Tantra Yoga – Benefits and Prerequisites For Practice

Tantra Yoga is a much talked-about term, but what is it and what does it take to practice tantra yoga? Quite simply, it is a set of tantra exercises that harnesses extremely potent power for spiritual regeneration.

Because of this power, it lies at the fundaments of ancient tantra practice.Tantra yoga lays special emphasis on the development of the powers latent in our six chakras, from Muladhara to Ajna. It should be clarified here that tantra yoga is not concerned with sexuality, but with creative force and transmuting the energy of this force into higher channels.

This revered and highly efficacious form of tantra practice involves deep meditation, in which the student of tantra sits calmly and purifies the mind and heart of wayward thoughts and desires.Tantra yoga is a ritual path, and is often grossly misunderstood and wrongly practiced. The fact is that its practitioners must have purity, humility, devotion, courage, dedication to their tantra teacher, a deep understanding of cosmic love, faithfulness, contentment, dispassion, non-covetousness and honesty. This form of yoga is a process that can unfold one’s spiritual nature through the constant worship of the energy within, collectively known as Shakti.

Practiced diligently under the guidance of an accomplished tantra master, it brings about an awakening of the self.Tantra yoga does not limit itself to a particular branch of study – rather, it incorporates in it diverse elements which are linked by a unifying rule of Tantra Dharma. It aims to bring about consciousness in all states of human life – the conscious state, the waking state and the dream state. It is a path and practice that teaches the methods and ways by which we can discard intolerance, ignorance, selfishness and the animal instinct that lives in all of us.Tantra believes teaches us that the primary driving force behind the Universe isnothing but desire, and that desires are very natural for a soul residing in a human body.

Tantra yoga brings physical and mental cleansing through Pranayama (tantra breathing exercises) the visualization of energized energy vortexes (yantra) and deities, the repetition of mantras (energized sounds/words) etc. It is a holistic means of studying of the macrocosm from microcosmic point of view.When a student of tantra practices tantra yoga under a tantra teacher, he or she will soon be able to identify a wide range of factors that impact our thoughts and feelings. Regular practice of this most basic – and yet most powerful – manifestation of ancient tantra inculcates the contentedness, concentration and focus which are needed to release our consciousness from its inherent limitations.

In short – tantra states that desires are natural, and tantra yoga provides practical means and devices to reprogram our minds and desires so that they serve us, rather than the other way round.

Acharya Subhojit Dasgupta is a Tantra Teacher with an in-depth knowledge of traditional Indian sciences and Sanskrit literature. Visit his tantra online guide to read more about Tantra Yoga, learn tantra exercises and tantric techniques from this young Tantra Master.

The Art of Tantra And The Seven Chakras

In the ancient tantric scriptures, the word ‘chakra’ signifies a conscious spinning-energy wheel. A tantra teacher will reveal that there are seven such spinning-energy nerve centers located along the spinal column, and that every chakra corresponds to a specific area of our body. Further, each chakra represents a specific set of behavioral characteristics associated with that specific area of our body, and the various phases of our spiritual growth through them.

When you practice authentic tantra under the guidance of an experienced tantra master, you will learn to correctly focus your energies with specific positions/postures. This will help you to align the chakras, and to induce them to spin in their proper direction and velocity. Learning how to energize, focus and control the chakras through tantra meditation will help establish physical equilibrium and peace of mind, body and spirit.

The chakras are essential components of tantra courses. It is essential to understand the seven chakras and how each  of them relates to a distinct part of our body along the spinal column, from the perineum to the crown of the head. All seven chakras pertain to a particular set of organs, distinct colors and sounds, specific emotions and/or behavior, and also control certain other personal aspects – including personal identity, goals and attitudes.

The seven chakras are:

•    Muladhara – located at the base of the spine
•    Svadhisthana – located around the abdomen, genital organs, lower back
•    Manipura- located at the solar plexus
•    Anahata – located in the heart area
•    Vishuddha – located in the throat region
•    Ajna or Agyna – located in the eyebrows region
•    Sahasrara – located at the top of head and the cerebral cortex

When your tantra teacher guides you through certain tantra positions and yoga postures, you will be able to focus your conscious awareness and prana shakti (energy) on the chakras. This will allow you to correct specific areas of your body that are out of sync with or inactive in correlation to your body.

By balancing the prana shakti among all seven chakras, complete emotional, physical and mental balance is attained. This spiritual energy (or shakti) attained is better known as Kundalini shakti. In its sleeping state, it is pictured as a coiled-up serpent resting at the base of your spinal column, around the Muladhara chakra.

Because the chakras behave like valves influencing the flow of energy, the postures and techniques your tantra master teaches you are extremely beneficial in realigning the chakras to bring about complete harmony of mind and body.

