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Diana:
Last month I joined my sweetie upon a nest of pillows and blankets and we spent
the day kissing. This wouldn't be so unusual, except that, as if in a strange
dream, we were in a schoolroom with several other couples doing the same thing
while learning tantric embodiment practices: breathing exercises, energy
meditations, sensual heightening, and touch training.
I later met with the instructor, a wild woman named Cherie Byrd, to learn more.
I began by telling her that I'd felt slightly wicked even considering coming to
the class, but that the idea of being in school learning how to stay in my body
while sucking face was just too deliciously weird to pass up.
Cherie: That's right, the whole idea of going to school to learn the arts of
loving is pretty radical in this puritanically engendered day and age! It's not
unheard of in other cultures, however, particularly in the past. I find that the
process of being taught to love while engaging the energy of Spirit often rings
a bell in our soul memories, echoes from past lives; there's the tug of
something familiar.
I'd bet that a large piece of your "slightly wicked" curiosity comes from your
teenaged subpersonalities. Remember that our teenage days were most likely thick
with hungry desires that were not only unschooled, but were ultimately
dangerous. You could be suspended for kissing in class. Sex? You could get
pregnant, diseases even. Do you think your whole self would want to be present
for that possibility? Not likely, so we contorted our full-bodied bodaciousness
into what we felt kept us safe. Furtive loving was the rule; peer training
consisted of, "Be quick, be quiet and be cool." Much of this early training
stuck; consider for a moment the bound-up sexual and creative energy this
non--education has generated over your lifetime.
Diana: Are you saying that these past experiences continue to block our energy?
Cherie: All our past models of experience that are too small for how we desire
to be "here and now" block our present experience. We create energy habits based
on those experiences and project these into our future, which we then
unconsciously live out. They become our underlying definition of what's
possible.
When we're young and beginning to explore the paths of romantic love and
sexuality, we have experiences, and from these we make decisions about how we
are going to function. We make choices, not necessarily consciously, about how
open, how experimental, how free we'll be with our sexual energy. We decide
whether we like it or not, that it should be done in just this way, and if it
should it be meaningful. We sculpt our thereafters based on very little real
education.
We certainly didn't go to class to learn to be powerful and trusting and loving
with our sexual energy. We probably never even heard that it was possible to
integrate our spiritual self into our sexual energy! I think one of the things
we figure out pretty quickly as teenagers is that sexual energy is hard to
control. In an interesting way, it's not meant to be controlled, which is a very
scary thought at first glance.
The energies of both sex and creativity are the focus of second-chakra energy,
and this is the chakra in charge of "flow." It stimulates flows within our whole
psychophysical energy system: not only the flow of the bioenergy, but also our
mental, emotional, psychic, and spiritual energy. The flow of our
manifestations, or what we create, is inherently tied to this regeneration
chakra. Both sexual energy and creativity are meant to take us into the unknown.
For a sexually unschooled teenager, this is troublesome, so we make
second-chakra decisions about safety and power, and judgments about sexual
goodness and badness, and arrange our subtle energy bodies to hold these, to
block the flow as directed. These energy distortions, this holding, becomes our
norm until the pattern becomes too small; then it becomes our suffering.
Consciously changing these energy habits opens us to the possibility of choosing
again. Working intentionally with your energetic process while cultivating the
art of kissing expands your relationship with your inner lovers, realigning that
second chakra in relation to your whole presence. You begin to move into a more
richly embodied, trusting, and powerful relationship with yourself, which frees
your ability to access your loving nature and your deeper self.
You've probably noticed that most sexual stimulation in this culture tends to
come from outside of ourselves; the other person turns us on, or the picture or
video does it to us. Tantra is a practice that offers us internal access to our
energy, sexual or otherwise, which brings our power and choice back to our self.
Diana: Let's talk about the idea of embodiment. I've heard about people walking
around not being in their bodies, but I can't figure out if I'm in mine or not.
Cherie: Not knowing whether or not you're in your body usually is a sign that
you're not there! It's often easier to see this in someone else. Have you ever
kissed someone and wondered if there was actually "anyone home?" What are you
noticing? Maybe a lack of presence, a kind of robotic or automatic response? No
electricity, no juice, no chemistry.
The odds are good that the person is energetically disconnected from his or her
subtle energy bodies, and from the here and now. We have to be in the here and
now to be in our body, or else we're in the "there and then." Have you ever
caught yourself driving down the freeway and all of a sudden "coming back" from
being spaced out and wondering just where you are and whether you passed your
exit? We often drive on "automatic pilot." When we learn to do something well,
we frequently decide not to be there for the execution of it, and we miss it.
We're not home in the body, which is meant to be the amplifier of the qualities
of our experience. Ideally, all of our subtle energy bodies vibrate, fully
expanded, in our whole body. If not, we're disconnecting and limiting our
experience of our life.
Diana: So what happens with our subtle energy bodies when we're out; what does
that look like?
Cherie: Typically, when we're out of the body, the mental body is pulled out of
the torso and connected to the two upper chakras ‹ a favorite energy habit for
those who love to be in their heads ‹ or even further away. The emotional body
won't stick around if the mental body isn't in the torso to keep us safe while
we feel what is there, so it's as far away as possible to keep it from
vibrating. The psychic and spiritual bodies are usually contracted to their
smallest possible state, and the whole system is most likely ungrounded, which
short-circuits the whole mess.
All this distortion translates into the physical body through a chakra and
meridian system that responds by running on the energy of the past until we've
drained our reserves. The majority of us walk around in this state, or some
variation of it, much of the time. We're carrying our energy in response to very
old ideas about how to be safe, and in our maturity, this can be very limiting,
keeping us disconnected from the direct experience of who we really are, as well
as eventually making us ill.
It's easy to see that making love or being creative from this energetically
frayed and depleted state leaves something, or someone, to be desired. Beyond
the second chakra, if one is working on developing spiritual energy, power, or
access to one's inner selves, it's really crucial to have tools for integrating
and running his or her energy. All these states of vibrant consciousness need
the body to be an integrated and resonant container; otherwise, we get into even
more amplified states of our dissonance, which is usually not pretty. We really
have to "get here" before we can "go there" into higher states of consciousness.
Diana: Is tantra a system for learning embodiment?
Cherie: It can be. Tantra, in its widest sense, is usually considered "energy
weaving" or energy mastery. It's a set of beliefs and tools, beyond the domain
of religion really, that generates a type of mystical communion through the
energy of one's being: communion with one's own subtle energy bodies first,
which generates that resonant container for communion with the energy of All
That Is.
In the West, tantric teachings are frequently just focused on sexual energy, or
perhaps a mix of the sexual and spiritual, instead of the whole energetic
system. I see sex as a really fun place to practice embodied energy mastery and
the arts of communion. One of my favorite mystic poets, Rumi, comments, "There
is some kiss we want with our whole life, the touch of spirit on the body." This
can be interpreted many ways, but what I've found is that simply cultivating a
kiss that carries the energy of one's wholeness can be a daily practice that
brings us sweetly into an experiential attunement with our deeper self. Sharing
this presence with another is a very deep blessing.
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