Tantra: The Art of Conscious Loving, "Sex can become a way to heal our wounds, open our hearts, and fuel our spiritual awakening."

Before you begin this article, I'd like you to take a test. Not some tabloid questionnaire to assess your level of sexual performance – how often you have an orgasm, for example, or (if you are a man) how often you have an orgasm before you're ready – but a kind of sexual Rorschach, an opportunity to reflect on some of your sexual attitudes and expectations. As you envision the following scene, pay attention to how you feel.

First, you enter a doorway into a candlelit bedroom where your beloved awaits. (If you don't have a beloved right now, imagine your ideal man or woman.) You begin by sitting quietly together, meditating or praying or simply opening to the sounds around you. Then you bow to one another, acknowledging the sacred or divine within you. As you embrace and kiss you fell your throats, hearts, bellies and genitals align and your breathing come into harmony. Lying down side-by-side, you begin to touch one another with utmost sensitivity, bringing all your presence and love into every caress.

With awareness, you help one another gently open to the places inside where you may feel fear, shame, or aversion. Looking deeply and soulfully into one another's eyes, you whisper endearments and tender words of love. As your passion increases, you touch one another with greater urgency, never losing the heart connection or the deep conviction that your lovemaking is a sacred activity. There's no performance anxiety because there is no particular goal you're trying to achieve.

As the charge between you increases, you experience a powerful current of energy connecting you at the genitals, rising up to the heart, bridging the space between you and dropping back to the genitals again. Although your lovemaking continues for an hour or two, the energy between you continues to grow and expand, flowing from your heart like a never-ending fountain of love. At times, all sense of separateness dissolves and you feel yourself to be one with everything.

Now take a moment to notice how you've responded to this vignette. Are you feeling uneasy or even annoyed at the juxtaposition of sexual passion and spiritual experience? Or maybe you long to achieve similar heights in your own lovemaking.

Perhaps you feel a nagging sense of shame about what you perceive to be your own sexual inadequacies. Then again, you may be inclined to dismiss the whole thing as some silly new age fantasy. "Who has time to make love like that these days anyway? With two jobs, the house and the kids, we barely have enough energy at the end of the day to kiss one another goodnight"

Whatever your response, it's clear that many of us feel uncomfortable when sex and spirit are mentioned in the same breath. Blame it on the body-negative values of our Judeo-Christian heritage or the ambivalent, do-as-I-say, not-as-I-do attitudes of certain Eastern gurus, but few of us have managed to forge a secure and fulfilling link between our sexuality and our spirituality. Although all of us have genitals and most of us presumably use them, we have difficulty communicating openly about our sex lives, even with our closest friends and we may be so confused and conflicted about sex that we seek asylum in spiritual teachings that counsel us to avoid it entirely.

In the culture at large, of course, the split runs even deeper. Despite the sexual revolution, the women's movement, Masters and Johnson and the Hite report, sex for many remains a brief and loveless encounter fueled by loneliness and lust but largely devoid of true passion, intimacy or heart. Beneath our sexual impulse as a species lies a desire to penetrate the veil that separates us from one another. But rather than risk exposing our vulnerability, we hurry about in search of the right partner, or the right position, or a better vibrator or a more titillating obsession.

If we choose to remain monogamous, we may simply fail to show up for sex, either emotionally or spiritually. (How often have you caught yourself planning your schedule or fantasizing about your favorite movie star in the midst of an ostensibly sensitive moment?) Or we may respond to our sexual shame and confusion by shutting down and withdrawing from relationships entirely.

In Tantra, sexual union is seen as a sacred activity whose ultimate goal is self-actualization.

Those of us who are spiritually inclined are even more acutely aware of how difficult it is to bring our spiritual values, our hearts, and our genitals into harmony. "I'd meditated and practiced yoga for nearly a dozen years," reports one woman, "but somehow I couldn't bring the same depth and presence to my lovemaking. It is so hard to open up and let go." Or, as one man puts it, "No matter how much meditation I was doing, as soon as I'd become sexual, I'd become a different person. All the old conditioning and anxiety would come back about how a man is supposed to behave."

