Podcast Ep. 7 ~ Introduction to Yoga and Tantra

You can view this podcast episode on Big Shakti’s YouTube Channel https://www.youtube.com/@BigShakti

This episode is taken from Big Shakti’s Light on the Chakras and Kundalinī training masterclass series. This masterclass is taught once every two years and is conducted over nine months. In this episode, which comes out of Lesson 1, we discuss the concepts of yoga, meditation, tantra, and yoga-tantra.

The Sanskrit word yoga means connection or union. The English word meditation also means the connection of the meditator (the consciousness of the meditator) with the object of meditation via the act of practicing meditation.

Yoga and meditation are, therefore, synonyms. One is Sanskrit, and the other is English. However, they point to the same thing: conscious connection. The aim of all systems of yoga is to consciously connect with your body, mind, and consciousness so that you are more in touch with yourself. You can then be more in touch with all of life.

Tantra is a wisdom tradition and an empirical philosophy, like Raja Yoga, that places major emphasis on embodying knowledge and experience rather than intellectual speculation. It is a profound system of self-transformation that teaches liberation of consciousness through the release of energy trapped within the chakras, particularly within the mūlādhāra chakra.

So, while Raja Yoga is a science of consciousness, tantra is a science of energy. It is the science of self-transformation that is most appropriate for us in this day and age.

All of Big Shakti’s meditations and courses are based on yoga-tantra and teach you how to cultivate and amplify self-awareness, liberate trapped energy, and awaken higher consciousness.

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Podcast Transcript ~ Episode 7

Yoga

To understand the chakras, you must first understand what yoga is.

• The Sanskrit word yoga means connection or union.
• The English word meditation also means the connection of the meditator (the consciousness of the meditator with the object of meditation via the act of practicing meditation.

Yoga and meditation are, therefore, synonyms. One is Sanskrit, and the other is English. However, they point to the same thing: conscious connection. The aim of all systems of yoga is to consciously connect with your body, mind, and consciousness so that you are more in touch with yourself. You can then be more in touch with all of life.

Classical yoga (Raja Yoga of Patanjali) is a science of consciousness, of increasing self-awareness by calming and stopping the chatter of the mind. It is a science of consciousness in which consciousness is used to develop consciousness. It is a very advanced form of yoga that is beyond most people in today’s world. Therefore, we use yoga tantra, which is focused on using energy to awaken consciousness, rather than in Raja Yoga, where consciousness is developed directly. Yoga tantra is, therefore, a system of self-development in which your intention is to stop conceptualizing the world (via mental processes) and to experience your authentic, essential self directly. You experience the truth of who and what you are.

Yoga and tantra, being practical philosophies, do not lay down any dogma or theory of what you should experience. It is a system that provides you with techniques to liberate energy to expand your consciousness to discover your own truth. It is an empirical or practical philosophy that enables knowledge through practices that liberate energy.

Yoga is a process of self-discovery.

Yoga is a process of self-discovery that occurs as a result of self-awareness and self-reflection. Self-reflection is very important. You explore your own body and mind, your own personality, your strengths and weaknesses, your abilities, and your connection to higher consciousness. The bodymind is the living laboratory, and your own conscious awareness is the tool you use for exploration. It is awareness, the light of consciousness, that allows you to actually feel more of who you are. Once you can feel things, you can develop direct experience and knowledge, and this leads to deep understanding, wisdom, confidence, and joy.

The techniques of yoga

The techniques of yoga allow you to bring about balance within the body-mind. They help you to re-establish a connection and a mutually satisfying relationship with life at all levels.

Yogic methods exert pressure on the body-mind in order to awaken feeling. One yogic method is the use of postures (āsana) to put pressure on various parts of the body to increase awareness of that part. Other techniques include the use of sound vibrations to vibrate the body and mind, again to increase meditative awareness, for example, via mantra chanting. Another method is to use the breath to consciously increase the level of prāna, the life force, within the body-mind, or to direct prāna to a specific physical structure or mental process.

There are many techniques that increase vital energy, prāna, again to enable you to feel and understand what is going on within. This is what chakra meditations are all about. They inject prāna and mantras into the chakras, which begins a process of purification and healing, strengthening, and awakening.