Do not attempt any Tantra techniques without the close guidance and supervision of an experienced Tantra teacher if you wish to derive optimum benefits. Without proper guidance and supervision, most Tantra exercises can cause physical and emotional harm as they influence our mind, body and soul simultaneously.

Copyright (C) Subhojit Dasgupta.

Subhojit Dasgupta is a Tantra teacher and offers Tantra lessons to select pupils.

Kundalini Tantra and Kundalini Shakti

In my role as a tantra instructor, I have spoken extensively of kundalini tantra to those I instruct in this ancient tantric art. Kundalini tantra, which gives rise to Kundalini shakti, is the superpower that lies inactive within the uninstructed in the form of a coiled-serpent.

Specifically, the power of kundalini tantra dwells in the Muladhara Chakra, which is the first of the seven chakras. (The other six are Svadhishthana, Manipura, Anahata, Visuddha, Ajna and Sahasrara, in order of magnitude of higher consciousness.)

Together with the Vedas, the Agama Shastras are the origins of the ancient tantric arts, and they offer elaborate descriptions of tantric life. One must familiarize oneself with these to gain a proper comprehension of kundalini tantra.

The original Agama shastras/sastras are twenty-eight in number, and are acknowledged as Saiva Agamas. Their primary focus is on building a relationship with (and finally realizing) the superior devotee Shiva, or Siva. There are some other names such as Vira signifying Hero, Siddha implying Perfected and Swayambhuva implying naturally revealed.

The Agamas have four parts known as padas or lessons. The first two padas address Chariya (or good demeanor) and Kriya (or external worship of Goddesses) and includes all details of personal life, home planning, city planning, personal worship in temples, the architectural designs for temples and sculpture in addition to the elaborateness of temple puja.

The final two padas – Yoga (or internalized worship and union) and Jnana (or enlightened wisdom) give elaborate descriptions of the techniques and phases of kundalini tantra yoga, and the super high consciousness experienced while Tantric Samadhi is attained. In the actual shastras, the padas are sequential with Jnana first, Yoga second, and then Kriya and Chariya.

The Agamas comprise tens of thousands of verses, so much more prolific than the Vedas. Especially the Yoga and Jnana Padas are indeed advanced and omnipotent. Any student should strive to peruse and understand them. They can be complicated, so be sure to avail of the guidance of an accomplished tantra master.

Do not attempt any Tantra techniques without the close guidance and supervision of an experienced Tantra teacher if you wish to derive optimum benefits. Without proper guidance and supervision, most Tantra exercises can cause physical and emotional harm as they influence our mind, body and soul simultaneously.

Copyright (C) Subhojit Dasgupta.

Subhojit Dasgupta is a Tantra teacher and offers Tantra lessons to select pupils.

Tantra and Tantric sex – Explaining the tantric path

A shloka from Tantra Rahasayam explains Tantra as “Tanyate vistaryate jnanam anemna iti tantram” (Tantra is the divine scripture by which the light of advanced spiritual knowledge is spread).

Tantra is an ancient system of psycho-spiritual meditations and self-realization techniques that originated in India. It is still practiced in its authentic entirety by a young Tantra Acharya Subhojit Dasgupta, who represents the most ancient lineage of Tantra in India.

Tantra is collectively a large set of specific tantric techniques that includes yamas, niyamas, asanas, mudras, pratyaharas, dharanas, dhyanas and samadhi techniques. These techniques are considered an integral part of tantric self-realization and awareness.

Tantra is defined as the combination of tattva (the advanced science of cosmic principles), and mantra (the sciences of mystic sound and energy vibrations) and its various applications. Authentic Tantra is based on the harmonization of this combination, raising its intensity to unlimited potency.

Tantra can further the growth of human consciousness in all its manifestations – in personal growth, health, business, and knowledge – treating mind, body and spirit as aspects of the one intelligence.

But there is a unique aspect to Tantra: Unlike several other religions and paths that preach abstinence from all that give pleasure, Tantra proclaims that a life without pleasure is no life at all. Moreover, our desires will continue to haunt us until they are allowed to reach its peak; only after that can it be submerged. Tantra instead says that the transcendental experience of sexual union should be utilized in our path to spiritual awareness. Does that mean that the paths that teach abstinence are wrong?

No! It simply means that they are trying to attain transcendence in different ways. Their aim is the same, only their basic methods differ from Tantra.

Tantra aims for the transcendence of the transient world and aims at giving its practitioners, experiences of intense meditation. Tantra recognizes sex as an important part of a person’s being and the development of one’s soul, but acquiring the right balance is the key.

Tantra is to be used as a spiritual path by people who do not prefer to sacrifice their sexual activities, either due to their disposition or because they are involved in family life.

