Dear Sunyata, What is Tantric Healing and what will it do for me?
Tantric Healing is an alternative healing practice that is becoming more known and accepted as the stigma of fear attached to sexuality and the body lessens in modern culture. Since the latter decades of the 20th century, Tantra (an esoteric science of sacred sexuality) has become well known in the U.S. and western culture. Tantric healing provides a vocabulary and methodology for addressing issues and challenges associated with an individual’s sexual energy and emotional/sexual trauma.
Eros is Life Force, as the primal urge or drive to connect—with emphasis on the connecting aspect of experience. Eros is revealed in many forms, through: imagination, emotions, sight, and the multitude of ways to touch and sensually connect. Erotic energy energizes and vivifies the mind and its thoughts, our heart and its emotions, and our body and its sensuality and sex.
Healthy erotic energy flows freely as it expands and travels throughout the energetic and physical bodies. When there are contractions or knots in the flow of sexual energy, symptoms of discomfort, numbness, low libido, and lower satisfaction with sex and intimacy are felt.
Tantric Healing (aka Sexual healing) seeks to reveal and release the energy knots that block a person’s full experience and expression of their sexual energy. These knots come from adverse experiences of emotional and sexual trauma resulting from such things as betrayal, assault, molestation, or rape. Energy knots are psychosomatic or psychoid —having an emotional-psychological and physiological nexus felt in an area of the body.
Just as when a muscle cramps up and clenches, it tightens and is painful—so too, these energy knots create a clenched, restricted, and contracted energetic knot that limits the flow of sexual energy. When energy is impacted this way, the physical body feels discomfort, pain, or numbness and a loss of energy or desire—and feeling connected to a partner is diminished.
What Does Tantric Healing Do?
A Tantric Healer works with erotic energy and its pathways and repositories in the subject’s body. Hands-on energy healing techniques activate and stimulate energy flow and utilize the restorative power of erotic energy to remove energy knots and revive the natural flow of sexual energy.
Tantric healing is useful because it can effectively address both the physical and energetic aspects for the subject receiving the healing session. The esoteric science of Tantra, (neo-Tantra in the West, Red or Left Hand Tantra in the East) with its understanding of erotic energy applied in healing treatments seeks to discover, release and clear the energetic knots resulting from sexual trauma and emotional wounding. When these blocks to energy flow are cleared there is a return to feeling the fullness of being alive and engaged with life.
Why is Tantric Healing Needed?
Unresolved and unreleased trauma impacts a person’s energy field and its ability to provide life-sustaining and healing prana (energy). When emotional or sexual trauma is experienced, it creates a psychological imprint or “knot” that doesn’t go away by itself if left alone. On the contrary, it will fester and eventually “leak” negative influence into other areas of life, causing upset, sabotage, and unwelcome/unwanted outcomes. Trauma is cumulative, it builds up with each experience that is not healed, cleared and released. This takes a toll on the emotional and mental bodies, suppressing their vibrancy and ability to function well.
An emotional body impacted by trauma carries a heavy load that influences day-to-day interactions with others. It needs to be able to recover, and it needs to relax and feel safe. The mental body impacted by trauma is frequently on overwhelm due to the incessant demands of life’s challenges—and it needs a “time-out” to recuperate. The etheric body—our connection to spirit and the divine—is often starving for conscious engagement; being limited by the emotional and mental bodies’ overloaded levels of concern, with little time for meditation, prayer, introspection, or spiritual communion.
Tantric healing releases and clears energy knots and restores the natural flow of energy and well-being.
Tantric Healing Sessions
Tantric Healing clients request sessions to address long standing deep issues that have not been healed, and to seek help with clearing and releasing stress or trauma recently incurred. Clients are also interested in maintaining their natural flow of erotic energy free from contraction or obstructions, and so will request a session to align, clear, or “tune” their subtle energy system (Chakras, nadis, Sushumna)
Tantric healing session treatments release energy knots that limit the full experience and expression of erotic energy. Releasing these knots returns to the subject an enormous amount of erotic energy flow and personal empowerment, sexual confidence, and a healthy mind-body integration. This state produces enhanced mental acuity, improved emotion regulation and elevated self-awareness that opens them to greater amounts of presence with pleasure and more profound sensual experiences.
Tantric Healing session treatments are designed to engage life force -erotic- energy pathways and the major energy centers (Chakras) through Tantric pranayama breathing, movement, visualization, sensual touch, and sound resonance. Treatments are intuitively guided in a process of sensing erotic energy as it moves, builds, ripens and flows.
