My approach to Tantra has been through a side door, having more sexual energy than I knew what to do with and violating myself for years because of it. My first Tantra workshop was with an ex-porn star, Annie Sprinkle. “Have sex with everything,” she told us, with a smile as big as her love for life. I wanted to know her secret.

An essay from the late black lesbian warrior poet, Audre Lorde, inspired me to change my name. She said:”The erotic is the measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.”I still have yet to fully understand, but her words took hold of my soul. I wanted to be the reflectress of the erotic Ms. Lorde spoke of, bringing up all of the shadows and light a long the way. In the mirror, e r o t i c spells c i t o r e, which I later found out is the zen term for the moment of enlightenment, only it’s spelled satori instead.

New Identity & Letting Go

I remember both loving my new name and being afraid of it, ashamed of it as I slid the new plate into the slot on the door to my corporate office. I chose Tantra as a spiritual path because it was the only “religion” I could see myself ever fitting into. I suppose I was also looking to make sense of my wounds, to sanctify my suffering by becoming a sexual healer. But contrary to my hopes of finding an identity, the Tantric path has been a journey of annihilation, of losing my identities and letting go of attachments

Letting go includes everything from houses to marriages to a fifteen year career to my twelve year old daughter who chose to move across the country to live with her father to life in this body as I healed from cervical cancer. I’ve been initiated both in ashrams and in dark caves where I was left over night alone to find my own way out. I’ve been pushed off of cliff edges by strange teachers and had to walk for miles on a sprained ankle so I could learn to trust my intuition to guide me to just the right sit spot where the healing herbs were.

Tantric Philosophy

If I had a philosophy, I would say Tantra is the path of the receptive warrior, who embraces all that she is and all that life offers her. It is the quest of merging our raw, sexual creative life force energy with the all-knowing, loving, powerful presence of our spirit. For some, the Tantric journey begins by awakening Shakti, the ecstatic life force energy which propels all things into being.

For others, the journey begins in learning to move the Shakti energy up the body to experience it at different levels of vibration-as creativity, power, unconditional love, our voice, our truth and ultimately our essence.At higher levels, we learn to bring the essential self, the infinite consciousness of Shiva down into the body and into the world, using the combined energies of our spirit (Shiva) and our life force (Shakti) to create genius works of art or perform healing miracles or regenerate our bodies, reversing the aging process. This is sacred union of Shakti (the power of manifestation) and Shiva (the inert underlying consciousness) that is the true quest of the Tantrika.

Doorway to Evolution

Tantra is the path of unashamedly using everything-our desires, our pleasure, our shadow, our sexual energy (which is the highest source of energy currently accessible to human beings) as fuel, to expand our consciousness and raise our cellular vibration and that of the planet. To me, Tantra is the doorway to humanity’s next evolution. The act of sexual union, the merging of Shiva (sperm) with Shakti (ovum) has the power to create life. What else might we use our sexual creative energy for? But the door can be opened only as far as our degree of receptivity, and only as far as we can let go of our expectations and judgements in wanting ourselves and others to be any different than we are.

Merging Energies

In a culture where bigger, better, faster, louder is rewarded, this quiet quality of receptivity is a rarity. I first experienced my feminine receptive self during a three year celibate period when I learned to merge and make love with nature. Being an earth sign I preferred to merge with things that were bigger than me, that I could press my body up against. What I came to understand was the greatest gift I could offer a tree or a boulder or anything in this world was to simply fully receive it.

Only the “it” I soon discovered, was not the “actual” tree or boulder, but an ecstatic organic current, a life force energy that flows through everything. And that by connecting with this ecstatic current and breathing into it, making it bigger with my awareness, I could climb inside of it, dissolve into it. I could feel myself as the ecstatic current expressed as an Oak tree or a granite boulder as well as its expression through my own body. I could feel the ecstatic current expressed through the merging of Oak and woman, of woman and boulder-the combinations of energies was infinite!

Making Love with All Things

The more of life I merged with, the more I realized there was truly no separation. We are all of the same ecstatic energy dancing through us. Tantra is the path of making love with everything, of being open and receptive to the adventure of your life. Multi-orgasms are a by-product. When couples ask me about techniques, I tell them to learn them, then forget them.

I once had a Tantra teacher, who became my husband for a brief time, call me a clumsy lover. Indignant at first, I smiled at him, relieved. “Lucky me to get to be a beginner again,” I said. I once had a woman share with me how she felt too shy and fragile to have sex-to which I replied, “There is nothing sexier, my sister, than vulnerable authenticity. The shyer, the more fragile, the more real, the better.”