Yoga practice

Yoga must be performed systematically over a period of time. In the same way that it takes time to learn to play a musical instrument, it also takes you time to learn how to use our most important instrument, the body-mind. It also takes time to explore how to apply the changes induced by yoga into your life in a balanced way. Yoga gives you maps and guidelines you can use to make this process safe, continuous, and joyful. Over time you feel empowered, through knowledge, wisdom, and intuition, to be self-directing on your own spiritual and yogic path.

Tantra – A Science of Self-Transformation and Liberation

Tantra is a wisdom tradition and an empirical philosophy, like Raja Yoga, that places major emphasis on embodying knowledge and experience rather than intellectual speculation. It is a profound system of self-transformation that teaches liberation of consciousness through the release of energy trapped within the chakras, particularly within the mūlādhāra chakra. So, while Raja Yoga is a science of consciousness, tantra is a science of energy. It is the science of self-transformation that is most appropriate for us in this day and age.

That is, rather than providing theory, it provides techniques and methods to liberate energy in order to expand consciousness and realize one’s inherent spiritual power. Consciousness and energy are united and made available for health, mental peace, emotional resilience, creativity, and spiritual realization.

Tantra is a practical, experiential science that lights the torch of self-awareness and show us the way to self-transformation and to psychological, psychic, and spiritual growth and fulfillment.

Tantra and Yoga are intimately related. Many yogic techniques are used as part of tantric practice and ritual. Both yoga and tantra share the common goal of uniting individual awareness with the highest Self. This is why we have called the system of tantra that we teach yoga-tantra.

Defining yoga-tantra

The word tantra is derived from the Sanskrit roots tan and tra.

• The root tan means extension, expansion, stretching, and pulling as you pull rubber.
• Tra means to liberate, to release, to emancipate, and to make free. Therefore. it is the liberation of energy to expand consciousness.
• Yoga means conscious connection or union. In this context, it refers to techniques that enable the union of consciousness and energy of Shiva and Shakti.

Yoga-tantra, therefore, means the “liberation of energy trapped in matter and in neurotic psychological patterns in order to expand your individual consciousness and unite it with universal consciousness.” Once energy is liberated, it can be used to perceive the subtler realms of existence that exist beyond the realms of the senses, to e domain of the socially conditioned, limited egoic-self, into the invisible world. The invisible becomes a tangible experience. You no longer have to think about it. You can perceive and experience it.

Energy is often trapped in tensions and old unconscious habits and patterns within the bodymind. In this state, you may feel small, powerless, and out of touch with your true Self. This is what keeps you from feeling the invisible world and moving beyond the smaller state of being most of us are trapped in. In this state, the Self is asleep, and only the mind is operating. Being trapped in the false self, there is no way to experience the authentic Self until you engage in methods that liberate you from the conditioned state. The process is one of de-conditioning and re-conditioning.

Yoga-tantra provides the maps, techniques, rituals, and methods to liberate trapped energy. This energy can then be used to power your journey back to a deep connection with your essence, with your true Self. It all depends on your karma, how much you are trapped and how much you can free yourself, and how much you need to do to start to move away from constricting patterns that may have held you imprisoned for many lifetimes.

The rituals can be external and complex or internal and very simple

A rich and diverse tradition

Tantra is a rich and diverse Indian philosophical tradition, a profound system of self-transformation that teaches liberation of the mind through the release of energy. The little thinking sensorial mind is expanded into new dimensions of being. You need to be properly prepared to handle this.

Tantra is both a philosophy and a sādhana shāstra. Sādhana means yogic or spiritual practice. A shāstra is a text that gives instructions on how to perform techniques, in this case, for liberation.

Tantra is a systematic, scientific, and experiential method that offers the possibility of expanding your consciousness and faculties. It does this via a staged path.

Tantra also incorporates various sciences and systems into itself, including mathematics and physics, the nature of light and sound, atomic theory, space-time relationships, astronomy and astrology, the calendar and cosmology, alchemy, and their use in spiritual practice.

A flexible, non-dogmatic tradition suitable for all

Tantra provides you with very diverse methods to suit your individual needs according to your karma, nature (swabhāva), and abilities (adhikāra). Swabhāva includes the things you are designed to be attracted to. For example, are you more intellectual or devotional, more active or passive, academic or physical? And your abilities, what strengths and weaknesses did you bring with you that will enable you to move towards your life purpose, your reason for this incarnation. Are you mathematical, musical, or into movement? Are you able to comprehend the subtle esoteric philosophy, or are you more inclined to hedonism? These are all things you need to reflect on and then utilize for your growth and development. Anything can be used.

