The Tantric Path to Awakening

July 11, 2023
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How we found true love and unity in our long-term monogamous relationship

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Image by Anne-marie Ridderhof from Pixabay

I’ve been saying to my beloved recently: “We got there, we made it. We have what everybody wants.” She looks at me and nods. I know what I mean and my beloved knows what I mean. What do we mean?

We met at 47 and we’ve been together for 10 years. What we mean is that through 10 years of monogamous Tantric practice, we have come to know unity between man and woman. Some might call it true love. We have openness, trust, honesty, deep connection, emotional fluidity, freedom, and harmony. The passion remains. And we are happy.

Recently, we had a private meeting with our favourite Tantra teacher, Ma Ananda Sarita. I described to her an experience that we have quite frequently. It goes something like this: After an extended period of love making, we arrive in a place where physical sex transcends into energetic connection, male-body and female-body dissolve, every moment from the moment we met shows up in the present, and every time we have made love appears in the now. Both of us dissolve and all that remains is oneness, unity, love. Some would say God.

Sarita listened and said calmly and simply: That is Tantra. I admit, I was delighted for the confirmation. We got there.

Sarita says that Tantra is the hardest path to awakening — but also the fastest. We are on this path — waking up as individuals, but together. What could be more fun?

With this story, I want to share what we do, how we live, the disciplines we practice that have got us to where we are. My aim in writing this is to help you the reader be happy and deeply connected over the course of a long-term relationship.

Just for clarity and context. I am a cis man. My beloved is a cis woman. We have a monogamous relationship. And within that, we are both to a certain degree gender fluid. We have hugely compatible chemistry. And we consider ourselves twin souls (see the linked story below for more info on that).

So, here’s how we live and what we do…

We don’t have ‘normal’ sex

I guess the first thing to say is that we don’t have ‘normal’ sex. I mean it starts off as sex. But the focus is always more on making love. Other names for it would be Conscious Lovemaking, Divine Lovemaking, Tantric Sex, or Sacred Sex. Whatever we do, we are doing it from a place of love, connection, and togetherness. There is no goal to reach. No climax or orgasm to reach. We give ourselves to the present moment.

When we stop, we stop. And then start up again another time, another day.

In between we might have an ecstatic dance session (can recommend Gabrielle Roth’s 5Rhythms and Modestas Stonkus playlists), give each other Tantric massage, have a heavy smooch on the sofa, lay together resting and connecting deeply, or simply have a meeting of minds.

We strive to meet in the deepest place

So yes we try not to have a goal, but if there is one it is to meet in the deepest place. For both of us, that’s the best thing we know. And we get there through love making. Typically, 40 minutes will get us there. But sometimes sooner. Sometimes instantaneously. It depends.

This from Persian mystic and poet Rumi says it all really.

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase ‘each other’
doesn’t make any sense.

When we meet in the deepest place, we are brought into the present moment and — as I sometimes say — Spirit enters the room. There are three of us: He, Her, and Spirit. When we meet in the deepest place, we connect with the energy of how we met and how we fell in love. It is like we rediscover the original falling in love and it is brought into the here/now and merged with every other moment since. With this, we fall in love — like the first time — over and over.

When this happens, I jokingly say: Now we start another six month honeymoon period. Fantastic.

We don’t invest in ego

We met quite late in life and we had both been through our own journeys. We had both suffered in our own way and both discovered tools to help us alleviate this suffering. By the time we met, we both understood very well not to trust the various machinations of the ego — especially in relationships.

For both of us, our favoured tool to move out of the fear-based ego and into the open heart was and still is Byron Katie’s self-enquiry tool, The Work. I have written about this tool a lot — in particular in the story linked below.

As my beloved said to me very early on in our relationship: And if we get into problems, we always have The Work.

We use The Work whenever our ego is screaming out for attention. The central question of The Work “Is that true?” lives inside us and helps to neutralise the ego’s tantrums.

In short, we do everything we can to keep our individual ego out of our relationship. We prioritise love, harmony, and togetherness.

And if we do get into problems, we sit down, connect, and use The Work.

We keep the love alive

Similar to the above, but worth a separate heading. We keep the love alive.

