09 Oct Tantric Embodiment
When I was in a bookstore in the 70s and first encountered a book on tantra and the concept that sex was spiritual, it stopped me dead in my tracks. “Of course,” I said out loud, under my breath, “what else could it be?” I had not yet had the transpersonal sexual experiences I would later have, but early on there was that awareness, that sensitivity. Somewhere in my outside reading since beginning this program, I’ve encountered the idea that exceptional human experiences are most readily available to anyone through sex, and I believe it is Maslow who said that it is the most commonly reported vehicle.
In my decades-long study and practice of tantra, embodiment has been a consistent focus. I often relate the story to participants in my workshops that I used to think I was “embodied” because I was a dancer, did yoga, ate well, etc. It was while living at the tantra ashram in India that I realized those were all things I was DOING TO my body, rather than living inside it. During many exercises there, we learned to drop our awareness down inside, and to live and breathe from that place. Osho once said for us to imagine ourselves as headless people, and this is an amusing but also helpful image. Today I remind myself several times a day, whenever I remember: “Am I in my body?” and practice dropping inside no matter what I am doing.
Transpersonal sexual experiences often come to people unbidden, but we can also provide the “set and setting” for them to occur — one of the things I’m going to write about as I have not yet encountered anything about this in the formal research. When my husband and I were first together, we had created a sacred space as we do in tantra, with devotional music, candles, mindset and mindfulness, but we were unprepared for the Exceptional Human Experience (EHE) that ensued. Time seemed to disappear as we made love, in fact, afterwards we both estimated we had been making love for two hours when in fact it was four. We were both aware that we were a small part of a cosmic “lovemaking” and that our partner was a manifestation of the Divine. We “fell in love at first touch.”
One of the things I’m interested in answering is: were we experiencing sex as spiritual because we were already “spiritual people?” which is what he thinks, or were we tapping into a universal “place” called “spiritual?” I look forward to researching this in the years ahead.
© 2024 Catherine Auman
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