Introduction to Tantric Pair Meditation
Contents
EXPERIENCES OF TANTRIC PAIR MEDITATION
THE SEXUAL NATURE OF THE “TANTRIC BODY”
ADVANCED TANTRIC ARTS OF AWARENESS
THE POWER OF TANTRIC INITIATION
AN EXPERIENCE OF TANTRIC INITIATION
1. Joint Meditational Posture
Sit with your back erect directly facing your meditational partner. Use cushions or stools with adjustable height to ensure that your eyes are level with those of your partner.
One of you should cushion your partner’s knees between your legs. This is in order to allow a sufficient degree of physical closeness to your Partner to feel their bodily presence and sense the space between you as full rather than empty – as a resonant field of inter-bodily awareness.
2. Pre-meditation
The pair meditation begins with a pre-meditation in which both you and your Partner close your eyes and turn your awareness inwards, giving yourselves time to ground your awareness in the depths of your own inwardly felt bodies. Then each of you should give yourself as much time as you feel you need to become more aware of the way you have been feeling yourself over recent minutes, hours, days or weeks, of the way you are currently experiencing yourself, and/or the way you would ideally wish to experience yourself.
When either of you feels ready to open your eyes, tap your Partner’s knee. If one of you, having been tapped by the other, does not yet feel ready to open their eyes, the other can either return to closing their eyes and inwardly meditating themselves or alternately, switch their awareness to their Partner - seeking to feel the particular qualities of awareness that reveal themselves through the face of their Partner.
3. MAIN meditation
1. Be aware of the spaces within and around your own body and that of your Partner.
2. Visualise and feel the inwardness of your own body and that of your Partner as hollow spaces, spaces into which your Feeling Awareness can flow like breath.
3. Alternate freely between (a) searching your own soul for that which finds expression in the face and eyes of the other, and (b) searching the face and eyes of the other for that which resonates in your own soul. This means:
1. showING your Partner with your own face and eyes anything important you are aware of FEELING within or around your own body as a whole.
2. FEELING within or around your own body as a whole anything important you see SHOWING through your Partner’s face and eyes.
3. MIMICKING as precisely as possible with your own face and eyes what your Partner is SHOWING through theirs - thereby helping you to feel it more with your body as a whole.
4. IMPARTING what it is you are seeking to show through your face and eyes to the sensed inwardness of your Partner’s body – thereby helping your Partner to feel it with their body as a whole.
The key to the power of Tantric Pair Meditation lies in letting go of your ordinary sense of personal ego-identity. To do so means allowing what you are aware of feeling to alter your feeling awareness of who you are – your experienced self. In this way both you and your Partner, Self and Other, can come to feel and quite literally perceive the faces of your Other Selves, whilst remaining rooted in that larger Self of which they are all an expression – the divine Awareness Self. The secret to this aware ‘i-dentification’ with different aspects or faces of Self and Other lies in ‘Eye-dentification’. This means always feeling your eyes, seeking to feel whatever you are feeling in your eyes, and in this way coming to literally feel yourself looking out at the world and at your Partner through many different eyes and from many a different self or ‘I’.
Through Tantric Resonation and Tantric Pair Meditation, the principles of ‘morphic resonance’ and the practice of ‘morphic resonation’ cultivate the ability to freely shape-shift or ‘morph’ one’s face, eyes - and entire felt body - in resonance with changes in one’s feeling awareness of self and other. In this way Tantric Pair Meditation can lead to countless extraordinary experiences of metamorphosis or Metamorphic Resonation of the sort described below:
“I clearly perceived my wife ‘morph’ into a younger brother and warrior comrade in an earlier life.”
“My morphing took me, shaman-like, through a variety of animal forms.”
“I heard a sweet and soundless music at the edge of the spiritual light that bathed me.”
“I experienced hundreds of different selves looking out through my eyes, becoming each in turn.”
“I spoke inwardly in a wordless musical tongue — but knew exactly what I was saying to my Partner.”
“I experienced how each inner sound seemed to alter the whole shape and tone of my bodily soul.”
