What is Tantric Sex?

When you think about it, what about a sexual encounter turns it from really good to the most extraordinary, epic sex of your life?

Is it the cosmic-level connection with your partner? The feeling that you are whole for the first time? The Earth-shattering orgasm that leaves you speechless and your body shaking? Surrendering so deeply that you forget who you are? If you’ve experienced sex like that, you’ve likely experienced tantric sex.

Defining Tantric Sex

With so much conflicting information on the internet, what exactly is tantric sex? The short definition is this:

Tantric sex is a way of applying Tantric philosophy to your experience of sex and sexuality. It’s about having sex with intention, engaging in certain rituals, and learning certain practices that take ordinary/everyday sexual experiences and turn them into extraordinary experiences. 

Tantric sex can be divided further into classical tantra and neo-tantra. Classical tantra is a body of spiritual practices from many different traditions that existed on the Indian subcontinent from around 500 AD to 1500 AD. Neo-tantra is a set of practices and teachers which came about in or after the 1960s that innovated sexuality practices to truly help liberate and awaken people. Neo-tantric teachers such as Osho took classical Tantric concepts and applied them to sex.

The three classical Tantric philosophies that were applied to sex are as follows:

1. Awakening to the truth of who you are – not as your ego, thoughts, or emotions
2. Liberating yourself from societal conditioning and discovering your truth apart from said conditioning
3. Recognizing that there is consciousness in everything and that everything is one

Solo Tantric Sex

That sounds nice and all, but do you need a partner to have tantric sex? No! The great news is, tantric sex can be a solo or partnered experience.

Getting Started with Solo Tantric Sex

Learning to have tantric sex starts with you. One of the reasons people are interested in learning tantric sex is because they want a deeper, richer, and more spiritual experience of their sexuality.

The best way to learn how to accomplish that is by starting a conscious self-pleasure practice to do the following:

• Activate and awaken your sexual energy
• Learn to consciously move sexual energy through your body
• Replace any guilt, shame, or fear around sexuality with a sense of divine connection and celebration

Start having tantric sex with yourself by incorporating the following in your self-pleasure practice.

Breathwork

Breathwork opens up the unconscious brain. In Tantra, the unconscious brain is a key to spiritual awakening. This means that you’re more likely to have a spiritual experience in sex when your unconscious mind is activated and ‘online.’ When you allow yourself to consciously breathe, it takes you into the unconscious where you’re likely to enter altered states.

A How-To Guide to Breathwork 

Start out your self-pleasure session with deep, long, full breathing into your genitals for about 20 minutes. You can touch and stroke your genitals as you breathe. 

Allow yourself to open, let life move through you as you breathe, feel whatever you’re feeling without judgment, and give yourself permission to cry, scream, or shake as you drop more deeply into your body. This allows whatever is in your unconscious mind that’s not in alignment with the type of sexual experience you desire to come to the surface and move through you. 

Sound

As you self-pleasure, allow yourself to make sound deeply and fully in whatever way feels authentic to you. Many people either repress or fake sounds to make it seem they’re more interested in the encounter than they really are. Practicing opening your voice – letting the sound be wild, free, and authentic – leads to a much richer sexual experience. Are you willing to let yourself sound however your body wants to sound? 

Movement

Do you tense up your body right at the moment of orgasm, or are you fluid, free-flowing, relaxed, and authentic in your movements? 

Some people self-pleasure with so much tension from goal-oriented sex that they miss out on all of the pleasure available to them. When you drop the goal and relax into the experience, pay attention to if your movement is repressed or held back by trauma, contraction, or tension. Focus on slowing down or being completely still if that is authentic to you at the moment. Practice relaxing and surrendering more deeply as you approach orgasm. When you’re about to orgasm, breathe deeply and fully and relax your body. You may find that being still and going slow with your touches and strokes actually brings a more exquisite orgasmic experience.

Partnered Tantric Sex

Once you’ve gotten the hang of intentional breath, sound, and movement, you can begin practicing what you’re learning with a partner to see how your solo practices change your experience of partnered sex.

One of the greatest reasons people seek to learn about tantric sex is because it gives them the tools and practices to transform spirituality from being a solo practice, into a shared experience that offers couples the opportunity to be in profound spiritual states together.

When you apply Tantric philosophy to sexuality with your partner, you begin to become aware of sexual energy – how to activate it, move it through the body, and share it with one another in ways that can lead to full body and energy orgasms.

Tantric sex changes the sexual dynamic from being genitally focused and all about the end goal of orgasm and shifts it into something that takes on a sacred dimension, and that allows you to make love from a place of recognizing a deeper presence inside of your partner.

Many people hunger for having a shared spiritual experience with a partner, and to be at the height of orgasm while looking into each other’s eyes and meeting soul-to-soul with another human being. This can be one of the richest and most meaningful things that someone experiences in a human body. 

Tantric sexuality practices can support you to have spiritual and even healing experiences with your partner. They can also help long-term couples from getting bored with each other or feeling like sex becomes habitual or routine. Practicing Tantric sex with your partner can help to keep the passion and interest alive, and to keep having more to explore and experiment with. 

Tantric Sex and You

Whether you’re practicing solo or with a partner, Tantric sex is about who you are when you show up to make love. Knowing who you are, apart from social conditioning, gives you unprecedented confidence to approach a lover in a more vulnerable and connected way. This can lead to the type of cosmic, soul-connected, prolonged, and heightened orgasmic states that people experience when they have the best sex of their life. Tantric sex gives you the tools and practices to create the experience whenever you want. That’s the magic of Tantric sex!