Tantra is not a technique: it is a way of being by which life is lived from a deep trust. Madhyamikatantra does not require or involve technique. You could say that it must be learned, but it cannot be taught: it needs only to be remembered, regained. Its essence is a willingness to feel. This willingness is obstructed by any intention to achieve or accomplish and no skills are required. While sexual energy is the medium of tantric practice, its purpose is to allow us to relate freely and fully to any intense energy that we will experience: including grief, anger, jealousy etc. We learn to become truly comfortable with the full spectrum of human emotion by becoming comfortable with the most potent energy of all: sexual energy. This not only allows us to accept ourselves, but also to enter into genuine and fulfilling relationship with others.

Intimacy is the essence of relationship. Within a coventional relationship this intimacy is totally personal. It involves exposure and exchange of personal detail, personal secrets, personal fears and hopes. In tantra intimacy is impersonal, and is based on the simple polarity of sexual energy into male and female. It involves an exposure and exchange much deeper than that of the personal. To access this depth all personal impulses must be relinquished. This relinquishment takes place on the basis of openness and acceptance, rather than resistance and control. Feelings pleasant and unpleasant are invited to flow freely and to be tasted deeply. If the tasting is deep enough their impersonal essence, the love, peace and delight that we most deeply are, will be savoured, and the personal will dissolve into insignificance.

In both romantic and tantric relationship the deepest, most intimate  expression is sex. In both cases the pleasure of sex deepens the nature of the relationship. In romance it deepens attachment, need, anxiety and manipulation. In tantra it deepens acceptance, generosity, awakening and freedom. Of course, this does not mean that couples cannot explore and benefit from tantric sexual practices. Nor does it mean that tantra and romance are incompatible. It just means that the inherent problems of sexual tantra are exaggerated within a romantic relationship, while the inherent nature of romance is a huge obstacle to tantra.

The heart of tantra is the recognition of the impersonal in the personal, the divine in the mundane. This recognition is only genuine when it is based on direct, deep experience. It is not a matter of belief. It is an organic disposition from within which life takes on a different hue. This transformation, this disposition depends upon encountering and recognising that love is not only the fundamental movement of consciousness, but what we most deeply are. This clarification reveals the essentially impersonal nature of all phenomena, and is made by consciously surrendering to the flow of sensation in the body. Within this active revelation the eyes into which one looks are always the eyes of God. The hand that touches one is always the hand of God. The voice that one hears, in ones mind and in ones ears, is always the voice of God. The song that life is singing is always the song of God. The pleasure that is being felt is being given by God.The pleasure that is being felt is being felt by God.

The use of sex for the revelation of the divine is almost unavoidable, but highly problematic. For where sexual pleasure is met with selfclinging it creates deep and destructive interpersonal attachments. Accordingly the sexual practices of tantra must be approached and learned as meditative practices, where feeling is given precedence over action, being passive over being active. The natural energies of mind and body are allowed to awaken a vibrant awareness of the universality of the divine: including love, desire, pleasure, fear, anxiety, loneliness and pain. All these energies are easily awakened by sexual exchange. By allowing them to express themselves internally and to be deeply, fully felt they trasform into the deeply peaceful presence of love. Sex then becomes the ultimate spiritual path. One that can have many avenues of expression. Honest sensitivity to the movement of internal energies reveals the specific unfolding of the path, which is always unique and spontaneous. This can lead to radically different experiences of sex, and totally satisfying expressions of intimacy and love. Within which the habitual grasping and clinging patterns of sexual relationship are absent, and love reveals its impersonal depths, origins and nature.

There are many techniques associated with tantra. Most of them are based on controlling, or resisting, the flow of natural energies: especially the impetus of the male orgasm. These techniques can totally transform the patterns and possibilities of sexual exchange. But they cannot invite deep intimacy. For any attempt to assert control creates a distancing space of isolation and detachment. Nevertheless, some simple techniques can invite deep tantric possibilities. However they all depend upon a willingness to feel, rather than the desire to achieve; a willingness to surrender rather than to control.

Madhyamikatantra is the tantra of genuine surrender. It is based on directly experiencing the true nature of body, mind and spirit, through sensitivity to sensation. The human body is experienced as the temple of the divine. It is not a symbol or a representation but a holographic microcosm of totality. It is neither corrupt nor limited.  Madhyamikatantra is based on a deep intimacy with the body that reveals its fundamental nature as unconditional bliss. Experiencing this aspect of the body brings with it a deep intimacy with mind and spirit. This intimacy arises naturally as a result of intimacy with the body. An intimacy that is not possible so long as any tendency or impulse to control remains active. Madhyamikatantra is an invitation to establish the deepest possible intimacy with life itself. It is an approach to life rather than an esoteric methodology.  It embraces each aspect of our psychology and uses the energy of desire to deepen our experience of being alive.  As survival is the most fundamental human desire, breathing which ensures the survival of the individual moment to moment, and sexual intercourse, which ensures the survival of the species generation to generation, are at the heart of tantric methodology.

Sexual desire is en energy of overwhelming force.  In order to experience it, and its possibilities,  fully and consciously, requires deep training.  Becoming free from the deeply destructive effects of our sexual conditioning is not easy. In Tantric Sex the emphasis is on intimate, open sexual activity, that uses conscious cultivation of desire to awaken deep sensitivity and openness. Embracing and harnessing desire and pleasure allows sexual energy to deepen, broaden and build. As it rises it sweeps aside our learned, defensive patterns of inhibition and fear and reveals its inexhaustible source in the love that we most deeply are. Then perhaps we can rediscover the joy and delight that being in a body can provide through sexual intimacy: where intimacy is a sensitive, honest, open, intimate, generous exchange of attention, presence and love.

Sex, neverthless, is perhaps the most problematic of all human activities. Along with eating and breathing it is a natural precultural activity that is deeply embedded in our organic makeup. So deeply is it embedded that it is not easy to recognise and express its natural place in our lives. Especially as, like eating and breathing, it can be and is profoundly effected by cultural experiences. The fact is that we have all been subject to very powerful, and destructive, cultural forces of sexual conditioning. Few us are not suffering the consequences, one way or another.  Becoming free from them requires courage, faith and resolution: but it does not require control.

The power of sexual energy and the binding effect of intense pleasure are too much for many people to bear. They simply fall in to intense attachments and suffering. However tantra is not only sex: its heart is meditation. Where meditation means a willingness to feel. Tantric sex is the ultimate expression of meditation, within which two individuals meet each other in and as the love that they are by way of the pleasure nature of the body.

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