What Is Shamanic Tantra?
Like traditional tantra, shamanic tantra is a path to enlightenment through the body, a spiritual practice that teaches us to be in the now and to open ourselves up to more bliss, joy, and connection to spirit by connecting our sexuality and our spirituality. Drawing from Wiccan, Druidic, and Shamanic roots, Shamanic tantra differs from traditional tantra in working extremely intuitively and in its strong connection to the earth. We have created the six gateways to sacred sexuality as an attempt to structure the work of shamanic tantra for teaching, but by its nature, shamanic tantra is fluid and guided through each person’s connection to the divine, and their sense of what is right for them.
What are the Six Gateways to Sacred Sexuality?
The journey to enlightenment can take many roads. The six gateways are a path that works for us. Red Lotus Tantra have intuitively created this road map for discovering the bliss that is created when we connect spirituality to sexuality. This is a practice that can be used alone or with a partner. These steps are not necessarily practiced in order. In fact, they seem to interweave and spiral with each other, spirals being a geometric pattern often used to describe earth-centered spirituality, where linear motion from point a to point b is rare.
The First Gateway: Connecting to Spirit
This is where we begin in shamanic tantra, in a belief that something greater than us is willing and able to connect with us and bring us healing. This is also where we end in shamanic tantra, so that the six gateways become a spiraling circle of practice, rather than a linear journey. Through our connection to spirit, we learn to connect not only to the divine, but to ourselves, and to see that we too are divine beings. We do this mostly through meditation, visualization, and trance journey, familiarizing ourselves with the feeling of spirit moving within us before moving forward.
The Second Gateway: Breathing Love
In both traditional and shamanic tantra, love is the key to everything. Opening our hearts and keeping them open is a foundational practice. Understand that this is different from being “in love” in the romantic sense. An open heart applies to everyone you meet in the world, and is the most profound state of joy and bliss imaginable when attained. The most powerful tool I have discovered for opening the heart and then keeping it open, is the breath. Daily practice of various breath techniques, as well as simply remembering to breathe through a painful or difficult emotion, is the first step to opening ourselves to bliss and joy. In consort practice, we learn to breathe together, synchronizing breath in an attempt to synchronize our energies.
The Third Gateway: Soul Gazing
Soul gazing is the process of looking deeply within and connecting, first with ourselves, and then with a partner. This practice is most easily begun alone, through insight meditation and then through mirror gazing. Once you are comfortable with these solo practices, then it is easier to move into gazing into the eyes of a partner to connect and allow them to see the divine essence within you.
The Fourth Gateway: Channeling the Dragon
The sexual life force energy that flows through the body has many names, but my favorite comes from the gaelic: ”nwyvre”, which means “dragon fire”. In shamanic tantra we learn to channel this fire and to move it throughout our bodies to create a state of intense aliveness. Part of this work specifically focuses on balancing and clearing blockages in the energy centers of the body, also called chakras in traditional tantra, which brings a greater openness to moving ecstatic energies through the body, as well as increased health and vitality.
The Fifth Gateway: The 16 Elements of Ecstasy
Astrologers believe that all of us are imprinted with clusters of elemental energies at the time of our birth. The 16 elements of ecstasy are the elements of Earth, Air, Fire, and Water broken down into their light and dark, masculine and feminine components. We can commune with these elements that are both within us and all around us in nature through touch, movement, trance journey, visualization, and ceremony. The free flow of energy through the body and the creation of a feeling of connectedness to all that is depends on both elements and chakras being in harmony. Balancing and connecting to these energies allows us to lead more balanced and connected lives. The elements and the dragon energies are intertwined in the practice, and often a moving back and forth between the two is required for deep healing of emotional, mental, sexual, and spiritual blocks.
The Sixth Gateway: Divine Union
In solo work, divine union describes a marriage of the masculine and feminine energies within the self, balancing our tendencies to be active, for instance, with our ability to receive, so that our inner masculine and feminine energies work together in harmony. Divine union also explores our connection with the natural world, with the life force energy in the spirits of the plants, the rocks, and the animals. In consort practice, divine union becomes the place where we merge completely with the god or goddess in our partner so that we no longer have the need for boundaries between us. This merging can only come after a sense of safety has been created through work with the previous five steps, where we learn to be strongly centered and balanced within our own energetic and emotional fields. The practice of divine union is the ultimate goal of shamanic tantra, to merge our life force energy with all that is, through the experience of the body.
Returning to the First Gateway: Re-connecting to Spirit
Once we have gone deeply into union with another or with ourselves, we cycle back to our connection with spirit, to the safety and protection of being grounded in the earth and open to the sky. We let go of any need to cling to another person to experience the bliss of this union. The beauty of this path is that once our bodies have experienced the bliss of the deeply connected divine union with another, we can return to that again and again through our connection with spirit. Because there is no scarcity of love in the universe, we can draw on this whenever we want, only now we are not drawing from another person, we are drawing from source.
Practicing With or Without a Partner
Many of our clients complain that they have no partner to practice with, or that their partner is not interested in practicing tantra. It is perfectly acceptable to practice tantra alone. In fact, traditional tantra was first taught solo, to allow the student to master the complex spiritual practices of breathwork, energy movement, and meditation before coming into union with a partner.
In shamanic tantra, we work to bridge our beginning point into the heart of sacred sexuality. For those who are more spiritually inclined, solo practice is often the place to begin exploring, because it is what is most comfortable. If you are practicing solo, I encourage you to try self pleasuring with the exercises once you are comfortable with the practices, BEFORE you move into practicing with a consort. For women, I often encourage they use some sort of sex toy for self pleasuring, so that it is an effortless practice, and they can concentrate on the breathing and balancing practices they have already learned.
If you are coming into shamanic tantra from a place of wanting to enhance your sexuality, then consort practice is a great place to begin, and slowly begin to bring the practices into your lovemaking. Like any other new endeavor, it is best to begin slowly, with the more simple exercises, and then progress into more complex work. If you are extremely sexual and do not have a partner, then begin by slowly introducing the gateway practices into your masturbation. Especially if you are using a lot of fantasy to become aroused, a large part of the work will be to learn to be fully present in self-pleasure. This can be difficult for some, and the ability to climax in your traditional way may elude you. This is natural in light of the fact that you are rewiring your pleasure centers. Learning to drop into and allow each touch to be arousing and to let go of the goal of orgasm leads eventually to a place where sexual arousal becomes larger and richer, and orgasms begin to take on an intensity and duration previously unknown.
