New Age Tantra: Intentional Subterfuge
"IN THE 40'S REVERSE TANTRA WAS DISSEMINATED IN THE WEST AND GENUINE TANTRA TAKEN UNDERGROUND DUE TO THREATS FROM THE CHURCH. THE DECOY WORKED AND WHAT HAS BECAME KNOWN AS 'TANTRA YOGA' IN THE WEST IS THE VERY OPPOSITE OF THE ANCIENT TEACHINGS THAT TO THE UNPREPARED AND UNINITIATED WOULD BE LIKE PUTTING 1,000 WATTS INTO A 25 WATT BULB."~THE LAST INDIAN TANTRA SWAMI, 1990
Three Basic Requirements of the Tantric Hands-on Healer and Why We Resist Healing
One of the reasons this work "works" is that nothing is ever rushed. It is not because I have too much time on my hands that I ask patients and students to carve out enough time from their busy lives to have a minimum of four completely unencumbered hours for their session. Without that much time, at least, one of the most important requirements of this work cannot be met.
There are three basic requirements of a Tantric Hands-on Healer and they are born talents, the same as a musical virtuoso is born with his or her gift. Just like the virtuoso, these talents must be practiced, honed and mastered or they are just so much squandered potential.* They are:
1) Technical skill and mastery of many different modalities of body work (the Alexander Technique, Trager Mentastics, Rosen Method Body Work, Esalen Massage, Reichian Therapy, Watsu, Rebirthing, Gestalt Therapy, Primal Therapy, meditation, Kundalini Yoga, Holotropic Breathwork and Authentic, Original Tantra Yoga, which has been transmitted to very few people - I know of only 6 - and a natural feel for how the body interprets and responds to language and movement;
2) Absolute personal integrity, self-knowledge and the kind of personal satisfaction, happiness and emotional freedom that enables the healer to allow his patients and students fully their own experience of healing and growth, bringing none of his own agenda, always intending and actively clearing himself in order to be the cleanest, widest, and deepest channel for healing energy possible, fully cognizant, attentive and responsive to every fleeting need of his patient's body, mind, emotions and spirit, as well as a clear channel for his guidance and The Creator to communicate with and heal his patient; and
3) The most important: Endless patience. The kind of utterly free and attentive patience that defines balance and inner peace and that I did not have, or have any way of accessing, until my infant son brought it to me from heaven the day he was born. I believe it is this absolute, utter patience that makes this work successful, that has resulted in the spontaneous remission of chronic illnesses that have defied medical science's attempt to cure them, then vanished during full-body orgasms, never to return again. It is Endless Patience that gives Tantric Hands-on Healing the "magical" feeling my patients and students describe.
Because of the near total flexibility the therapist must practice during sessions, it may seem like a contradiction that, once they make the decision to try this work, it is essential that they make their appointment right away and not change the date or time for any reason, "come hell or high water", even if they feel sick or get called for the audition of a lifetime. The reason is because of the power of the work itself and the body's amazing ability to sense when it is about to encounter major change. It can feel the change already beginning as soon as the appointment is made. This is easy to understand if you think of time as a river and the event of their first Tantric Healing is like a boulder thrown into that river. It will send out concentric waves both downstream and upstream that can be felt by the body, exactly as if it were a canoe traveling downstream, rocking the canoe even before it has reached the site of the event.
But it goes even deeper. By the time my patients find Tantric Hands-on Healing, they have grown way past typical new age concepts of self-improvement and their spiritual journey has been growing within their bodies for quite some time. They are ready to acknowledge and awaken to the fact that their work is not occurring outside of themselves any more but is alive and growing within the bodies where they live.
They are finally ready for life; ready to join in the game for real and this can be scary. Some look back on their progress up to this point in their lives and see that compared to where they can now see they are headed, up to this point, they've done little more than move from the bench to the sidelines. Usually what has caused this move to a vantage point where suddenly they see clearly where the game is being played, is some event that has served as a wake-up call. Few noob seekers end up in this powerful therapy. They may be down ten points with their backs on their own five yard line, knowing for a fact that unless they do something and do it now, the game is over.
