Q: What brought you to the
tantric path?
A: After leaving university I was a highly trained intellectual who had
learned to think about life, to analyze it, to discuss it, even in a
heady kind of way to appreciate life. But I had no idea how to live
life. I didn’t know this, of course. I was clever, was managing well,
opportunities were queuing up at my door, until I found myself on a
director’s course at Jerzy Grotowski’s Theatre Laboratory in Poland.
Suddenly I was surrounded by people who were really alive, not in their
heads but in their bodies, vibrant with energy, emotionally rich and
above all authentic in their way of being. By this I mean that they were
not formed by others’ opinions of them or demands on them, but that
their aliveness came from inside, out of an inner wellspring, an
integrity, a totality of being that they called soulfulness. And after
experiencing this quality of aliveness nothing else would do.
Q: You mean that being in the head appeared as a pale half aliveness
while they had found the full blooded version?
A: Exactly. There was no way of going back to the inhibited English
intellectual I had been, and yet I didn’t know how to open myself up in
the total energetic aliveness they incarnated. I felt a huge gap between
how I was and how I wanted to be. So my search began.
Q: And it was this search that finally brought you
to tantra?
A: After a long journey through theatre, therapy in the form of
bioenergetics and other bodywork both as a student and then as a
therapist, and finally tantra.
Q: What was it about tantra that satisfied your search
for aliveness?
A: First of all that tantra is a soul path that honours the body,
celebrates the senses and the experiencing of life through the pleasures
of the body, and expands enormously our sense of our potential as energy
beings. It’s about living life as totally and intensively as we wish to,
and liberating ourselves from our tensions, patterns, inhibitions and
toxic shame. It’s about saying yes to our aliveness, to the sacredness
of the body and of the joys of sexuality and love. The basis for this is
to allow and experience the free flow and pulsation of energy throughout
your body. The tantric structures we teach in SkyDancing provide this
liberation and create the sense of your self as a flow, of being a
dynamic event rather than a static thing. So we define ourselves in
terms of our potential instead of in terms of our boundaries,
experiencing ourselves in terms of a complex weaving of many threads
instead of a black and white duality, no longer creating what I am by
denying and rejecting what I decide I am not.
Secondly, tantra emphasizes the value of experience. We could almost
paraphrase Descartes: I experience, therefore I am. Tantra is not a
religion, it does not ask you to believe anything, there is in the words
of John Lennon nothing to live or die for. Rather tantra invites you to
try out certain experiences that can reveal to you what was hitherto
hidden: the enormousness of your energy potential, and the vastness of
your consciousness potential. You have a capacity for bliss and ecstasy
as a direct experience of the sacred – of god /goddess not as an
abstraction or an authority figure but as a potential dimension of
experience within ourselves. By questioning and discreating our learned
feelings of toxic shame we can begin to choose what energetically has
rightness and integrity for us. Healthy shame, a spontaneous heat
flushing through the body, can then warn us of our moments of
unconsciousness and inappropriate behaviour.
Q: So in a natural, healthy state we don’t need rules and external
authority?
A: Tantra teaches us to trust the inner authority of our own heart and
our own experience. As we learn to perceive ourselves, others and the
world in terms of energy, we directly experience the interconnectedness
of all things and feel respect for the multiple realities of life. The
relationships between ourselves and others, or between ourselves and
life, and the dimensions of purpose and meaning are no longer mysteries
but are directly experientiable. We no longer unconsciously act out the
selfish demands of our own egos, for we see that true happiness is only
possible in a loving and understanding connection with the experiences
of others and the good of the whole; nor do we do battle with the world
to enforce our one truth and colonialize others into the empire of our
own belief systems. We replace the unthinking following of rules with
the exercise of consciousness, no longer driven by unconscious behaviour
but choosing and creating our lives with awareness.
Q: I thought tantra was about sex, perhaps about
having better and more conscious sex. You make it sound very
philosophical, political too.
