Many people come to the Tantra Temple to learn more about themselves and their erotic life, to explore, to heal, to relax, to re-awaken, to discover new things. The experience of receiving a tantra massage is often surprising because it is both intense and relaxing at the same time, you have the time to take in what is happening, every little sensation and every emotion, the energy in your body and the feeling of closeness and intimacy. It is energizing anderotic, and at the same time you enter a space of just being, relaxing into the sensations because you don’t have to do anything, you can just relax. Breathe. Feel yourself.
The experience is savoured, it is not a rushed pleasure but an awakening of your body and your senses coming alive – an experience to be enjoyed fully and to affect you deeply. It’s a conscious experience, unlike the often hasty and hectic sexual arousal where you immediately need to do something with all that energy and excitement. You feel the pressure building and something needs to happen – NOW! Sexual arousal can quickly overwhelm our capacity for staying conscious, as the heart rhythm increases, the breathing gets shallow and fast, our focus narrows, the tension builds and a hunt for pleasure begins.
But what would happen if you would learn to “be” more with your body and all that energy, instead of needing to “do something” immediately? This question is the start of a journey into conscious and sacred eroticism.
Two different kinds of orgasm
There are many different kinds of orgasm, but they can essentially be divided in two categories. One of them is familiar to the vast majority of people on the planet, the other one not so much. We’re talking about explosive and implosive orgasms.
Explosive orgasms happen more or less by themselves, driven by instincts and sexual arousal. It’s the type of orgasms described by Masters and Johnson in “Human Sexual Response (1966)” as “the sudden discharge of accumulated sexual tension resulting in rhythmic muscular contractions in the pelvic region characterized by an intense sensation of pleasure.”
The explosive orgasm is brief, lasting only few seconds or less and is famous for making people roll over and fall asleep and for being so essentially unsatisfying that it leads to all kinds of frustrating feelings of “wanting more”, boredom with sex in general or spending late night hours on Pornhub searching for more exotic forms of excitement.
The implosive orgasm on the other hand is deeply satisfying, it is a much more powerful and enduring orgasm that creates extraordinary sensation and ecstatic pleasure, not just in the genitals and pelvic area. Every cell in the body becomes orgasmic to the point where many people experience a perceptual reality shift with mystical overtones. It seems to go on and on forever, lasting for minutes or hours, because the energy fueling it is not lost in a bright explosive flash but instead moving inside your being and intensifying. The experience is often profoundly emotional, you feel grateful to be alive, whole inside, in touch with something deep within you, profoundly connected with your beloved. It can feel like a spiritual experience, being lifted to a higher dimension of life, in touch with eternity, embraced by God, angels singing, intuiting the meaning of life and being one with the universe.
The implosive orgasm seems to be a rare bird, rarely seen in the wild just passing by without you looking for it specifically. It happens, of course, when the conditions are just right. When you are freshly in love, for example, and you feel to endlessly explore each other, feeling the mystery of the unknown, profound openness and the ecstasy of making your beloved the happiest person on earth.
Aside from very favorable circumstances, quite frankly this type of orgasm requires some serious skills and training, especially if you want to experience it again and again.
Serious skills and commitment
It would be wonderful if it were easy to stay in love, to have a happy couple relationship and an amazing erotic life. It would also be wonderful if it were easy to play piano like Beethoven, to win an Olympic gold medal and if you could just order six-packs off the internet (no, not beer…)
Lovemaking is an ART to be mastered, and you should know that – even if you would prefer that the latest magazine tips would be enough. Mastering an art requires practice. As the saying goes, if you want something different you have to do something different and while there might be plenty of books and personal trainers who can teach you how to get six-packs, given that you’re willing to put in the work, the path to mastering the erotic energy and the implosive orgasm is not quite as simple, reason for which many people give up.
Why should we master our erotic energy?
In the Tantra Temple all masseurs are actively working to awaken and control their erotic energy and to connect it with the heart, both for their own personal development and in order to offer a unique experience of intimacy, love and eros during the tantra massage, touching both the body and the soul of each guest. The ability to be fully present and sublimely erotic has a special impact, a both healing and awakening power.
Some of the guests of the temple are doing a “30 day challenge” of not ejaculating or they have lived in this way for years since discovering the benefits of mastering their erotic energy. As one guest puts it:
“I like this way much better. When I ejaculate, it’s over and I don’t want it to be over, when I feel like it’s just getting started. I feel much more when I make love in this way and I also feel more connected to my wife”
In the tantric tradition the erotic energy is both your life force, the source of all creativity and the fuel for spiritual evolution. You can use it to make bombs or to power a whole country. When we have “a leak” in our system,things stop working properly and we often do not know why. Little things annoy us, stress us, exhaust us. There is a problem but we might think the cause is something else.
