Making Love :: Books - The Heart of Tantric Sex

CHAT

books | table of contents | introduction | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | reviews

EXCERPTS FROM BOOK

The Heart of Tantric Sex

A Unique guide to Love and Sexual Fulfilment

by Diana Richardson

Chapter 4

Awareness Of Body And Mind

The art of Tantra, most simply stated, is the union of sex and meditation.
It is simultaneously a physical and a spiritual happening, where two seemingly opposite extremes are joined into one.
When this happens, a magical quality arises, and we have the sense of entering a fourth dimension where the mysteriously engulfing “present moment” arises.
In this realm, everything sparkles and radiates, creating a freshness in the eyes, a song of love in the heart and a new appreciation of the surroundings, our lover and ourselves.
We feel highly sensitive and porous, because the essential energy of the Universe, pulsing life itself, is moving through us.
In conventional sex, we do not achieve this sensitivity or aliveness because we are usually not aware, not conscious, of what is happening.
We are simply “doing it”, often mechanically or habitually, and hopefully enjoying ourselves, but we are usually lost in the activity of it.
In conscious sex we are attempting to be aware of what is happening at each moment, and through this we create the opportunity to have an enriching experience of love each time.
This happens because we understand the real nature of sexual energy.
A natural meditation For this reason, Tantra invites us to become aware and conscious of ourselves as we make love.
We don't get lost or become mechanical; our attention is inward, we are present to our senses and feelings, we are “here”.
Thus, whilst making love a natural meditation arises.
To most people, meditation implies being alone, sitting upright, still and unmoving, but this is only one form of meditation.
The movements in sex need not be chaotic but restful; they can revolve around a core of stillness, as in ballet or Tai Chi or swimming.
Contrary to popular belief, meditation can arise most easily during the sex act, because its physically pleasurable intensity helps us, even forces us, into the experience of what is happening as it is happening!
This awareness of the unfolding moment creates the experience of “here-ness” - one of “being present” - and from which an inner peace and relaxation arises.
This is the sought after fulfillment of meditation.
The mere fact of bringing the consciousness to reside within the body, whether we are moving or lying still, creates a silence, depth and presence.
The body can move around and change position, it can even fly, but the consciousness remains quiet and serene.
Slowing down and being unhurried during sex, so as to experience the “present”, is the way we can begin to have an experience of consciousness.
We must take time to listen and be inwardly attentive to subtleties which arise out of an inner focus or stillness.
As a couple continue to make love in this relaxed way, a new level of sensual perception and sensitivity grows with time and familiarity.
The experience becomes increasingly pleasurable and ecstatic.
In this way sex can become a profound ongoing meditation, where communion happens between the bodies and spirits of two people.
When we speak of changing the way we make love, we find that awareness is at the core of it.
It is a crucial key to lifting sex to a new height.
The first step in awareness is that we must continuously pay attention to our bodies and become aware of precisely what we are doing and feeling as we make love.
Slowly, slowly we become alert to each movement, each gesture, each breath.
When we learn to “watch” everything that is happening inside of our bodies, and “be with it”, the very act of sex becomes our whole focus, or realm of perception.
And the very phenomenon of being it and watching it, transforms it.
When we bring awareness into our bodies, we will be surprised to find that it is a world unto itself, with many different realities operating simultaneously.
The heart is beating, breath is rising and falling, and we can feel certain vibrations, tingling sensations and warmth, even light, through the body.
When we become too involved in forms outside of ourselves, their colors or content or character, if our minds are pre-occupied with something else or someone else, our awareness will be diffused and ineffective.
Our awareness is also greatly diffused by our interest in orgasm, because in our focus on an event lying ahead, we miss the precious present moment.
Even if we are one second ahead of ourselves, we are in actual fact, absent.
As we begin to challenge our habit of being absent in sex, we have to begin establishing “presence” in its place.
We have to learn to stay in the here and now in the body, and this requires tremendous awareness.
Focus on the present moment Sex offers us the opportunity to practice and intensify awareness in order to literally “create” the present moment.
We learn to “be” more in sex, and to “do” less.
It is out of this that the magical Tantric experience emerges, where suddenly when there is no goal, there is an injection of spontaneous and uninhibited life energy.
The natural attraction between the penis and vagina is so strong, so full of life, it gives easy access to the present moment.
When we walk, for instance, it is easy to drift off into thought because foot contact with the ground through a shoe, is not exactly a heightened feeling (although it can be if you want it to be!).
Likewise, when we cook, the wooden spoon in our hand does not create tremendous delight, no thrill.
It is easy for the mind to drift off to other matters.
The intensity of sexual union, however, its powerfully engaging nature, makes it easier for us to be aware of the elusive present moment, unlike when we are walking or cooking or performing any familiar task.
