Episode 2: What are Tantra and Taoism?

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Hello, everyone. Welcome back to Nectar: sex and soul with Sureya Leonara.

Today I want to share a bit about what tantra and Taoism are because so much of my work is deeply rooted in tantric and Toaist teachings. A lot of people are unfamiliar with what that is or have misconceptions, so we're just going to get into a brief overview of what tantra and Taoism are so that some of the things I discuss going forward in my podcast episodes will have a bit more context and make more sense to you. I want to start by just expressing my deep gratitude to these lineages and to all of my teachers. These are ancient lineages that have shaped my life in such a powerful way and have given me so much, and continue to give me so much. It is my honor and privilege to be able to share them with others, and it's with deep reverence, respect, and gratitude that I share them with you today. Tantra and Taoism are both non-dual, non-dogmatic, philosophical, traditions, cosmologies, ideologies. They are both an art and a spiritual science, and they both originate in the ancient far east.

I'll begin first with tantra. Tantra traces its earliest roots back to the Indus valley, five to 6,000 years ago, and it's since spread through much of Asia. There are many different lineages with many different variances. Tantra at its core is geared towards the expansion of consciousness and the liberation of energy, and I'll break down what tantra means.

Tantra means loom or to weave, and it can also mean teachings and texts.

And "tan" means whole or wide reaching. So it's really this wide reaching weaving, connecting all things into one through this yogic path of the spontaneous awakening to our absolute divine essence. Tantra sees Shiva, the masculine consciousness, and Shakti, the feminine life force energy, as the two forces that are in perfect indestructible union. Through their love-making they are creating and sustaining the universe.

Taoism is an ancient Chinese philosophy and religion that's at least 2,500 years old, and it addresses how to live in harmony with the universe. The Tao loosely translates to "the way;" it's like the way of the universe.

And Taoism sees the opposite forces of yin and yang as counterparts working together to harmonize as a greater whole.

Life is full of opposites, full of polarities. If we look at yin and yang, Shiva /Shakti, masculine/ feminine. Energy/ consciousness, matter/ spirit, fire/ water, light/ dark, projective/ receptive, body/ soul, sex/ spirit, life and death, and inhale and exhale. We see that our whole world is constructed of these opposites, which we tend to see through a dualistic lens, but duality is a construct of the mind. Through the lens of Tantra and Taoism all of these opposites exist within one whole, they are two sides of the same coin, and both sides of the coin exists within all of us. Each person contains the whole within. We need both sides to generate energy and polarity. Just like an electrical current, or a battery, or a magnet, we need a positive and a negative pole to generate energy, to have magnetism, and attraction. We need both masculine and feminine energy to create life, and we are all made of both masculine and feminine energy. What's really important to understand is that when we try to repress one, we automatically dilute the other.

These opposites cannot be separated. They truly are two sides of the same coin. They are born of each other. They inform each other. They feed each other, and inspire each other. And they become and return to each other. We can see this in the way that the breath is made up of both the inhale and exhale, but both pieces are necessary for the breath to be possible, right? As soon as we inhale, we are ever approaching that next exhale. And as soon as we curl over into that next exhale, we are ever approaching that next inhale. So we can see how they seamlessly start to weave together; just as the sun is setting, and the moon is rising as the day fades into night; and then the moon is setting as the sun is rising, as the night bleeds into day.

There is this primordial pulse moving through all things. It's the breath of life, and we can tend to favor one side of the coin over another, depending on the circumstance. But when we see that they're not actually separate and that they can't be separated, we can start to embrace all pieces of ourselves, of each other, and of the world; we can really integrate all of the pieces into wholeness. Every single piece has a place in the whole.

Both of these systems see everything as one. Tantra sees everything as sacred. Since everything is one, it's all stemming from and returning to the same source. Nothing can be anything less sacred than anything else, it's all an expression of the divine. Every single expression in this reality is a face of God, essentially; a face of divinity; a face of love, and it can present in so many different ways, but ultimately it's all made of the same stuff. So much of the beauty of this path is learning to find the sacred in the mundane and the profane, and to really embrace it all.

