Tantric Sex: Making love last. Cassandra Lorius

starts before you even touch each other.

       The creation of a ‘sacred space’ using subdued lighting, candles and essential oils in burners, and a tray of sensual foods and drinks to feed your partner.

       The creation of a deep heart connection by spending a long time gazing at each other, feeling a sense of connection and harmony between you.

       The sharing of exercises to ‘awaken the senses’: feeding your lover titbits, wafting perfumes or essential oils under their nose, and stroking their skin with feathers or fabrics like fur.

       Tantra involves the whole body – so sex isn’t just focused on your genitals.

       Focusing on the quality of sexual connection, not the quantity of sex.

       Taking time. Sex lasts much longer – instead of a few minutes the whole process lasts hours.

       Changing your orgasms from genital experiences to ‘whole body’ orgasms, where you feel energy rushing through your whole body.

       Breathing work: slowing down your breathing and harmonizing your breathing by breathing in and out together.

       Energizing the various energy centres in your body (see here), which is a practice of kundalini yoga, a type of Indian yoga.

       Imagining your breath is going right down to your pelvis, activating your sexual energy and building sexual fire. This is especially good for those who habitually suppress their sexual energy.

       Linking up the sexual energy in your pelvis, with your heart centre (over your heart) to get in touch with your loving feelings, and your third eye area (between brows) which is the energy centre (see here) related to your spiritual vision.

       Transcending the ego-bound aspects of your relationship, by focusing on what is essentially beautiful about the other person.

       Creating a convergence of breath and life-force through the subtle energy exchange taking place, in which the Shakti and Shiva principles unite within themselves and with each other.

      According to Barry Long, on his Making Love tapes, the divine alchemy of sex cannot take place unless couples meet in deep love. If a man can open up to love and love his Shakti partner selflessly during love-making, he can express sufficient love in his body to reach the spiritual part of her.

      This is how he can connect with the divine energies at her deepest centre. To be able to love woman this deeply is the masculinity man has lost. This is the conscious awareness, which Tantrics would call Shiva energy, that men have lost in this age of commitment phobia. To fully become an integrated man, a man has to be able to assimilate in his body the divine female energies a woman releases during love-making.

      Woman cannot exchange her divine energies if neither she nor her lover is not yet integrated or fully aligned with love. The gap of unhappiness can only keep on growing.

      Sex on the Tantric path is about exploring making love as the god and the goddess. You call them into your love-making and allow them to do with you as they will. It’s about getting out of the way and allowing yourself to be surprised at what emerges, rather than trying to make something happen. Here, the physical activity is directed by the energy between you, so that love-making becomes a natural flow that is entirely unselfconscious and innocent.

       During ritual intercourse women are adored, the inner fire of kundalini is offered up, and the inner female and male principles are united.

THE TANTRIC ENERGY MAP

      The key to understanding Tantra is understanding that we have a physical body and an energetic body. The energetic body is what animates our physical body, and permeates it. Sex is really an energetic meeting, a coming together of energy bodies as well as physical bodies. Tantrics visualize the powerhouse of our personal energy as a Kundalini snake, which lies coiled up in the base of the spine, waiting to be awakened and led up through the various energy centres in the body to the crown of the head. Preparation for Tantra involves focusing on this energy and drawing it up through the inner flute (central energy channel) in order to create powerful states of spiritual ecstasy.

      Tantra doesn’t assume that the subtle body exists in the same way as our physical body: it seeks to actively create the energy body through practices. It doesn’t matter to the Tantric practitioner whether chakras, wheels of energy, actually exist or not, because in visualizing them, you are in a sense creating them. If they help with the process of attaining a blissful state of consciousness, that’s fine. Choosing to work with the energy body, as opposed to the more usual approach of experiencing sexuality as a purely physical activity, automatically allows you to transform physical experiences into spiritual reality.

CHAKRAS: WHEELS OF LIFE FORCE

      Mavis, 30: Nearly four years ago I had what I later realized was a Kundalini experience. It spontaneously happened during a Chi Gong class, with someone who was teaching us beginners very advanced stuff. I felt as if something was crushing down on my back, along my whole spine, and as if it was shaking me. My body was really hot one minute, then really cold. For three days I couldn’t sleep, and after that I felt wonderful; I felt freed up, as if there were no boundaries between me and other people. I could look at people on the street and felt I could see into them, and I knew where their pain was. But it was very disorientating and everything felt blurred. My body and my mind were suddenly having to deal with a new reality, and these feelings kept coming back. I felt the Kundalini had opened me up, and there was no way of getting myself back together. The bodily sensations never stopped, but I can cope with them now, because Tantra has given me a framework for understanding them. Now I can see it’s just energy moving in me.

      It is considered dangerous to awaken the Kundalini energy without preparing and purifying the body. Tantra is a path of fire, and the power of the Kundalini energy when it awakens can burn us. Traditionally purification is achieved through a vegetarian diet, yoga postures and breathwork. These practices are then developed through the recitation of sacred sounds (mantras) and meditative visualization.

      Kundalini snake energy emanating from the yoni.

      Energy moving along the sushumna, the central energy channel of the body, is thought to pass through different energy centres or chakras (literally ‘wheels’ of energy), each of which have different associated qualities. The energy of the root chakra, at the base of the spine is described as solar energy and associated with the colour red, while the energy of that at the brow is lunar, and associated with the colour white. In fact, the energy of different chakras alternates between solar and lunar. Part of the art of drawing energy up through the central channel is to unite solar and lunar energetic qualities.

      The energy body has been documented over thousands of years. In Tantric philosophy the seven layers of cosmic energy are reflected in the seven energy centres in the body – the chakras:

      1 Nestled at the base of the spine is a golden egg. Inside this egg is the first chakra, the muladhara. The muladhara (root support) is particularly important because the creative force of the cosmos, the Kundalini, lies sleeping here. Visualized as a serpent, she sleeps with her body coiled into three and a half coils. In this chakra, you are working on the awakening of awareness, by awakening the sleeping kundalini energy.

      2 The