What is tantra?

Learning the truth about one of the most misunderstood spiritual practices of all

Thanks for reading Ink Roads. For this post, I’m fusing my travel blog with Cosmic Junkyard, my series about the world’s most interesting unanswered or unanswerable questions, and diving into tantra through the lens of my own personal experience of it on the island of Koh Phangan, Thailand.

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I hadn’t realized that the retreat I was staying at on the island of Koh Phangan was way more famous for tantra than Osho meditation, but I would soon find out.

Before anyone gets concerned: Prior to arriving, I did make sure sure that the retreat didn’t practice any form of sexual tantra — and everything really and truly did remain resolutely PG for the whole time I was there.

As it turns out, the idea that tantra is all about sex is a mostly Western bastardization of a truly beautiful esoteric philosophy. If you take one thing from this post, let it be this — tantra is truly about finding oneness through the unification of binaries.

Yes, some tantric practices do culminate in sexual rites and tantra does make use of sexual energy, but traditionally, these rites were only performed by deeply knowledgeable spiritual masters who had already transcended their physical desires. At Samma Karuna, tantra was exclusively practiced through non-sexual exercises, and a hug was the most intimate anything ever became.

That’s not to say it all wasn’t uncomfortably intimate, though. It absolutely was, almost the entire time.

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My first class was called Biodynamics, and it reminded me more of contact improv than anything else. We were invited to dance with our fellow students, and we all wound around each other, leaning on each other, experimenting how it felt when we led or followed each other as we mirrored each others’ movements.

Everyone was very stylish, dressed in their New Age best, and felt slightly inadequate in my shorts and T-shirt before reminding myself that I was no longer in the business of criticizing myself. I had, I reminded myself, the right to be there.

Even so, interacting with strangers is challenging for me. I knew in my heart we were all projections of the same divine oneness, and yet something about eye contact made me want desperately to look away and disappear back into my own safe hole.

This would be a good challenge for me, I decided. After so much introspection at my last retreat and in Vipassana, perhaps it was time to learn through relationship and connection.

At one point the power cut out, and we all stood around sweating buckets before deciding to go out to finish the class on the beach. The session ended by the shore, the waters stretching towards the limestone cliffs in the distance, the sky smeared with wispy clouds.

We hugged our last partner. Mine was a woman with beautiful sparkling green eyes that radiated love, and after we pulled away, we just started laughing at each other, cackling harder the longer we stared at each other.

Eye contact is very intense for me, and when I look in someone’s eyes, I often feel a slight electric shock. It’s like I’m seeing their whole soul and spirit and being. All their emotions, all their aliveness — it can feel like a lot.

At the same time, eye contact is extremely important for me when it comes to anything romantic; I love staring into someone’s eyes once I’ve passed a certain threshold of comfort with them. And yet with strangers or new friends or anyone who I’m not quite sure about, I often feel so much discomfort welling up in me. It’s actually a similar discomfort as the sense of unease that often wells up in me during meditation — an intensity, a current, a bright aliveness, wild as the sea and cutting as arctic wind. That’s another reason why I’ve always written; there’s simply too much without some way to offload it.

But anyway, this was a tantra class, I forced myself to push through my discomfort and gazed in strangers’ eyes.

Afterwards, another attendee with kind blue eyes told me he was a jazz musician and said he was performing at an open mic the next night. We quickly made plans to attend and play something together. That night we wound up having dinner together and discussed our share love of music and spirituality and the intersection of them both, and made casual plans to host a music and spirituality and creativity retreat at his house in Mallorca someday.

That evening I attended my first tantra lecture. Our teacher was a gorgeous man around my age with long, flowing hair and a shirt unbuttoned to reveal a startlingly chiseled chest — appropriate for a tantra teacher, I supposed.

We all sat in a circle in a shala by the beach, and as the sun set, he discussed how the tantric path deviates from the path of self-renunciation, which I believe includes Vipassana. 

There are two paths that lead to the same place, he said: a path of compassion and a path of renunciation. The renunciation path is definitely the one I’d been most educated in across most of my spiritual journey. It involves renouncing the senses and desires, and using self-control to dissolve the idea of the self achieve enlightenment. Tantra, on the other hand, involves using compassion for all beings to reach that same end goal.

I think that a binary between these two schools of thought is actually pretty reductive, for when you look closely, they split and unfurl to reveal similar, intertwined ideologies. But it was useful to hear, and I found myself resonating with so much of what he said and realizing that my heart had been calling me towards a more tantric, open, connection-based mentality as opposed to the militaristic, renunciation-based mentality Vipassana had taught.

