Tantricnews

I’m sort of an anthropologist, but not one who studies trance-dancers in Polynesia or searches for lost tribes in the Amazon. Instead, I’m studying a strange new world that resides within our pedestrian lives, formed by an emerging community of neo-tantric practitioners, polyamorists, and shamanic healers. This community has achieved a sort of cultural critical mass – displaying a vibrant and integrated pattern of knowledge, beliefs, values, and practices that are socially transmitted within the collective.

Within this neo-tantric sub-culture, esoteric knowledge is shared between practitioners, and a new symbology is mutually constructed every time some dakini utters the terms amrita, yoni, lingam or shaktilicious. What’s more, it’s a unique sub-culture that draws knowledge that spans from the birth of humanity to new theories of neuroscience, turning 2500 year old pujas and yogas into postmodern rituals and passages.

And at the heart of it, there is something genuinely unique. What I’ve found is something that differentiates tantrikas from psychologists, ministers and faith healers – all offering to hand you the key to understanding love. This special characteristic is the ability of tantric experts to control and channel the energy of love.

What do I mean by the energy of love? Consider the martial arts. What makes tai chi, qigong and aikido masters so much more spiritually compelling than their UFC and cage-fighting brethren? Is it the breathing? The katas and forms? What is the secret sauce of these internal martial arts? I believe that what differentiates the internal martial arts from all others is the use of “life-force energy” as a component of martial arts training.

If you’ve never had a direct experience of life-force energy with a great internal martial artist, you might think it’s a scam, or just some tall tales about how someone took down an opponent with a single finger, or broke concrete blocks with his head, or moved an object or student with his “ qi”. That’s telekinesis, right? That only happens in the movies, right? No, it happens in real life, but only if you’re good at finding genuine qigong masters and not falling for the scams and tall tales of third rate kung fu teachers.

Well, what I believe is that masters of tantra have an equivalent ability, specifically, to emanate and channel a pure form of sexual life energy that directly impacts the heart chakra. If you’ve never had a direct experience of tantric energy, you might think all of the breathing crap is just a scam, or maybe some tall tales from rock stars about keeping it up for eight hours. But once you have such a direct experience of such a thing, you know it’s real. You know that it’s a palpable, experiential thing.

And so, as a scientist, I’m seeking to learn as much as I can about this energy of love.

My First Time

When I was in my 20s, I had the great fortune to fall in love with a wonderful woman who was a powerful faith healer. And I mean powerful. She twice my age, but the spiritual connection was so strong that I could not help but fall for her, and want to follow the bright warm sunny light she projected into the universe. However, after a couple of months with her, I knew that we weren’t really meant to be together, so I decided to break it off. However, my heart was absolutely breaking over the idea of parting!

When I announced to her the end of our relationship, she noticed how sad I was… and she simply smiled and placed her hand on my heart. Suddenly her hand become very hot, and this tangible and irrefutable energy was transmitted from her hand into my chest. At this time, I was a graduate student in theoretical physics and trained not to fall for faith healers and flimflam men, but here was something I could not explain nor ignore. What’s more, she was so powerful at healing, that it was like an furnace of love/energy that literally tempered my heart, healed it of its leaky corners, made it whole. When I gasped, all she said was, "Now you know how I feel all the time."

This was what she felt all the time. Every moment. Every breath. Bliss.

After we parted, I realized that she had actually left me with a wonderful gift… she left me with a seed of universal love, planted in my heart chakra. I have come to recognize that over the years, it was this energy that caused wonderful spiritual awakenings. As I spiritually matured... I was able to take ownership of a subtle vehicle for spiritual transformation, because slowly, over the years, I’ve sought to not only be imbued with this energy, but to become this energy.

Basically, since that day, I've never felt brokenhearted pain in a negative way. Sure, I’ve felt my heart break, but it was beautiful to behold, like a sunset so perfect it makes you cry. When I’ve felt sadness, it’s always been like the kind of sadness you feel when listening to Sade... an oddly comfortable pensiveness that can only be derived from living in a state of satori and suchness. It was this seed of love energy that eventually became an awareness that craves what I call complete reality.

Every quiet moment as I float along this existence, every white knuckle thrill and spill of life – I know now, just breathe, let it happen and enjoy the ride.

Absolutely palpable

And so I reached out to people in the tantric community to ask them about when they felt the energy of love. I came across some very interesting and powerful experiences. Here is the first of many stories I’ve collected over the last couple of years:

I was at a Quedoshka shamanic retreat in Arizona with my boyfriend. We had spent the first day and night doing spiritual sexuality practices, working with strong lustful energy. That night I had one of the most exquisite sexual experiences of my life. The next day, we were dancing in the main room on a break, having fun when he leaned in and whispered in my ear how much he loved me. For some reason, at that exact moment, my heart exploded. My whole heart chakra felt like it was on fire. I was in absolute pure ecstasy from the top of my head to the tips of my toes. I felt gloriously happy, swept away by feeling. Afterwards, I described this experience as a heart orgasm.