Both tantra and Taoism also have a heavy emphasis on cultivating qi, or prana, or life force through internal alchemy practices to support health, vitality, longevity, intelligence, creativity, wisdom, harmony, and sexual pleasure. Which brings me to my next point, which is the question of how do these traditions relate to sexuality?

I do want to clear a common misconception that tantra equals sex. So many people in the west, when they hear tantra, they think of sex, and sex is only a small piece of tantra. Sex is also the life force that permeates all of existence; it's creative energy; it's what we're all made of and how we all got here in these bodies, so sex is present in all of reality. It's not just the act of sex, but it is that life force that is pulsing through all of existence. From that perspective, it has everything to do with sex, and so we can use tantric as an adjective to describe sexuality if we are relating to our sexuality in a way that is weaving in the principles of tantra as the root foundation, and we can talk about sexuality specifically from the perspective of how tantric traditions have addressed sexuality. One of the reasons that I think tantra gets so wrapped up with sexuality through the Western perspective is that both tantra and Taoism are two of the only spiritual traditions that really embrace sexuality. Rather than repressing it, or shaming it, or excluding it from the sacred, they embrace it as sacred.

Within these traditions, we intentionally work with sexual energy. We build it so that we can circulate, nourish, and revitalize our bodies. Rather than depleting them, or rather than sex being this distracting part of life, it can be something that's deeply integrated. We can work with these internal alchemy practices to harness and cultivate and channel it.

We can transmute raw, sexual, creative energy into spiritual energy, and higher states of awakening. We can infuse sexual energy with spiritual energy and spiritual energy with sexual energy because they are two sides of the same coin, they are two parts of the same whole, and they are not separate.

If you think about it, the fact that we create life through sex, through orgasm... what could be more sacred and magical than that? Our orgasm, our sexual pleasure is literally what creates new life. Sex is the energy that gives life; it's the seed of creation; it's that raw energy that propels all of creation. We can harness that energy and use it as fuel, not just for creating new life, but for channeling it into so many other areas of life.

Because these traditions embrace sexuality and use sexual energy as fuel, there's also the perspective that desire is a holy force; it's energy, right? So desire is not the root of all suffering, it's the attachment to desire and it's those egoic desires. But desire can be a holy longing to be connected to, to really feel our wholeness. Oftentimes what lies behind our desire is the feeling that that thing or person we're desiring will bring us. It's not usually so much about the person or the object, but about the feeling that it will bring. That desire can propel us. It's desire that propels us to create life.

Through the tantric and Toaist lens, we're working with the body and the senses as pathways to, rather than obstacles to enlightenment.

Both of these traditions really embody and celebrate the human experience. They are not these purely transcendent traditions that are trying to escape this material hell and rise above the body or that see the material realm as illusion.

The material is the feminine; it's the body; it's the earth; it's sex. Sex and spirit, energy and consciousness, body and soul- that is what makes up the human experience. We didn't come here to just hurry up and transcend this human experience; there's a reason that we're here. These pathways really embrace the body as a means to enlightenment, as a path to awakening, as this incredible technology that we can work with to reach these incredible states of consciousness. These paths are very focused on embodiment and eminence, as well as transcendence; they hold both simultaneously. It's not an either or, but a both, and more. They're equally as necessary, equally as important; so really immersing ourselves in the human experience, sinking our teeth into this experience; and also being able to reach these transcendent states, realizing the human experience isn't the whole picture. We need to be able to hold both because if we get too deep into eminence, and we lose sight of transcendence, we can get really lost in this moment and in our emotions and what we're feeling. And if we get too lost in transcendence, we can become very detached and start spiritually bypassing. Detachment is different than non-attachment. Detachment, there's a lack of presence or an inability to be with what is. We want to work with holding both the eminent and the transcendent. We can be embodying and having this human experience while also seeing everything from the perspective of the witness, from the observer consciousness.