They have reached the point where, win or lose, the pain of watching one more play from the sidelines is too painful to bear. They burn for the freedom they know is on the other side of that thin line and the one they have to cross or give up for good. The thin line is their appointment book and no matter how willing their minds are, no matter how convinced they are that they need to do whatever they need to in order to survive and thrive, they still fear it. Their bodies already know everything they are going to do, all those things that were safe as long as they were confined to spiritual books and lectures. They've heard all the words and most of the concepts, they know how life-affirming it all is, how they need it to grow and be all they came to the earth to be. And their bodies read it as revolutionary in a very personal way and discern that they are no longer content to live in their heads, they have already had the epiphany that the head is not where their happiness lives, and they SO want happiness! Having seen how and where the game is played - this game we call life - they are inevitably in a corner they can't excuse themselves from. They are staring freedom in the face and there is only one way to flee this time! From now on when they flee, they have to take their body with them and the body knows how important it has suddenly become - a major change since no one is taught that in our culture. Now in order to grow and heal and become great, they are required to occupy the body fully - it is now recognized as their temple here on earth, where everything spiritual is physical and the myth they are opposites is revealed. Everything emotional, spiritual and physical happens in the body. So they have to go by the body's "playbook" and the body defines "happiness" with one simple, terrifying word we have been taught to reject, that we have even had to obey laws against it: "Pleasure".
So why amid all this flexibility do I have to be so firm, unbending, even rigid about making that first appointment and keeping it even if the body has manufactured a virus or bacterial infection? Because the body knows everything I've just written. The body can feel it all as clearly as the born actor, ignored all his life, suddenly finds all eyes on him - as clearly as the gangly little girl, always awkward around men, suddenly finds that she has become beautiful and they are all staring at her and, even more terrifying, suddenly she even knows how to respond to them and what to say.
The body knows there is change afoot but at this moment,just before that first session, often only the brain knows the change is necessary. The body has been programmed for millenia to fear change because in the jungle change as big as this can only mean one thing: Death! Getting to that first appointment can - and often does - literally feel like you are going to die. I have seen bodies manifest full-on killer flu, complete with real vomiting, fever and chills, only to have all the symptoms disappear within minutes of arriving for their session! But within seconds of feeling the first healing touch, the symptoms, no matter how severe, evaporate.
Because of the power of the work itself but also because my clients arrive so ready, it can take just a few sessions to fully manifest changes they originally sough, sometimes for years, and now whether they continue working at this level is fully optional.
Because of this, while teaching people to become ever more sensitive to their internal compass so they don't need a "guru" in their lives, so they can directly access heaven on their own, or in the company of lovers and friends, or under life and death conditions because we will all face those, it is not optional, I also have to occasionally remind them that the compass has not kept up with evolution and sometimes makes rigid choices for them, based on the conditions of the world when we crawled out of the ocean.
While reassuring my patient, I also reassure my own body that it is safe to do what is required of me as healer and that is that I always do and say what I am clearly and forcefully directed to by their guidance or mine, no matter whether I understand it completely, no matter how uncomfortable it makes me. I have learned that my patient always knows exactly why and what it means. This is what is required of us to make this process work. Interpreting primal signals in our modern world, where we are ambitiously taking back our power and tearing down the barriers to our own happiness that society's oppressors have erected because of their own fear of unbridled power, or their distorted megalomania, it takes an outside eye and the willingness to stay open and let truth come through us. When we are in the midst of our own healing process, it is sometimes difficult if not impossible to see, hear and feel clearly and therefore to know what needs to be done.
Therefore, I do not just do the healing myself, I teach all my patients how to use their own powerful internal compass. We all face the task of interpreting primal signals in a modern world where the dangers are not the same as they were in the jungle. The body's response to any change, from centuries of natural selection, is to fear it because in primitive environments the odds were that such major change would be unhealthy to the point of mortality! In fact, this is often central to the work and I have had clients experience instant remission of chronic illness just by identifying, working through, and releasing traumas from previous lifetimes during their Tantric body work.
So once the decision is made to get in the game - to come and integrate your healing into the actual place where you live your life, in your body, it's best not to think about it. Take into account the body's natural tendency to resist change, knowing that at some point it is likely to rebel openly. So I tell new patients to intentionally not think about their appointment but to just show up as if they are going to the hairdresser. I don't have a complete explanation yet of why, but when faced with our core issues most people feel like they are going to die - much the way people who suffer from panic attacks do. It never ceases to amaze me how our bodies are able to manifest such powerful reasons not to be healed - viruses, complete with vomiting, fever and chills, I've seen this many times - at the moment they are scheduled to deal the final, killing blow to the demons they have been fighting for years, even when they have already figured out that talk therapy is powerless to achieve the kind of result therapy-based body work does. Yet no matter what the symptoms were or how powerful they seemed, they vanish within minutes of beginning their session.