Mosquitos buzzed around us as we listened. People asked tons of questions and shared their own stories, and I had more questions than answers by the end of it, but I started to realize that it seemed like, at its core, tantra is about acceptance rather than rejection.

The next day we had our first actual tantra class, which included a practice called Atisha’s Heart. After a long opening exercise of improvisational dance and more prolonged eye contact, we all joined hands, placing one hand on the heart of the person to our right and one hand on the waist of the person to our left.

There, threaded together, we did a collective Metta meditation: first channeling love to ourselves, then to the others in the circle, then to people we loved, and then to the whole world. We swayed by the sea as the sun sank into the waves. 

At first my feet were killing me and so were my arms, but I tried to channel as much love as I could into them, and eventually, I am not kidding, the pain just disappeared. 

And then I was just connected to the others there. Arms around each other. Discomfort arose, then passed away.

Tantra is about connection. Connection and love is the animating force that breathes the universe into being.

Tantra developed around the first millennium CE in India, and the term tantra literally means “loom, warp, weave” in Sanskrit. As an esoteric tradition, tantra is wrapped in mystery and misunderstanding, and there are many different variants of it. But all of it is tied to the idea that there is no separateness and no duality.

“The word interweave is the key to understanding the real meaning of Tantra. As many tantric texts put it: ‘Nothing exists that is not divine,’ explains the Samma Karuna website, which features a very eloquent overview of tantra.

“Everything is interconnected and is a manifestation of the divine energy that rules the whole universe. It is the dance of the by-polar energy of Shiva and Shakti, the masculine and feminine archetypes, the Sun and the Moon, night and day, life and death. This duality is found in everything that exists in nature, it’s a never-ending cycle that remains in balance. This is why a deep understanding of reality reveals that there is actually no duality, these two poles are the two sides of the same coin.”

Many tantric thought systems believe that the whole universe is animated by a divine feminine force, often called Shakti, which saw the feminine principle as a wild and powerful entity that births all being and all awakening. I’ve long believed in the importance of unifying masculine and feminine archetypes, and think a lot of our modern gender wars could be solved by realizing we all have different levels of masculine and feminine energies in ourselves, and we need to accept them both and learn to work with them rather than rejecting opposing sides of ourselves or others.

During my second tantra class, we stood across from each other in lines and gazed into each others’ eyes for long periods of time, switching every few minutes to different partners. Then we held hands for a few rounds and finally, we embraced. It was amazing to notice how differently I felt with each partner. How some people made me feel vulnerable, and how I wanted to protect and comfort others.

In our final tantra lecture, two teachers I hadn’t worked with before spoke on the topic of using tantric practices on our relationships with ourselves and on our deepest core wounds. The practice is to offer profound acceptance to the sources of our deepest pains, and to not lock out any parts of ourselves, but rather to gather them all up and hold them.

One of the teachers spoke of finally realizing she would never have a real connection with her father. She recalled at last accepting him exactly as he is, with love, as they were watching television together in his small apartment on a winter day.

Someone brought up the psychology practice Internal Family Systems and recommended the book No Bad Parts, which had also been on my mind during the conversation — its’s amazing to see how much of modern psychology is rooted in ancient spiritual wisdom, and how all these healing systems are really mirrors of one another, all framing these deep truths in different ways.

Then blonde girl who had smiled at me so radiantly after my very first class spoke about how she feels she’s pushed away love throughout her life, and tears glistened in her eyes as she opened up about how guilty she feels for how cruel she’d been to others in the past. It was a reminder that the people who do this work and who are drawn to these practices are often people who do have deep wounding themselves. A reminder that everyone carries their own pain. That everyone is really looking to be loved, and yet we constantly build up walls against this love, because it exposes us to our greatest fear — not being loved.

Yet people have always, across all of time, been drawn to developing loving relationships with the divine. We know there’s something out there, something taking care of us, something guiding us. Tantra is just one way of getting to that same place.

One of my most powerful lessons from this whole trip has been the importance of connection with others. When we are really seen, and when we really see others, we being to realize that we are all just mirrors — and others are in as much pain, and are full of as much love, as we are.

This, I believe, is at the core of tantric practice; seeing ourselves in others, and so seeing ourselves as part of the truth, which is oneness, and wholeness, and interconnectedness with all things.