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Yoga-Tantra - Self Liberation and Transformation
Tantra cleans up your personality, your deep-rooted complexes, corrects your behavior, and rehabilitates you psychologically and physically.
Paramahansa Satyananda Saraswati
For the yogi every moment is an opportunity to make every situation better in some way. Every moment is an opportunity to apply the methods of yoga and tantra that we have embodied to uplift ourselves and others.
Dr Swami Shankardev Saraswati
The methods of yoga most commonly taught today have their basis in tantra. Hatha yoga, mantra yoga, yoga nidra, and meditation techniques such as meditations on chakras, derive from tantric systems. Although Patanjali’s Raja yoga provides a profound philosophical basis for practice, the practices themselves are based on tantra. Mastering yogic discipline, including posture, breath, concentration and meditation techniques, are pre-requisites to successful practice of tantra. We can call this process yoga-tantra.
At our core we are powerful beings connected to timeless, infinite universal consciousness. Yet often we are unable to tap into or fully realize our potential. This is because we are bound by unconscious destructive patterns of thinking and behavior. This inhibits our capacity to fuel all the dimensions of our life. The side effects of our inhibited capacities can be anything from general tiredness and apathy, to chronic physical and mental disease. We may feel small, powerless, and out of touch with our true Self.
Within yoga-tantra there is a precious key to disarming and reprogramming our negative patterns so that we connect with the powerful luminous forces that lie dormant within us.
Yoga-tantra teaches philosophy, methods, techniques and rituals that can be applied to the body-mind to liberate energy, to awaken the innate, but usually unconscious, higher Self, the more capable, bigger us.
Simple postures, breathing and meditation techniques can be performed daily to expand our energy, our ability to feel, and our attraction to higher, more holistic living. By practicing these techniques regularly we can experience greater Self-knowledge, Self-love and exalted states of consciousness.
The fundamental principle of yoga-tantra is that all of life can be used as a path to attain higher awareness. Yoga-tantra proposes that we reject nothing, but rather, that we use every means available to us to raise our human consciousness to higher consciousness.
To the tantric practitioner every act in life is a spiritual or sacred act. In this way yoga-tantra helps us to purify our personality and our deeply rooted psychological complexes.
Yoga-tantra techniques integrate head and heart. The faculties of the intellect are discrimination and concentration. Those of the heart are love and compassion. The heart is the passionate centre that fuels the journey to attain true knowledge. There is no spiritual path without a heart, and the discovering the infinite space within the heart is also the goal of the tantric.
Today, the word tantra is associated with techniques for attaining sexual ecstasy and longevity. While it’s good to learn how to have more pleasure and fun in life, this is not the true aim of tantra. Tantra is a system of making every aspect of life more potent and joyful. It does this by charging our body-mind with energy and awareness. What we do with this energy and awareness is up to us.
To limit tantra to sexuality is to limit one of the most profound systems of self-exploration that we have on the planet today. Every relationship we have, whether with our partner, family or colleagues can be the source of tremendous joy and satisfaction. True tantra lifts our entire Self and our entire life toward divinity.
Yoga-tantra empowers us to forge a strong, authentic and deeply fulfilling relationship with our selves, with others, and with the universe.
About the Author(s):
In 2004, Dr Swami Shankardev and Jayne Stevenson decided to pool their talents to create Big Shakti. They co-create various seminars and workshops, which Swami Shankardev presents throughout Australia, USA, Europe and India.
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