Ironically, many of us have glimpsed the possibility that lovemaking can be a gateway to a higher state of consciousness. We may have had peak moments in sex when all sense of separation fell away. Or we may simply have the intuition that our sexual longings have a higher purpose. As a Georg Feuerstein points out in his book, Sacred Sexuality, "Sexual love is the most intense and tangible way that ordinary men and women strive for a union that transcends the boundaries of our everyday experience." For some people, notes Feuerstein, "sex –or to be more precise sexual love –can be a hidden window onto the spiritual reality." For the rest of us, without guideposts or role models, sacred sex remains little more than an empty oxymoron.

Of course not everyone experiences such sexual frustration and sexual angst. Some of us have warm, supportive, reasonably fulfilling relationships in which we give and receive love freely. Or do we? "It's not that my husband and I don't love one another," explains one woman in her mid-40's. "We do. We still make love every week, and even meditate together daily. But when he has an orgasm, which is generally within a few minutes, he abandons me emotionally. I lose him for several days. Of course he makes sure I have an orgasm too –but it's not the same. I keep thinking there must be more to lovemaking than this."

The Art of Conscious Loving

If popular authors and workshop leaders Charles and Caroline Muir are to be believed, there can be more to lovemaking than this. The Muirs teach an approach to sacred sexuality they call "The Art of Conscious Loving," a contemporary western adaptation of the ancient spiritual teachings called Tantra. With other well-known Tantra teachers like Margo Anand and David and Ellen Ramsdale, they are at the forefront of a movement that invites it's followers to approach sex as a sacrament, and sexual union as a sacred activity whose ultimate goal is self-actualization.

"The essence of Tantra," the Muirs teach, "is to bring all of your consciousness and all of your love to the bedroom and to transform your lovemaking" from a brief and entirely genital encounter into an "extended meditation that affects you on every level of your being: physical, emotional, mental, energetic and spiritual."

The reason for our confusion about sex, say the Muirs, is that we were never initiated into the mysteries of lovemaking by knowledgeable elders, but instead gleaned what little we know from sex manuals, women's magazines, locker room banter and limited personal experience. "The combination of our early conditioning and lack of formal education in this area leaves most people in an interesting predicament: We don't know how to feel of give love sexually or how to mix passion and intimacy in the beautiful blend that sexual loving can be."

Indeed, many of us, the Muirs note, are more than simply uneducated –we have been deeply wounded or even abused in our early sexual encounters and bring a history of pain into the bedroom with us. As a result, we've learned to split our hearts and our genitals, "having sex" without really "making love." Before we can become fully empowered sexual beings, they claim, we must heal this split through the practices that Tantra provides.

"Tantra teaches important tools for today's couples who are searching for a significantly different way of relating to each other and, as a by-product, healing the wounds of their past sexual traumas," Charles Muir explains. "Tantra asserts that negative imprints from sexual preconceptions and past experiences make their home in the second chakra, the sexual center. The first step toward healing our sexual scars is to shine the light of our consciousness into our second chakras so we can see what is creating the short circuit.

"Imagine the second chakra as a doorway into a room filled with your personal sexual belongings. You must enter this room with a lantern held high against the darkness. You must walk through the room, past everything in it, in order to overcome your personal obstacles. Each time you enter with the light, you will eradicate a little bit of the darkness."

This split between the light of consciousness and the darkness of the lower chakras is often most pronounced, the Muirs have noticed, in practitioners of Eastern spiritual disciplines. Their own spiritual journey is a case in point.

Before he became a teacher of tantra, Charles, 47, was for many years a successful and widely respected Hatha Yoga teacher who felt confident of his spiritual accomplishments. Then, in 1980, the breakup of his first marriage and his precipitous return to the single life threw him into an emotional turmoil and forced him to face his sexual duplicity. "In professional life I was the model yogi, but in my sexual life I was just acting out old scripts. I decided to figure out how to bring the yogi into the bedroom with me. There weren't a lot of role models. It was devastating to discover that many of the swamis I loved and honored were sleeping with their disciples. I'd already cleared my mind and my heart, and I'd developed an understanding of breath, energy, and concentration from my yoga practice. Now I needed to work on my lower chakras."

