What is Tantra?

(ocean waves crash) So what is Tantra? This is a topic that I'm really passionate about and really is near and dear to my heart. I've been a student of Tantra for almost a decade now and I am continually astounded and humbled by the breadth and depth of this particular form of spiritual practice. When many of us hear this word Tantra, in the West we have a connection to sex and sexuality and certainly that is a part of the Tantric Cosmology of spiritual practice, but, it's really just an infinitesimally small part of what this system has to offer, so, in order to understand what is Tantra, which is a massive question, it helps us to actually look at the roots of the word itself and even within the tiny roots of the word, there are many meanings, so I wanna look at a couple of them and I think that will help you see how actually this isn't something exotic or far from your actual experience, but is something that you're probably already practicing to a certain extent if you are doing yoga or really any type of spiritual inquiry. So, the word tan means to be expanded and the word tra means a methodology or a tool or a technique and so when we put those two words together, we have tantra, a means for expanding.

Tantra, a tool that will enable me to move into a bigger realm of what my mind can understand. Tantra, a methodology for moving out of my very real or even just perceived sense of limitation. So, at the end of the day, we can think of it really simply as most of us, if not all of us, are at point a, and when we wake up in the morning, we would like to be at point b, right? There's this innate quality in all human beings that the Tantric saw as a longing. There is something inside of humans in particular, that longs to go somewhere else and this somewhere else can be anything, right?

It may be, you wake up in the morning and you think, "Wow, I'd really like to "accomplish x in my job today," and there's some obstacles to that or you wake up in the morning and you think, "Oh, you know, I'd really like to get fit "and have a more health body," and that's point b, or you wake up in the morning and you think, "Oh, I'd really love to accomplish this dream "of serving the world in this particular way," and that's point b, or maybe you just wake up in the morning and you think, "You know what, I really don't wanna feel sad, "I don't wanna feel stuck, "I don't wanna feel afraid in this way anymore, "I feel that joy and really experiencing "the divinity in my life "is possible, and yet, I'm not feeling that yet," and so, what I love about Tantra is it's this methodology that honors the fact that you are what the Ancients called a kamayoni, and that means a desire creator. The human being is, her desires aren't bad, that's what humans do, they create, the word yoni literally means womb because it's pushing out, it's creating, so human beings are constantly longing and creating and it is their nature, so when I try to go against this nature, I am going to feel a resistance. So, on one hand, Tantra really honors the fact that you have desire and by no means do we see this as bad, but at the same time, it is also not this permission for lasciviousness or crazy action, right. If you wanna be a Tantric actually, it's a very disciplined system and so what the system says is because we are longing, we need to be able to walk back into our consciousness, into our mind, into our emotions, into our experience to be able to see where is the origin point of my longings? What is actually my soul hungry for?

If you listen to my talk on Ayurveda, you heard me speak about how your soul longs for maybe, a sweet potato, but you go and eat potato chips, it's kind of the same thing with Tantra. You wake up and think, "I want this," and you're really sure of it, but then you get it, right, and we've all had this experience of having our longings given to us and then what we may see is that oh, I actually didn't want that at all or yeah, now that I've got it, I actually want something else now and so, it's kind of this funny, cosmic wink or joke that when we do attain these superficial longings, we start to see that either we don't want them or they're actually pointing towards a deeper longing. So, what I love about Tantra is that it does two things and this is really one of the many definitions of the word tantra and that is, it weaves, like threads on a loom, and so what, what does that mean and what does that have to do with me in my life, and what it means is that, I begin to weave the sublime, weave the reality of the divine. You can think about it, weave my highest spiritual purpose into the fabric of what is occurring in my daily life. I can begin to utilize what feels like an even superficial longing or desire to understand my deeper, individual soul's purpose and my higher mission to reach freedom.

So, by no means are you wrong or sinful for having any desire, in fact, if we enter into them, they can become portals into understanding what the deeper and deepest desire is. Anther central hallmark of Tantra is this notion of both duality and non-duality and what I mean by that is that when anyone wakes up in the morning, unless they've reached total liberation and freedom, we have this experience of good and bad. I know in myself, I wake up in the morning and I feel in my body, right, oh, I feel kind of off or some days I wake up and I'm like, wow, I feel great, and if I feel kind of off, it really sets me in kind of a weird mood, just feeling a little wonky, a little off in the morning can actually paint the rest of the day's feeling if I let it and so it's this idea that we're all, all of us, no matter how elevated and sublime our consciousness, we are under the vricty, the sway of this continual interface with what feels like good and bad. What feels like yes and no. One day I feel happy, the next day I feel sad, this continual fluctuation in my life of feeling satisfied and then not satisfied, hungry and then full, I mean, sun and moon, we could go on and on and on, the nature of life is this experience of duality and what I would even add to that is and this really is my own personal practice right now, is the feeling of being totally held and loved by the divine, by my creator, by the universe, whatever words you wanna use for it and then, maybe the next day or week or year, feeling abandoned and feeling so disconnected and just this pulsation of feeling this love and this sense of loss and so, even at these other, more mystical states, we can feel this duality as very real.

So, if you're listening to this, and you're feeling depressed or anxious, which is a lot of us right now, self included, there are these waves of emotion moving through collective culture that bring us very quickly into an interface with duality. I like this, I don't like this. So, Tantra honors that, right. This is our experience and if we try to jump too quickly into this positive place of everything is love and light, there's a word, Dr. Robert Masters came up with, a phrase, spiritual bypassing. Tantra was the first to come up with this.

