What Is Tantra?

This is me practicing tantra aka working on my eye-gazing game (JOKE)

Ever since deciding to build this platform to share my thoughts and understanding about yoga and life, I’ve been crystal clear about the subject of my first-ever blog post. Especially in my beloved home country Finland, this topic needs to be clarified. 

I have learned that there are usually two types of responses when mentioning the word tantra to someone who’s new to the concept: people either brighten up or freak the F out. I believe both reactions are arising from the assumption that I’m about to reveal the recipe of 3-hour-full-body-orgasm or some other secret sacred sex tricks. And depending on their relationship to their own sexuality, people either get excited or frightened.

This belief of tantra being some sort of sexual practice is understandable but false. Contrary to what google tells us, tantra does not equal sex. 

Claiming so is a little bit similar to the myth of yoga being a stretching practice. Tantra is an ancient art of living and has as much to do with sex as with any other aspect of being a human. Selling it as sacred sexuality is complete misuse of an age-old wisdom, harnessed into our own desires (money and sex, gets us everytime).

Ok, rant completed for now, let me get to the point. 

Tantra is such a large concept and defining it without confining it feels quite challenging. However, to free tantra from that ridiculously tiny box we have placed it today, I am going to give it a try.

Tantra is a sanskrit word with several meanings, the most common ones being to weave or a technique/system. The term is derived from two words: tanoti which means “to extend or expand, to stretch;” and trayati which means “to free or liberate”. A science of self-realization, self-knowledge, quite literally meaning “a technology that moves us beyond our limitations or limited views”.  Tantra helps us to see our self-created limitations, both conscious and unconscious, and then expand beyond those limits.

And how we are going to do it, is through mastering our energy with large set of practices including asana, pranayama, mudra, bandha, visualization, mantra, meditation, and so on.

It is indeed a practice of growth, path of metamorphosis. 

Holding a non-dual worldview, it is very similar to the concept of yin and yang in taoism. Non-duality is kind of impossible to express in words as words are dual in nature. We understand words and thoughts through opposites, and non-duality is something beyond this duality. It means not-two, or oneness, wholeness. That which lies beyond good and bad, right and wrong, black and white. 

All is energy and all is sacred

As quantum physics says, everything is energy. Tantra agrees, and it also states that all is divine. Everything in life, all form, each particle, every atom in this universe is sacred. This includes you, your sexuality (this is the part us westerns decided to adopt from the whole concept of tantra) and also all the struggle, every obstacle you’ll ever face in this lifetime. All of it is just another possibility to experience the sacred.

And experience is what tantra calls us to learn through. The main difference between yoga and tantra is that where yoga suggests us to detach ourselves from the gross world, tantra sees everything, including the world of matter, as divine. Tantra does not propose us to leave our jobs and go live in caves up in Himalayas, it wants us to experience the divinity within and use it to thrive in all aspects of our lives. Live a full, rich life, embodying the sacred, becoming the sacred. Rather than achieving liberation from the world, tantra wants us to liberate IN the world. 

That’s pretty awesome, isn’t it. 

Then there is consciousness 

So all is connected and all is divine. No need to separate ourselves from the physical world, we can experience it right here, in these human suits, in this human life. To get to the essence of tantra, let’s shift the focus to the one that is experiencing. (And this, btw is something quantum physics have not managed to explain yet -the more we study consciousness the bigger of a mystery it seems to become.)

So what is it that’s witnessing this ever changing ocean of energy? What is it that’s experiencing all that is? Who are you? And no, I didn’t ask your profession, or how old are you, where are you from or which university did you go to, what I meant is who or what is the one witnessing all of the above?

As mentioned before, more than anything tantra is a science of self-realization. Through becoming more sensitive to energy, we can begin to connect with our true self, the infinite aspect of ourselves. Our highest Self, which is limitless, eternal, unchanging and connects us to all that is.

Tantra is the dance between energy and consciousness

In Samhkya philosophy, the main philosophy behind both yoga and tantra, all reality is composed of two principles, the primordial pair called Purusha and Prakriti. Purusha means pure consciousness and prakriti describes unlimited creative potential, or matter. In other words, in the dance of life there is always the one who’s watching the dance and then there is the momentum, the dance. Like subject and object, the unchanging and the change herself, or as Bhagavad Gita says “the field and the knower of the field”. 

This is what everything in life is made of. And we are a microcosm of the macrocosm, everything out there is also in here.

In humans this can be seen as the Soul (Purusha) and the rest of our being/ our human nature (Prakriti).  Purusha also means “the mighty one”. She has a mission, and to manifest it she obviously needs some matter (no worries Purusha, we gotcha *hands over prakriti*).

Yes, our souls have unique missions; each and every one of us are having a greater purpose to fulfill in this lifetime. To find out that purpose and to start living it, is to realize our true nature. Which is, nothing less than greatness.

This is the path of tantra, a journey to self-realization.

Photography in this post by Quincy Engelhardt