“I felt as if my whole body had been inwardly massaged and become again a safe home for my soul.”
“I learned that we are not “in” our bodies at all, but in some strange way our bodies are in us.”
“I recaptured a lost freedom of spirit — the freedom to roam and shift-shape my soul body at will and follow it into different inner landscapes and dimensions of awareness.”
“Objects in the room where we engaged in Tantric Meditation seemed like dumb stage props — so much less real than the space of awareness we had entered.”
“My everyday self and its worldly concerns seemed to have disappeared into the background, hovering like a thin mirage above the deeper part of my soul that I was now resonating with.”
“I resonated with an intelligence within me so awesome, that the experience completely transfigured me. I knew after that what my inner being really is — and thus who I really am.”
“I tuned into a gentle, loving aspect of myself that made my whole body feel bathed in warmth, and allowed my soul to breathe in an incredibly soft, slow and smoothly flowing rhythm.”
“I perceived a vast, dark field of what at first seemed like corpses, but I later understood as the deserted, dormant and unhatched spiritual eggs or “cocoons” of the living.”
“I felt illuminated and blessed with grace in the benevolent, healing light radiated by the gaze of my Partner, who experienced herself as a divine-angelic being.”
“I saw and knew my Partner (female) as a fierce Samurai I had known in the past whose fiery and impulsive temperament was still a force in her soul.”
“I entered other dimensions in which I experienced aspects of my being which I could only describe and visualise as beings on the scale of planets, behind whom lurked yet higher beings of the nature of constellations of pure intelligence.”
“I knew my own innermost being as something like a vast cosmic womb that was a mouth of creation, my soul a vowel issuing from its awesome voice, and my body a type of unutterable solid “consonant” by which it spoke me into physical existence.”
“I felt myself entering a weightless, floating realm in which I entered into communication with a group of ethereal, dancing spirits like will-o’-the-wisps, together called “The Seven”.
“I perceived the divine face of Lord Shiva in my Guru, feeling that he was not only revealing that face, but embodying the Divine Awareness, and imparting its Bliss to me.”
Which body is it with which we feel the ‘brightness’ or ‘darkness’, ‘tone’ or ‘colour’ of our own and other people’s moods? Which body is it with which we can feel ourselves as ‘heavier’ or ‘lighter’, ‘fatter’ or ‘thinner’, yet without any change to our physical weight or size? Which body is it with which we can feel closer or more distant, warmer or cooler towards others irrespective of our temperature or physical distance from them? Which body is it with which someone’s ‘heart’ can be felt as ‘big’ or ‘small’, ‘warm’ or ‘cold’, with which we or others can ‘lose heart’ or suffer ‘heartache’, feel ‘heartened’ or ‘disheartened’ – independently of any change in the functioning of ‘the heart’ as a physical organ? Which body is it with which we can feel ‘uplifted’ or ‘carried away’, ‘sucked in’ or ‘trapped’, ‘pressured’ or ‘de-pressed’, ‘spaced out’ or ‘closed off’, ‘hollow’ or ‘empty’, ‘shapeless’ or ‘spineless’, about to ‘explode’ or ‘implode’ - yet without our physical body moving or changing shape in any way? Which body is it whose ‘skin’ we can feel ourselves or others to be more or less ‘at home’ in, which can make us appear ‘thick- or thin-skinned’, ‘edgy’ or ‘irritable’ - yet without any change to our physical skin surface or texture? Which body is it whose tone can be felt as ‘dull’, ‘flat’ or ‘sharp’, and whose texture can be felt as ‘solid’ or ‘airy’, ‘firm’ or ‘brittle’, ‘jagged’ or ‘smoothed out’, ‘frayed’ or ‘fragile’, ‘gutted’ or ‘crushed’, ‘torn’ or ‘stretched’, ‘strained’ or ‘stressed’? The answer to all these questions is not the ‘physical’ body – the body perceived from outside as an object. Nor is it some form of second ‘psycho-physical body’ or ‘energy’ body – one that we also think of or perceive as an object. Instead it is our subjective body – the body as we feel it from within. The inwardly felt body however, is more than just our outer physical body as we are aware of it from within. Instead it is a ‘Field Body’ unbounded by the Flesh - for its only boundaries are the boundaries of our feeling awareness of ourselves, other people, and every other body in the world around us. Through it we give physical form to our divine body (‘Divyadeha’), our ‘Awareness Body’ (‘Vijnanadeha’) or ‘Body of Feeling Awareness’.
