The colors flooded across the sky in spirals. Their bright reflection in the quiet river amazed my heart. It was just as sensual an experience as the sensation when my lover came up behind and slipped his arms around me in a hug. I was in bliss! On my front I had the warmth of the sun, and on my back the loving touch of his chest, and the strength of his encircling arms. The moment was so wonderful, that we we kissed, other greeting the glorious day in front of us.

Birds were hopping from treetop to treetop pecking at nuts and seeds. Seagulls and pelicans were gliding over the beach with complete freedom, squawking joyfully. The wind blew the palm fronds one way, then another, creating a moving carpet of green all along the shore. I felt so connected to nature, and really centered and fulfilled in my heart.

Because I took those 10-15 minutes to connect with nature before jumping into work, my whole day was more productive and much less stressful.

What happens to you when you take time to connect with nature? Have you taken a moment lately to see the beauty around you? Are there ways you can work in just a few minutes a day to slow down and ‘smell the flowers’ – maybe even the real ones?

Blessings,
Carla

When I work with couples who are resistant to healing their relationship and who no longer feel the kind of  sensuality they felt when they met, it is often due to their lack of listening. It’s very common in long-term relationships.

Tantra says that newness is the preferred food for Eros.  Eros dies when habits come in. But when you have been with someone a long time, it’s very easy for both of you to fall into a rut. Your lover gets to know your patterns – what you like, what you don’t like, what you complain about. When your partner hears the beginning of a sentence, they already “know” what you are trying to say; they  stop listening and start replying the usual way, leaving absolutely no space for newness to occur.

You might be in a new space, and trying to bring a new view or approach to this issue, but now your suggestion or insight gets completely ignored and you feel discouraged and “lonely”. In this lonely place, you may stop being open and trusting, and close off to your lover, or you may desperately try to talk anyway to your partner’s deaf ears, hoping in vain that one day he or she will actually listen to you.

Either way you are closing off to Eros.  If you are no longer expressing yourself or are compulsively repeating yourself,  Eros leaves your relationship.

If you are the one no longer listening, you may want to refresh your relationship by becoming curious again, and really listen for what you could say to break the vicious cycle. To do that you need to let go of assumptions. An assumption usually says:  “Why should I listen to this again?  I already know what they are going to say.”  Stop!  You are closing the door for possible newness to come through.  If your lover is really just repeating the same thing and really nothing new comes up, it means they are feeling unheard. So bring some intention to giving them space to feel heard -  you may even try to ask questions to bring out the possible newness of the situation.  Every moment is new if we really look and listen.

This is an important teaching of Tantra:  “When you are in the NOW fully you are in a tantric space.” Some of you may have read the work of Eckhart Tolle – his book “The Power of Now” is reviving this ancient tantric idea in self-growth circles.  (If you haven’t read the book, I highly recommend it. )

Sexual and romantic connection are about energy. Be fully present with your partner and focus your energy into truly listening to them, deeply, with intention and love. You will be surprised how that energy juices up your relationship in every way!

Blessings,
Carla

Photo by Renee Barron, Flikr.com

Are you conscious of when you start holding back emotional truths and thus clouding the clarity of consciousness? Clouding the clarity is only the beginning of the damage you do to your relationship. When you hold back your emotional truths, such as fear, jealousies, insecurities, and resentments… you create coolness in your relationship that slowly freezes the love that you have for each other, turning it into an iceberg.

The problem with having this iceberg lurking under the surface of the ocean of love, is that you never know when you are going to hit it and sink the ship. Even such a powerful ship as the Titanic could not survive the hit against the ice block. When you express what you are afraid to express, you melt that iceberg. Yes, you are making yourself vulnerable, but you are ensuring that the formation of an iceberg, the greatest danger to a relationship, does not happen.

We all would like to be perfect, to never make mistakes, to be smart and to make great decisions, to be always completely honest and open… However, sometimes even the best of us fails in some of those areas. When that happens, the tendency is to isolate and hide the imperfections, but in doing so we are starting to close off our heart.