I'm not sure I believed this kind of thing really existed until I experienced it first hand. In fact, for the first few years of my tantric studies, I thought people were just being all new age-y when they talked about ecstasy and bliss. I didn't realize they were talking about very real and embodied states of being, of feeling and sensation. It wasn’t until I was able to experience it myself that I believed that such a thing was possible.

– Amber St. Germain, www.passionpriestess.com

This case history illuminates a few characteristics that I’ve found to be generally true. First, these types of spiritual energic peak experiences generally cannot be controlled or scheduled. These are spontaneous awakenings, but perhaps are kindled by a myriad of factors – such as a serious and dedicated approach to meditation and inner energy work, clearing any psycho-sexual issues that inhibit your sexuality and access to states of bliss, the right circumstances in terms of having a successful relationship to begin with and safety in terms of root issues, and the spiritual generosity of a true teacher. Who knows, maybe it’s important to have your stars in alignment as well, in terms of auspicious dates.

As to the actual process of heart chakra opening… I believe that it is an event equivalent to the awakening of kundalini through the spine and into the Agya chakra – the third eye chakra. When the energy enters the Agya chakra, it awakens bliss and transcendent wisdom. But when the energy enters the Heart chakra, it awakens a slightly different from of bliss, as well as access to states of universal love and kindness. Furthermore, it seems to be a complex process, as it deals with many interlinked forces and biological systems – the strength of life-force meridians or nadi’s, the neuro-endocrine system, and a dozen other factors within the human body and psyche. It even requires an active balancing of energies, according to acupuncture theory – which also correspond to balancing neuro-hormones, like dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin and their re-uptake inhibition processes (SNRIs).

In fact, this process of “heart chakra activation” could possibly hold the potential for a new wholistic approach to understanding the mind/body processes of unipolar depression. The simple fact is that scientists don't know enough about the chemical changes that occur in the brain during depression and little research has been done on how these changes affect sexuality.

Research has shown a clear tendency for the depressed to lose interest in sex. The double whammy happens when you start taking anti-depressants… which can further interfere with sexual function – including a further reduction of interest in sex, and increasing difficulty in reaching orgasm. Also, most therapists note that renewed interest in sex may be the first sign of recovery. However, what if we turned the system around, and looked at it in a different way? What if we propose a little new thinking by proposing that a shift in the underlying proto-sexual energy – the stuff that psychologist Wilhelm Reich called orgone or acupuncturists call jing – is actually the cause of both depression and a slowing of other bodily functions, such as appetite and sex?

Here’s a report from someone who used tantra to lift a depression:

“As someone who has a history of major clinical depression, I learned the powerful potential of sexual energy and its ability to change mood states when I was suffering from a depression. I appealed to a tantric practitioner to assist me with a mild depression that was setting in. In a paired tantric meditation, he moved sexual energy up into my third eye, but in a non-sexual way. It was so potent that I felt an immediate lifting up out of the darkness as if I was pulled up by invisible energetic strings, straight into a state of bliss. There was also a lot of physical heat that was generated. I stayed in this state of bliss for several days and even as it slowly subsided I did not return to that place of deep pain or despair I had been in. It was a much more tolerable level of sadness, and I found it tolerable enough that I was able to reflect upon and process the sadness. Actually, it was quite miraculous...”

So I ask you… isn’t something like this worth researching? Or is our society so sex-negative that the mere possibility of using sex energy to treat depression scares everyone off, insuring that such techniques will never be adequately researched?

Here’s another point – the clinically depressed usually suffer from a powerful feedback loop, known as depressive rumination or perserveration, powered by the tendency of the depressed to indulge in obsessive and compulsive negative thinking. Tantra is fundamentally a meditative practice, which is actually the opposite of rumination. In fact, recent studies have compared depressed ruminators who had undergone a mindfulness meditation program with those who had undergone relaxation training program on a number of variables. Results revealed that only the meditation group demonstrated significantly reduced rumination compared to the control conditions. 

Actually, one new Western psychotherapeutic technique has already been developed using such holistic approaches: EFT, aka “emotional freedom technique”. In essence, EFT is a psycho-emotive version of acupuncture wherein practitioners stimulate certain meridian points by tapping on them with their fingertips. In the EFT view, emotional issues are supported by unbalanced energy meridians. Too much fire and you’re angry. Weak kidney energy and you’re depressed. Properly executed, the EFT technique can accelerate the therapeutic process from months of therapy down to a few days or even hours!