¿What is Tantra?
Tantra is a path of awareness, acceptance and connection with life.
Tantra teaches us that everything we experience is consciousness expressing itself in different forms.
Our body, our emotions, our thoughts, our sexuality, pleasure, pain, stillness and movement are all part of the same consciousness. Rather than separating the physical from the spiritual, Tantra invites us to experience everything as part of one whole.
Nothing needs to be excluded. Everything we experience can become a doorway to greater awareness and presence.
One of the master keys of Tantra is acceptance.
It begins with accepting ourselves as we are — our body, our mind, our emotions, our sexuality and our spiritual dimension. When we stop fighting against parts of ourselves and begin to meet ourselves with awareness and acceptance, a process of transformation can naturally begin.
Tantra is not about becoming someone else. It is about becoming more present with who we already are and allowing a more spontaneous and authentic response to the experiences and opportunities that life brings us.
Rather than seeing body and soul, matter and spirit, or sexuality and spirituality as separate, Tantra brings them together.
Unlike many other spiritual paths, Tantra does not exclude sexual energy. Sexual energy is understood as part of our life energy and therefore also as a possible path towards greater awareness and expanded consciousness.
Tantra speaks about the meeting of complementary energies: masculine and feminine, Shiva and Shakti, father sky and mother earth, stillness and movement, consciousness and energy.
These energies are not simply about men and women. They can be understood as different qualities that exist within all of us. When these apparently opposite forces are no longer in conflict but are allowed to meet, we can experience a greater sense of balance and wholeness.
Tantric practices can also work consciously with sexual energy. Instead of experiencing this energy only in the genital area or directing it immediately towards sexual release, we can learn to circulate it through the body — from the sexual centre towards the heart and further through the higher energy centres towards the crown, or seventh chakra.
As this energy expands, the experience can move beyond sexuality into a feeling of openness, connection and expanded awareness. The mind can become quieter and we may enter a deeply meditative state.
In Tantra, ecstasy is therefore not simply sexual ecstasy. It can also describe those moments when the usual activity of the mind becomes quiet. We are no longer occupied with the past or anticipating the future. We are simply present — feeling, breathing and experiencing.
When we stop rejecting parts of ourselves and allow all these different aspects of our being to coexist, life can become less of an inner conflict and more of a dance.
As Astiko Ji describes it:
“Tantra is not a philosophy, nor a doctrine, nor a manual to be a good lover, it is not intellectual, nor does it care about the why of things, nor how to define the truth. Tantra reminds you that you are the vastness of heaven, the space that contains everything. Tantra is an internal revolution, it is to strip away all beliefs, moralities and concepts of the mind, to create the inner space that one needs to conceive the infinite and timeless truth and gives us tools of understanding and acceptance of our nature that allow us to love ourselves and others.
Tantra understands duality as the friction generated by life: positive-negative, light-dark, man-woman, energy-matter, sex-spirit, etc. When this duality ceases to be a conflictive friction where one denies the other; when you accept and understand your own duality; Living becomes a joyful dance, a celebration. Tantra neither denies nor favors sex, it simply investigates human nature as it is, without any moral evaluation. A tantric person loves his body, his mind, his heart and his spirit. Your path to awareness and joy is understanding, acceptance, and sensitization of these.
Tantra is a challenge to taboos and creeds imposed by any religion or moral code. The great mystics of the tantric tradition were constantly persecuted and condemned. Although tantra is a rebellion against moral and oppressive precepts, it teaches neither debauchery nor pornography, but the intelligent observation of the human being with all its contradictions and the acceptance that the body is as divine as the soul, because everything comes from the same source. (Quantum physics has also come to the same conclusion: energy and matter are different manifestations of the same thing.)”
— Astiko Ji