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The Art of Ecstatic Love and Deep Connection

Tantra is the art and science of living consciously and joyously. It teaches to fully accept and expand sexual pleasure as a gift and celebrate it to go deeper into love.

Most people’s perception of Tantra is limited to controlling sex so you can have it for hours and hours in strange positions. Tantra is much more than that. It includes 64 arts that support you to be the most sensitive and accomplished lover of life and of another person. It includes the art of understanding the energy flow, of communicating deeply from your feelings, the art of romance, of setting up a room that will encourage you to create a mood that takes you higher into your fullest potential of vitality and passion, and more….

l embraced Tantra fully and I teach it passionately because it has helped me to free myself from limiting emotional conclusions about sexuality, and to accept on all levels of my being that sex is an powerful force that amplifies any intention I hold. So if you intend to increase your love or vitality, or abundance your sexual _expression is doing that. If you have the intention of connecting deeply with another and experience bliss together, sexuality becomes a very high _expression of love and learning to become the best lover you can becomes very important. Tantra encourages you to become the ultimate lover on all levels.

Tantra is a path that successfully unites sexuality with spirituality. It is the only spiritual approach I know that faces the sexual challenges directly and teaches how to use sex in a safe, powerful and way. It is a path to enlightenment, which can be reached by transcending of our dualistic state of mind. Often we think one thing and feel another. Tantra uses our natural sexual energy to heal the split between body and spirit, between thinking and feeling, and helps you feel whole and really fulfilled.

It is not about how many hours you spend in sexual activities, although it helps with that too if you so desire. Tantra guides you to generate, heighten and transform sexual energy to more subtle energies as you channel it up to higher energy center in the body (chakras). With the intention of transforming this powerful energy you can create a new you.

Chakras are wheels of energy. The Hindu tradition believes that there are seven energy wheels that need to spin freely to be fully healthy and move the maximum amount of energy. The first chakra, is situated at the base of our spine. It connects us with earth and when it is open and balanced we feel safe. The second chakra is about sex, fluidity, juiciness, the third –the solar plexus - is about _expression of will power and self-esteem, the fourth –at the heart level –is about love and compassion, the fifth–at the throat level -- is about free and honest communication, the sixth –at the forehead level – is about intuition and the seventh-- in the middle of the brain --is about connection with the part of us that is beyond our personality and reaches into the spirit.

The idea of Tantra is balance these energy centers and to raise the vibrations of pleasure from the first and second chakras to the higher chakras to express self-esteem, love, honest communication, intuition, and finally to merge with into your ultimate transcendent reality. It transforms the sexual energy that is coiled in the lower chakras into love and into light.

Tantra is also a path to complete intimacy with oneself and with another being. Many find it easier to be physically intimate than to share true emotional intimacy. We hold back on letting others see us as we are, especially the parts of us that we judge as bad. Many are more interested in learning love making techniques, which Tantra offers in abundance, than to committing to emotional and spiritual intimacy and absolute honesty with a partner. It seems logical that, in order to achieve the highest state of union with All That Is, we must first be willing to be fully open with at least one human being.

Furthermore, even on a less cosmic level, in order to fully heal ourselves from the shame of our imperfect state of being human, we long for a person who loves us as we are. However, in order to be able to allow that love to penetrate us and heal us, we must first be willing to fully accept ourselves with all our desirable and undesirable qualities.

Tantra gives us plenty of suggestions about how self-acceptance can be reached, and guides you gently to go beyond self-acceptance to honor our true God self.

Sex is very important in our lives. It is a powerful creative force and it leads to orgasm. Orgasm is probably the closest some of us get to the experience of enlightenment. For a more- or-less brief moment, we get to forget ourselves, our problems, our egos, and just be with pure energy, with God.

Tantra guides you gradually to lengthen the peak experience of sexual ecstasy so that, in a way, we get to "hang out" with God longer. This expands our consciousness so that, when you come down to the dualistic plane, you see yourselves and life in a new way. You can actually experience the love that supports the whole cosmos. It is awesome.

When I started playing with the idea of making Tantra my path, I was surprised to notice my resistance to practicing it, finding "plausible" excuses not to find time for it. I remember feeling a similar resistance to my meditation practices. My resistance was confusing to me because here I had found a path that allowed me to use pleasure to reach God and I was avoiding it. Why? After some inner search I realized that this pleasure was different from the previously felt pleasure, which was mixed with pain and guilt. This, however, was pure pleasure, and I did not know how to be with it. Slowly, with a lot of patience and practice, I have started to build up my capacity to sustain pure pleasure. I also had to overcome the voice of my internalized mother, who condemned me for feeling sexual pleasure in the first place.

With practice I was able to relax my body while being at the same time in a highly aroused state. Somehow these two states are not mutually exclusive, as one might be tempted to think. In Tantra one can relax because there is no issue of performance. The process itself is the reward. Only through being fully in the process can one reach the highest orgasm.

To do Tantra love, it takes willingness to become the other. Using the breath to go back and forth between you and the other until you forget who you are and relax into just being. This moment of transcending your personality is very energizing for both partners, and harmonizes the relationship.

Any tantric love session starts with preparing with care a sacred space for the encounter, and honoring the partner with a heart salutation. This opens you up to new feelings of relaxation, self-acceptance, and self-esteem. Then you proceed by looking lovingly into each other's eyes and doing some breathing together to harmonize your energies. Now you are ready to make any communication you have in your heart at that moment. You can confide some of your fears, and you can express how much you love your partner, both communications being equally important. Tantra love is based on total honesty. Any secret, anything withheld, any mind stuff you keep from the other, becomes a wall that separates you. So before you exchange sexual energy, you make a declaration of the intention to honor the spark of God in the other, and put on the altar as an offer to the fire of love anything that isn't love, such as jealousy, manipulation, anger, dishonesty and other love-denying emotions. Thus, detached from such lower energies, you get to experience the purity of sex. At this level you exchange subtle energies of acceptance, love, and light.

The four keys to tantric love are: intention, breathing, movement and sound. They are used to harmonize your inner man and your inner woman, and to transform your body into a stream of vibrating energy that cleanses all the built-up tensions, turning them into highly pleasurable sensations. By staying relaxed in states of high arousal, you permit orgasmic energy to flow through your whole body. Then you can channel orgasmic energy up the chakras toward the brain, where it can be experienced as ecstasy.

Do you necessarily need a partner for Tantra love? No. Many tantric exercises can be done alone. In fact, learning to love and honor your own body is an important step toward the tantric experience with a partner.

Tantra helped me break old taboos and heal my past emotional and physical traumas connected with my sexuality. I can now use this additional experiential knowledge to help woman, men and couples in my New York.

To my great joy there are also people who are already fully sex positive and emotionally healthy and feel great with high erotic energy flowing through their bodies. It is a pleasure to assist those people to achieve higher levels of ecstasy even in the first session.

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