A: Tantra is a map of human experience understood as the meeting of two
principles which can be seen as female and male: the dance between
energy and consciousness. This is indeed the basis of our sexuality, but
also of the whole of our lives. Sexuality is one manifestation of our
life energy. Love is another. In the tantric map of experience
sexuality, love and spirituality are on one continuum of life energy,
just as red, green and blue are on one continuum of light energy. The
map of the chakras within the human energy body helps us practically to
choose through which gateway to relate to our experience and so
transform the destructive forms which our energy might have taken into
creative, playful and life-enhancing forms. As we apply this skill to
our intimate relationships we can heal our sexual wounds, and heal the
old split between heart and sex. So we can experience sex as meditation
in the expanded consciousness of sacred sexuality. The by-product of
this is more intense and sustainable sexual pleasure and more satisfying
and soulful relationships.
Q: So tantra isn’t about sleeping with lots of
partners?
A: Tantra does not judge or proscribe. You can be on the tantric path
with one bonded partner, with many partners who bring you many aspects
of the god or the goddess, or on a path of celibacy - it’s always about
the sacred marriage of energy and consciousness, shakti and shiva,
within yourself. As you learn simply to be in and celebrate your
aliveness you discover a thousand ways of expressing your sexuality, in
your playfullness, in your creativity, in your intuitiveness, rather
than compulsively having to end up in bed with someone to feel like a
real man or woman.
Q: It’s about expanding our possibilities of
expressing ourselves?
A: It’s about transcending duality. Duality is the mind’s way of
understanding the world. The mind is incapable of experiencing the world
directly. It is constantly interpreting the world to us, offering us a
running commentary on our experience. And this voice in our heads
prevents us from having a direct, immediate experience of life. We are
living in the midst of all these wonders, and instead of standing there
in amazement, letting our senses be filled by wonder, in deep
appreciation of the beauty of life, we are doing the equivalent of
watching a television programme about life while sat in front of the TV
with the curtains drawn.
Q: So why don’t we draw back the blinds and look out
of the window, or better still get out into life?
A: Because it would dazzle us. We are so used to living at low energy
with our senses shut down that so much intensity of energy at first
would actually cause us pain and fear. Also we have learned that what
appears on TV – i.e. the received opinions that our mind regurgitates
with the inner dialogue – is truer than our own direct experience. So as
we do the tantra training we have to get the body used bit by bit to
containing more and more energy, and get the senses to experience
gradually more and more intensively.
Then we need to create moments when the TV is turned off. But the
programmes on the TV are addicitive. The most popular programme is
called “what will people think?” where we debate for hours and hours
what people will say if we do this or say that, going over old
criticisms and judgments, longing to win approval. It’s very tedious
really.
Q: What does this have to do with duality?
A: The duality is the split between experiencer and that which is
experienced. It makes us spectators of life rather than participants.
Q: Or TV viewers rather than actors?
A: Interestingly enough Grotowski’s search for many years was informed
by his desire to transcend the duality between audience and actors.
First of all he cut out the bits of baggage that confused the message
such as lights and costumes and placed actors and audience in close
physical proximity to each other. Then he made the actors of the Theatre
Laboratory into first hand artists instead of interpreters of texts by
cutting out the playwright and developing his theatre pieces through
years of improvisation expressing the actors’ own souls. Then he trained
the actors’ bodies intensively to express the energy and aliveness that
makes them able to share in a powerful way their human experience.
Q: It was this intensity that characterized his shift
from poor theatre to holy theatre?
A: That’s right. And it was the energy body he trained as much as the
physical body. For example he had us running backwards through the black
room that was the theatre in Wroclaw until we could sense where we were
going, not with our physical eyes but with our energy bodies. And he
would have us facing a wall together with the instruction that the group
should sense the moment of rightness when they were all to turn round
together at the same moment, without any kind of signal but simply by
intuiting that moment. Tantra achieves similar results less arduously by
practising raising the sexual excitement and orgasmic energy into the
higher chakras, which expands the ability to experience such psychic
phenomena as mind reading, lucid dreaming, clairvoyance and channelling.