It has had many names – ‘subtle body’, ‘astral body’, ‘energy body’. Yet by recognising the true nature of the ‘inner body’ as a subjective body or soul body – our ‘felt body’, ‘feeling body’, ‘body of feeling awareness’ or ‘awareness body’ - The New Yoga offers us a totally new understanding of the initiatory and divine-sexual teachings and practices of Tantra. What Gavin Flood calls the “Tantric Body” is not a body of subtle ‘energies’ but our divine and eternal Body of Feeling Awareness. It is that body with which we can feel ourselves ‘closer’ or more ‘distant’ from others without any movement of physical bodies. It is that body with which we can ‘close off’ our Feeling Awareness of others or alternatively ‘open’ ourselves to them - taking them into the spacious field or ‘Feel-d’ of that Feeling Awareness.
“She touched her heart.”
“She felt deeply moved inside by him.”
“He tried reaching out to him.”
“He was gripped and captivated by her.”
“She exposed herself to him.”
“He never took him in completely.”
“She found her company stimulating and exciting.
“She opened herself to him fully.”
“She felt he had pushed her away.”
“She always tried to handle him gently.”
Such expressions are not simply sexual metaphors couched in words, but true and literal descriptions of some of the countless ways in which we relate to others through our Tantric Body - our Awareness Body. It is with our Awareness Body that we can feel reached out to or shut out by others, exposed or stripped naked by them, held or embraced by them, gripped and captivated by them, uplifted and carried away by them, weighed down or de-pressed by them, prodded or poked by them, penetrated or violated by others, full-filled or left empty by, stimulated and excited by others, left cold and unsatisfied by others, drawn to or pushed away by them, neared or withdrawn from by them, warmed or chilled by them, twisted and contorted or straightened out by them, bound and gagged or set free by them, handled gently or mishandled by them. It is with our Awareness Body that we can also make ourselves more or less approachable, touchable and movable by others, more or less graspable by others, penetrable or impenetrable to others. We can be more or less willing to reveal or expose ourselves ‘naked’ to others, more or less willing and able to let them get close to us, to come face to face with us, to let ourselves be touched, held and gripped by them, to open ourselves to them and to take them in. Similarly we may feel more or less willing or able to move closer to others inwardly, to stand erect before them or reach out to them, to gently open them up or get under their skin, to get inside them, stimulate and excite them, seed and fertilise their souls.
What people ultimately seek through physical contact and intercourse is a sense of dissolving the apparent bodily boundaries that divide us as beings - thus experiencing true spiritual intimacy of soul with another. Through the medium of Tantric Pair Meditation we can come to feel this intimacy, dissolve the felt bodily boundaries that seem to separate us as souls from other beings and thus experience the subtle sensual bliss of merging or ‘melding’ our soul with that of another. This is the art of Tantric Soul Melding as taught through The New Yoga. Tantric Soul Melding is not Tantric ‘sex’ – more like a profound Tantric ‘hug’ in which we allow the felt sense of our surface boundary to dissolve, and feel the hollow soul inwardness of our own head, chest and abdomen merge and meld with that of another - even without physical contact. If ‘soul’ is essentially unbounded, bodiless Awareness (Shiva) then what it is aware of is nothing less than the entire embodied cosmos (Shakti) and every body in it. Tantric soul melding is the key to the arts of both Tantric Soul Coupling and tantric initiation - in which the ‘empowered’ or ‘initiating’ Guru (‘Siddha Guru’ or ‘Diksha Guru’) may merge their awareness with that of the disciple, enter the body of the disciple without leaving their own, embrace it in a boundless space of awareness, or fill it from below with an ever-rising up-flow of awareness (Kundalini) from the root centre of awareness (Muladhara).