It's through the merging of those two that we start to experience this sacred union. The sacred union is the merging of all opposites within us. Not only do these traditions embrace the body, but we need to embody these teachings, otherwise they're just cerebral candy. These teachings are designed as holistic integrative systems, and the nectar is really how we ground these practices and these teachings into our moment to moment existence. It's not just about having our practice on our mat or a meditation cushion, and then running around living the rest of our day, disconnected from that. Really, where the real growth and transformation happens is when we can pulse these teachings, and these practices, and this awareness into each moment. The most mundane of moments; just washing dishes, or sitting in traffic, or going pee, or standing in line; all of these are opportunities to step through that doorway to the divine, to bring our awareness and our presence. We're so often checking out, we have so many distractions, we have all kinds of technology, all kinds of reasons to not pay attention to this moment. But the real work is in how do we integrate these teachings and practices into each moment. Somebody who meditates on a mountain for years, but can't be around people, or go into town without being reactive, without losing sight of this practice they've been cultivating; it's not integrated for them; it doesn't really count. That's a really great example of just being fully in the transcendent.

We need to have both eminence and transcendence. This is a path of both eminence and transcendence.

The last thing that I'll say about these traditions is that new iterations are built upon older foundational traditions that organically evolve over time. We live in a very different world today than when these traditions were created, so we have to adapt the teachings and practices to more modern times. In the west, we have to adapt them to the Western mind, the Western existence. They don't always directly translate. There's always a taproot that stays connected to the origins, but the expression can branch off in many different directions.

Neo tantra is a modern approach that focuses mostly on sacred sexuality without any of the other pieces of tantra. Depending on the teacher or practitioner, it can still have the roots intact, or it can be completely irrelevant and irreverant to what tantra actually is. Very often it's been super diluted, but it can still offer really rich experiences, and this is just highly contextual in terms of how much of the root system is still intact, and who's offering the teachings and how.

But just know that some of what's labeled as tantra or neo tantra might not really have anything to do with tantra at all.

There can be a lot of confusion in the realm of tantra specifically. You can go with a very, very traditional pathway with it; you can go the super neo tantra pathway with it; you can find many in-betweens, and ultimately I encourage you to tune into your internal compass with any system that you're exploring; really finding what resonates to be true for you and not just hanging on to every word of something, even if it doesn't resonate.

It's really helpful to come to these kinds of traditions with a beginner's mind, and to be curious, and to try new things on, and to work through some of our programming and conditioning that could block us from being able to try on these new ideas. Ultimately, you are your own guru; you are the person who knows what's right for you, and that's going to look at differently for you than it will for anyone else because every single person is a unique expression of the one consciousness. Each person is a unique face of the one creator, a unique facet of the one gem. You're here as a unique vantage point of consciousness that's going to have your own experience, and I think one of the things that's really dangerous, especially in the world of neo tantra, but really this can happen in any religious or spiritual tradition, is things can sometimes get culty. People can give too much power away to somebody who claims to be a guru and they can abandon themselves; they can abandon their own quest for internal truth and place it in the hands of another person. We really always want to be coming home to that internal compass, so anybody that ever tells you that they have all the answers and that you have to do everything their way is a red flag in my opinion, and that's something I would watch out for.

Tantra has this really beautiful essence of curiosity. Much of it feels like an invitation, inviting us to explore something and to see what happens. Rather than saying do this and expect this precise result, each person is on their own journey and each person will have their own experience with the various different practices and teachings.

I see these traditions as incredible ancient wells of wisdom that can guide us home to ourselves, that can offer us tools, and perspectives, and practices to come home more fully to our wholeness, to ourselves, to live in greater harmony, and to integrate every piece of the whole through a non-dualistic perspective where we can find the sacred in each moment and really live our most fulfilling lives.

hope you have a better idea of what these traditions are now. I really loved getting to share about them with you and we'll continue weaving them into so much of what we talk about on this podcast.

If you want to go a lot deeper into these realms, that's something that I offer in my private one-on-one coaching. For now, I'll allow you to integrate this.

I hope these insights continue to unfold throughout your day. And i look forward to seeing you on the next episode much love and ciao.