The Truth about Tantra

Promising physical and spiritual ecstasy, Tantra workshops lure couples who want more from their relationships. But what really goes on?

By Todd Jones

The Yoga of Relationship

Before adjourning for the evening, Charles outlines the three interwoven topics he and Caroline will be teaching throughout the week: increasing energy and pleasure; increasing intimacy; and quieting the mind. "We'll learn many techniques for increasing the energy and pleasure you can feel in your body," he says. Many of the techniques will be what he calls White Tantra—practices that can be done individually, like asana, pranayama, repetition of mantras—while others will be Red Tantra—practices that involve joining your energy with a partner's.

Techniques for fostering intimacy, Charles says, are designed to allow lovers to increase their ability to give and to receive each other's energy. He adds that workshop participants will discover that they don't need to learn to do more; they simply need to surrender and allow themselves to be who they naturally are. In the end, says Charles, "Relationship is the ultimate yoga. If you're in a relationship, it is a yoga, a spiritual pathway. Relationship will bring up every lesson you need to learn."

All these techniques culminate, he emphasizes, in the quieting of the mind. Instead of habitually using the thinking mind, students will learn to cultivate the mind's capacity for being completely quiet and receptive. "Ultimately, Tantra is a meditation," Charles notes. "In fact, orgasm is the only universally shared meditative experience, the one that cuts across all cultures. At the moment of orgasm, you're not in your thinking brain, you're in your receptive, being brain; when you're completely absorbed in the present, you enter into timelessness."

As the week progresses, some of the information and exercises are explicitly sensual and sexual. Participants are given primers on touch, kissing, and oral sex, on using the breath to intensify and prolong orgasm, on strengthening the pubic-coccygeal muscles to increase sexual pleasure. One session especially directed at the men focuses on a number of methods for delaying (and heightening and lengthening) orgasm. Using hand puppets—an oversized, furry yoni and lingam (respectively, the Sanskrit names for female and male genitalia)—Charles and Caroline demonstrate how to use your hands to delight your partner, how to mutually pleasure each other using a man's "soft-on" instead of a "hard-on," and how to bring infinite variety to intercourse by changing the speed, depth, and angle of penetration. Inviting their students to gather around them, the Muirs conduct a graphic (though fully clothed) seminar on sexual positions, complete with detailed demonstrations of how to use pillows to support an aching back, and how to gracefully segue from front to side to back entry positions, and from woman on top to man on top and back again, without ever losing contact and intimacy.

Charles and Caroline also spend just as much time on techniques that are far more esoteric and far less explicitly sexual. Almost every day, they lead the class through a half-hour or more of gentle hatha yoga. The routines wouldn't pose much physical challenge to any regular practitioner, but that's not the Muirs' focus. Instead, as in all the yogic techniques they teach, they emphasize awareness of the subtle energy body and the chakras. All the chakras, Charles says, contain dormant energy, consciousness, and intelligence, and the Tantra techniques he teaches aim to arouse and harness those latent energies. He stresses that the goal in doing these asanas shouldn't be to achieve any particular stretch or outward form, but instead "to recognize and reconcile yourself with your body just as it is."

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