“Retaining the sexual energy is to an individual what electricity is to an electric bulb. Without retaining the sexual energy no spiritual progress is possible.” Sri Swami Sivananda
So what does it have in common when the stove is cold, your room is dark and the television is off? Most people would connect the dots and go to check on the fuse box, but we don’t realize when the problems in our life are due to problems with the fuel of life, our erotic energy.
In the tantric tradition creating a “leak free” system is called continence, which involves refraining from ejaculation (in the case of men) and clitoral explosive orgasm (in the case of women).
The fear of losing your pleasure
Many people recoil in horror when they first hear about never ejaculating again. They may typically think, “It almost seems masochistic, I don’t want to give up my pleasure! What’s the benefit?” The prevailing fear is that by withholding ejaculation or clitoral explosive orgasm, they would be sacrificing pleasure for some abstract health or spiritual benefit. In fact, the consciously experienced erotic awakening is beyond any pleasure that “blowing up the bomb” can offer.
This is where we have to realize that there will be an adjustment period and that commitment to training is needed. While it’s not exactly a “no pain, no gain” situation since the training involved is indeed quite pleasurable, the fear of losing the pleasure you know and the psychological pressure and temptation of going for the “easy orgasm” is something many people have to deal with as part of the training.
You both have to deal with breaking many years of sexual habits that instinctively pull you in one direction, you may feel that you can’t perform as you are used to and have to accept being a beginner and learning from scratch all over again.
The advantages of practicing continence:
- infinite lasting power in bed
- regeneration and rejuvenation
- increased health, vitality and strength
- elimination of tiredness and exhaustion after lovemaking
- a system with no leaks is a system in balance, including mental and emotional balance
- increased energy to fuel your creativity, intellectual power and strokes of genius
- increased charm and radiance for both the man and the woman
- elimination of undesired pregnancy
- considerable decrease of the woman’s menstruation and its side effects
- fulfillment, happiness and harmony in the couple relationship
- the preserved sexual energy can be used as a fuel to reach elevated, refined and expanded states of consciousness, and the lovemaking transforms into an efficient spiritual practice
How is erotic continence actually possible?
Scientifically it is known that orgasm and male ejaculation or the specific female explosive loss of energy are not one and the same. Both men and women can learn to separate the state of orgasm from the ejaculation or explosive orgasm and learn to experience orgasms without any loss of energy.
We can recognize the sexual creative energy and tendency to explosive orgasms in our daily life, when we start to feel heavy, tense, goal-oriented, tired, contracted, in contact with frustrations, shame, guilt, impurity, and selfish desires, full of fears and worries. We can recognize the erotic creative energy and tendency towards implosive orgasms in our daily life, when we feel light, free, connected, happy, fulfilled, open, alive, spontaneous, playful, and expansive.
Here are some of the aspects that are important to practice on a daily basis and not just during the lovemaking:
- Exercising the muscles of the pelvic floor, e.g. the PC muscle, which is the muscle that allows men to move the penis up and down while the penis is erect. The sexual energy needs an impulse to go upwards, this can happen through contractions, causing the energy to travel up instead of continuously flowing downwards with the natural gravity.
- Yoga exercises: specific yoga exercises which help the energy to flow up.
- Training the mind: An agitated noisy mind is one of the biggest obstacles to being able to practice conscious eroticism. Mental training exercises and meditation is a must.
- An erotic attitude in life. Being able to relax when life gets intense, enjoying everything you do, staying present, practicing gratitude, happily accepting challenges instead of contracting, struggling or avoiding.
- Focusing on love and making your beloved happy: giving is one of the best ways to get out of our limitations, and when we deeply love someone, there is nothing more fulfilling than making her/him happy.
Receiving tantra massages and learning to give tantra massages is a very big help when you want to make the shift from explosive to implosive. You will need time to relax every time the pressure builds, to calm the mind every time it wants to go somewhere else, to stay in the present moment, to open the heart and letting the experience affect you, to let go of rigid goals and fixation on pleasure, to gain a higher perspective and looking at everything with new eyes, to become conscious of everything that is happening.
How can I learn more:
Read more about the difference between erotic energy and sexual energy
Advaitananda and Adina Stoian are teaching this online workshop for mastering the erotic energy. They will share from their 30 year vast experience as a couple and as tantra teachers. Advaitananda is also a guest teacher at the Tantra Massage Education in the temple.