"Why I too hate Tantra" and upcoming events

When I first began to explore Tantra in the mid-2000s, my friend Robert Allen, who at the time was one of Seattle’s main tantric emissaries, inspired me to deepen my role as a tantric guide. So when I saw the title of his recent blog entry, “Why I hate Tantra,” I had to read it to see what might have gotten into him. (Read it here.) None of my friends and colleagues has a deeper understanding of Tantra than he.

Robert, like many others, is fed up with much of what passes for Tantra these days, and in many ways I agree with him. The deeper my understanding of Tantric mysticism goes, the less content I am to call even what I teach Tantra. Yes, it is “neo-tantra”—that much is beyond debate—but what separates the real thing from what most Americans think of when they hear the word, “Tantra?”

Tantra is not smoking-hot sex bathed in curry and lit by a patchouli-scented candle with a Ravi Shankar CD playing in the background, the Kama Sutra book on the night stand opened to page 69. Tantra doesn’t need to be sexual at all. Tantra at times melds sexuality with the sacred, but sacred sexuality (which I’m a major proponent of and teach as well) does not equal Tantra.

Tantra can be the most confronting, and perhaps, most comforting, of all the spiritual paths known to humans. Tantra is making love to your fear. Tantra is making love to your work or leaving it. Tantra is finding the Divine wherever you look—especially in places they told you you wouldn’t find God. Your most profound encounters with the Divine will most likely come when you’re not looking, but the Divine tends to reveal itself most often to those who take the time and energy to look anywhere.

Most Tantric and, dare I say, spiritual teaching is all about ascent—with the goal being to elevate the spirit, raise the vibration, transcend the suffering, achieve purity or attain higher states of bliss and ecstasy, but the truth is there is the soul has other needs, like getting to the bottom of that mother complex you have been plagued by all your life. Spirit is good, and seeks to rise, but the soul is the part of us that is like water—it seeks descent and depth. Soul is of the soil and ashes and earth, which perhaps is why Tantric practitioners in India do their rituals in graveyards, with the ashes and bones of immolated people. Only when you are ready to get down and dirty, to smear yourself with the grief, tears, and blood of your own suffering, and maybe mine too, and let out a baleful wail, will you be ready for enlightenment. Today’s best-selling spiritual writers and religious teachers don’t tell you that to be enlightened, you must first be endarkened. But it’s the truth.

Of course, grief, tears, and blood are difficult to sell to a world desperately trying to put a band-aid on any kind of suffering it encounters.

Dear readers, are you ready to go deep into your body and get serious about healing those deep, wounded places? Are you ready to cross a living threshold, or are you content to buy a Kama Sutra candle at the Exotic Love Boutique, practice your orgasms, and call it good?

Maybe you’re thinking, "Where’s my Nag Champa incense? Where’s my day-long orgasm?” If you’re ready to cross a threshold, to live on the edge of your personal magic and power, you have a great opportunity on July 31 when Michael Mirdad guides the Portland Tantric Meetup in a day-long intensive. Michael is the real thing. After July 17, the $100 tuition increases to $125, so save some money and register ASAP. I look forward to sharing this journey with you.

As we ramp up for fall, plan for the return of our two-part series on the essence of Shiva and Shakti, Massage A Trois, and other opportunities to explore the longings you carry in your soul.

Speaking of which, check out my other meetup, the Spiritual Growth and Adventure Meetup.

Many blessings, and enjoy our spectacular weather,

Owl