The pleasures of sex with awareness, form an experience, the very nature of which can anchor us in the present moment.
Be aware of yourself To assist us into the present moment, Tantric attitude asks that our attention and awareness to be on ourselves.
On “me”.
In conventional sex, I have found generally, the attention is on the partner first and foremost, as we focus on his or her pleasure.
When I started my exploration I found that I was more concerned about my man than me, so my focus was outside of myself.
How is he doing? I would ask myself. Does he feel good? Am I doing it right? Is this enough/too much? He was almost more important than me.
As I placed my attention on my lover, in these and other ways, I noticed I did not have a real inner connection to my body, or a sense that I was “rooted” inward and downward.
I was all up and out, and essentially, I was making love for somebody else.
Tantra taught me to pull my attention back to myself, to forget about the man and to engage with my own energy first.
It taught me to bring the awareness inward and downward and back into my body.
It taught me to feel my belly and my breath, to make love for myself, before I concerned myself with him.
This may sound crazy and contrary, but it makes all the difference! It creates an ease and relaxation out of which a natural intimacy and attraction arises, and where insecurities easily dissolve.
It means that I am energizing and uniting with my own body first, before I join it with another. I bring my body to my lover, inwardly in attunement, alive and joyous, ready to make love.
With this attitude of putting yourself in prime focus, rooting and centering yourself inwardly so much more can happen in love.
This was initially clarified to me during my practice and teaching of bodywork.
Massage is something I have taken great joy in giving throughout most of my life.
But at one point I decided that I needed to be more qualified, so I learned some new techniques, more advanced and sophisticated, and I found much to my dismay that the spirit and joy of giving which I had previously so enjoyed, disappeared when I focused on a specific outcome.
After quite some time I decided to drop whatever fancy techniques I had learned and gratefully returned to the magic of massage in its oily simplicity, cruising down the contours of the body, slipping and sliding along the musculature.
I felt the delicious textures, each one an engaging story in itself, while I hunted around for knots and hard sinewy bits.
For me, these were always the most “juicy” spots to play with, and I soon forgot to think about how I was doing it. Instead I began to put my whole focus on what I was touching. How did the body tissues underneath feel? How did the fingertips most enjoy searching? What would feel most delicious if this was me lying here? Where did my hands most want to touch, and how?
I began to forget entirely about the person I was massaging, concentrating only on the movements of my own body, my breathing, my internal relaxation, and the interior of the body beneath my searching hands.
I noticed that the more I focused on my body, my hands, the deeper the person seemed to relax, an almost ringing “silence” would emanate from the body.
They would feel extremely benefited from the massage, deeply rested, at peace and refreshed.
They had lost sense of time, an hour of bodiless eternity.
This was an unexpected outcome that the more I focused on myself and the moment, the more the other person was able to relax back into themselves.
I remember feeling guilty about it when I stopped thinking about their physical problems during a session, but whenever I had simply loved touching their bodies, the people always felt better, even enriched.
Today I teach my massage students, first and foremost, to focus on themselves and the innocent joy of touching and giving, to stop worrying about “technique” and simply to bring love and consciousness into their touch.
Technique has value, but “who” is doing the technique is even more valuable.
Relax into your body In the same way as we make love, we must pull ourselves back into center-stage, focus on and become familiar with the interiority of the body, learn to relax all over.
When you are relaxed, your partner is more relaxed, and vice-versa.
The more we relax, the more we become involved in the present moment, and from here the sexual experience can emerge spontaneously.
The intensity of having to turn the awareness inward onto the delicacy of the genitals during sexual union encourages consciousness to awaken in the body.
The body then becomes a temple, sex a god-given meditation.
Our new approach is essentially a shift from mind to body, so I suggest to couples that they forget about each other, as such, the personalities or problems, and focus on their inner world.
When I was retraining myself in becoming sensitive in sex, this approach worked well for me, allowing my mind to slip into the background, and the body was an anchor which created my inner reality.
Because senses and sensuality are greatly enhanced through awareness, and because love is made in the physical body, we must learn to expand our sensory awareness, its feelings and perceptions.
So what is happening in our very own bodies? And where? Remember, it is a matter of pulling your attention from the periphery to the core.
From the outside focus of the mind, to an inside focus of the body.
What am I feeling and where am I feeling it? you can ask yourself. How does it actually feel? Exactly where do I feel the awakening of life in my body? Where is the light in here?
I will often suggest to couples at the beginning of a workshop to look around inside their bodies “for a place that feels like home”.
When you find such space, be with it and rest.
Give it some light or color, make it bigger.
Get a sense of it as a location in the body where you can “root” yourself and find some peace.
