Why is Tantra so important today?

Tantra is about receiving the great blessings - the full power - of the masculine and the feminine, not just at the human level but as cosmic principles.

Tantra is about inner harmony and the incredible - truly Divine - gifts that reveal themselves in the state of inner balance.

These gifts include the infinite unfolding of human potential, practically dissolving the frontiers between the human and the divine.

The ultimate goal is the utterly liberating Self-Knowledge - also known as Atma Siddhi.

The ancient symbols of Tantra - of harmony and balance - of Wholeness, need a new 'face' in the West. But to provide a fuller picture of what Tantra is about, we need more than just the image of Western couples in orgasmic embrace. We need not just sensuality, but also connection, tenderness and compassion. We need 'cosmic' symbols which are as far-reaching as the Eastern 'Shiva-Shakti', Shiva-lingam, Yab-Yum, Yin-Yang and other archetypal Oriental representations of the Divine principles.

Tantra is not all about what we can get out of sexual play, or what we can give to our sexual partner.

Practitioners and especially teachers of Tantra have a greater responseability when it comes to bringing awareness and helping resolve world-wide issues relating to sexuality and to human dignity.

But today, undeniably, Tantra has become associated with fantastic sex, sexual healing. and relationship therapy.

So let's look first at the sexual dimension of Tantra, and 'sexual healing'.

Encountering Tantra, it is common to hear people praising Tantra for helping to overcome or to cure sexual dysfunctions.

However, 'sexual dysfunction' is not just frigidity, erectile dysfunction or premature ejaculation.

We live in a world that is plagued by sexual dysfunction of all kinds.

These range from temporary personal issues to long-term or serial relationship problems.

Also, in the West, where studies on this have been done periodically, we can see that it is still common for women to not experience orgasms during much of their lives, or to not experience a single orgasm in their whole life.

It may still surprise us that many adult women, who have had years of sexual relationship, have never experienced an orgasm.

This is not an anatomical issue, it is a social and psycho-somatic issue.

And in these circumstances, is it any wonder that birth is typically such a stressful and difficult process for women?

The connection may at first not be obvious to us, but a woman's access to her own pleasure-potential is believed to have a great deal of influence on how labour unfolds and the degree of intervention that may be required in order to give birth.

It is still common today for women to fake orgasms because men are so disconnected from what women feel and therefore from what they need in order to experience sexual pleasure.

Really this is because men are often so fragmented and disconnected from themselves, and this is why for so many men sex - or pornography - becomes a compulsion. or even a self-destructive addiction.

So, men generally simply don't know how a woman opens up to pleasure, and in many cases women too are unable to guide the men because they're afraid to offend the man or because they don't even know themselves and their sexual needs well enough.

Holding space and giving guidance to explore and discover our sexual needs, as men, as women, or as sexual partners is what much of modern Tantra has become occupied with.

What truly helps us to establish trust and to create and sustain intimacy is one of the gifts that Tantra has been bringing to the West.

Trust and intimacy is, for many women, the first step in discovering their pleasure-potential.

It is therefore usually the first step in the literally 'mind-blowing' or 'consciousness-expanding' orgasms that are facilitated by Tantric practice with a partner.

But as I've become well-known for emphasizing: Tantra is not all about sex, it's not all about pleasure, and it's not all about orgasms.

Tantra is not all about what we can get out of sexual play, or what we can give to our sexual partner.

It is also not just about ritualizing sex to turn it into 'sacred sexuality'.

Tantric practitioners and especially Tantra teachers have a response-ability to address worldwide issues around sexuality.

Traditionally, Tantra is ultimately about spiritual Liberation... but it has also always been associated with some degree of cultural and social activism, raising awareness or creating alternative systems to reaffirm equal social rights and human dignity for all members of society.

Tantra leads to a deeply liberating, heart-opening and consciousness-expanding bliss - a divine ecstasy.

This is not just heightened sexual orgasmic pleasure.

In fact. we cannot let Tantra just be another form of pleasure-seeking - another fascinating distraction - even if it does address some of our personal and social symptoms of imbalance.

So, before exploring the spiritual dimension of Tantra, let's look at this other aspect of Tantra's importance today.

Tantra is traditionally also a social, and ethical movement, promoting the equality of genders and the dignity of all human beings.