Rather than suppressing our sexual inclinations, Tantra asks us to utilize the power of sex to gain transcendence. It instructs us not to have sexual play but to use it to climb the ladder of spiritual consciousness. Sex will not stop the continual distraction in one’s mind but when the sexual urges are strong, it is better to utilize it for spiritual purposes and not suppress it. And through these esoteric experiences gained by tantric union and through other non-sexual tantric techniques, one can anticipate to evolve spiritually in a natural way and will gradually lose mundane interest in sex.

And finally when the mind’s attention is diverted away from sex, it becomes ready for serious spiritual sadhana. That is the prerequisite for greater spiritual evolution.

But a word of caution: Tantra does not preach indiscrimate sexual play. It has set specific rules as to how the sexual energy will be utilized. These rules have to be strictly followed; otherwise one can suffer undesirable experiences associated with the premature awakening of the chakras, which is life-threatening without the direct guidance of a knowledgeable Tantra Master

Persons who would like to practice this sexual aspect of Tantric Sadhana must do so under the able guidance of a Tantra Master, who will lay down strict guidelines on the conduct of their lives and what focus their spiritual sadhana must follow.

Copyright (C) Subhojit Dasgupta.

Subhojit Dasgupta is a Tantra Master and offers Tantra lessons to select pupils.

Tantra And The Pursuit of Happiness

“That is happiness; to be dissolved into something completely great.”
-   Willa Cather (American novelist)

There is a certain something that everyone wants, consciously or unconsciously; there is a certain something that is the ultimate goal of every soul, whether they know it or not. But nobody seems to give it the kind of importance that it deserves. Few understand it, even fewer know how to go about getting it. That is what I am going to address now, in this article … in pursuit of happiness.

Whenever I ask people what happiness means to them, they hum and haw a while before telling me a number of things – more money, a bigger house, a sexy wife, an influential husband, the latest sports car, the latest Jimmy Choo, more parties, more drinking – all this and more defines happiness to the average person.

And in this pursuit of happiness, people race. They race against time to make it for that meeting, they race against the Jones to keep up a lavish lifestyle, they race against life itself, trying to make more out of it than necessary. To use a double cliché, one really must take time out from the rat race to smell the good ol’ roses. Does happiness really mean partying all night, every night and getting high and blowing up pots of money on designer clothing? No, I say.

I have and always will maintain that happiness is a state of mind – you can be happy no matter what your situation in life, if you choose to be happy. This is a secret most people do not realize: that happiness does not come to you, you can call upon it whenever you choose to. Happiness does not simply happen, you have to make it happen. Those who believe otherwise have allowed society, peer pressure or their own misgivings to delude them.

Happiness has nothing to do with what you own, which religion you follow, which community you are from, which country you are from, whether you believe in God or not, whether you believe in a higher force or not – at the end of the day you are responsible for your actions and you choose to be anything you want.

As Charles Schulz, the creator of the popular Peanuts comic strip, famously said, “My life has no purpose, no direction, no aim, no meaning, and yet I’m happy. I can’t figure it out. What am I doing right?” What most people fail to realize is that being happy is a continuous process; it does not stay with you without your effort in maintaining it. And no, you do not need to run after more money or party or have sex like a maniac.

Based on my detailed studies of the Vedic scriptures, I have come to understand and believe that sexual pleasure is the highest form of pleasure that can be achieved in the tangible, material world that we know of today. Tantra, too, categorically states that sexual pleasure is the ultimate level of happiness that the physical form can attain. It is the last bastion of happiness for the earthly body.

However, having continuous sex with multiple partners to satisfy a strong drive without the right kind of awareness and expertise will severely damage one’s psyche… maybe even to the extent that one requires psychiatric help. This is because the mind is far more expansive than the body; while the mind hungers for more, the body cannot keep up.

 This is why the mind has to have the right level of consciousness. Unfortunately, today everyone has lost sight of that fact. The promise of happiness be damned, it doesn’t seem to be the bigger of the two, or rather, most have mistakenly identified frequent sex with happiness, whether it is meaningful or not.

All over the world societies have become more permissible and people are more and more blatant about sex, picking it up and using it like a commodity without value. There is no real significance left in it anymore. It is like chasing a rainbow to find the pot of gold at the end of it, when, in reality, the rainbow is nothing more than the mind’s perception. It is not really there, so what can one get out of chasing it?

That is what sex has been turned into today – an empty promise. You have the power to see through that promise. I’m sure that you are beginning to understand that this is a matter that deserves deep thought.

Tantra states that sexual pleasure is the highest form of pleasure man in his physical state can achieve. I must add that, attraction is an inescapable fact of life. A beautiful flower, a beautiful landscape, a beautiful sunset, a beautiful man or a beautiful woman – each evokes a certain sense of attraction within one’s heart. Whatever you do, you should follow it through right to its essence, its essential core, and this action, this effort alone, is the true pursuit of real happiness.