As fate would have it, a series of "women of great power" appeared in Charles life who, as he puts it, "insisted on healing me," initiating him into the arts of sexual tantra. In addition, he read as much as he could in the tantric texts then available in English and put what he read into practice. As he became increasingly successful in the integration of his upper and lower chakras, he began to share what he was learning with his students. However, he never lost his dedication to hatha yoga, which he continues to teach in his workshops on Tantra.

Like Charles, Caroline Muir, 51, began practicing hatha yoga in the late 60's when she was a "frazzled, cigarette-smoking housewife and mother," who had relocated to New York from the Midwest. When she and her family moved again, to California six years later, she happened upon a class being taught by Charles and enjoyed it so much that he became her "yoga teacher of choice." For many years she attended the weeklong workshops Charles led each year in Rio Caliente, Mexico. "Those retreats opened my chakras and transformed my life," Caroline recalls.

When Charles started adding Tantra yoga to the curriculum, Caroline was fascinated. "I'd always been a very sexual person and a very spiritual person, but never the twain did meet. As soon as I'd get to the bedroom, I'd go into overdrive and become goal oriented. I lost my sense of connection with myself and my husband, and that made me very sad."

Although her husband reluctantly agreed to study Tantra with her, he eventually lost interest and the marriage ended. As Caroline felt called to follow the path of Tantra, she increasingly sought out Charles for instruction, and eventually the two became lovers and finally, eight years ago, husband and wife and co-teachers of Tantra.

Sexual Healing

At the core of the Muirs work is the experience and cultivation of energy, which they teach –in a safe, supportive workshop setting involving no classroom nudity or other possibly intimidating sexual behaviors – through a series of exercises incorporating asanas and breathing techniques derived from hatha yoga. Sex is not seen as merely the rubbing of two bodies together, but as an energetic exchange in which two people nurture and empower one another.

In the traditional Tantric view, the universe is the play of two polar energies (the masculine Shiva, pure consciousness, and the feminine Shakti, pure energy), and sexual intercourse is used to rouse the shakti, or Kundalini (believed to lie coiled at the base of the spine), and thereby fuel the process of spiritual awakening. Adapting this view to more interpersonal ends, the Muirs teach that energy generated by the polarity between the sexes – which often gives rise to misunderstanding and conflict can be used to inspire, deepen and sustain an intimate relationship. "The differences between men and women can be used as a positive force in a partnership," they write, "and the proper combination of these differences can produce a near-alchemical reaction, an ether in which everything flourishes, in which the garden of our relationship bursts with color and new life and growth and you and your beloved thrive."

Passion is a crucial component in an enduring relationship, the Muirs believe, and must be cultivated if the relationship is to survive. When a couple lessens their lovemaking, they begin the not-so-slow process of starving their love. Love is nourished by the sexual energy the couple generates. Yet the generation of sexual energy need not involve intercourse, or even foreplay in the usual sense. For example, busy couples are counseled to spend at least 10 minutes a day practicing one of several exercises for sharing and harmonizing their energy.

Among the most powerful techniques the Muirs teach are those that enable a man to make love indefinitely by withholding his ejaculation and retaining and recirculating his sexual energy. Men who have mastered this process often report that their passion continues to build from one lovemaking session to the next; fueling the love they feel for their beloved. Before I learned this technique, one man relates, I found myself feeling a certain aversion towards sex, especially when I got older, because I knew it would take me several days to recover my energy. Now I feel endlessly attracted to my sweetheart and perpetually in love.

When a woman realizes that her lover won't abandon her, she can relax and open to receive his love, opening more fully to her own deep sexual feelings as well. "When my partner contains the energy of ejaculation, his presence with me brings through the quality of maleness that supports me in experiencing the power of my deep feminine," reports one woman, a veteran of many workshops with the Muirs, "I often feel a primal sense of masculine and feminine coming together that makes me hopeful about the healing of gender conflict in our culture."

