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

Bill and Susie McKay grew up in the same small Southern town. His father was a military man; hers was a Baptist preacher. Duty was an important word in both of their households, and it applied to just about everything—including sex. "I grew up with the message that sex was a duty that a wife does for her husband," Bill says. "That didn't seem quite right, but I didn't know anything different."

"For a long time, I hadn't been happy with our sex life," Susie chimes in. (Names and some biographical details have been changed to preserve subjects' privacy.) "We were still pretty much repeating what we did 25 years ago when we were inexperienced kids. It reached a point where there wasn't much for me to like. Then a friend started telling me about these Tantra workshops. At first I was reluctant, and then one day everything just dropped into place and I knew I wanted to go. I didn't just want sex, I wanted to connect with both my heart and my second chakra—to have an open heart in a loving, sexual act. And a Tantra seminar seemed like the perfect place to learn."

In the past, couples like Bill and Susie might have sought to infuse more love and passion into their marriages by consulting a minister, a priest, or a rabbi. In the first half of this century, they might have consulted a psychoanalyst; beginning in the '60s, they might have made an appointment with a sex therapist armed with the research data of sexologists like William Masters and Virginia Johnson. All those options are still available. But over the last couple of decades an increasing number of Americans and Europeans have turned instead to books, videos, and seminars with such titles as Spiritual Sex, The Art of Sexual Ecstasy, The Love and Ecstasy Training, and Tantra: The Art of Conscious Loving. These teachings claim to fuse sex and spirituality in a transcendent mix that can transform sexual relationships into both physical ecstasy and a path to personal growth, liberation, and enlightenment.

Seekers exploring a consciously spiritual approach to sex are not just motivated by sexual dissatisfaction. Many already have fulfilling sex lives, but sense that sex and relationship have the potential to provide them with deeper experiences of connection with each other and with the cosmos. Others embark on a search for sacred sexuality after years of meditation in some Eastern tradition. These traditions offer time-honored methods of achieving spiritual growth and insight, but they offer scant wisdom on the subject of sexuality, since they have historically been practiced mostly by celibate monks and nuns.

The sacred sexuality teachings that have gained popularity over the past 20 years incorporate ideas and techniques from the human potential movement workshops that have been evolving since the '60s, from pre-modern Taoist and Middle Eastern sexual teachings, from India's extensive texts on the sexual arts (including the famous Kama Sutra), and from mainstream sex therapy. But, above all, the modern sacred sexuality movement draws its inspiration and techniques from the same ancient spiritual tradition of the Indian subcontinent that spawned most of the practices we now know as hatha yoga—the tradition known as Tantra.

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