What do we mean by Tantric Bliss?

If you think about you in your everyday life, most people would say that they don't live in a state of bliss, and for me, bliss is on that spiritual journey to this thing called enlightenment. Bliss is a Nirvana that we're all heading towards on a spiritual path, where we find peace and love, togetherness and unity, divine wisdom, understanding and knowledge. Now, who doesn't want that?! Many people are afraid of this level of understanding - like passing through the doors of perception, as Jim Morrison sang of, through drug taking. This is why being taught in a safe and controlled manner by experienced and qualified persons such as myself, are a good way to experience bliss.

Specifically for me, there are two different ways of getting into bliss.

The first thing is through silence. Sometimes this is achieved when we have tine to ourselves - no TV, no music, phones, alarms, noise, people or animals...which happens ever so rarely these days unless you specifically set time aside for your silence, by silencing all these things. A bath is about as close as many people get to it, but this is not silence as you are cleansing yourself in water. And, nowadays most people 'pooh-pooh' a bath and opt for the quicker, less expensive and perhaps cleaner-resulting shower, but at the expense of the peace and tranquility .

So, silence is best achieved through meditation. During meditation, you train your mind to take a back seat and be with what comes up once the mind has taken that sidestep away from everyday thoughts. There's a quality, an energy, and a sensation in the body that you feel that is very, very subtle when you stop your mind from thinking..

And for me, it absolutely feels like the divine feminine, because my masculine energy can't control it. The feminine energies are receiving, introverted and based around the moon, whereas masculine energies are extroverted, giving, and based around the sun. All bodies have both masculine and feminine energies that entwine through the body and meet in the third eye (the forehead in humans). When I meditate, I receive and let the universe flow within me. I can't grab it, I can't make it happen, I can't gravitate to it, and what I know is that the more that I surrender, the more that I let go. When you start this, then it creates the possibility for that to happen again and again. But I know that my ego, my mind, my wanting, is absolutely not in control of it. So there's a relationship of surrender around meditation. It's listening without probing, leading, comments or judgement.

The other way into that state of bliss is through sexual energy peak orgasmic experiences. If you do like the tight clench and a whole wad of cum after building up that orgasmic energy, that is also another rocket of bliss to take you again. However with learning and practice, there is also the bliss that can be attained without ejaculation, where you can be somewhere out of the mind, somewhere out of the part of you that wants to control and drive, and drive their own show. Let the masculine ego be pushed aside.

If you think about you on a day-to-day basis, probably like me, your mind is in control of your waking time. Other than my meditation practice, I would say my mind is running the show.

There is a quality inside me that I would say has a level of awareness of where my mind is running now. That awareness is a constant, but I would say frequently through my day, I have this state of awareness that enables me to take a step back and observe my mind and observe my feelings and observe the sensations going on in my body.

So for me, all spiritual practices are going to help you develop this state of awareness, and when I come back into a state of awareness, there's then also another quality of being present. The way I feel it in my body is that it has an energy.

That for me, is the portal to accessing this thing called bliss. I teach diploma retreats that last a week to many men. I offer short meditational practices that last just an hour with one man. And everything inbetween! I would say most people leave that week, feeling deeply moved. Now, why are they deeply moved? Well, there's several things, several combinations that are going on in parallel that are enabling people to evolve.

Firstly, there are very intense meditation practices, catharsis release, letting go. I talk about tantra being a mix of love and truth, and another way that I describe the tantra pathway is, all about bliss and dealing with the crap that gets in the way. This can be dancing furiously, moving and sweeping your body around in release, for example.

In your deeper sessions, such as counselling, emotionl freedom technique, hypnotherapy and psychic tarot, you're dealing with a lot of stuff that has often been suppressed. Often, people are not aware that that's going on. People will be reminded or stuff will come up that they're able to link back to previous things going on in their life.

People often have profound experiences of bliss, of ecstasy, of orgasm, any of those descriptive words that are experiences beyond the mind and experiences that are beyond that take people into, as I say, these states of bliss.

Now, I don't feel for a moment that living in a state of happy bliss is the answer to everything. But I think definitely a starting point in a spiritual journey, looking to see how you can sit more in presence, more in bliss and more in awareness of what's going on. When those things happen, life is more joyful, and you have more choices. I talk about tantra being a pathway to freedom, and what I mean by freedom, is that it's not suddenly being let out of your prison cell of your house, but actually being let out of the prison cell of yourself, your patterns of behaviour, your routines, your mental way of behaving, because you've always behaved that way.

We can learn to recognise the ingredients that ensure we stay stuck, or stand still. Those are the things that we may then change. It could be marriage, mortgage, governmnet regulations on travel, money, resources. We can also learn what gets in the way of knowing that, or having an awareness that actually something isn't right, and then feeling scared to change it.

Often that goes on for a lot of us. Many people face up to the truth that they do not have the courage or resources around them, all the people they feel they need around them to help and support them to make changes.

So in Tantra, as in Freud's seminal psychological analyses, we talk about these things that get in the way. Those barriers are all related to ego, they're all related to mind, and the reason being, is because your mind and your ego, are always running on historic events. Everything that your ego perceives is what the world is based upon what has gone before. It is either frightened of the future, or remembering the past, and it is never really sat in the present, the now. So can we push our egos aside and recognise and seize the opportunity for the presence of now, the opportunity for now?

