Celtic Sacred Sensuality & Tantra Resources

The following section is adapted from the work of Traktung Rinpoche (with permission) who can be found at www.flamingjewel.org

rom the beginning there have been certain rare women and men who, following their hearts great yearning, have answered the question of birth and death with realization of who they truly are - who we all are.

The intent of Sacred Sensuality is to experience and merge with the Divine (God/Goddess) using sexual energy as the vehicle. Sexual energy is the most powerful force within the human body and can lead to profound spiritual experiences accompanied by intense physical pleasure and bliss. Celtic Shamans use their erotic energy with awareness, love and respect, for themselves and their partner.

Sacred Sensuality views everything as energy, vibrating at different rates and manifesting in a myriad of ways (e.g., matter, space, time, forces, people, animals, objects, etc.). Harmony and peace are the result of energies being in balance -- life flows without restriction. Often, due to various reasons, the energies that make up the human body become unbalanced. This results in ill health, sleeplessness, sluggishness, pain, distraction, and many other unwanted conditions including unsatisfactory sexual performance.

The goal of the Sacred Sensual Process is to bring the body into a balanced state before engaging in sexual activity. The benefits are many, including deep relaxation (important for High-Erotic energy), heightened sensual response and better health. The process builds trust and intimacy between the partners.

From the Sacred Sensual perspective there are many energy centers in the body. The seven primary psychoenergetic vortices are referred to as Psychic Power Centers or Wheels of Light, each having a specific function in the body. The most important one is the Heart Power Center. There are three Psychic Power Centers above and three Psychic Power Centers below the Heart Center. The upper three have to do with intellect and spirituality. The three lower Psychic Power Centers deal with base human needs and emotions. The Heart Center balances the Spirit with the flesh. This Center is the seat of unconditional love and divine presence.

(If you aren't already aware of these energy centers or for more detailed information, I suggest you acquire one of the many excellent books about the Psychic Power Centers, Sex Magick and TANTRA. Metaphysical bookstores are a reliable source for these books. Wheels of Light by Anodea Judith is one title to check out.)

Sacred Sensuality smashes the taboo against unreasonable happiness; a thunderbolt path, swift, joyful, and fierce. There are many different types of paths. Some touch you like a gentle spring rain, but Sacred Sensuality is the wild summer thunder storm churning with creation, destruction, bliss and emptiness. Sacred Sex is a wild tiger - if you approach her with right motivation, right intention, and integrity, she'll suckle you at her breast; but if you come to her in a sloppy way, she'll rip apart your body-mind and eat you for dinner.

The Sacred Sensual path is complex and can be dangerous. It requires a strong, well integrated sense of self. Otherwise it is possible for the practitioner to make gross errors in judgment. On the Sacred Sensual path, it is easier to become the ultimate form of egohood and delusion than it is to become free. You can begin by intending to liberate the tyranny of ordinary appearance into primordial awareness and end up crystallizing the ego into diamond-hard delusion. There is no authentic Sacred Sensuality without profound commitment, discipline, intelligence, courage, and a sense of wild, foolhardy, fearless abandon.

Foolhardy because the path is for gamblers. There is a beautiful poem which speaks to this from the Sufi tradition:

Discipline, courage, hard work and intelligence are required because that is what any quest of the heart demands. Sacred Sensuality, which molds the power of creation and ego into skillful means cutting through delusion, requires careful preparation. We don't expect someone who just wants to play around now and then on a keyboard to become a concert pianist. We don't expect someone to be able to get up off the couch one day and run a four minute mile. Great tasks require great effort.

With Sacred Sensuality we are taking the mind and body as cauldron, feeling, ego, elements and world as alchemical ingredients, and imagination informed by divine power as catalyst; and we are accomplishing the great magical task of alchemical transformation. The base metal of dualistic view becomes the infinitely valuable gold of pure and luminous awareness. Sacred Sensuality is a path of tremendous power. This power is not easy to use without getting burned by it. Yet, at the same time, it is a path of great joy.

If you're going to use pleasure and personality as the path, you have to be careful not to self-destruct. In working with an advanced practice such as Sacred Sensuality, powerful energies of psyche, nature, and the subtle realms are harnessed. When such a powerful practice is introduced into one's system through authentic empowerment, it is not something to be taken lightly. Let's say you re going to bring anger into the path. It's a razor's edge between liberating anger into the wrathful compassion of mirror like wisdom and just becoming an arrogant, self-righteous prig. With Sacred Sensuality, either you are actually transforming your mind stream into this wisdom-being of great wrath and power, or you are just dressing up your egoistic anger in the deities's clothes. If Sex is misused, the divine becomes a demon.

When you work with the Sacred Sensual path, you are playing with a live wire. It's charged not with electricity, but with the power behind creative force. Sacred Sensuality practice deconstructs and constructs reality, as play, until the essence of reality becomes obvious. Through the practices, private non-realities interface with the public non-reality until you realize the true nature of both. You use illusion to cut through illusion.

With Sacred Sensuality you are not getting somewhere; you are just waking up to the true nature of things as they are. The colors inherent in clear light are not other than the light. The display whereby Being presents its limitless mystery is not other than the birthless and deathless pure mystery from which Being comes.

Some groups teach that delusion is only an illusion and all that you need to do is understand the illusion to be free of it. Because all you need to do is understand, then all the master has to do is explain the truth to you, and all you need to do is listen and you will "get it".

In truth understanding is a whole body act. You must understand with the cells of your body, your mind and your feelings. Listening involves a profound action of the entire self. This action is what Sacred Sensuality is. The Sacred Sensuality Spiritual practice is the act of listening to the teaching with the whole body.

Sacred Sensuality is a spiritual path whose goal is union with the divine through ecstatic sex. This path is based on the philosophy of sensualism: the idea that in order to transcend our physical existence, we must first fully experience it. Sensualism teaches that the experience of the physical world with complete awareness leads to communion with Divinity. This is different from hedonism, which is mere indulgence in physical sensation and which encourages blind attachment to the physical world rather than conscious understanding of it.

Sacred Sensuality also describes the human body as a microcosm which reflects the larger whole of the universe, and suggests that self-knowledge leads to an understanding of the workings of the cosmos. As above, so below.

Click Here for the Art of Sacred Sensuality

Click Here for Sacred Sensuality and the Great Rite

Click Here for Sacred Sensual Links