Tantra is the ancient science of liberating energy in order to expand consciousness. This energy is called kundalini, the coiled cosmic creative power that lies dormant in our body-mind, but which can be tapped to awaken our potential.
Today, the word tantra is associated with techniques for attaining sexual ecstasy and longevity. While it’s good to have pleasure and fun in life, this is not the essential aim of tantra.
Tantra is a system to embody higher awareness and to make every aspect of life more potent and joyful. It does this by charging our body-mind with energy and awareness. What we do with this energy and awareness is up to us. We can use it for our own pleasure or we can use it to create a better world and to support other beings, or perhaps a combination of both.
Tantra has two main aspects: theory and practice. Tantric theory teaches us the philosophical basis of tantra; tantric practice uses the techniques of yoga and tantra to create the process by which we can attain higher experience. Tantric ritual combines theory and practice to link us to luminous subtle forces that sustain our being and our lives.
Ritual is at the heart of tantra. It is psychic technology for the transformation of individual consciousness. Ritual is participation in cosmic cycles, a method of hooking into the vast power that lies at the core of our microcosmic and macrocosmic being. Ritual leads the practitioner from mundane states of existence to exalted states of experience and realization.
The main tools of yoga-tantra include asana and pranayama, mudras and bandhas, mantra and yantra, and various forms of meditation and visualization.
In yoga-tantra we practice a number of individual techniques simultaneously, thus engaging several aspects of self at the same time. For example, a simple practice may combine asana and pranayama and visualization of a symbol. In more advanced practices, we may combine asana, pranayama, mudra and bandha, mantra and visualization of a yantra or symbol. The process of combining techniques is profoundly healing and effectively integrating.
In its simplest form, yoga-tantra allows us to begin to manage the unconscious destructive patterns of thinking, emotion and behaviour that may have stubborn roots in the lower mind. Combining techniques addresses unconscious thinking and emotional patterns while we aim our attention towards higher experience. This prevents destructive patterns from interrupting our practice and our lives while we create new, higher, more creative and useful patterns. In this sense, yoga-tantra has the ability to remove the causes of our suffering.
Jayne Stevenson is a writer and filmmaker with a deep interest in art and spirituality. Dr. Swami Shankardev Saraswati is a yoga Acharya (authority), medical doctor, yoga therapist and author. As a direct disciple of Swami Satyananda Saraswati, he lived in the Bihar School of Yoga India for 10 years, where he trained to teach the highest practices of yoga-tantra. For more information, visit bigshakti.com.