Tantra: My Sacred Journey Beyond the Mosh-Pit
In early 2009 I attended my first Sacred Union Meet Up. I had just finished listening to and studying the entire archive of the Tantra Podcast (http://personallifemedia.com/podcasts/225-sex-tantra-and-kama-sutra). I knew about the tantric concept of evoking divine masculine and feminine energy from audio books, podcasts, books, pdfs, and my own practice, but my understanding was very shallow. Now I know it and feel it in a much deeper way.
In the tantric tradition, the universe itself is thought to have been danced into creation by the combining of masculine and feminine energies, sharing love and power, complimenting each other’s strengths and compensating for weaknesses. According tantric teachings, for an individual to be healthy these energies must be balanced within oneself and within one’s relationships.
There are many practices that work to balance this sacred mythical union. Unlike many western myths, this one isn’t just an abstract story it’s an experiential way of being. The techniques and methods by which to cultivate sacred energies can be trained.
In the meet up, the facilitator had the group of about 40 strangers (half women, half men) stand up and do some yogic body movements to get their energy flowing. Then she gave a presentation on the history, origins, concepts, and applications of an array of spiritual tools to reach higher consciousness through self love and relationships.
She stated that her background was in activism and community organizing. I was stoked because she approached this spiritual work as a warrior goddess and hoped to empower the group to liberate themselves from and resist the negativity and programming of the industrial system. Further, she emphasized the need to clean our bodies and energy fields and to elevate our consciousness.
She then organized us into a dance where all of the women created an outer circle and all of the men created an inner circle facing the women. She instructed the women to evoke their erotic goddess power to love, heal, nurture, seduce, be wild and primal. The women were to build this energy through their dance and give full presence and attention to the man they were facing. The men were instructed to not engage our genital sexual energy but rather to take the building heat and energy produced through the transfer of feminine energy, draw it up through our chakra systems, and apply it to visualizations of our highest self-transcending purposes. The exercise was intended to give women a safe space to really cultivate their sensual/sexual energies and apply them to heal and empower the men and help the men get beyond our base sexual desire and selfish egos and apply divine energy towards positive transpersonal transformation.
At first there was a lot of awkwardness and tension, but the teacher did an amazing job to help people understand this was not about coupling, or even being turned on. The men were profoundly moved by the level of presence and energy and all seemed to be entranced and enchanted, not with the individual they were dancing with, but by the channeling of pure interdimensional energy by the whole group.
There was no touching, just dancing, deep breathing and eye contact. The key for this to work so well was that every minute or so the teacher clapped loud enough to be heard over the music, and the women rotated to the next man. There were people of walks of life and levels of experience with this kind of stuff. At first there was unease but the collectivity of love, trust, and abandonment of ego and selfhood led to a melting away of fear. Eventually we achieved the dissolution of our social masks that that we normally hide behind and trap our essence in. A deep sense of unity was established and the level of healing that started to occur brought me to tears. This may sound like just a bunch of hippies dancing at a drum circle, but having experienced both, I can tell you that this was radically advanced.
I was making a sacred connection with each woman. They all opened their hearts and gave of themselves and the universe with such authenticity and purity it felt like making love to the cosmos, experiencing the goddess and being a god. Not just symbolically but experientially. It was a real felt experience: the presence of surging, flowing, electrifying, energy filling my body and giving me a tangible sense of spirit. I was able to work with it and direct it through my body, through my mind, my visions, my intentions. Everyone was in tune, doing the same thing creating a sacred vortex of divine energy. If you don’t like the word “spirit”, simply “energy” will suffice. What we were being guided to create was a field of energy that was generated and charged by dance and connected with and channeled through the conduit of eye contact and breath.
It was so awesome to see the depth and richness grow and to see the men and women slowly let go of their shyness. It was a multilayered journey that started with a building up of fiery animalistic seductive energy, then moved towards a totally healing nurturing compassionate gentle maternal energy. The teacher kept people engaged, focused, and directed in their dancing and intention. By just saying a word, she was able to change the character of the entire room’s energy, you could almost see the colors change in the auric fields.
At the heights of the dance, each breath I took in, as my eyes were locked with a dancing woman, was like taking a hit of some kind of potent third-eye dilating drug that sent energetic shockwaves through my entire being. As I danced I felt what one woman described as the “sculpting of auras”. She said at first she was just dancing, in her self, dancing with movements she self-consciously created but as the dance evolved, she began to move in currents and patterns that were totally beyond her conscious control. She began to sculpt the male aura in a loving and healing way.
After the female to male exercise, the roles were reversed and the males were put in the outer circle and instructed to attempt to impress the females. This was really comical and challenging for many of us. The dominant culture teaches men that to impress a woman, one must offer a display of alpha male machismo, financial wealth, and/or social status. Without being able to pull up in a fancy car, act tough and intimidating, or appear to be of high rank, for the first time a lot of the guys were left with only their ability to speak through their eyes and dance movements. We looked like a bunch of fools, but in time, energy from beyond our conscious minds began to animate us into sacred geometric patterns of motion that ended up becoming very much like what the females had been doing. We felt as though we were massaging and sculpting the auras of the females though with a more masculine type of energy. It was an exercise to bring forth the positive, constructive, creative masculine traits and create space to cultivate male strength and power in a nurturing and giving manner, not in the so often culturally conditioned hostile taking manner.
