Terrific Tantra- Femina

Dr Anil Patil tells us why Tantric sex — a complex fusion of yoga, meditation, ritual and sex — is changing the concept of making love as the West knows it

Singer and musician Sting and his wife Trudie Styler, actor Woody Harrelson of ‘Indecent Proposal’ fame and his wife Laura Louie, Oscar winning actor Tom Hanks and his wife Rita Wilson have discovered the secret to keeping a marriage long and happy.

Believe it or not, these men and women swear by the joys of continuous, slow, full-body lovemaking, also known as Tantric sex. Read on to find out more about this technique that is helping couples the world over to revitalise their relationships.

Religious Beginnings
About 5,000 years ago, Lord Shiva’s followers developed 112 methods of meditation, through which one could enter the state of super-consciousness. Some of them included the act of sex. Lord Shiva’s symbol, the ‘Lingam’ (‘the wand of light’) represents the penis and rests in a ‘Yoni’, ‘the sacred place’ that represents the vagina. Very simply explained, the entire spiritual path of Tantra is the harmonious union of the male and female principles in all of us.

Most ordinary Indian traditions hold that the way to return to the wholeness of truth is to repress ferociously, by asceticism and will power, all the faculties of the body and mind, which participate in the process of self-gratification.

Tantra regards that sort of uphill struggle as absurd. Instead, it says that all the faculties — the senses, the emotions and the intellect — should be encouraged and aroused to their highest pitch, so that a person’s responses can be awakened and be converted into the pure energy from which they all have originated. Feelings and pleasures thus become the raw material for enlightenment.

Rediscovering Sex
Why is the world so overtly obsessed with sex? Does the fulfilment which one gets through it give him or her the happiness and joy that is inaccessible through any other medium? The enlightened ‘yogis’ tried to find the answers to these questions and in the process discovered that the joy of sex is actually a glimpse of the bliss which one would attain at the time of spiritual enlightenment or samadhi leading to freedom from the cycle of birth and death.

Based on this understanding, the ‘yogis’ tried to give a correct direction to the sexual urge through Tantra. If one practices Tantric sex and masters certain techniques, then one’s sexual life could very well become the route for spiritual enlightenment.
Different Paths Of Tantra