Tantra and Relationships

How Tantra can help in a relationship

Tantra is raising consciousness and awareness, creating an impact on all aspects of life, including sexual connection with your partner.

Tantra is a philosophy and way of life where we get to learn and connect with our selves first through various tantric practices, such as yoga postures, meditation, mantra chanting, partner yoga, rituals, etc.

A tantric relationship is a relationship in which a couple uses different philosophies, tools, and techniques given by tantra to deepen their relationship, which allows them to move away from pure vanilla-based relationships often found in many couples these days.

A tantric relationship allows you to live a relationship full of harmony, peace, love, and deeper intimacy where the focus is paid more on yourself first rather than the relationship itself.

• In a tantric relationship, my relationship with myself takes the front seat followed by a relationship with a partner in which each aspires to live as awake as possible, as real as possible, confronting with each other’s fears, insecurities, weaknesses and supporting each other with a lot of love, compassion, and devotion, which culminates a deeper sense of connection, nourishment, joy, happiness, and bliss. 

• Normal relationships often focus on getting by in day-to-day life whereas tantric relationships focus on awakening the subtle energies, which helps to raise consciousness and awareness, transcending all aspects of life.

Tantra provides various rituals, some of which are listed below and often used by tantric couples in relationships.

If you are not familiar with these or haven’t tried these at all, I would strongly suggest bringing these into your relationship and noticing the impact it creates.

Don’t worry if this sounds strange at the beginning just like any other new thing in life, with practice, everything will become easier.

• Transfiguration is the practice of seeing the divine in yourself and others. It is the core of the tantric practice, which believes that everything in the universe is divine and we are all an aspect of divinity. Unlike normal relationships where a female is a woman and male is a man, in tantric relationships, the woman is considered to be a Goddess (Shakti) and man is considered to be Shiva.

• Consecration is about becoming present before doing an act. It’s about pausing and focusing on the breath and energy inside the body, calling for higher selves to offer blessings and setting the intention for the fulfillment of desired results. In a normal relationship, when we feel turned on and want to have sex, we often do so by going straight to caressing, touching, kissing, and having sex itself. ‘Honey, I am feeling horny’, ‘Hi babe, are we on tonight’, and ‘I think we have time for a quickie’ are some of the normal phrases used to indicate couples’ desires to connect sexually. In a tantric relationship, before starting the act of lovemaking, we set the intention, bring awareness to the energies in the body, and connect with our partner. Couple in a tantric relationship often says these: let's make love tonight. My intention for this is to access a deeper part of my consciousness, or my intention for our connection today is to discover new nuances of lovemaking and divinity’.

• Transmutation and sublimation: Transmutation is the process of transforming the chemical element of one energy into the chemical element of another; for example, the energy of anger is transmuted into the energy of love. Sublimation is energy moving from one energy center (chakra) to another to raise the vibration, consciousness, and awareness of experiencing superior levels of humanness.

Tantra provides various tools that are used as part of living and experiencing life as tantric. Starting a tantric relationship will require a commitment to do daily practices, perform rituals, and learn and study more about tantric principles, but over time these get easier and more enjoyable.

Some of the tools that are used by tantric couples as part of their living together are:

• Practicing Intimacy: Intimacy means ‘into me’, i.e., allowing the other into me, my experience, my reflections, my thought processes, and my feelings of bodily sensations. This can be done by holding hands and staying present in sensations like feeling of heartbeats, feeling of warmth and love, eye gazing, regular check-ins during the day, reflecting gratitude for each other, etc.

• Working through the polarity and dynamics of masculine and feminine energies: Why do normal relationships lose spark over time? Why do couples tend to have a less sexual connection even though both desire to connect more and enjoy each other sexually? This is often because of a lack of understanding of how polarity works. Tantra allows us to understand that each of us has these masculine and feminine energies, and it is the interplay of these energies that creates a spark between two beings.

• Practicing conscious sensuality refers to becoming fully aware of the connection between the two of you through touch, caress, gaze, massages, sensing, and feeling the impact of erotic and other energies. Couples, of course, touch each other in a normal relationship, but in a tantric relationship, this touch goes beyond physical touch. The goal is to drop away from the mind and get into the bodily experience. A felt sense experiences all the senses so every single move that is made is made with full awareness.

• Tantric sex and massages aim at increasing intimacy by creating a heart-mind-body connection, which creates an amplified experience of lovemaking and transcends the whole experience from body pleasure to divine experience and cosmic bliss. The focus is on experiencing the slowness, tenderness, activation, transmutation, and sublimation of energies rather than positions and orgasms. Once a person gets the flavor or experience of tantric sex, it is generally very difficult to go back to enjoying normal sex. Normal sex often tends to get repetitive and boring, creating a lack of interest in sex; tantric sex is never boring because there are millions of combinations of experiences relating to energy and chemical composition that one experiences.

In the western world, tantra has become associated with sex and has been portrayed through various forums, i.e., retreats, social media, workshops, etc.

Tantra is more than just sex and a tantric relationship doesn’t mean people leave their homes and careers or cities and move away to a jungle or become hippies.

It simply means that we bring the amazing elements of tantric principles into our relationship, into our life, and our self, so that we can live and experience life the best way possible with extreme levels of sensitivity and receptivity rather than living numb and insensitive towards each other’s feelings, emotions, and energies. If you haven’t tried this yet, what are you waiting for? What’s the worst that could happen?

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