There is a heated conversation about tantra going on in the press, partly due to the unfolding drama within the Anusara community, and partly in response to the recent article by William J. Broad in the New York Times in which he makes the dubious claim that yoga began as a sex cult.
Yoga, tantric or otherwise, is a set of practices that help us expand our consciousness to connect with the universal intelligence and then to bring that experience into life so that we live in the world in a liberated state. While all yoga draws on the same sources, each school or lineage has its own set of practices and interpretations handed down from teacher to student in a very specific way, making it almost impossible for the modern yogi or scholar to tweeze out all of the influences let alone the specific provenance of the various practices. Some contemporary schools have been interested in creating yoga as an institution that can be branded, replicated globally, and sold for profit. But yoga, the real living practice, has always been more like an organism that grows organically and can only survive if it is grounded in the kind of relationship between teacher and student that fosters the direct transmission of what we call the shakti, or living energy, of this ancient wisdom tradition. [Read more…] about What Tantra Is and Is Not
