08 Sep Sacred Sexuality
In tantra, sex is sacred, as is the body. This is a radically different attitude than the one most of us grew up with. The majority of us learned that sex is naughty and that pleasure is something we need to sneak. The conventional worldview of the last two thousand years has been that the body is sinful, thus sex and pleasure are too. We’ve learned to live ignoring our bodies which encourages people to walk around as merely heads — looking, thinking, analyzing, and judging — rather than feeling the wisdom that the body can bring.
One of the first step to Tantric Mating is to befriend our bodies and those of our lovers and honor them as sacred. When we do so it’s possible to gaze in amazement at their breathtaking beauty, their seemingly endless capacity for pleasure, and their innate wisdom. When we hold sex as sacred, we begin to honor our partner, our bodies and theirs, our sexual organs, our pleasure, and the space we make love in as manifestations of the Divine.
As a tantric practice we can remember to remember that we are embodied, that this moment is sacred, that this man or woman is my Beloved in this moment, and that these sexual feelings are sacred. We cultivate these attitudes within ourselves and through practice become more open to love and life. It’s a discipline like any other like learning to play tennis or chess or how to speak French.
Osho once said that the best sex is had by meditators. Meditation is a practice of touching the sacred in daily life. I believe what Osho meant was that tantric people are practicing mindfulness while we have sex. Consciously, we’re staying in the present moment, not trying to get somewhere in the future. We’re not thinking about lunch, or the news, or the multiplication tables, which is what they teach men to do so they won’t come. (Thanks, guys for doing that, but we’d rather have your presence.) We’re not trying to get to orgasm; we’re too busy enjoying the present moment. Just to touch each other’s hands mindfully is making love.
When you are fully embodied as you touch another’s flesh you can notice when you aren’t present or when you were spacing out. As a practice, we can remind ourselves to stay present as much as possible and bring that to lovemaking. Always we come back to the present moment with full awareness, just as we do in meditation.
By practicing mindful, sacred sex with our lover, we may share an experience of the Divine. We may even participate in what we might call “psychedelic sex.” It all depends on letting go of what the conventional culture has taught us about unloving, mechanical sex, and bringing heart, love, and mindfulness to lovemaking, plus a sense of worshiping our Beloved as a god or goddess.
© 2022 Catherine Auman
This is an excerpt from Catherine Auman’s book, Tantric Mating: Using Tantric Secrets to Create a Relationship Full of Sex, Love and Romance. Tantric Mating is a companion to her previous book Tantric Dating: Bringing Love and Awareness to the Dating Process named by BookAuthority as one of the Best Dating Books of All Time.
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