After the dances, the group did a series of chakra clearing exercises based on ancient Egyptian martial arts. It was basically a series of striking movements whereby each strike is designed to break through and throw out blockages in our energy systems. It’s all about synchronizing breath, visualization, and combative and defensive training.
We closed the evening with a discussion of how we felt and what we experienced. After we all expressed how profound and life-changing the dancing was, the conversation moved in the direction of confronting patriarchy by using sacred traditional ways to restore balance. It was clear to all of us that the sacred feminine (which had been honored in pre-history but violently and systematically suppressed world-wide over the last 5,000 years of patriarchy) is never more than a few breaths away from all of us. As an energy it flows through all of us whether male, female, gay, straight, or any combination thereof.
You don’t have to read a book and believe what prophets, saints, priests, and gods tell you to believe and have faith in. You don’t have to imagine divine energy, you see it and feel it under the proper direction. Ancient tantric culture developed the means to actively engage real power and energy that we now suppress and deny.
I think the gateway concept to get people to understand the potential of this kind of healing/therapeutic/empowering energetic work is to ask if they’ve ever felt energetic sensations in their heart area. Everyone has had crushes, and many of us have been heart broken. During those times it’s impossible to deny that there are energy fields and circuits that exist beyond our normal perception of the physical world, and are beyond the current scope of scientific instruments of measurement.
You don’t have to follow a religious doctrine to discover and work with your own energy fields. There are many pathways to direct your attention towards them and to develop and cultivate them as you would your intellect or your muscles. Sacred sexuality, martial arts, singing/chanting, dancing, meditation, and many other means are available. Less ascetic cultures valued and held sacred the ability to transcend the normal waking state and access higher states of mind and body through ritual practice.
You don’t have be a freaky hippie on a commune, a Buddhist monk, or move to India to start to reclaim these skills. You can do it yourself, and it can enhance any lifestyle and social identity you have. Yoga is a ritualized practice that has transcended almost every sector of society. Tantra I feel has more utility for would-be warriors and revolutionaries in that it holds an inherent critique of patriarchy and critique of the dominator culture in its heart (see the work of Osho). My tantra teachers Reena and Rhoda are some of the most powerful radical transformative activist goddesses I’ve ever met.
In my early punk years I had fully rejected all religion and without knowing it, all spirituality. Within the last few years I’ve been able to reclaim experiences of the sacred, without shackling myself to belief in religion. Our profane existence can become sacred on our own terms. I used to chant “No Gods, No Masters” but now I feel more like we are all goddesses and gods, and if we choose a path of mastery, we can truly be our own masters. It’s my hope that we’ll evolve new ways to access very old sacred experiences that will help us return to primal animistic polytheism. Both monotheism and atheism are equally destructive and both have failed to explain the universe and provide ecologically conscious moral guidance to humanity.
As I’ve pushed myself to go beyond the punk and metal most pit and learned to dance in other circles, I’ve found that there are many allies in resistance that I once dismissed as hedonistic ineffectual hippies. Now I feel much more whole and balanced and can experience the best of both worlds. Who knows maybe some day there’ll be a way to bridge the two worlds. I know one thing, there’s a big difference between the energy field of a crust pit and a street punk or metal pit. Crust’s musical structure is inherently hypnotic and trance-inducing. With the cyclical d-beat drumming and the loud chaotic mind overloading wall-of-sound distortion, the crowd tends to rock and dance in waves. You can feel the emotional intensity of the music in a very deep spiritual way and when you focus on the meaning and message of the lyrics, you can evoke the anger and pain of the Earth herself, you can become a conduit of the rage of tortured animals and oppressed peoples.
As much as I love the hearts, flowers, rainbows, and unicorns of the more hippie scene, I’ll never be able to forget the powerful rage that comes from confronting the dark imagery of the profane reality that we inhabit. Eventually we’ll be able to synthesize the two visionary movements. The artwork of Jeremy Clark does this for me. It depicts both the dark and bright aspects of the post-industrial future.
We’ll all be dancing to drums around campfires soon enough I hope. And if we’re all open- minded we can learn a lot from all the tribes, ancient and modern.
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Profane Existence 
Yeah. love that post. I took a tantric dancing class a number of years ago. It was just women though. It was powerful. It connected me to powers I didn’t know existed. Reading your post relived that experience for me and causes me to yearn for more. A co-ed class would be most rewarding.
I like the way you bring it all together: the tribes, the hippies, the punks, everyone else….and how you highlight the fact that universal energy is real, has a unifying force, and when we connect to it, we connect to our higher selves. It has nothing to do with religion. The sacred feminine has been burned to the ground. Exercises like tantric dancing ressurrect her to her rightful place, and in the process, those who partake.
Thanks Abigail, I just found this comment, so glad to hear there are more folks out there with this knowledge and experience! I’ve found that there are a lot of Tantra groups on Meetup.com that have different types of gatherings/events. Peace! -Ben