Tantra is not limited to any one group or sect, and indeed many traditions have absorbed and accepted tantric practice into their own philosophy or religion as a practical way to achieve a profound experience of the inner reality.

Part of tantra’s beauty lies in its ability to offer multiple methods and approaches so that it can be incorporated into an individual’s life, rather than just a single method or a dogma that demands we conform to a single “right” way of being. So, the key takeaway message as practitioners of tantra is that you have to create and adjust your own individual and unique sādhana that suits you according to your karma, swabhāva, and adhikāra until you find a guru or guide who can instruct you on the next step. It all depends on what you want to achieve, and there are multiple techniques and approaches that can take you toward your goal. There are multiple approaches to the chakras, from very simple to very complex.

Tantra provides a synthesis between spirit and matter, enabling you to achieve your fullest spiritual and material potential. The key is to go into the inner world and bring that into your outer world. That is what enriches you. If you want to make the outer world the source of your meaning and fulfillment, you are in trouble because it is just matter. It does not have any inherent or intrinsic value other than what you give it from within you. You project your desires, values, and meaning onto objects based on what is in you. It is essential that you recognize that the psychic projections are the true reality, not the material object. Of course, both are important. Psyche and matter are essential for your existence. The problem is that most people are over-focused on matter and disconnected from their essential inner nature. They want the object to fulfill them in ways that it can’t. this is because they are empty inside, disconnected from the source of joy, meaning, and fulfillment. Of course, objects do have a value. The key is to make spirit the source of your joy and to transfer that onto the objects of the world.

Renunciation, detachment, and asceticism are not part of tantric philosophy. Rather, tantra teaches the opposite: not a withdrawal from life, but the fullest possible acceptance of our desires, feelings, and situation as human beings. It teaches you to dive into life and to accept all the good, the bad, and the ugly as part of the creation of the one primal Shakti.

Tantra has healed the dichotomy that exists between the physical world and its inner spiritual reality. For the spiritual, to a practitioner of tantra, a tantric is not in conflict with desires and with the organic world but rather is concerned with its fulfillment. You need to be able to live in accord with society and its restrictions, as well as recognize the universal laws that are part of the creative force. Tantra does not demand withdrawal from life as does Patanjali in his Raja Yoga. Rather it is the fullest possible acceptance of your desires, feelings, and impulses and your karmic situation. It is the ability to control your mind and its internal drives and forces and to use these for the advantage of the whole world and all beings.

This creative force, called libido in Jung’s depth psychology, carries all of the human basest and highest drives. It is, therefore, inevitable that sometimes these two aspects conflict, and it requires a mature level of sādhana to be able to handle the tensions such conflict can create.

It is important to understand that the creative force, the libido, is actually kundalinī. This path of the union of the world and the spirit is often called the razor’s edge for good reason. Yoga tantra, far from being a libidinous and hedonistic path, teaches you how to control your desires and impulses, especially those that are transgressive and unacceptable in society. You learn how your raw animal and base nature can fit into a sublime philosophy. It is this philosophy that transforms your base nature into something wonderful that uplifts you and supports the well-being of all beings.

So tantra has healed a dichotomy that exists between the physical world and the inner spiritual laws of dharma.

The chakras

Tantra has brought to light the theory of the psychic centers, the chakras, as a fundamental backbone of its practice. Various tantric traditions have elaborated on the chakras and have devised visual and abstract symbols that map these centers and enable you to journey either up or down the chakras to gain either worldly or spiritual experience.

The chakras are doorways into the universal, which is accessed either through working directly on the chakras, via kundalinī yoga, through the performance of various rites and rituals, or through the repetition of mantras, particularly seed mantras, and gazing at sacred images, such as yantras, mandalas, and deities. Mantras are particularly important, especially the seed mantras, the bīja mantras.

Tantra Practices and Techniques

Tantra is, above all, a very practical system that aims at producing defined results. Tantra provides us with simple techniques that you can perform daily, either as formal practices or applied to your daily life for creative living.

By practicing these techniques, you can remove tensions and negative patterns, create joyful states of body-mind and awaken consciousness.

The main practices of tantra taught today are Yoga Nidra, which is probably the easiest and most accessible of all the tantric meditations, various Chakra meditations, and the core yoga-tantra practice Ajapa Japa, which unites breath, mantra, and consciousness.

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