Just as you should be able to pick the flower you like or take a picture of the sunset that holds you spellbound, the person you feel passion tinged with romance for must also reciprocate those feelings, and if you already have that special someone, you would want your relationship to grow in a positive direction.

Anyone would want their feelings to be mutual. If you like a flower, you’d want to take it home. If you like a sunset, you want to capture it on film. If you love a person, you’d want to be with that person all the time. Tantra has always advocated balance and harmony. When two people get together too, there should be a balance.

There are so-called spiritual ‘gurus’ and wannabe ‘gurus’ who propound the theory based on their own half-baked knowledge that the more sex you have, the more sexual partners you have, the more your awareness grows. I knew of such a person who liked to project himself as a fountain of true knowledge, the king-pin of such rackets, when glib talk cleverly interspersed with logic was all he had to truly offer.

I choose this moment and this platform to give him a fitting reply. If this theory were true, prostitutes and gigolos would be far more aware and far happier than the rest of us put together, right? Sex without awareness is the lot of prostitutes and gigolos because for them, sex is work, and there can be no true pleasure in the act when it is carried out in the name of work. The proponents of this theory, I believe, are doing what every other marketing agency does – using sex to promote the self in this earthly life. Awareness cannot be brought about by having meaningless sex. Only two people whose levels of consciousness are compatible can dance their way to higher levels through sex.

Tantra advocates the concept of gender as far as it goes in the concept of consciousness. There is the masculine consciousness and then there is the feminine consciousness. In the case of a couple with alternative sexuality, one partner will always have a slightly more masculine consciousness while the other, a feminine one, regardless of their gender. One balances the other and when the two come together in harmony, there can be nothing more fulfilling.

You can never achieve anything without desire. That is what I have learnt, seen, experienced, understood and known. Without desire, nothing is possible at all.

To achieve happiness, one must know some of the divine, mystical secrets Tantra has given to us and I am about to share some of then with you now. I won’t be surprised if you have heard of it, and maybe even experienced it to a certain extent, but I am sure that you hardly understood it.

Chakras – those apparently inexplicable centres in your body that you have heard can heal and empower you. I am now going to introduce you to the Chakras and their original Sanskrit names. Very few know or acknowledge that the true origin of this knowledge of the Chakras comes to us from Tantras.

Chakra is a Sanskrit word that actually means ‘energy wheel’ and Tantra is the only philosophy that has deciphered these esoteric centres of the human body, leaving them crystal clear for us to understand. To activate these Chakras without acknowledging Tantra is almost blasphemous.

Every human being has been gifted with Seven Chakras:

• Muladhara or the Root Chakra
• Swadishtana or Hara Chakra
• Manipura or Solar Plexus
• Anahata or Heart Chakra
• Vishuddha or Throat Chakra
• Agnya or Third Eye Chakra and
• Sahasara or Crown Chakra.

Each of these ‘energy chakras’ has a specific part to play in your development. Unless each of these chakras is activated one by one using special techniques and processes of Tantra, one cannot ascend to the highest level of complete consciousness. From sex to superconsciousness – these Chakras are crucial to this journey; they are absolute, the ultimate pathway to your destination.

These Chakras, when activated, will enable you will become fearless, even in the face of adversity. Even when you’re the proverbial eye of the storm, your inner strength and stability will make you the picture of calm. A true follower of Tantra never denies anything; we accept everything into our lives, and that is what I do as well. We absorb the good; the bad slips away on its own, in good time. There is no need to fight it out.

I hope that I have awakened a fresh perspective in your mind. I know the happiness I speak of is probably not the happiness that you have thought of, rather thought of consciously. I know the path I have outlined is different, unique, something you have never thought of till now. But this happiness is real, this path is true, and that’s what you shall come to realize through your own experience when you are ready for it.

You have come upon something so valuable that you are itching to know more, to learn the path instead of just reading about it. Well, it has to be learnt from an authentic source. Reading about Tantra alone does not help; one must master the path. People think that there are many ways that they can be happy but in fact there is only one way – to be conscious.

We are in the midst of the Aquarian Age and a human revolution is destined. Let me tell you that this is only the beginning; there is so much more to come that it will boggle your mind. There is a world within you that you have not tapped yet; I am here to show it to you.

So come and learn about how you can be happy without even trying; learn how to invite it into your life and make it your life-long companion. If you take one small step, you will realize that the extent to which Tantra can help you is far greater than you could have ever imagined.

Copyright (C) Subhojit Dasgupta

Subhojit Dasgupta is a teacher of Tantra