Are you awake enough in that moment of perceived “failure to be perfect” to overcome the instinct to hide it by taking a deep Ocean Breath? Connecting to your core with the Ocean Breath will allow you to remember that now is the best time to reveal “your failure to meet your perfection quotient” to your lover and ask her or him to help you feel love. You could ask your lover to hear you without criticizing you and offer you understanding, reassuring you that you are still loved.

You might end up actually making love. For most of us, it is easier to love a vulnerable flower than a rock.

Have you ever experienced a similar reaction from your lover when you shared your vulnerability?

I would love to hear what your experience is.

Most people’s perception of Tantra is limited to controlling sex so you can have it for hours and hours in strange positions. Tantra is much more than that. It includes 64 arts that support you to be the most sensitive and accomplished lover of life and of another person. It includes the art of understanding the energy flow, of communicating deeply from your feelings, the art of romance, of setting up a room that will encourage you to create a mood that takes you higher into your fullest potential of vitality and passion, and more…

l embraced Tantra fully, and I teach it passionately because it has helped me to free myself from limiting emotional conclusions about sexuality, and to accept on all levels of my being that sex is an powerful force that amplifies any intention I hold. So if you intend to increase your love or vitality or abundance, your sexual expression is doing that. If you have the intention of connecting deeply with another and experiencing bliss together, sexuality becomes a very high expression of love, and learning to become the best lover you can becomes very important. Tantra encourages you to become the ultimate lover on all levels.

Tantra is a path that successfully unites sexuality with spirituality. It is the only spiritual approach I know of that faces the sexual challenges directly and teaches us how to use sex in a safe, and powerful way. It is a path to enlightenment, which can be reached by transcending our dualistic state of mind. Often we think one thing and feel another. Tantra uses our natural sexual energy to heal the split between body and spirit, between thinking and feeling, and helps you feel whole and really fulfilled.

It is not about how many hours you spend in sexual activities, although it helps with that too if you so desire. Tantra guides you to generate, heighten and transform sexual energy to more subtle energies as you channel it up through higher energy centers in the body (chakras). With the intention of transforming this powerful energy, you can create a new you.

Chakras are wheels of energy. The Hindu tradition believes that there are seven energy wheels that need to spin freely to be fully healthy and to move the maximum amount of energy. The first chakra is situated at the base of our spine. It connects us with the earth, and when it is open and balanced we feel safe. The second chakra is about sex, fluidity, and juiciness; the third – the solar plexus – is about expression of willpower and self-esteem; the fourth – at the heart level – is about love and compassion; the fifth – at the throat level – is about free and honest communication; the sixth – at the forehead level – is about intuition; and the seventh – in the middle of the brain – is about connection with the part of us that is beyond our personality and reaches into the spirit.

The idea of Tantra is to balance these energy centers and to raise the vibrations of pleasure from the first and second chakras to the higher chakras to express self-esteem, love, honest communication, intuition, and finally to merge with into your ultimate transcendent reality. It transforms the sexual energy that is coiled in the lower chakras into love and into light.

Tantra is also a path to complete intimacy with oneself and with another being. Many find it easier to be physically intimate than to share true emotional intimacy. We hold back on letting others see us as we are, especially the parts of us that we judge as bad. Many are more interested in learning lovemaking techniques, which Tantra offers in abundance, than to committing to emotional and spiritual intimacy and absolute honesty with a partner. It seems logical that, in order to achieve the highest state of union with All That Is, we must first be willing to be fully open with at least one human being.

Furthermore, even on a less cosmic level, in order to fully heal ourselves from the shame of our imperfect state of being human, we long for a person who loves us as we are. However, in order to be able to allow that love to penetrate us and heal us, we must first be willing to fully accept ourselves with all our desirable and undesirable qualities.

Tantra gives us plenty of suggestions about how self-acceptance can be reached, and guides you gently to go beyond self-acceptance to honor our true God self.

Sex is very important in our lives. It is a powerful creative force and it leads to orgasm. Orgasm is probably the closest some of us get to the experience of enlightenment. For a more-or-less brief moment, we get to forget ourselves, our problems, our egos, and just be with pure energy, with God.

