Urban Tantra: Sacred Sex for the Twenty-First Century (27 page)

Your intention in this section of your ritual is to release any stress and tension you felt prior to the start of the ritual and replace it with a relaxed, alive awareness. The exercises above are suggestions. Create your own techniques. Laugh for ten minutes. Wrestle with your partner. Have a pillow fight. Any activity that leaves you relaxed but tingly and ready for more is perfect.

In these next three chapters, you will learn several traditional Tantric lovemaking positions and—just as important—variations that will help personalize and add variety to your ritual. I hope they will also give you some ideas for creating your own variations. As you try each posture, I suggest you start off with the traditional form and then allow it to morph into one or more of the variations. This way, you’ll get a sense of the original intent and also find the form that works best for you and your partner.

Tantric lovemaking positions allow you to build, share, and circulate sexual energy with a partner. In the process of a Tantric ritual, you will circulate two distinct expressions of life/sex energy: the genital/sexual/lower chakra energy and the heart/spiritual/upper chakra energy. During lovemaking, you’ll want to keep both fires lit and burning brightly. If all the heat is in your genitals, you will miss the presence of the Divine within you both. If all the heat is in your heart and upper chakras, you will miss the passion and desire for each other. Many of the postures can be done with or without genital contact or penetration. You can add actual fucking where and when you like.

The Pose of Recognition with Hand Balancing

When we first come together with a partner, we want to open up and invite our partner into our emotional and physical space in the same way we are welcomed into theirs. In order to do this, we need to drop our emotional and physical defenses. This pose helps us to feel less separate by harmonizing our energy with our partner’s.

The Pose of Recognition with hand balancing is most easily done on the floor. Use pillows to make yourselves comfortable. Sit directly across from one another, close but not quite touching, with your legs crossed. Look into your partner’s nondominant eye. (If you are right-handed, your left eye is your nondominant eye; if you’re left-handed,
it’s your right eye.) Put your right hand, palm down, onto your partner’s upturned left hand. Put your left hand, palm up, under your partner’s downturned right hand.

It is said that the eyes are the gateway to the soul. Tantrikas believe that the nondominant eye is the receptive eye, and therefore the actual gateway to the soul. It is not necessary to keep your gaze glued to your partner’s eye—but eye gazing is a wonderfully intimate practice, and it does give you a very specific place to put your gaze. This helps to keep your attention focused.

Traditionally, the hand balancing exercise helps to unite your yang/masculine energy (situated on the right side of your body) with your yin/feminine energy (located on the left side of your body) by joining with the opposite polarities of your partner. The upturned hand receives love; the downturned hand projects love.

Some people like to invoke the Tantric love god, Shiva, and the goddess, Shakti, by calling or singing their names. You can simply gaze into your partner’s eye and recognize the god/goddess/divinity in them. You’ll see your own divinity reflected back to you.

The Pose of Recognition

VARIATIONS ON THE POSE OF RECOGNITION

Feel free to modify the Pose of Recognition so that it meets your physical, emotional, and physical needs. Here are some suggestions.

Sitting positions
. Instead of sitting directly in front of each other, sit slightly to the side of each other and gently hold hands. Sitting directly in front of each other can feel confrontational to people who are used to facing off across a desk with a boss or a competitor. The last thing we need at the beginning of lovemaking is to feel confrontational!

A Note to the Time-Challenged

Yes, it will certainly take longer than twenty minutes to practice all these positions. But it will only take twenty minutes to practice one or two of them. Eventually, you may want to make the time to string them all together in a ritual. But, please, do start enjoying at least some of them right now. Simply add one or two to whatever kind of erotic play you’re already enjoying. If you wait until you have the time to do all of these, you may never try any of them.

Leg positions
. You can use a wide variety of leg positions for all the sitting postures. Don’t feel that you have to sit in the classic cross-legged lotus position unless it’s comfortable for you. You can sit on a pillow or two so that your knees are lower than your hips, with your legs outstretched over your partner’s outstretched legs. You can even sit on chairs. The most important thing is that you both be comfortable. If at any time you feel uncomfortable, move! Change positions. Staying conscious during sex means first and foremost knowing and responding to what your body is feeling. You cannot be totally present when you’re sore or cramping!

Hand balancing
. Hand balancing is traditionally used to balance male and female energies. I look at this somewhat differently. For me, had balancing helps balance all my identities, not just male and female–or even yin and yang. When I feel out of balance, it’s not my male and female sides that need balancing–it’s all the other identities I try to juggle on a daily basis!