This idea that I shouldn't move too quickly into these states of oneness until I've actually deeply gone into my own pain, right, my own humanity and that, I think, is something that is expanding and contracting continually within us, throughout our entire life. Tantra pays honor to this and sees these energetic emanations of good one day, bad the next, as this dance of shakti, this divine creative force that's continually keeping things in chaos, in movement, in change and if we honor that aspect of even our own emotions or our own mind, I think we can really approximate the other truth of Tantra, and that is non-duality. So, at the end of the day, this is a non-dual system, meaning that, we all are one. We are all brothers and sisters, including the animals and the sea and everything that exists. We are one family.

We are one, but, it is so real, in that it asks us to really ask ourselves the question, is that your experience, and for many of us, it's not. Right, it's not always our experience. So, Tantra is the methodology for coming into that recognition from the experiential body itself, not from the head, but from the entire being being energetically aligned in experiencing this reality. How do I practice? Another hallmark of Tantric practice in Tibetan Tantra and Indian Tantra and many other forms of mysticism that we wouldn't call Tantra use these words differently, but in this tradition, which is Hindu Tantra, we call these two aspects of duality, in their highest form, Shiva and Shakti.

Shiva is the principle of consciousness itself, as I spoke to you on the topic of Ayurveda, that great love story. We can go back to that and the word Shiva, I love this. One of the meanings of the word Shiva is that which brings great auspiciousness and success and joy to life, but the other meaning of it, in just regular English is silence. So, there's a teaching there. It's saying, do you want more good luck, good fortune, success and joy in life, cultivate your relationship to Shiva who is silence, the silent witness.

So, in many forms of meditation, especially those practiced quite often in the past here in the West, we paid a real honoring to and we utilized the Shiva practice, which is observe your thoughts, be quiet, get your mind silent, non-attachment, right, and that's a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful practice, but Tantra says if I'm only honoring that aspect, I am imbalanced and we can see that if we practice only silence and not attachment, it kind of, we have no legs, right, on the planet and we can kind of become too femoral and etheric, so what Tantra says is you have to cultivate this quality of Shiva consciousness in yourself while at the same time, honoring this other aspect of seemingly dual nature, which is Shakti and that word, I love this, it means power. It means capacity, that spark that knows how to birth a baby in a woman, that intelligence that knows while I'm sleeping, how to keep blood moving through my veins, that spark that knows how to really do all processes in the known universe is incredible, right? I don't know how to do that, my limited mind and ego doesn't know how. You know, you could contemplate that alone and become enlightened, right. So, there's this force that knows how to do that and we call that Shakti and so, Shiva and Shakti are actually not separate, but it helps us to see them separately, in terms of practice.

So, what this looks like inside our own body is that I am able, as one person, to hold loving awareness around the wild storm of my life, around the wild storm of my emotions, around the wild storm of, you know, Ram Dass said, "If you think you're so enlightened, "go live with your parents for a week." So, around the wild storm of your family, karma and dramas and relationships that I'm able to hold the witness consciousness of that, but at the same time, I'm able to enter into an intimacy with the life itself, to be able to enjoy swimming in the ocean with my new friends here in Santa Barbara, just to be able to be in that amazing love of that experience is Shakti and how can I bring both of those to the table at the same time? This really is the hallmark of a master in terms of Tantra. The masters of this practice that I know are really funny, they're down-to-earth, children are welcome, dogs are welcome, there's discipline, there's structure, but there's also a willingness to say, hell yes to life on Earth. So, this next hallmark, and I'll speak to two more, of Tantra is that we understand that life is transient, that everything changes, that, as the Buddhists say, life is just a bridge, don't build your house on the bridge, don't become attached, and what a Tantric would say is, yes, we agree, but we're gonna make it the most beautiful bridge possible and enjoy the time on the bridge. So, it's very much this practice that celebrates the body as a vehicle through which we can experience the divine liberation of self, as well as, the beauty of the mundane that's actually already occurring, that doesn't need any work.

So, the last piece I want to mention is a little bit in that same vein, and that is, the actual lineage that I work from is call Sri-Vidya and there are other lineages, but I love to speak to the words here because I think they really help us as modern, Western human beings with our busy life, understand the promise of what your yoga practice can give to you if taken really to a deep realm and Sri-Vidya, vidya, as we said before, or vida is the same root mothers, it means science and sri means, it's hard to define sri, but we can do our best and the best way of defining sri is that which is resplendent in an unending way. There is a resplendency, there is a beauty that can't be described in words and it has zero to do with only physical beauty or superficial beauty, it's a beauty that is inexpressible, but that shines out in a radiant way, and so, another way of defining it is that thing that is forever kind. That unending wave that is beautiful. Vidya means science. So, when you put those two words together, this just blows my mind, it means the science of beauty.

The science that enables me, the inner science that is enabling me to be able to see how actually life is this unending wave of beauty and the extent to which I'm aware of that is the extent to which, perhaps, I am more illumined. In the extent to which I am asleep to how it's beautiful, even the crappy parts, even the pain, even the confusion. It's still the sri. It's still the beautiful thing, unfolding for you. So, life, in one sentence, we could really define all of Tantra in a very easy way and that is, it's not that life isn't suffering and painful and wonderful all at once, it's that you are no longer struggling.

That you are no longer resisting any of it. Pain and pleasure, life and death, son and moon, day and night, loneliness and togetherness, in all, I am in the unfolding of sri. I hope that this little talk just give you at least a spark of interest into Tantra. If you're practicing hatha yoga, you're practicing Tantra, so, I encourage you to study more and I wish you all the best with your practices. Thank you.