TantraPedia

If you are a woman that dreams of a man who will worship you — who will feed you strawberries as you lie naked on satin sheets and massage your skin with scented oil as he dusts a feather up and down your body, then read on. If you are a man who wants to deepen your sexual pleasure and improve your love relationship (which includes having more sex) then tantric sex might be for you.

What is it?

The word tantra means a tool for expansion. The heart of tantric sex is learning to see your lover as truly divine and holy. During lovemaking the five senses are engaged and an intimate connection is created between lovers using breath, meditation, and body positions. The tantric sexual experience engages the body as a whole instead of focussing exclusively on exciting the genitals in order to achieve orgasm. Not that orgasm is left out of tantric sex—many participants describe the orgasms they experience, after connecting in such an intimate way with their partner, as bliss. In fact tantra teaches that harnessing one’s desire and using the energy of sexual arousal can lead to self-realization and enlightenment. Sex as a path to enlightenment—certainly sounds better than fasting and selling your worldly possessions!

There is openness, a revealing of oneself within tantric sex, which can feel a little threatening if you’ve been raised with the idea that sex is a physical activity with a goal in mind. So it may work best if the ideas and exercises are introduced slowly, with a sense of excitement and anticipation that are sure to peak your partner’s curiosity. There are some common elements — for instance one central tantric ritual includes these five items, alcohol, meat, fish, kidney beans and ritual intercourse. Aside from the kidney beans that doesn’t sound much different than our western view of a date, so how hard could it be to incorporate these erotic foreign practices into your usual bedroom routine? Not hard at all, here’s where to start.

• Create a “love space” that is comfortable, playful and relaxed. Clean the room of miscellaneous clutter. Decorate with fabrics, pictures, candles, flowers, stones, or anything else that creates a sensual space. Music sets the mood so find some in advance that you both like. Scent the room with essential oils like ylang-ylang, rose, jasmine or other erotic aromas. Make sure your bed is inviting with many pillows to assist in various love positions.

See the rest of the article at the Tantric Yoga Techniques portal.

Tantra is a Hindu yoga term that defines the sexual merging of two lovers. You can improve your sex life by first establishing a higher level of intimacy between you and your partner. Tantric sex techniques are as much about the preparation for intercourse as they are about the act itself. There are several steps you can take before intercourse ever happens to increase intimacy and strengthen the bond you share with your partner.

Step 1

Schedule an hour a week for you and your partner to share intimate time. Choose a quiet place to be alone, and make this scheduled time a priority. Show each other that the relationship and the desire to make it stronger are important to each of you.

Step 2

Dim the lights for your intimate time. You can light candles and add seductive aromas to enhance the mood. You and your partner can also play erotic music as a background for your time together.

Step 3

Sit cross-legged on the floor facing each other and let your hands rest on your knees, palms up. Look into each other’s eyes and concentrate on breathing slowly and deeply, matching your partner. Practice doing this until you can hold each other’s gaze for 10 minutes.

Step 4

Explore each other physically with soft, gentle touches. You should both feel safe enough to gently guide the other’s hands to the parts of your body that you want caressed. Be open with your partner about what works for you to create intimacy, and don’t be afraid to ask for what you want.

Source: Tantric Yoga Techniques portal.

What Is Shamanic Tantra?

Like traditional tantra, shamanic tantra is a path to enlightenment through the body, a spiritual practice that teaches us to be in the now and to open ourselves up to more bliss, joy, and connection to spirit by connecting our sexuality and our spirituality. Drawing from Wiccan, Druidic, and Shamanic roots, Shamanic tantra differs from traditional tantra in working extremely intuitively and in its strong connection to the earth. I have created the six gateways to sacred sexuality as an attempt to structure the work of shamanic tantra for teaching, but by its nature, shamanic tantra is fluid and guided through each person’s connection to the divine, and their sense of what is right for them.

What are the Six Gateways to Sacred Sexuality?

The journey to enlightenment can take many roads. The six gateways are a path that happens to be working for myself and my healing partner, Steven Jay. Together we have intuitively created this road map for discovering the bliss that is created when we connect spirituality to sexuality. This is a practice that can be used alone or with a partner. These steps are not necessarily practiced in order. In fact, they seem to interweave and spiral with each other, spirals being a geometric pattern often used to describe earth-centered spirituality, where linear motion from point a to point b is rare.

The First Gateway: Connecting to Spirit

This is where we begin in shamanic tantra, in a belief that something greater than us is willing and able to connect with us and bring us healing. This is also where we end in shamanic tantra, so that the six gateways become a spiraling circle of practice, rather than a linear journey. Through our connection to spirit, we learn to connect not only to the divine, but to ourselves, and to see that we too are divine beings. We do this mostly through meditation, visualization, and trance journey, familiarizing ourselves with the feeling of spirit moving within us before moving forward.

The Second Gateway: Breathing Love

In both traditional and shamanic tantra, love is the key to everything. Opening our hearts and keeping them open is a foundational practice. Understand that this is different from being “in love” in the romantic sense. An open heart applies to everyone you meet in the world, and is the most profound state of joy and bliss imaginable when attained. The most powerful tool I have discovered for opening the heart and then keeping it open, is the breath. Daily practice of various breath techniques, as well as simply remembering to breathe through a painful or difficult emotion, is the first step to opening ourselves to bliss and joy. In consort practice, we learn to breathe together, synchronizing breath in an attempt to synchronize our energies.

The Third Gateway: Soul Gazing

Soul gazing is the process of looking deeply within and connecting, first with ourselves, and then with a partner. This practice is most easily begun alone, through insight meditation and then through mirror gazing. Once you are comfortable with these solo practices, then it is easier to move into gazing into the eyes of a partner to connect and allow them to see the divine essence within you.

The Fourth Gateway: Channeling the Dragon

The sexual life force energy that flows through the body has many names, but my favorite comes from the gaelic: ”nwyvre”, which means “dragon fire”. In shamanic tantra we learn to channel this fire and to move it throughout our bodies to create a state of intense aliveness. Part of this work specifically focuses on balancing and clearing blockages in the energy centers of the body, also called chakras in traditional tantra, which brings a greater openness to moving ecstatic energies through the body, as well as increased health and vitality.

The Fifth Gateway: The 16 Elements of Ecstasy

Astrologers believe that all of us are imprinted with clusters of elemental energies at the time of our birth. The 16 elements of ecstasy are the elements of…

See the rest of the article at the Tantric Yoga Techniques portal.