It may be the belly, the heart, genitals, lower back, anywhere, but not the head! Wherever it is, hold it in your awareness, and grow into the feeling of it.
Expand the feeling.
Remember, you can return home any time you find you have suddenly walked out of the front door.
And you will find this happens often! We have to continually step back to our “inside space”, leaving the “outside space” outside.
It is as if we literally have to step inside our bodies, create the inside space and keep expanding it.
As things stand the outside space is usually much bigger in people than the inside space, so we have to “force” the boundaries of the inside space open to expand.
Moreover, at the outset of lovemaking, when each person gives the time and attention to his or her own body first , by expanding their inside space, it is as if the air between the bodies that normally separates them, actually comes alive, like a magnetic field.
You become aware of the life in your own body, which radiates outward to communicate with the body and presence of your lover, right through the space between you.
The perception, the inner awareness of the body, is a far more delicate phenomenon than the thinking process.
When our attention is caught up with thought, it is difficult to reach down into the vastness of the body to experience what is specifically happening there.
It is difficult to “be” in the body.
One contributing factor is that at the outset of approaching love, we are much too fast in bringing our bodies into physical contact.
We compress what could otherwise be a prolonged and wonderful exchange, into a few seconds flat, trying to create something enjoyable for the other.
This has the effect of “pulling” each person out of awareness, off center, and away from home as it were.
Rather than feeling ourselves by dropping inward, and absorbing the other, being sweet and simple, we put more effort into doing something to them, a rub, a touch, a caress.
We have become human doings, and forgotten how to be a human being.
Let your body be your guide To experiment with this slow approach, try this exercise: Before you make love, lie in bed on your sides, and face each other.
Your bodies slightly apart, and without any physical contact.
Pull your focus away from your partner, into your own body.
Close your eyes for a few moments and feel yourself withdrawing your awareness from the outer to the inner.
You can imagine you are sliding down your own spine, vertebra by vertebra, into the back of the body, down into the pelvis, and so connecting with the energy in base of your body and legs.
Hold yourself “in there” for a while, give yourself time for this.
This brings vitality to your own body before you bring your bodies together.
After several minutes, open your eyes and look at each other.
As this happens you keep your awareness in your own body.
Breathe.
Relax your jaw.
After some minutes, slowly, slowly inch forward toward your lover, keeping your focus inside.
Move into an embrace, the slower the better, starting with a meeting of the fingertips, and let it be more of a “happening” than a “doing”.
And be acutely aware of each body part, the skin, the warmth, as it meets and wraps itself around the other.
If you wait long enough, just intensely “being” you will even find the bodies are eventually pulled or sucked together, attracted like magnets.
Remove any intention, and be with the experience of moving closer to the one you love.
When we move into love with this slow sensitivity, awareness of ourselves, and thereby the other, is greatly expanded.
The body energies too respond vibrantly to this languid lazy approach.
You can also try this when you are greeting each other, after a separation, a day at the office.
Before you hug, stop, stand still and take several seconds to draw your awareness inward, ground yourself in your body, your legs and feet.
Then step forward, as slowly as possible, and move into a gradual hug with your Beloved.
Stay relaxed, drop your shoulders, don't make any undue physical effort, breathe.
With awareness stay in the body, let the bodies do the greeting, and allow it to be a “melting” together.
Pulling the awareness inward in this way, instead of projecting it outward, creates a more sensitive environment within the body.
You become aware of places that you didn't know had feeling or sensitivity, because your attention was placed elsewhere.
And whilst making love our attention is frequently preoccupied by ideas of orgasm.
When you can be present in your body, you begin to experience you dimensionality, an exquisite interior between your front and back, which explodes into sensitivity like an inner display of fireworks.
Switch off your mind We are diverting the focus from our periphery to our core, from an outward expression to an inward impression, and thereby enhancing sensitivity in the body.
Tantra returns us from sexuality to sex.
Today we are restricted to the experience of our sexuality, we do not experience the true force of sex, because the mind has become an integral part of the sex act.
To return to the innocence and naturalness of sex we have to start by “switching off” or disassociating from the thinking part in us.
Perhaps the biggest distraction in sex today is the incredible ability of the mind to fantasize.
Indeed, sexual fantasy has become the powerhouse, the driving force of many people's sex lives.
Often in lovemaking we get involved in sexual fantasy, not conscious of what is happening, specifically and moment by moment “in the present”.
Our attention is not on this partner here and now, but creating an imagined one or an imaginary situation.
Thus we are not really experiencing the truth of the body.
Instead the mind is using fantasy to drive or motivate the body.
We are with thought and not with the body.
Sexual fantasy can even be habitual, in which case it is as if we are repeating the same program again and again.