Q: Which all become simply part of our expanded
experience when we transcend the duality between liver and life and can
open ourselves up to direct experience?
A: Yes. And the ability to do this has been elevated to the spiritual
domain to be the prerogative of priests, who then claim a superiority to
normal folk and the right to control them in the name of the divine
authority they represent. Whereas in fact that spiritual dimension of
life is the birthright of every one of us, accessible through an open
and conscious exploration of our sexual energy. That is why religions
have universally tended to ban sexual exploration – its power to
generate inner authority would challenge their usurpation of authority
and power.
Q: So how far did Grotowski get on his search to
transcend the duality between spectator and actor?
A: He came up with the concept of the audience as witness, directly
experiencing the energy of the actors’ experience, sharing the impact of
the energy field. This seemed more immediate than just watching: in the
same way as he asked the actors to be more total, he invited the
audience into the experience of totality and directness. He wanted their
experience to be as direct as possible, moving them rather than making
them think.
Later he transcended the duality of actor and audience by inviting
interested audience members to make contact with them after the
performance of Apocalypsis. People came then to spend time with the
members of the troupe out in nature, in the mountains, dancing all night
around a fire, bathing in the river at dawn. We shared experiences
without words, in order to let the masks fall, to be in direct contact
with each other, the actors animating and inspiring but without roles,
as equal partners. This was called “Holiday”, holy days set aside to
experience meaning and significance.
Q: I suppose that tantra is also interested in
transcending the duality between male and female?
A: Indeed. Tantra is a path of liberation from the limitations of such
roles as male or female, slut or goddess, or any dualities that restrict
our being, such as young or old, familiar or unknown, control or
abandon. But even more fundamentally tantra teaches the principle of
expansion (while naturally not neglecting the particular pleasures of
contraction!), expanding our awareness until we can contain within it
opposite poles. When we achieve this we experience in that moment a huge
release of energy, which is purely exhilarating. It might be the
experience of embracing a wish of our beloved instead of fighting it,
even though it appears diametrically opposed to a wish of our own, which
creates a huge opening of the heart. Or it might be the experience that
the energy of passionate lovemaking and the high energy that arises in
the stillness of meditation are one and the same. But above all it is
the release from the tyranny of the mind into the freedom of
consciousness. The trick of the mind to attempt to understand life in
the absence of the willingness to experience it directly has been
formulated by the structuralists as “ p = what not-p is not”. So evil is
the absence of good, to have the sacred we have to have the profane, and
the dark becomes sinister in direct proportion to the light being seen
as right. This is pseudo understanding, creating the illusion of clarity
but actually trying to make sense of light by judging shadow. On a
non-judgmental level black is not the opposite of white and we don’t
have to choose between them, it is simply a different quality of light
(absorbed rather than reflected) within a palette of possibilities each
one of which has its own particular value.
Q: This sounds interesting but rather abstract.
A: Then let’s take a practical, down to earth example. Let’s take the
penis, usually referred to in tantra as vajra in a wish to escape both
from derogatory and from coldly clinical terminology. We would normally
perceive vajra in terms of the duality erect / non-erect. This duality
would then become highly charged with emotional and moral meaning, in
this case clearly relative. So a prude looking at Greek statuary would
conceive of the erect version as obscene and the flaccid as artistic,
whereas a man anxious about his sexual prowess might perceive his
non-erect penis as a failure and unmanly, while an erection might be a
sign of virilty and success. In tantra one would seek to heal the
prejudices and preconceptions that create such mental and emotional
reactions (both positive and negative, just healing the negative would
leave the system intact). This enables a direct experience and
appreciation of the individual vajra’s particular expression of its
aliveness in each moment, while at the same time experiencing and
honouring its deeper meaning as a unique incarnation of the phallic
power of the male principle.
Q: Which would allow one to be in touch with the
reality of the energy and its potential both for danger and for
pleasure, instead of reacting to mental images and interpretations that
are based on the past or on received opinions?
A: It would allow one to respond in the here and now to the
direct experience of reality, participating in life instead of being a
spectator of it.
Q: What is the difference between tantric sex and
normal sex?