Within The New Yoga, Tantric Pair Meditation is the key not just to the art of Tantric Initiation, but to an entire range of ‘Advanced arts of Awareness’. These include among others:
Tantric Soul Melding and soul journeying
Tantric Soul Melding is one of the principle arts of the Tantra Guru - the art of entering the body of another without leaving one’s own. It is achieved first of all by intensified and intimate bodily sensing of different inner regions of another person’s body (for example their head, chest and abdomen), by visualising and sensing those regions as hollow spaces of awareness, and letting awareness flow into, feel and fill those spaces from the corresponding region or regions of one’s own body. This allows one to sense and feel the subtle soul tones, qualities and textures of awareness already present in the inwardness of another person’s felt head and body spaces, to resonate with these and also impart new, transforming and healing qualities to them. Above all, Soul Melding is a way of dissolving the surface bodily boundaries that seem to physically bound our awareness and that appear to separate us as souls from one another - and from the soul world. In this way it also provides a gateway into that world and a way of experiencing extraordinary shared journeys of soul within it – the art of Tantric Soul Journeying.
2. TANTRIC SOUL INTERCOURSE OR COUPLING (‘MAITHUNA’)
In contrast to Tantric Soul Melding, Tantric Soul Coupling is initiated through an intensified gender polarisation of the Partners engaged in Tantric Pair Meditation. The Partner - male or female - embodying the divine ‘masculine’ role identifies with the state of unbounded bodiless awareness that is Shiva, enfolding and filling the body of their Partner (male or female) with that Awareness, feeling and perceiving it as the sole body in the entire universe – indeed as the entire embodied cosmos (Shakti). Enfolded and filled by the sensual substantiality or nectar (‘Amrita’) of Divine Awareness, the Partner (male or female) embodying the ‘feminine’ role of Shakti experiences the transformation of divine awareness bliss (‘Ananda’) into heat, radiant light and intensified sensory and sexual pleasure (‘Kama’). The soul body becomes a body of bliss or bliss body.
A yogi can enter another person’s body without leaving his own.
Abhinavagupta
Tantric Pair Meditation is a vehicle for the cultivation and embodiment of the highest and most advanced yogic powers or ‘Siddhis’ that can be attained through The New Yoga. These include the power to enter the body of another without leaving one’s own, to feel one’s own soul in the body of the other and vice versa, to merge or meld one’s soul with that of another, to freely shape-shift one’s soul body in resonance with that of another, and to use this resonation as a medium of soul melding and spiritual healing. Tantric Pair Meditation is therefore also the principal medium of Tantric Initiation or ‘Guru Diksha’ in The New Yoga - the direct impartation of divine awareness and knowledge by a ‘Sat Guru’ (true guru), ‘Siddha Guru’ (guru with powers) or ‘Diksha Guru’ (initiatory guru). By means of initiation through Tantric Pair Meditation, Tantric Soul Melding and Tantric Soul Intercourse the most profound depths and exalted heights of spiritual awareness can be experienced in the most blissfully sensuous and bodily way. Through Tantric initiation the Tantra Master or ‘Siddha Guru’ comes to experience their own body too, as a ‘Bliss Body’ - nothing but a blissful condensation of the bodiless awareness that is Shiva, thus experiencing the ultimate mantra of Lord Shiva:
and Bliss – and the entire universe is my body.”
Tantric Initiation reflects the fundamental principle of Tantric religious ‘worship’ – to worship a God by becoming that God (‘Theosis’). Does the hand need to ‘worship’ the arm or body of which it is a part - as if that arm or body were a separate being? No, for it knows itself as a part of that arm and body. Worship in Tantra means learning to identify with that divine awareness of which our entire body is itself just one bodily part or portion, just one condensation or embodiment.
You start meditating,
Entering your bliss body
With eyes almost closed
Your face enraptured.
I move into my bliss body
And begin to resonate with you.
Ahhh, shivers of pleasure
Flow through my body
As the tones of your being
Reverberate through me and
The instrument that is my soul
Resounds in harmony.
You respond with a sensuous smile
And the serpent begins
To uncoil her body.