Living in the Western world at the beginning of this millennium means not living one life, but ninety-nine lives. We become more people in one day than our ancestors were in a lifetime. Here are just some of the identities that I’ve been juggling while writing this book: author, Broadway theatre manager, sex educator, workshop facilitator, friend daughter of two parents in their late eighties, gardener, herbalist, mediator, artist, and lover. I also went from caregiver to estate executrix when an old and dear friend of mine became seriously ill and died.

So, when I sit down opposite my lover and connect with her in the hand balancing position, I’m not focused on balancing male and female. I want to balance all my identities and, specifically, bring the lover identity into proper balance. It is the myself-as-lover who gets pushed aside and buried by busyness and the demands made on me by all my other identities.

This may in fact be the primary reason why so many people who are truly in love with each other are not making love to each other. Their inner lover has been shoved aside by all the other identities a person needs to be in a day. Use hand balancing to bring your inner lover in balance with all your other identities.

Imagine that in your left hand, you hold yourself as Lover. In your right hand, you hold all your other identities. Put your right hand, palm down, onto your partner’s upturned left hand (which holds their self as Lover). Put your left hand, palm up, under your partner’s downturned right hand. Let your identities flow.

Drawing in the sacred
. Tantric practice includes seeing the god/dess in your partner or calling your partner a god/dess. This works for many people, but not for all of us. I consider myself a very spiritual person, but I’m uncomfortable seeing my partner as either a conduit for, or the literal incarnation of, an anthropomorphized deity.

A healthy compromise might be the twelve-step model of a higher power. You can decide for yourself who or what your higher power is. One friend of mine, an atheist and recovering alcoholic, decided her higher power would be the singer Robert Goulet. Whenever she wanted a drink she called upon Robert Goulet to keep her from drinking. It worked for her; she’s still sober. Your higher power could be a God, a Goddess, the Universe, All That Is, Source, the Divine, an energy force, an inner knowing, or Dolly Parton.

I believe that all human desire for connection is really a desire for connection with some higher power—a desire for a connection to something greater than our everyday selves. Relationships, especially sexual relationships, provide an ideal arena in which to practice and enjoy connection. The act of raising sexual/life-force energy in any situation puts us in closer connection with our higher power. Add a partner and the effect is multiplied. Therefore, it makes sense that when we raise sexual energy while connecting with a partner, we feel or see the presence of a higher power reflected in that partner—hence the Tantric tradition of seeing God/dess in your partner.

Communication
. The Pose of Recognition is a good position for sharing anything that needs or wants to be spoken so that the two of you can move deeper into erotic intimacy. If you are with a new partner, each of you can ask and answer “How do you like
to be touched?” If you have been partners for a while, each of you can ask and answer “What are some things you love about me?” If you’ll be moving from this position into an activity that requires consent and negotiation, each of you can tell the other what you would like to do, might like to do, and definitely would not like to do.

Should you feel the need to clear out some feelings that you think may be preventing you from opening up to your partner, or if you are feeling emotionally stuck, you can each complete a little exercise to help you get in touch with what you are feeling.

I am angry about …
I am sad about …
I am scared about …
I am glad about …

This is not a discussion or a bitch session; it’s an emotional clearing exercise. Complete all four statements without interruption or comment by your partner. Then allow your partner to do the same. Repeat until you can move ahead in peace. You will probably discover that whatever is making your partner mad, sad, glad, or scared has nothing to do with you. If anything does come up that might merit further discussion, agree to set it aside to discuss later if it’s still on your mind.

Other suggestions
. As you do eye gazing and hand balancing, you may feel a desire to reach out toward your partner and pull them toward you. Please resist that temptation. You don’t have to do anything except breathe. Just be with them and with yourself. See what happens. Feel what comes up. Just be.

The Pose of Giving and Receiving

I can always count on the Pose of Giving and Receiving to drop me into my body and restore my ability to receive pleasure. When you give the strokes at the Resilient Edge of Resistance, you’ll find giving as pleasurable as receiving.

Sit across from one another. One partner sits with their hands resting on their thighs, palms up. This person is the receiver. The receiver does not give out energy; he or she accepts it.

First stroke
. The giver begins at the top of the receiver’s head and, slowly and gently, like a feather, strokes down the receiver’s head, neck, shoulders, arms, and wrists, and finally off the hands. Do this once.

Second stroke
. The giver again begins at the top of his or her partner’s head, but now strokes down to the third eye (center of the forehead), lightly strokes the receiver’s eyes, moves back to the ears, comes forward and touches the nose with his or her thumbs, brings the thumbs down to the lips, and then strokes down the chin to the throat center. The giver continues stroking down to the receiver’s heart center; brushes the nipples, outer torso, and inner thighs; moves back to the wrists; and slowly moves off the hands and fingertips.