What is tantra?

As yoga has become common practice for so many we're hearing the word Tantra more often, especially on social media. But what exactly is it and how does it benefit our health and wellbeing?

Tantra is an ancient spiritual path that, like yoga, originated in India thousands of years ago. It involves recognising our eternal nature whilst being active in the world. Tantra invites us to have a life of totality, to trust completely, to love fully, to jump into life without a safety net; ultimately, Tantra invites us to expand into our true self, our inherent divinity.

Walking this path isn't only focused on sex (as is popularised in the mainstream media) but in Tantra we recognise that everything is a product of sex, so sexual energy is seen as the root energy of everything. Sexual pleasure is seen as a way to experience the divine within ourselves and, by doing so, we are able to recognise and connect with our own true divinity. When we address this energy we tap into the force of all energy and from there we learn the energetic mastery of life. Tantra teaches us how energy flows and channels through us and how we impact others through our energy. Once mastered, this allows us to enter magnetism where living a full and abundant life is magnetised towards us. Tantra is essentially a system of life mastery; by understanding tantric energetics we access our human potential.

The alignment with the self Tantra leads up to is the key to a person achieving sovereign wholeness. This is when a person reaches a state of knowing who they are and that they don't need to push or prove anything. They feel comfortable in their body and there is great peace of mind.

As an energetic science, Tantra incorporates the mind, body, and spirit, and it's known for its various practices, including meditation, yoga, and breathwork, all of which lead to significant benefits to a person's overall health, both physical and mental. When combined with the wisdom that we get to understand and feel on a cellular level, we begin to understand how energy vibrates inside us and all the karmic imprints that are in the way of being abundant and successful get shaken and moved. As people, we try to protect ourselves from this natural fullness, this abundance, and we create layers of protection instead of softening into what is actually meant for us, what is our true nature.

As we move through life, we tend to collect painful emotional knots in the body; when we work with the emotional body through Tantra, we work to undo those knots and untangle. But we don't have to do it from a therapy approach. In Tantra we aren't healing anything, we are returning ourselves to purity; our truest, purest state of being. Seeing these things clearly allows us to understand and bring them back to source and they dissolve. For example, for many people shame is a big block in the body, and often this begins with sexuality and moves into a general feeling of shame. When we see that shame, acknowledge it, breathe into it and love it, it returns to purity and gets dissolved. This is when you see real improvements in all areas of your life; changes in your body, your behaviour and, in turn, your relationships.

Tantra is all about nurturing the relationship we have with ourselves. Everything starts with us as individuals understanding that we are our main provider, we are our main beloved, we are the ones that need to treat our hearts and bodies like the most precious thing on this planet. It's only within us – and everything else is reflected back to us energetically.