What do I mean by that moment of now? Well, that moment of now, just as I'm with you, and I feel that in my body, I kind of giggle because I can just tune in to that. Not needing to know, not needing to have an opinion, not needing to be anything and not needing to be feeling the fears of the future, projections, or remembering of the past. The opportunity of now is actually being at this moment of now, that hasn't yet fully defined itself, that doesn't fully know yet.

That moment, isn't utter opportunity that we have opportunity after opportunity, moment to moment of our lives, to be able to experience as new. That isn't based on our conditioning on what's happened to us before and what we're frightened might happen to us in the past, and 99% of people will never understand or even have an awareness that is a possibility.

Now I want to go back to what we mean by bliss. How do you bring this to that, or that to this? It's very good to have experiences that take you beyond whom you think you are. Thise people who might feel this is a bit scary or a bit too far out there, you need to take a deep gulp, you need to take a run and jump as far as you can.

I would say that the tantric path is absolutely about that. It's absolutely about taking a run and a jump it's about starting to lose and let go of the need to know what's going to happen next, and being able to step or stand in that new possibility of now, moment to moment, without any preconceived idea of what that can be.

When you're in that state of presence, the way the world looks is wholly and hugely different, there is a bliss about it. Now, how do you keep that alive through your day? You can master this with some tantric practice, tantric workshops and talking to others about it.

The practice here is about how to keep that state of presence, how to keep that state of awareness with you constantly. Observing yourself, doing your life, and then watching yourself, doing your life and looking and seeing how you are now. Look out with a non judgemental mind at how you behave. This isn't a mind activity. It might sound like a mind activity, but it isn't, it's a state of presence,  and there's always this process of self-inquiry around, inquiring, why you're behaving in that way.

Why are you reacting that way? What's going on? For me, when I go back into that, I'm able to release things. I'm able to understand why I'm behaving certain ways. I have more awareness. And then when I have more awareness, I have more choice, and if I'm being aware of the things that trigger me, that upset me, that go on in my life, and I have an awareness about that, then creates the fertile soil to be able to then be open to the moment of now and be able to experience now without any history attached to it or without any fears about what the future might hold.

I talk about this thing about love and truth. So as I'm with you, this awareness that I'm talking about, this self-inquiry is about the truth part. But one of the things I was talking about recently was that truth without love is incredibly harsh, and another trap here might be that you trap yourself into always being in awareness.

The ego is completely caught up in that, making that awareness the paramount thing in the mind. Now, if we can then lose it, then that makes it lose the point, because it needs an equal amount of love to hold that truth. The love needs to hold the truth, and the truth keeps the love on it's toes, so that it doesn't fall asleep. These two parallels and in all my experience of spirituality, this is where I'm at the moment that these two qualities, these two things are what we're aiming for, truth in awareness and an utter truth, and with love. Love for me, is about bringing compassion to yourself and compassion to others.

The reason I'm wanting to bring that to you is around looking at how compassion sits in that. A son may feel angry at their mother for persecuting their elder sister, how dare she talk about my sister like that? My sister's doing her best. She's not out to piss anybody off or offend anybody, and as I was sitting in awareness, as I was sitting with this situation, it then progressed to, the mother may be talking from some wound, her reason for constantly criticizing, judging, demeaning and assessing her daughter.

When I felt that in my body, it wasn't doing it with my mind and I wasn't doing it in a psychotherapeutic way. I was doing it in a way where I was taking it through my body and just sitting meditating on the quality of that criticism and what then came up into my mind, came into my windows, that this mother may be talking from a core wound that she has, It could be a wound about wanting to be perfect. 

I know this mother utterly cannot cope with any criticism at all, and I know that she's been paranoid that her children might criticize anything she did as an adult. I think she carries some guilt about some of the choices that she made, and I think she still, maybe, goes round a loop of still persecuting herself. So.this behaviour where she criticizes her daughter, is explained by her ego to control her daughter and protect her own self from criticism.This reasoning is around actually, if you throw the first stone, maybe people won't throw them back.

Remember, as I said earlier in this talk, that actually we keep ourselves prisoner. We keep ourselves prisoner to thought patterns that we have about certain situations that keep us, that hold us hostage.

I often come across people in my day-to-day life, in my tantra teaching life, where people are holding on, and I think I also may do this in some situations where I'm not meditating. I'm questioning that at the moment where I hold onto patterns of mental thinking, mental views, mental judgements, mental assessments that actually keep me prisoner and keep other people prisoner. I could then feel that my heart then opened, and I could then sit with that wound. I could sit with that pain and bring awareness and bring love to that.

I’m not saying I've got it right, these are just my ideas, but that for me is one example of how to bring that, how to bring the love and the truth together to unpick and undo the situations and scenarios that you have in your life, and once you unpack those, there's space between your thoughts and your awareness, and that gap is where bliss then starts to unfold.

So, for me, it's not just about being in awareness, that's kind of half the game, but the other half of the game is how you physically manifest that bliss in your day-to-day life.

People talk a lot about self-care. My question is how do you manifest bliss in your life alongside with the awareness and the truth.

And that for me is the spiritual challenge that's in front of us. When we bring more love to ourselves, we then can only do things that are fulfilling and helping us. We get caught up in so many ideas of what we think is important, and what we think is true. Actually in truth, much of that is just not important. Meditate and bring bliss to yourself and manifest this in your life.

I hope that's helpful for you. I hope that's given you some ideas and, look forward to seeing you!