What is tantra, anyway?

Lake Affect, 2018

Wednesday mornings are
my extended practice mornings.

Wednesdays are currently the only morning I don’t teach, so they offer a wonderful opportunity for me to carve out more time for self practice. I spend at least two hours in morning practice on Wednesdays, and the clarity of mind that results from this extended session is quite amazing.

This particular Wednesday morning, after my physical practices and meditation, I made a latte and sipped it while relishing a few minutes of Richard Freeman introducing different systems of yoga.

The recording is called The Yoga Matrix¹ and I’ve listened to it time and time again over the last decade. It is about six hours long, so I usually skip to a subject that interests me on a particular day. But today I decided to let it play from the beginning, and Freeman starts out by offering some very brief overviews of a few different types of yoga. These aren’t schools, really; they’re too broad for that categorization. They are like different frameworks for conceiving of the nature of yoga and devising systems of practice.

Tantra is one of these frameworks, and it is the one that I feel most grounded within. I would call myself a practitioner of tantrik² yoga and I think tantra best describes my offerings as a teacher as well.

So, today I heard Freeman’s introduction to tantra for the first time in a while. It struck me as really lovely and helpful, so I wanted to share it here.

I formatted it like a poem because it feels like a poem to me, even though I believe Richard is just speaking conversationally, perhaps while referencing some notes.

What is Tantra?

The word tantra
means “a thread” or “a weaving of threads”
which could form a lattice of intelligence,
very much like a matrix.

All of the practices of tantra
are based on opening up
the central axis of the body

so that we can enter
with our minds,
with our breath,
with all of our attention

deep into
the core of our heart,
deep into
the entire phenomenon
that occurs along
the central axis of the body,

from the center
of the pelvic floor
right up through
the crown of the head.

This
is what the practices of hatha yoga
are actually designed to do —

to unplug
the normally closed
central channel of the body,
called the Sushumna Nadi.

And in unplugging it,
to allow our attention
(which always flows with inner breath)
to enter into this most
sacred of channels.

When this happens, the mind
automatically starts to fold in on itself
into ecstatic depths of
understanding and concentration.

Tantra is also
the practice of realizing
that the ordinary world
and the things we do in the world
are incredibly sacred.

And so,
it is also
the practice of ritualizing
our ordinary sense perceptions
and ordinary sense activites
so that we can eventually
become grounded
in reality
as it
is.

——

From “The Yoga Matrix” by Richard Freeman

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Notes:

1. The Yoga Matrix is available as an audio download and CD format via Sounds True.

2. The spelling “tantrik” might look odd so I wanted to clarify. This spelling has been put forward by the scholar/practitioner Christopher Wallis with the intention to differentiate between Tantra, the broad system of yoga philosophy with an 1100-year-old lineage originating in Southeast Asia, and what scholars refer to as Neo Tantra, a more recent emergence in Western cultural contexts that centers physical intimacy practices. Sex practices do have a role in traditional tantra, because sex is a part of life for many people, and life itself is the true subject of tantrik yoga. But the philosophy does not center sex any more than it centers any other human activity.