It was during the ten years of couples workshops I conducted in Switzerland where I finally had to admit how powerful the body was both at achieving our goals and thwarting them. I finally had to add a day to our weekend workshops because I was getting so many calls the day after the workshop from people convinced they were dying of some dreaded disease and who wanted to warn others that something was going around and had they heard from anyone else about this deadly virus? I would drive from farmhouse to city apartment, spending ten minutes to set people back up on their feet after they had moved large amounts of material and phoned me from "death's door"! It is a real phenomenon that comes with this simple but powerful work we call Tantric Healing bodywork.
The good news is that if we stick with it, eventually - sooner than we anticipate - it balances out and we find ourselves deeply contented, grounded, attracting the people and events that serve our goals and desires, resulting in a lifetime of satisfaction; all of this with the surefootedness of a mountain goat traversing the very highest peaks of enlightenment and knowledge that are our human birthright.
Eyewitness Account of an Advanced Tantric Healing Session
She sent me an email asking about my work. It became clear after a few exchanges that she had done a lot of work reclaiming her own sexual power and even though she was quite young, was ready for this big step into the center of her own path. She already knew where it would lead her ~ into the jungles of Peru, on a journey through the Ayahuasca teachings pioneered for the west by my friend and collaborator, philosopher and author, Terence McKenna, lyricist for many of the songs from my album, Trance, who also attempted to translate into English his experiences in the extremes of consciousness. He died during the production of that album from brain cancer, fingers about to close around his Holy Grail, the purple liquid said to contain the entheogenic compound at the center of the last room in the ancient and mysterious mystery school that Jesus, Cleopatra and Cesar were all said to have attended. Whether or not attended by such famous students, archeologists and anthropologists agree that the schools really existed and that it was in the last room where you either emerged with the secret knowledge of the meaning of life, or you died. I was in the studio just before Christmas, not having seen the sun for weeks, when I received a call from Terence saying he was in South America about to realize his life-long dream. He was about to finally lay eyes on the mysterious and jealously-guarded secret plant that produced the most powerful psychedelic substance (entheogen) ever known, that produced the priceless purple liquid they imbibed, hands trembling as they lifted the stopper out of the heavy, but tiny crystal bottle from its stone altar in the center of the final room, from which they might or might not emerge with the secret of life. Gina already had her ticket to Peru, so I hurried her through her "initiation" into the Tantric secrets that Yogi Bhajan entrusted to me and six other students just before he died. We did her session the Monday after but in order to speed things along so she could take in as much as possible, while minimizing the potential for trauma from opening so fast, I offered to show her my work and she surprised me later that night with her blog, which I was not expecting. It is the clearest writing I've seen about what I do, which my clients and students unanimously agree is impossible to put into words because the true reality from which it grows and is made manifest is so far beyond any concept that we have the vocabulary to express. It is like that trip to Helsinki in the dead of Winter, when the sun comes up for four hours a day, to record with one of Finland's "national treasures" (she is actually a numbered treasure f the Finnish government, a composer and vocalist at the Sibelius Institute). When I presented Terence McKenna's lyrics for her to translate into Finnish, which was our language of choice for the project, we found that, "A terrifying integration of my consciousness into the sub-molecular fabric of the universe" could not be translated into the ancient tongue, which did not even have a word for "universe", the closest being "world".
Future entries in this column will include some of the things that Gina observed but chose not to describe not because they couldn't be, but in order to make it more acceptable to a wider internet audience, but that explain exactly how my client came to experience three powerful orgasms during the session she observed, eliciting the silent cheering she describes. She also did not include her insistence, after observing how it is possible to light up a darkened room with highly-charged orgone energy for two straight hours, that she left that night only after she had acquired for herself the very next appointment where she also found herself hurtling toward unbridled orgasm. Here is the link to her blog, which this blog is about:
http://lifeissexual.blogspot.com/2009/12/sexual-healing.html
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