Tantric Healing session treatments are facilitated within a container of informed consent to create a safe space of trust in the facilitator and session boundaries so the mind, emotions and body can relax and soften the psychoid armoring that prevents the knotted energy from “letting go” and releasing. To aid in this, usually a full-body sensual massage is often applied to facilitate physical, emotional and energetic relaxation and opening. Energy knots are addressed with gentle, safe, and conscious engagement (sometimes invasive treatments are appropriate: see Internal Pelvic Release) —restoring the subject to a greater sexual integration and vitality.
Tantric Healing, not Sex
Does Tantric Healing include having sex?
No. Tantric Healing does not require or suggest sexual intercourse for relief of symptoms or for healing benefits to be realized. Ethical and conscientious Tantric Healers providing a service to the public in a healer – client relationship do not have sex with their clients.
**However, when the situation is a personal relationship where a couple is trained and adept with Tantric Healing it may be possible to experience a deeper level of healing relief by including intercourse in their personal practice of Tantric Healing.**
Women and men who seek Tantric healing are not there to have sex with the healer, they are there to address sexual dysfunction and adverse symptoms from sexual trauma. Subjects typically go through a series of breath and movement exercises, combined with somatic activation and sensual massage for the purpose of relaxing armoring and discovering where there are energy knots impacting erotic energy flow. Further treatments are designed to release these psychoid knots and rehabilitate the flow of erotic energy, providing relief and restoring healthy body-mind integration.
Feeling safe in Tantric Healing sessions is paramount. People who have sexual trauma carry emotional baggage about sexuality and likely have trust issues and low self-esteem or body image issues as well. Due to sexual assault and abuse some are skeptical and afraid of seeking help with such intimate and vulnerable wounds. Scrupulous Tantric Healers maintain informed consent and consciously implement treatments that maintain the subject’s ability to safely absorb and continue their healing process.
Tantric Healing Results
The container for Tantric Healing sessions is one of: Unconditional Acceptance, Trust, Safety, Respect, Non-judgment, Openness, and Conscious Presence. What results, is a refreshed spirit and enlivened body. Releasing and clearing blocks to the fullness of erotic energy flow results in feeling more alive, more present, more embodied; and more able to enjoy sexual fulfillment with a greater capacity.
There is no threat to existing relationships, in fact the opposite is true—the subject’s relationship experiences a deepening, and a shift into more authenticity, freedom, and joy because the client feels more of themself which they can then give more of to their partner. Couples appreciate helping their beloved achieve the healing of emotional and energetic wounds—without attachment or enmeshment with the Tantric healer.
* The Tantric Healer’s desire for sexual gratification should not be part of the session. They usually remain fully clothed and their genitals are not engaged with or part of a Tantric Healing session. The Tantric Healer’s focus is on the client’s wellbeing and intention for healing, wholeness and integration. The client is always at-choice and frequent ‘check-ins’ affirm consent as the session progresses. There are no surprises or expectations of anything the client is not expecting or consented to.
If you are thinking of working with a Tantric Healer or Sexual Healer, please read my book first: “Safe Sexual Healing: a Guidebook for Healers and Clients.” It thoroughly demystifies and explains sexual healing and what to expect in a session and what kind of treatments are possible. It also shows what to watch out for regarding unscrupulous healers who take advantage of their clients. You can find it on Amazon (Kindle) or Google Play Store (for Android phones/tablets) and a softcover version is available from Amazon, Barnes&Nobel, or Balboa Press websites.
Here’s a reference discussing the psychoid (mental-emotional-physical) nature of trauma and what happens when it is released:
The Neurobiology of Touch Part of Attuning to Clients article in Massage & Bodywork magazine Jan/Feb 2009 by Stephanie Mines
“It is common for massage therapists to see their clients spontaneously remember trauma in response to touch. It is equally possible for numinous or otherworldly experiences to occur. This is because the hypothalamus transforms the activity of the frontal lobes (awareness) into hormonal messenger molecules. These then communicate with the endocrine glands, including the immune system, digestive system, and muscular-skeletal system. More messenger molecules are then released. When clients experience attunement coupled with compassion and educated touch they are poised for a numinous experience that could substantially enhance their immune function as well as change structure and movement. If this happens sequentially, lives change.”
“The release of tension can never be solely a muscular event. In order for muscles to come out of contraction the mind must also let go; with this letting go, memories are unleashed, along with the fear, anger or horror that initiated the contraction.”
If you would like to know more about Tantric Healing contact me for a free 15 minute consultation:
Coaching for men in healing their wounds and in becomming their potential as a man.
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Originally posted on September 28, 2013 @ 10:32 am
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