When I first became obsessed with Tantra at the age of eighteen I pretty much expected everyone to share my obsession.
I felt like I had personally discovered the answer to everything.
I mean, a path that allows you to feel lit up from the inside out with bliss and freedom?
A path that lets you feel love streaming through your body and heart into everything?
A path that lets you have all that AND success, fame, money and incredible sex?
Who wouldn’t want to run with joy and abandon down that path??
So I couldn’t understand why EVERYBODY wasn’t as obsessed with Tantra as I was.
At first I thought those that weren’t interested were bat-shit crazy…
but then I realized it’s more simple than that.
People might not love where they are at, but at least it’s comfortable.
The things they’ve believed since childhood might cage them, limit them, keep them unhappy…
But at least they are familiar.
Tantra isn’t familiar.
In fact, it can be downright scary.
Because you don’t get all of that freedom and bliss without a price.
And the price is only your habits, your stories and your way of seeing reality…
But most people aren’t willing to give that up.
It’s too…unknown…
Well, I consider part of what I do is to make that unknown just a little less scary and a little more real.
Because the chance is worth it…
That’s why it’s so important to me to share this vital information with you.
Discover the beauty and magic of Tantra below.
Transcript:
Tantra 101 – Sex, Love and Spirituality
It’s one of those incredible unanswered questions, “What is tantra?” It can be so difficult to answer because there’s a big difference between classical tantra, the roots of tantra, and what I could tell you about tantra, and the actual experience of it.
But if you really want to understand tantra, it does matter to know where it came from. So are you ready for a super quick history of tantra? Here we go.
The Tantra were a series of texts, compiled from 500 ad to 1500 ad that were based on more ancient practices in the countries of India, Tibet and Nepal predominantly. There were a whole range of different teachers, Gurus, and lineages that spanned a wide variety of practices.
Some of them were more classical and traditional, more oriented towards the ancient Vedic society of India. Some of them were more transgressive, meaning that they like to blow through people’s taboos and understanding of reality, doing things like having female gurus, initiating everyone, including the untouchables, an unthinkable thing to do at the time.
They also engaged in wild, ecstatic, even orgiastic ritual and celebration of the divine. They used a series of tools and techniques that allow people to recognize truth. At the heart and soul of all tantra was the recognition that everything is divine; that we are all at the heart of us, truth, love, and beauty.
To perceive the reality at the heart of everything, tantra used the portals of traditional Indian, spiritual society, puja, mantra, meditation, yoga. Yoga? Yes. Yoga.
If you’ve been practicing yoga, you’ve already touched into a tantric practice. Recent scholarship has shown that yoga was an original development of the tantric tradition.
So does any of this mean anything to us and the modern era? Yes and no. It’s always amazing to know the roots, the tradition of something to make it more powerful, but tantra was about awakening to reality. And a big piece of that was stripping away what keeps us from the embodied realization that everything is divine, that at our hearts, we are truth, love and beauty.
So a modern tantric practice is less concerned with ancient practices and more interested in what does it take for you to realize that as truth in your lifestyle? So I’m going to break it down in this video. Some of the main ways that you can understand the tantric path and what it can do for you and the major domains of sex, love, and spirituality.
I’m Layla Martin. This is the place to be if you want to experience epic sex, legendary love and the heart of tantra.
So let’s talk about sex. What would conditioning look like in sexuality? It’s that subtle belief system that almost all of us carry that sex is dirty, wrong, shameful, less than, that it’s separate from sacredness. This diminishes sexual pleasure. It creates sexual repression. This damages relationships.
It creates problems between couples who long to feel a deep and intimate connection, but can’t because of the sexual conditioning. So in tantra, we clear that and replace that with a belief system that’s inspiring and empowering. What would that look like? That sex is beautiful, sacred, natural, that you can use sex, just like a yoga practice to cultivate your inner energy, to evolve as a human being, to be vulnerable, connected, to have your heart wide open and to experience some of the most beautiful emotions of ecstasy, bliss, transcendence and of course the most profound experience of love and freedom.
Once you get rid of that conditioning, sex isn’t just only about pleasure. It becomes an expression of life, a piece of art where all emotions are welcomed, where you can be sad or angry or full of bliss, full of pleasure, full of love. Everything is welcome. Everything is okay. And there’s a deep meditative awareness throughout all of this.
So let’s talk love. What does conditioned love look like? It looks like us being told that we have to deserve love. So you end up feeling like you have to be worthy of your partner’s love by being beautiful enough, or you have to be worthy of love by being rich enough or successful enough or thin enough or something enough.
What that does, that conditioning of our love, is it makes our hearts shut down and it makes us seeking, seeking, seeking, looking, looking, looking for things to make us feel loved.
It creates problems in relationships because we’ve become dependent on our partner to know our own worth, our own value. We become dependent on the external world to reflect to us how good we are, how worthy we are.
In tantra, you release that conditioning. You start to recognize that you are love itself, that you are loved just for being here. So we look at nature, we see perfection in nature, but we struggle to see that same perfection in ourselves, also a creation of nature.
When you experience the tantric love, you know, in your bones, in your cells, that you are enough, that you are love itself when that kind of love overflows, it radically changes the way that you make choices, the way that you feel about yourself and how you love others and spirituality.
What is the conditioned spirituality that keeps us from truth? It’s this belief that God is outside of us, judging us, distant from us, potentially there to punish us. That makes us feel ashamed and disconnected from ourselves and from reality. In tantra, you release that conditioning and wake up to the divine within absolutely everything. It’s about giving you the tools, the techniques, and the practices to release the conditioning that isn’t you, that isn’t true to you that no longer serves you.
So if you’re curious about the practical application of tantra, what are these tools and techniques? Well, that’s what this YouTube channel is dedicated to in part is teaching you that and showing you that. So if you want to stay tuned in with this channel and get all of the videos every week, go ahead and subscribe.
And you can also head on over to laylamartin.com, sign up with your email address so we can totally stay in touch. And if you’re really interested in the practical application, you can check out my men’s training by clicking here, and you can learn more about my women’s training by clicking here. And if you want to find out more about tantra, then I suggest watching this video next, or you can check out this one.
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