Both of us feel it, if the love connection between us is missing. When one of us feels this, we immediately move to discover why and reconnect. In other words, we don’t let any resentment or anger or disagreement or misunderstanding build up. We catch these things when they are small.

In order to do this, we communicate a lot. We have learnt to express ourselves and, more importantly, we have learnt how to listen.

Staying in harmony, staying in love is the most important thing for us. We prioritise keeping love alive.

We go all in

Two strong, healthy trees side-by-side. The two trunks upright, firmly rooted in the ground. Separate. The branches of the trees intermingling. You’ve heard this definition of a healthy relationship, right? Well, we don’t follow that and we never have. We break all the psychological rules about boundaries. We go for total merging. Total openness. Total honesty. Total intimacy. We go all in. Within this context, we can have total trust.

It is this level of trust that opens the door to the deepest place.

We both have our own meditation practice

You might think that having no boundaries means that we are unable to do anything separately. But that’s not how it works out. After a time of total merging — during love making for example, there is a natural movement apart. This enables us to engage in our day jobs, embark on creative projects, or work in our beautiful garden.

As separate beings, we have our own meditation practice and we have both gone deep — either on retreat or in the day-to-day. We sometimes meditate together and sometimes separately. But having our own meditation practice adds fuel for our togetherness.

We cultivate and circulate the sexual energy

Okay time to mention this one. We — and in particular I (the male) — have another practice, which is to cultivate and circulate the sexual energy. I draw up the sexual energy and circulate it in the body instead of releasing it. Together, we use our breathing to circulate and distribute the sexual energy. You’ll find all you need to know about this one in Mantak Chia’s The Multi-Orgasmic Man: Sexual Secrets Every Man Should Know and The Multi-Orgasmic Woman: Sexual Secrets Every Woman Should Know.

We embrace the masculine and feminine

I, the male bodied one, can embrace the feminine but my sexual essence is masculine. My beloved is female bodied and she can embrace the masculine but her sexual essence is feminine.

When I am in the masculine — my job is to love the feminine in my beloved. And this is in line with my deepest desire. To love woman. What I sometimes say is that what my total being wants is to: Find God with and through woman.

When I am in this mode and we are lovemaking, this is how it goes: I love my beloved until she opens fully. I love her to God as David Deida expresses it in The Way of the Superior Man. At some point, the Shakti energy is released in her. When this happens within her, it also flows within me. The feeling for me is ecstatic. It is more ecstatic than my own orgasm. It is nothing I can achieve on my own. Together we bathe in the Shakti energy.

I have the key to the door. But it is she who allows the door to open. And then together we can enter the garden. The deepest place.

We have full and engaging lives

All this multi-orgasmic, non-climaxing, Shakti-sharing meeting in the deepest place leaves us with a lot of energy, positivity, and creativity. It also opens the door for us to do sex magic, which is kind of law of attraction on steroids.

So it is important that we have a life to pour all this into. I often say to my beloved that the beautiful life that we have created for ourselves springs out from our love and togetherness.

We make space for lovemaking in our life

It almost goes without saying, but we make space for lovemaking in our day-to-day life. As one of our first Tantra teachers Charles Muir said: Don’t leave the best to last. In other words, why leave lovemaking to last thing at night when you are both tired.

What this one comes down to is that we want to make lovemaking a part of our life and, therefore, we set up our life so that there is space for it to happen.

Just want to say at this point that we don’t have kids living at home. We have four between us, but they are grown up and live elsewhere. I think this is a factor in us being able to live the life we do. It would be unfair on all those with kids at home to leave this one out. As my brother used to half-jokingly say: “Kids ruin lives”.

We strive for Oneness

If you’ve got this far, well done to you. This is where I think we get to the real key, the real secret. I think what it all comes down to is that both of us recognise that life — everything we perceive and know — is in its essence non-dual. Not two. One. Including us. Everything is when it comes down to it, One. And both of us can feel the longing for Oneness with All There Is. And the pain of separation from All There Is. And it is this longing and pain that lies at the root of us using our relationship, our love, our attraction, lovemaking — to return home. To return home to unity.

My beloved just read this and asks: Is all this true? Yes I say. She gives a nod of approval.