When couples come to realize that lovemaking can enhance their vitality and empower them in the rest of their lives, sex becomes much more attractive and their sexual connection is renewed. "Right now we only have one avenue for this creative sexual energy," says Charles Muir, "It moves downward and outward to create a baby. Tantra teaches us to move the same energy inward and upward to regenerate and recreate ourselves. When people at our workshops unblock the conduits that carry this energy throughout the energetic and physical organism, they're surprised by its power, and they realize it has all kinds of creative uses that aren't sexual at all.

Early in their workshops, the Muirs focus on attempting to reclaim sex from the mire of shame, fear and obsession into which our culture has cast it. On the first evening, for example, they talk about how the names we use to refer to our genitals not only reflect our negative attitudes toward sex, but continue to perpetuate them. Amid much laughter, Charles rattles off a long list of slang terms for the penis, many of which are derogatory: prick, dick, stick, schmuck, weeniad infinitum. Brandishing a similar list for the vagina, Caroline declines to read it, stating gravely, "they're just not funny."

Instead, the Muirs suggest that women replace their accustomed term for vagina with the Indian yoni, meaning sacred space, and that they learn to treat it accordingly. "Isn't it wonderful to know that we have a sacred space down there," Caroline tells the women, not a cunt or a pussy. Men are likewise encouraged to replace their customary names for penis with lingam, meaning wand of light. Later in the workshop the Muirs offer exercises in which men and women learn to transmit love and respect to one another's sacred space or wand of light, healing some of the shame and pain that has accumulated in these venerable organs as a result of negative sexual conditioning and abusive sexual encounters.

Couples are counseled to revere one another in their lovemaking as god and goddess, embodiments of the divine masculine and feminine. At one key moment in the workshop, the Muirs divide the men and women into separate groups and instruct them in the art of being fully present and attentive to their beloved as a sacred sexual being. In the event that culminates the workshop, called a Puja, couples dress in their finest clothes and form two circles, the men on the outside and the women on the inside. As they slowly circle around, changing partners in a kind a tantric musical chairs, they draw on deep inner wellsprings of love and nurturing to offer balm for the wounds of their brothers and sisters.

In one exercise, for example, the man assumes the guise of benevolent father and sends healing to the woman's vulnerable, wounded little girl. (In the next station of the Puja the man and woman trade places.) In another of these exercises, the man and woman sit in the yabyum position (the woman sitting astride the man) and give and receive loving energy in a kind of loop of awareness: She sends it through her heart to his on out-breath, while he receives the on the in-breath; he sends it to her through his second chakra on the out-breath while she receives it on the in-breath.

As the Puja progresses, a famed new age vocalist named Sophia wanders through the group like a minstrel, strumming a guitar and softly singing. Whispering voices are punctuated by gentle sobs, and by the time the ritual draws to a close, most of the participants, men and women alike, are teary-eyed and radiant.

Through exercises like the ones used in the Puja, the Muirs give men and women the opportunity to act as sexual healers for one another; no small promise in this age of growing conflict and even violence between the sexes. One of the high points of this healing exchange is the sacred spot massage, which occurs as homework, on an evening halfway through the workshop.

The sacred spot, known as the G-spot in Western sexology, is a little-known and widely misunderstood area of sexual sensitivity located on the front wall of the woman's vagina, just behind the pubic bone. According to the Muirs, this area is frequently the dark closet where a woman stores the shame, fear and pain of past sexual experiences and conditioning. It may be painful to the touch at first and trigger powerful feelings when stimulated. But on the other side of this closet, as in C.S. Lewis's classic tale The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, lies a vast realm filled with secret treasures, powerful vaginal orgasms and the awakening of the goddess Kundalini Shakti. The key to entering this realm and liberating its treasures is the sensitive, skilled touch of a loving partner.

Because this area is excruciatingly sensitive in some women, the sacred spot massage is approached with utmost delicacy and respect. The men are instructed to transform the bedroom into a temple, to consecrate it with flowers and incense and to be saint-like in the attention and presence they bring to their beloved. The women, some of whom have never even heard of their sacred spot before, let alone touch it, are encouraged to allow their lover to touch them more deeply than they've ever been touched before.

