS
SEXUAL ICONS
Part 2: Day-to-Day Tantra
Female and male in Tantra
THE BODY AS A TEMPLE
THE WAY OF PLEASURE
EMOTIONS
Tantra for your relationship
CREATING A TANTRIC RELATIONSHIP
TANTRA FOR SEXUAL HEALING
TANTRA IN THE WEST
Part 3: Practical Tantra
Preparing for Tantra
PREPARING YOURSELF
CENTRING YOURSELF
MEDITATION
Creating sacred space
CREATING A TANTRIC BED
CREATING RITUAL SPACE
CREATING THE TANTRIC FIELD
Partner work
HONOURING YOUR PARTNER: NAMASTE
CLEARING THE AIR
CONNECTING
SEEING YOUR PARTNER AS AN ENERGY BODY
TUNING IN
Breathing practices
COMPLETE BREATHING
HEART TO HEART BREATHING
SEX AND THE HEART BREATH
HEART WAVE
MALE AND FEMALE BREATH
SYNCHRONIZED BREATHING
ALTERNATE BREATHING
UNITY THROUGH SACRED SOUND
Meditation and visualization
UNITING HEAVEN AND EARTH: MEDITATION
PURIFYING THE CHAKRAS
ANOINTING THE CHAKRAS
Raising the energy
FIRE MEDITATION
STREAMINGS
Eroticizing your body
AWAKENING THE SENSES
DANCE OF THE GODDESS
EROTIC TOUCH
Anatomy of sex
THE LOVE MUSCLE
FIRE MEDITATION WITH LOVE MUSCLE SQUEEZE
Improving your sexual enjoyment
SELF-PLEASURING
HONOURING YONI
HONOURING LINGAM
HEALING YONI MASSAGE
MASSAGING THE LINGAM
Extended sexual pleasure
THE GODDESS SPOT
MALE SACRED SPOT: THE PROSTATE
Part 4: Divine Sex
Relaxing into orgasm
NON-DOING IN LOVE-MAKING
RIDING THE WAVE OF BLISS
Working in an on-going Tantric way
ONGOING TANTRA
Glossary
Bibliography
Resources
INDEX
Acknowledgements
The Art of Sexual Ecstasy
About the Publisher
FOREWORD
Essences of lily, lemon and lavender were wafted under my nose, and small segments of pineapple, figs and pomegranate teasingly popped into my mouth – all of which I savoured with a sensual pleasure enhanced by being blindfolded. Percussion instruments were gently rattled somewhere near my ears, and my skin was brushed with fabrics, feathers and fur. In this state of heightened sensitivity my hand was placed in the tentative clasp of my neighbour to explore. ‘I don’t know where this is leading,’ I thought, ‘but if this is Tantric foreplay, I want more!’
TANTRIC WORKSHOPS
Tantric workshops have had a bad press – often portrayed as excuses for orgies by the tabloids. Yet they’re not solely about sex but sensuality in the broadest sense. SkyDancing’s ‘Taste of Tantra’ workshops combine the Eastern practices of yoga and meditation with techniques from modern humanistic psychology, which focuses on developing the intimacy skills needed to effectively communicate and connect with our partners. Participants are led through a sequence of exercises designed to increase energy and sensual awareness, culminating in an ‘Erotic massage’ from your partner. Tantra involves letting the mind go and becoming more expressive through your body. Along with a sense of relaxation and playfulness comes a surge of energy, which you can use in creative ways to enhance your interaction with your partner.
Discovering Tantra was a revelation for me – not that it felt strange or exotic. It was more like coming home to myself. Feeling freely expressive, worshipping my own body, and being worshipped all felt natural and inevitable. Of course I am a goddess incarnate; I’d always known that – it was just that no-one else had!
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 both more joyful, and more meaningful.
Part 1: Introducing Tantra
‘Bliss is my very nature I need not do anything nor strive for anything to secure it.’
A Rishi’s perspective translated by Deepak Chopra
How to use this book
The first half of this book describes traditional Tantra as it has been practised by different groups in India over thousands of years. It looks at how Tantric teachings have been interpreted and how contemporary Tantra trainings in the West use some of these teachings. Contemporary trainings, such as the SkyDancing training I did, developed by Margo Anand in the US, are more properly neo-Tantra. They don’t expect us to become familiar with the whole body of esoteric teachings of Tantra, but selectively take some of the practices and blend them with psychotherapeutic body work approaches to fit our current needs. In this sense, they can be considered a preparation for Tantra proper.
The book goes on to explore how the new forms of Tantra apply Tantric principles to contemporary life. I’ve quoted people who are on Tantra trainings to give you the flavour of what it means to real people, and how it influences the way they feel about themselves and their relationships. I’ve tried to weave a path between traditional Indian forms of Tantra, explaining some of the deep-rooted philosophy out of which these ideas and practices spring, and the ways in which Tantra can be applied to your life today.
