Why I'm On a Tantric Path - Exploring the Crux of Tantra

It's Got Much Less to Do with Sex Than Most People Think

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Last month, I spent a week at a Tantra camp in Angsbacka, Sweden. I went to the festival to see if the tantra field here in Scandinavia is something I want to identify myself with. Cause…. what on earth IS tantra?

I wrote an article about the experiences of my week, and my quest to sort out what tantra is to me. And for you today, here is a little wrap-up.

Tantra is so much more than sex!

Spoiler: I felt uneasy at the festival. The program was primarily focused on sex and relating – which is to me a very limited perspective on what tantra is.

It's true that tantra as a spiritual path addresses our sexuality. But that sexuality isn’t limited to intimate sexual meetings. Tantra is the art of exploring our SEXUAL ENERGY: The life force energy that vitalizes every living creature - as well as Existence itself!

And yes, we can work with this energy though our sexual meetings – but we can also explore it within everyday life: through work, creative processes, cooking, walking, relating to friends…

I came to tantra after several years in meditation retreat. Although I loved the peace I experienced in my meditations, I felt something was missing. It was as… life itself was missing. I yearned for tools I could take back with me into everyday life: tools that would make me more equipped in my relationships; tools that would empower me and help my energy to flow; tools that would support me feeling happy and content!

I found these tools within the tantric field.

To me, tantra is a way of spirituality that EMBRACES OUR HUMAN EXPERIENCE. It's a path of learning to master our oh-so-complex humanity, and a path of devotion to our physical lives.

Yes, part of the tantric tool-set IS relating consciously to others, and embracing pleasure and our sexuality. But tantra has nothing to do with rushing towards pleasure! Rather, it's the art of getting to know our life force energy – and to address whatever obstruct our life force energy from flowing freely through our bodies.

My tantric path has nothing to do with kink or polyamory or orgasms or fancy sex. Sometimes I tell people I'm on a tantric path, and they assume this is what I'm into, and that makes me feel sad. I also feel sad when going to a tantric festival where they completely bypass the self-practice of tantra, and where the concept of “tantra” is reduced and perverted into a focus on polyamory, group sex, kink and exhibitionism. I want to scream: Walking around naked and being sexual in a room full of people, and discussing polyamory… has got nothing to do with tantra!

At least not to me.

And I don’t want to be identified with this approach to tantra, because it hasn’t got anything to do with what I practice.

Yet, I'm building this little heart-baby of mine: Tunsberg Tantra, and I've put the word tantra in my organization name. Should I take it out, I've pondered, so I don’t have to face these strange assumptions all the time?

Or… should I keep the name, and insist on reclaiming the concept of tantra – to take it back from the kink environment?

I think that’s what I'm gonna do.

Cause I find tantra to be such a beautiful and unique path: A path that truly acknowledges the complexity of our humanity – a complexity I've often found forgotten on pure meditation paths, or in Buddhism, or even in the yoga environment.

Exploring the Core of Tantra: A spiritual path that embraces our human complexity

The most powerful aspect of tantra to me, is the focus on embracing our oh-so-complex-humanity.

Since our life force energy can only flow freely when we acknowledge whatever is, tantric practices support us to accept: accept our past, our shadows, our feelings, our sexuality. In its core, this acceptance is about consciousness. Tantra teaches us to embrace both light and darkness as part of ourself. It encourages us to see ourselves in our full complexity - and daring to love anyway.

Basically, tantra teaches us to embrace the darkness - ACCEPT the darkness - as part of our human experience!

I really can’t underline how important I think this acceptance is. Cause around me, I see all these spiritual seekers getting lost in their ambitions of inner peace – and responding with SURPRESSING their feelings. As I perceive it, that suppression is the spiritual environment destroying itself from the inside.

Just as much as I want to scream to the quasi-tantra environment: Tantra is about way more than sex, I want to scream to the general spiritual environment: Nothing good happens from suppressing your feelings!

To me, tantra is a spiritual path that provides an alternative to this suppression: Rather than seeking to suppress or deny our difficult feelings and our primal urges – the tantric path encourages us to GET TO KNOW our human complexity, and learn to master it.

And that’s why I love tantra.

…

Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons: Photographic reproduction of Womb Realm mandala, Japan Shingon tantric buddhist school, Heian period (794-1185).

My experiences at the festival have taken me into some very interesting discussions lately. A man I met on a date, thought studying tantra made me some sort of a prostitute. A woman of my mother’s generation though, thought tantra was about breath practices, and she'd never heard anyone connecting it to polyamory and kink before.

I'm feeling eager to debunk the assumption that tantra is about sex, and to take back the spiritual meaning of the word tantra. I'm also curious to hear what others associate with tantra? Maybe you can help me draw the backdrop: What is it really that we think tantra is in our modern western societies? Do we all assume tantra to be different things? Might there even be a generational difference in how we perceive tantra?

With love, Ida