Tantra guides you gradually to lengthen the peak experience of sexual ecstasy so that, in a way, we get to “hang out” with God longer. This expands our consciousness so that, when you come down to the dualistic plane, you see yourselves and life in a new way. You can actually experience the love that supports the whole cosmos. It is awesome.

When I started playing with the idea of making Tantra my path, I was surprised to notice my resistance to practicing it, finding “plausible” excuses not to find time for it. I remember feeling a similar resistance to my meditation practices. My resistance was confusing to me because here I had found a path that allowed me to use pleasure to reach God and I was avoiding it. Why? After some inner search I realized that this pleasure was different from the previously felt pleasure, which was mixed with pain and guilt. This, however, was pure pleasure, and I did not know how to be with it. Slowly, with a lot of patience and practice, I started to build up my capacity to sustain pure pleasure. I also had to overcome the voice of my internalized mother, who condemned me for feeling sexual pleasure in the first place.

With practice I was able to relax my body while being at the same time in a highly aroused state. Somehow these two states are not mutually exclusive, as one might be tempted to think. In Tantra one can relax because there is no issue of performance. The process itself is the reward. Only through being fully in the process can one reach the highest orgasm.

Do you necessarily need a partner for Tantra love? No. Many tantric exercises can be done alone. In fact, learning to love and honor your own body is an important step toward the tantric experience with a partner.

Tantra helped me break old taboos and heal my past emotional and physical traumas connected with my sexuality. I can now use this additional experiential knowledge to help woman, men and couples in my New York.

To my great joy there are also people who are already fully sex positive and emotionally healthy and feel great with high erotic energy flowing through their bodies. It is a pleasure to assist those people to achieve higher levels of ecstasy alone or with their partner, whether I can help them in private coaching, or in the wider sharing of a workshop.

You both love your kids, but somehow, with your focus on taking care of them, romance takes a back seat. Before the children, you had more time for each other. You could go out to dinner, see mutual friends, go to interesting movies and discuss them; you were motivated to be sensuous and creative, and could schedule time to make love more often. With your priority shifting to the children, this takes a toll on your intimacy together. As a couple, you can feel disconnected.

The ancient science of Conscious Love, Tantra, gives wonderful advice to parents. It is simple advice, but it requires your commitment to maintaining high passion in your relationship while you are being good parents.   

Tantra suggests that a good way to begin is to show each other understanding and gratefulness for all you do. For instance, men, you have the power to give your wife rejuvenation and energy, and bring back your wife into your life, not just your kid’s mom. And this can be a simple act: Tantra recommends that you massage your wife’s feet.

Why? Because a woman has to be relaxed before she can open up her sexuality. As you probably know, all energy lines that go through the whole body (meridians) end up in the feet, and can bring both relaxation and more vitality to all the organs of the body. A foot massage brings with it a sensual awakening that can be sexually exciting and open up both her heart and her yoni. So, rubbing her feet is both stimulating and relaxing.

However, Tantra reveals a secret about this situation. Women have a sixth sense about your intentions when you do anything. If you touch her with the intention of stimulating her because you want to make love, she will pick up on it, even unconsciously, and might resist because she’s tired. However, when your intention is to actually help her relax, that too will come through, and she might more willingly agree. So Tantra recommends that you come from their heart when you offer the massage, and let the sexual connection unfold naturally in the moment.

Tantra encourages couples to touch each other, and connect through hugging and kissing, or just breathing and holding each other because touch between a couple fulfills. Many people have grown up with the misconception that once you start touching each other sensuously you “have to” end in orgasm.
This belief is counterproductive and leads to dissatisfaction and mistrust.

If every time you touch sensuously you want to end up having intercourse, one partner may end up drawing back because they don’t feel like going all the way at that time. Especially for parents, who often end the day dropping exhausted into bed after tucking in the kids, the idea of a protracted love-making session may just seem like too much work. That’s the perfect chance to spend time just holding one another, renewing the deep connection of your love.

If you make the dedicated commitment to exchange this deep touch as often as you can, some nights you’ll find it progressing to hot juicy sex, and some nights you’ll fall asleep in each other’s arms, but along the way you’ll also be discovering how to have both the pleasure of parenthood and the pleasure of a great satisfying sex life.