In 1965 my yoga teachers all expounded celibacy as the only way to deal with our sexual energy. They all explained that sexual energy was the fuel for spiritual advancement and enlightenment. Conserve it, sublimate it, ignore it, transmute it, transform it.
As a young man I had a hard time with this and felt that I was failing my gurus. But so many were later busted for having sexual relationships with their female clients. Almost all of the schools of yoga and Vedanta recommend Brahmacharya (celibacy), which seems to work in an ashram, cave, or forest away from women.
Tantra was a path for living in the everyday world.
I started teaching Tantra Yoga to my hatha yoga students in 1980 as part of my school’s curriculum. It quickly became my primary yoga practice. When I started studying hatha yoga in NYC in 1965, there was no “Yoga” in the phone book. The closest listing in the Yellow Pages was “Dannon Yogurt.” When I made the transition to teaching only Tantra, there was no other teacher in the U.S. doing it.
The people who take our course discover that our presentation of Tantra Yoga is equally about love and sex. Lust is an energy that takes. It is second chakra (reproductive/sexual) energy being directed by the third (power) chakra.
Love is about giving, not taking.
In Tantra Yoga, it becomes the highest expression of the forth chakra (love) joined to the sixth (consciousness) and elegantly expressed through the second chakra. Our books, DVDs, and courses teach The Art of Conscious Loving.
Lust is easy for most men to express, yet love is what both their spirits and their women really crave.
Lust will make you do things that seem like a good idea at the time. Afterward, not so much. Lust can get one into trouble, so many people and religious institutions fear lust. They threaten us with damnation in an effort to limit our sexual experience. They rarely experience the sacrament of sexual love in the bedroom with their beloved.
Yet it is God that created sex; we have screwed it up because of a lack of education about how to be a great lover. We are 21st-century lovers held back from sexual love by 19th-century values.
I am the originator of Sacred Spot Massage. It is not an ancient practice from India, but rather is derived from my study and use of a tantric practice called Nyasa (ritual charging and awakening of the chakras), energy, mudra, massage, and psychology. Thirty years later, it is a worldwide movement with over a million Google hits, and it is part of most tantra teachers’ courses.*
Charles Muir
Founder of the Source School of Tantra Yoga
*Read the entire interview with Charles Muir in Common Grounds Magazine HERE.