Almost every one of us, I am sure, has used a sexual image, either past real or imagined future, to help us get excited and maintain an interest in the sex act.
Mostly we use sexual fantasy to urge us along toward orgasm, because the imagination helps us to reach the peak.
And it works incredibly well too! The mind must be proclaimed as a powerful tool to produce such effective, even immediate, results.
But sexual fantasy is, nonetheless, a great diversion in sex "as it pulls us away from reality" the person we are making love with here now.
Fantasy makes us absolutely absent to our present.
Tantra, in its wisdom, embraces this imaginative power of the mind.
It encourages it to be re-directed into the body.
The imagination can be harnessed to actually stimulate valuable movements of energy within the body instead.
And this happens because sooner or later the energy will follow the imagination.
We have all tried it too, and we even know it works!
Imagination can thus be used as a positive tool in sex, rather than a distraction.
If for example: we begin to imagine light and see circles of energy within the body; or energetic connections between the positive and negative poles (inside and outside yourself); or energy streaming from man into woman; or woman absorbing this golden light; or energy radiating from the heart and breasts or leaping from the penis, sooner or later we will begin to have this experience, the feeling of this actually happening.
The energy can be imagined as a streaming golden flow or even a jumping, leaping of light, even lightning men may find this second suggestion works easier for them.
A return to innocence It might be indistinct at first, the delicate tendrils of awakening life within you, but your awareness will help to fan it, and this makes energy grow, expand, configure.
For some people “to feel energy” is more easy than with others.
If it is not easy for you, please use the imagination, it is a tremendous support to the body.
Where you do have the sensation of energy moving within, the imagination can help to intensify the experience.
In these ways the mind is used to pave the pathways for the inner energy circuits, which become more and more dynamic with the passage of time. In the transition of sexuality to sex, the returning of sex to the innocence of the body, we must remind ourselves that the first step in awareness is to be aware of the inner music of the body, and the second step is to be aware of the thoughts.
Even if we are not using fantasy in the sex act, we are often thinking all kinds of thoughts, and these thoughts are potentially destructive too.
When we become aware of our fluttering thoughts, estimated at about 50,000 per day, it is a surprise to find out what is going on inside of us!
In my early sexual life, when the moments of lovemaking that I had been so longing for were actually happening, I noticed with horror that I would find myself drifting off and thinking about something else.
Anything, I was astounded that it could be something as banal as where to go for dinner! I found it difficult to be utterly involved in sex.
Since then, I have discovered that the sexual energy is so subtle and sensitive, even one sudden and simple train of thought is enough to disturb its natural magnetic flow.
A gradual process when we are bringing awareness to our thought process, it is not as if we must stop thinking.
We can't!
We do think, and that is the problem!
Here there is nothing we can do directly about thinking, however we can approach it indirectly.
The significant thing is to “notice” that you are thinking, caught up in a stream of thoughts, and in that very noticing you are thrown back into the present, you sever the thread to the thoughts.
By simply acknowledging that you were thinking, you disassociate or “cut with the mind”.
This is enough, and through this you return to the present.
Definitely do not begin an inner dialogue, giving yourself a hard time because you were absent and not present, simply and quickly slip back into the present. And stay immersed in the present, in the physicality and sensuality of consciousness in the body, for as long as ....woops! you find yourself caught up in thinking again!
Notice, and slip immediately back into your body.
It is a process, and the miracle of the phenomenon of awareness is that you need not do anything except to become aware.
The simple act of watching the thoughts, becoming aware of the physical patterns associated with thoughts, slowly there is a change.
The mind becomes more relaxed, content and attuned to the body, as if a bridge is created.
As couples embark on the Tantric journey, it is really important to bear in mind that this is a gradual process.
It is a shift in consciousness, not a sudden change, and neither is it a technique.
You can't do it, you have to be it.
It is an ongoing refining process of creating stillness which requires time.
It is helpful if you do not seek big changes or immediate results.
It does not happen like that every time!
Sometimes yes, but real change is made up of numerous, sometimes invisible, small changes which take root in the body.
Notice the smaller, less obvious things that happen to you, what you feel and where you feel it. And the joy of it.
This consciousness brought to the body and the sexual act begins to transform it, becoming a fountainhead of love, enriching to body, mind and spirit.

Summary
* awareness of mind and body transforms the sexual experience
* shift the awareness from outside to inside
* this focus creates a 'root' within the body
* challenge thinking by consciously experiencing bodily sensations
* use power of imagination to amplify and expand energy movement.

books | table of contents | introduction | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | reviews

Home

What is it

Dates

Q+A

Inspiration

Links