The second half of the book provides you with meditations and exercises in the art of sexuality, which can enrich your relationship, and harmonize the energies between you and your partner. Use the structures and exercises suggested here to inspire you, change them to suit your own particular needs, and then let go of them. Otherwise the techniques themselves become just one more barrier to experiencing the flow of energy in all its power and simplicity.
The exercises may seem at times simple and at other times too complex, but if you enter into them with a spirit of adventure, accepting that whether you find them easy or difficult you will learn about yourself and your relationship, you will gain a lot.
If you get stuck, or find it difficult to create a safe space in which to do Tantric work, you may want to contact one of the many Tantra training courses available, which you can attend either as a single person, or in a couple. Check the resources section at the back of this book to find out about established trainings.
This book will enable you to taste what Tantra has to offer for you and your relationships, and gives you tools you can work with effectively on your own. The basic exercises can be used by single people, as well as couples. Although the exercises are geared towards heterosexual couples, they can be used just as easily by homosexual couples, since all couples can experiment with playing with the different masculine and feminine energies described by Tantra.
It doesn’t matter if you’re not interested in pursuing the philosophy behind Tantra, because these techniques will help you at whatever level you choose to take them on. If you just want to spice up your relationship, they will help you do that. If you want to follow Tantra as a spiritual path, this book will give you some insight into what that might involve, and encourage you to find your own personal teacher.
This book is also a very practical how-to manual, and regardless of whether you believe in any of the philosophical points of Tantra, these exercises will help you enter the realm of divine sex.
Why Choose Tantra?
Tantra is a path of sensual celebration as a spiritual discipline, which uses the erotic charge of sex to help us to connect with the divine. It is this openness to sexuality as a means of spiritual development that has led to Tantra’s current popularity in the West – where we tend to focus on sex and self-development rather than the more radical message of transcendence.
The essence of Tantra is a relishing of earthly experience for the experience of divine bliss it can bring us. Sexual pleasure is used as a gateway to divine bliss, and sexual relationship is considered one of the fastest ways of reaching enlightenment. It’s certainly the most enjoyable!
If your passion for life has been stifled within a stagnating relationship, an over-focus on mundane necessities or too much work, Tantra can help you to regain your zest for life, as well as take your relationship to new levels of love and connection. Tantra is a potent means of transforming your relationship – although, if your relationship has cracks in it, putting more energy into it will only expose the weaknesses! Tantra can make your relationship more alive and vibrant, more fun and sensual, and move you out of stagnation by showing you where and how to put energy in. The starting point of this process is to reaffirm the place of spirit in your life, and embrace spirituality in your sexual relationship.
Essentially, Tantra encourages you to honour your relationship as a mirror of the divine relationship between Shakti and Shiva, the primordial couple in Hinduism, and to honour your partner as a mirror of yourself. Both you and your partner are divine, and seeing each other in this light helps you move out of petty squabbles and power struggles into affirming the fundamental strength of your inter-connection.
Tantra sees your connection as a meeting of divine energies, rather than of two ego-bound psyches destined to act out past patterns and ways of relating that stem from your family background. A psychotherapy-based way of looking at relationships can be of limited use, and Tantra replaces it with a more spiritual model. It teaches you how to unlock the energies within yourself and to use them to transform your experience of the world into one of bliss.
This involves becoming more aware of how your attitudes determine the way you experience your own reality, and how your level of awareness affects the quality of your relationships with others.
A strong sense of something missing is often what drives both women and men to explore other approaches to sexuality. The awareness of all the possibilities, all the different levels of experience we could have in love-making, and the knowledge that exquisite, divine sexual feelings are left untapped, are what brings us to Tantra. In orgasm we have a glimpse of eternity; letting go into something far bigger and more spacious than our orgasmic gratification. It’s this experience of something vaster that keeps us fixated on sex, striving to repeat the experience. Tantra is the practice that allows you to attain that state without immediately losing it again. It allows you to maintain and extend it.
According to self-styled New Age guru, Barry Long, women and men are prevented from making love to our full potential, because we have not learnt how to make love with consciousness. Loving consciously involves Shiva (the man) receiving the divine energies of Shakti (the woman) in the act of love-making. Tantra teaches ways to make lovemaking more aware, and techniques for assimilating the energies of your partner in love-making.
Tantra has become increasingly popular in the Western world in recent years as we seek to address this underlying dissatisfaction with our intimate relationships, in spite of the hype about how much more sexual satisfaction we experience post the 60s sexual revolution. Survey after survey shows that we are not happier with our sex lives, nor our relationships, and Tantra offers us methods to work on these problems in a positive way.
Tantra workshops attract an equal number of men and women from a whole range of backgrounds. They tend to be in their thirties, forties and fifties, coming to Tantra as a result of the realization that the area of relationship, and sexual relating in particular, needs more attention.
Tantra 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.
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