At first my touch is tentative
Yet it reveals every time
A different face of yours, then
A different body is emerging.
In front of my eyes.
Shiva has entered you
And through your eyes
He addresses me
As his Goddess
With reverence and love.
And our souls dance
Gently caressing each other at first
Touching here and there
Fluid and flowing around each other.
Then faster yet without urgency.
Weaving a joyful pattern of love.
And the Goddess rejoices
In her sensuous bliss
His soul taking me
Higher and higher
My soul responding
Gasping, swooning
My bliss body merging with his
In a sea of sound and darkness,
Swirling heat that burns
Into my heart and heals it.
You have taken me, Shiva,
Taken me in my fullness
Saying yes to all of me,
Your soul singing our love.
And every pore of my body breathes
Your light, my light and the divine light
In which we both have our abode.
Overflowing with bliss
I cry out and laugh with joy
And you join in the laughter
And for a moment we are
Human again.
You move your chair
To sit in front of me -
Your knees touch mine,
Your eyes burning with intent.
I feel you entering me,
A different force now than before.
Warm waves of voluptuous fullness
Well up from my womb.
Your power deftly explores
Where it needs to go
Yet subtle, without agenda,
Following what it finds
Yet knowing what it wants to achieve.
We move closer together.
Our faces almost touching
We breath in the fragrance of each others soul
Savouring the delicate sweetness
Emanating in thousand tones
From the joy of our union.
And my soul finds in you
The places that need healing
And I breathe over you
What I took from your soul breath
After savouring it,
Wedding it to mine,
Transforming it through knowing
Into medicine
That heals us both.
And the fragrance of our souls
We give back to each other
As nectar. Our eyes
Are full of it and overflowing.
Our soul bodies take a backward step
To behold each other in this new found bliss.
Yet I feel Kula hot within me,
Dark light in the darkness of my womb.
And then I see the movements of your hands.
Hands that grow out of, overlay
Your fleshly ones,
And visible for me as they.
Hands that move and shape
A poem of Mudras.
One after the other
Like something you’ve learnt by heart
And practiced for lifetimes,
Fluid, fast, speaking without hesitation.
You move closer again,
Your exploring gets more urgent,
Mounting pleasure opens every cell
Ready to take in what ever
You give.
And what a gift it is
That takes me by surprise:
You speak to me.
The coils of your intent.
Teach me what you do
And how you do it
As you probe and move and give and take.
I am enraptured
Can there be something so much more
Powerful and deep,
Exciting and exhilarating
Than the exquisite bliss that
made me swoon before?
Yes! And I feel you moving in me,
Being moved by what you are moving
To go further, and higher, and deeper
Seeking the boundary
But there is none.
Dark red hot waves pulse through me,
Bhairava rises in me hot and hard,
Throwing me, carrying me
Illuminated by the dark radiant light
Of the Kula within my womb
He is splendid.
And I am one with him,
One with the waves,
I am the waves
Smashing against no shore,
I am the sea, the world,
The Goddess, I AM.
You teach me the wisdom
Of my soul body
As you learn it,
Its width and breadth,
Its unfathomable depth and
Its heights that would make me dizzy
Did I not recognize them as myself.
You teach me the language of TANTRA
And I understand every word.
My responses come halting first
Repeating what I learned.
Then tentatively forming words
Addressing you.
My active vocabulary still small, yet
Our two voices sing
A powerful song that
Fills the space around us
In which we dance,
Teach, learn, cleave to each other, love and heal.
Enough, learning a new language takes time.
I am full, I need to savour now,
Digest what I have taken in,
Take a step back
And see the gift before me.
I need to study your tantric words
Which are reverberating in my soul
And bring them
Into my flesh body, into my bones,
To make them mine.
I need to explore the new space
You have opened and filled.
I am no longer
Who I was before.
I bow before you, beloved teacher
Who gives selflessly.
But you are also
No longer who you were.
I see it in your eyes
As they look at me
With love and joy and pride and some surprise.
I smile at you, Beloved,
knowing we have renewed
Our holy vows.
©Peter Wilberg 2006