"I'd spent years in psychotherapy," reports one woman, "but it wasn't until I received the sacred spot massage from my partner that I finally felt I healed the deep pain I still carried from my earliest sexual experiences." Says another; "I would get to a point in my lovemaking where I'd be afraid to let go into the pleasure. The sacred spot work and the support of the other women, empowered me to have all these incredible feelings. For women like these, the exercise is a transformative experience, in which they release old sexual conditioning and contact deep wellsprings of energy. For others, it's only the beginning of an extended journey of sexual healing. Whatever their initial response, however, couples usually report that regular sacred spot massage gradually releases a new level of orgasmic potential.

Aside from the increase in pleasure this affords, orgasm actually energizes and empowers a woman, claim the Muirs, The shakti of men and women are complimentary energies. While a man is empowered by controlling his sexual energy, a woman's sexual energy is brought to fruition through release. By using the various methods taught in the Muir's workshops, couples can learn to circulate and share this shakti energy, thereby empowering each other.

For men, negative sexual imprints tend to lodge as much in the heart as in the second chakra, the Muirs note, Hence, healing for the man often involves opening to intimacy and learning to give and receive love freely. Men have also been wounded by having their sexuality repeatedly rejected, they add, and a woman can help a man heal his wounds by loving his lingam.

Tantra, or Neotantrism?

The Tantra taught by Charles and Caroline Muir and their colleagues is not without its critics, of course. Popular writes tend to dismiss it (as yoga was once dismissed) as some quirky new age fad, as the following remark by a syndicated columnist makes clear: The new age element has the idea that tantric sex is some ancient secret of the Orient that will give you the ultimate orgasm. But in fact, all it is, is prolonged intercourse without ejaculation. There are many ways to accomplish this, of course. I can do it thinking about the Chicago Cubs.

More telling are the criticisms of yoga scholar Georg Feuerstein. Feuerstein debunks what he calls neotantrism, regarding it as a bastardized version of the traditional Tantrism taught in India and Tibet, which is generally kept secret and reserved for an advanced spiritual elite. In Tantrism, according to Feuerstein, sex is used only in ritual fashion for the purpose of awakening the Kundalini-shakti, transcending the ego and achieving spiritual realization. Practitioners are forbidden from engaging in sex for personal pleasure and must bypass orgasm entirely; indeed, the whole point is to channel the energy ordinarily expended in sexual release. The mind must remain one-pointed, says Feuerstein, and unification happens not at a personal level, but at the level of consciousness only.

By contrast, neotantrism in Feuerstein's view is just an elaborate strategy for ego fulfillment, rather than ego transcendence; the best it can offer is not true bliss, but merely oceanic sex, a pleasurable sense of fusion and melting with the partner into a state of blissful unity. In neotantric circles, argues Feuerstein, the bliss of being is all too often confused with a heightened state of sensory pleasure… (but) pleasure, like pain, pertains to the nervous system, (while) bliss belongs to an entirely different order of existence. It is not a feeling or sensation but rather that condition that prevails when all feelings and sensations as well as all thoughts have been eclipsed by the realization of sheer being.

Feuerstein does acknowledge that neotantrism may have a certain limited value for spiritual seekers. It has undeniably become an important factor in the emergent body-positive spirituality, write Feuerstein, providing meaning and hope for some of those who have outgrown guilt-ridden Puritanism and conventional sexuality… The ultimate usefulness of neotantrism in the present-day process of reappraising our ensexed human body as the basis of spiritual life will depend on two factors; first, whether its adherents can overcome their Western consumerist mentality with its penchant for instant gratification; and second, whether they can truly recover… a deep-felt sense of the sacred, of the awesome mastery that will not be compressed into convenient formulas, ready-made belief systems, or elegant rituals.

Feuerstein's point is well taken. As with hatha yoga, the quality of our practice of Tantra can be used to enhance our personal pleasure, heal our sexual wounds, strengthen our connection with our beloved, or fuel our spiritual awakening. In fact, these may not be mutually exclusive.

"We're at the beginning of our own journey as a culture into the unknown territory of sacred sexuality and I think we need to honor our experimentation," offers a student of Tantra, a woman in her mid 30's. "As a therapist, I know that our pathology is often our path, and the deepest wound is often the gateway to the highest awakening. In this country, our deepest wound is our sexuality.