A: Normal sex is focused on the pleasure of discharging energy.
Everything else, the romantic candlelit dinners, the anticipation, the
kissing, the touching are seen as kinds of foreplay leading up to the
big moment of release experienced, as Reich describes the orgasm, in
terms of charge and discharge. We enjoy the sexual energy but at the
same time are aiming at the moment of releasing the sexual tension from
our bodies during the 8 – 12 seconds of the conventional orgasm. This
shows our deep ambiguity towards our sexuality. We desire it, and spend
a lot of time longing for it and searching for it, but our highest
pleasure is in getting rid of it and being blissfully free of our drives
for a few hours or minutes of postorgasmic relaxation.
Tantra teaches us to relax into our sexual energy and simply be in it as
our natural state of pleasurable aliveness. Our habit is to tense into
our sexual energy, contracting the muscles, especially the muscles of
the pelvic floor. This has the short term gain of creating an impression
of intensity, as tensing the muscle does not actually mean that we have
more energy, simply that the same amount of energy is compressed into a
smaller space. The price we pay, however, for this feeling of intensity
is twofold: first, a contracted muscle is a muscle ready for action, to
paraphrase Desmond Morris, for flight, fight, or fuck, so the tension
takes us out of the realm of being into the realm of doing and
performance; secondly, whereas excitement with expansion creates a state
of pleasure, excitement with contraction creates an energetic state of
fear.
Q: So the tension in our muscles creates a sense of
fear associated with our sexuality that is responsible for the ambiguity
you talked about, that we simultaneously want to enjoy our sexuality and
get rid of it?
A: If we can learn to relax our bodies while feeling excited it can take
us out of this unconscious fear and ambivalence into a feeling of
naturalness and innocence. At the same time relaxing the body takes us
out of the dimension of doing and of performance into a state of
goallessness.
Q: Buddhist principles applied to our sexuality?
A: Indeed. Buddhist influence on tantra teaches us that our sexuality is
not something to do or to have, but something to be and to be in. If we
can achieve this we can leave behind us our tendencies to control or
manipulate or play games, even our habit of having needs and
expectations, and simply be in and follow the energy where it wants to
take us. In that sense there is a strong element of surrender in tantric
sex, not so much one partner to the other but rather both partners
surrendering to the energy, to shakti, to the goddess.
Q: Relaxing into the energy sounds quite simple. Why
aren’t we all doing it, why do we have to learn it?
A: We identify ourselves with doing rather than being, with form rather
than flow, with making happen rather than allowing to happen. Although
we long to surrender to something bigger than ourselves, yearn to merge
and dissolve the boundaries that isolate us, although this deeply
spiritual longing drives the deepest searching of both our hearts and
our sex, we fear the loss of control and identity. Our usual moment of
deepest relaxation is just before we fall asleep. So we are used to
relaxing into unconsciousness, or to experiencing letting go as
collapsing into emptiness. We have to learn to relax into excitement,
relaxing with our senses wide open, relaxing into more and more
awareness of our aliveness and our true nature as limitless energy
beings. We are afraid of how big and powerful we are.
Q: So if tantra questions the Reichian orgasm of
charge and discharge as limited, is there a tantric orgasm?
A: At first as you practise relaxing into the energy you will experience
a drop in excitement. You will miss the intensity of tension. But as
there is no discharge of energy, but rather a circling of energy between
the partners and through one’s own body, the energy can continue to
build and build. Gradually you can build enough energy to feel that
intensity not just in the sex but in every cell of your body. And if you
are not limited to identifying yourself just with your physical body,
the excitement can expand into your energy body, which itself can grow
to fill the whole room.
But I wouldn’t describe this as a tantric orgasm, but rather as our true
nature – who we really are, that tantra reveals to us through the
experience that we are love and we are sexuality and we are expanded
consciousness. So through harnessing the power of our sexuality, tantra
guides us back to our sacred birthright. If we truly experiencethe
miracles of life, of our bodies and our senses, the wonder of creation
that we and our beloved are.
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