Tantric Kriya: Awareness With Anapanasati

We start with the kriya that will help you take the first step towards our sadhana of Tantric Awareness. Lie flat on your back with the arms beside and in-line with your body and palms facing upwards.

Move your feet slightly apart to a comfortable position. Close your eyes and breathe deeply and just experience the breath coming in.

When the passage of breath touches your nostrils, let the breath move in slowly within you. During this time, you are not supposed to move any part of your body even if discomfort occurs. If you feel uncomfortable, you must not proceed further.

Now continuing this kriya, as you breathe deeply… try to go within in terms of awareness with your breathing-in and move with the breath fully conscious of its passage.

When you are going with the breath, do not miss the breath. Do not go ahead and do not follow behind, just go with it. Breath and consciousness should become one.

The breath going in with you simultaneously is very important. Only then will it be possible for you to get the point between two breaths. So move in slowly with your breath, then move out with the breath slowly doing in-out, in-out. In Tantra kriyas, this is the first step and it is also known as Anapanasati.

The whole purpose of this first kriya is to make you aware of the brief silence between the two breaths. When you are able to experience that briefness within, you have come a little closer to the higher Tantric awareness that awaits you.

Tantra Shuns Nothing, Judges Nothing

Just as one needs to be positive and have a good feeling about connecting deeply with a person before he or she actually gets to that point, one needs to be happy about any work one takes on before that work can lead to any degree of satisfaction. Your life depends on you being happy.

Are you happy? Have you ever perceived moments of divine harmony in your life? The peak moment of sexual ecstasy is only the first step towards this harmony. Can you even begin to imagine how pleasurable this process is? This pertains less to the act of making love and more to the peak moment of ecstasy it leads to – and one can achieve that peak even without the sexual act.

Imagine yourself in a place of complete and utter beauty… a place that is not just visually pleasing but effulgent in its effect. A place where you are completely satisfied without even trying to be, where you attain a sense of completeness without even asking – both in the sexual and non-sexual sense. If you can imagine or conceive this, then you glimpse a miniscule fraction of what Tantra can give you.

When two people engage in any intimate activity together, be it making love or cooking, two essences mingle to make that activity special. The brush of a hand reaching for a bowl, the conjoined love that seeps into a dish, the inhaling of aromas … all add up an experience that transcends the mere mechanics of cooking.

A dish tastes that much better when it is made by two people whose souls are open to each other, and whose essences mingle to infuse the food being cooked. It raises the act of preparing a meal to an art – to contentment, to happiness.

This feeling is what every human soul yearns for, and this is what Tantra offers. It encompasses every sphere of life, transforming every ordinary activity into an act of pleasure. This, in fact, is the goal of every religion in the world.

If a person is not happy, something has gone wrong somewhere. A person may not be inclined to follow the path laid down by a religion or philosophy properly, or may not have understood the path sufficiently… the problem could lie anywhere.

Though an integral part of the Vedic scriptures, Tantra is not a religion precisely because Tantra asks us to dive consciously and unreservedly into the very temptations that religions ask us to shun.

Tantra says that we should not shun anything the heart wants, but rather that temptations should leave us over time. This happens once we realise that they have no greater use than momentary satiation. Once the body, the mind and the heart have had enough, they will stop responding to temptation.

What Tantra does require is a state of happiness – a state we achieve by overcoming the restrictions we have imposed on ourselves by accepting them in our lives, and by walking down those very paths to overthrow them. Tantra picks you up like a baby and makes a man or a woman out of you.

This may bring up a natural question – why would you want your desires to leave you? Because they are of no real value in your life, and hinder your progress to higher levels of consciousness.

Tantra shuns and judges nothing, and nothing is taboo or black or white. There is only good, and more good. Some things have greater goodness than others, but there is nothing that Tantra considers bad. It asks of nothing from its followers except that they desire true happiness and accept and receive its precepts without pre-conceived notions.

The true follower of Tantra is like a new-born who opens his eyes for the first time and takes in all the shapes, colours and objects around him. He does not judge; he merely observes, and is happy and excited by it all.

This is why many children have spontaneous spiritual experiences, which gradually lessen in frequency and intensity as they grow older and conform to the mechanics of contemporary society. There is no conflict between the conscious and the subconscious in a child’s mind. He does what he wants to and does it with a supreme lack of guilt, inhibition or hesitation.

Look into the eyes of a child … witness the innocence, the wonder and the happiness in them. He is happy in every moment. His mind and being are ensconced within that moment itself. His soul does not judge, just accepts. He does not believe in bartering like adults do most of the times – rather, he gives and receives just for the pleasure of giving and receiving. He gives when he wants to and he is equally happy to receive.

This kind of free happiness, when experienced in the act of making love, is called Tantric Sex. Most of us go through the motions of life without actually living it, much as we scratch a boil simply because it is itching.

Tantra, however, wants everybody to live life to the hilt, immersed in its moments, whether good or not-so-good, loving everything and everybody around them and judging nothing. Tantra states that it is only when we do not project any negativity that negativity leaves us.

Follow its methods, and Tantra will teach you to be the master of your life… to shape it into what you want it to be and what it ideally should be. We have forgotten the child within us and become a part of a knee-jerk society. We filter out things that we perceive as irrelevant to our scheme of things, thereby ignoring the bigger picture.

But true followers of Tantra see everything with the boundless pleasure of a new-born baby … we are forever in that moment of pleasure. Tantra believes that the core energy that rules the world – the source of every creation – is feminine energy. We can harness that energy and use it to make vast changes in our own as well as others’ lives.

Have you achieved even a small glimpse of the world that Tantra offers you? Then, perhaps, you are ready for more. Tantra is not a quick-fix solution for nirvana – you need to prepare for a journey that will last your entire lifetime.

Recognise the opportunities before you. The benefits of this journey will last you not just this life, but several more to come, whether you believe in reincarnation or not. There is more to come, much more… and it is heading your way…