The Tao of Tantric Yoga

By Satyama Dawn Lasby

The Tao Tantric Yoga is the response to people wanting to know more about the tantric and yogic paths. It is for the tens of thousands working on themselves. Appealing to women and men wishing for more knowledge about sexuality, retaining sexual energy, the secrets of the feminine, making love better. Maybe you want to know tantra in a

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open to Bliss
• Release date: Jul 25, 2022
• ISBN: 9781777909215

Satyama Dawn Lasby

Satyama Ratna Lasby is an internationally known and advanced teacher of hatha, vinyasa and tantric yoga classes and retreats and yoga teacher trainings as well as sessions, trainings and experiences in the subject of Tantra.Taking deep learnings from the physical realms of the body she studied yoga and became a teacher first in Integrative Yoga Therapy in 2003. She began teaching Tantra in group settings in 2011.In her extensive travels in India, Guatemala, Bali, Hawaii and Thailand, she has gained accreditation in the therapies of Thai massage, cranial sacral, lomi lomi, Swedish, Chi Nei Tsang, and Tantric massage. Her love of Chi Nei Tsang abdominal massage and the Tao tradition flourished in 2013 in Chiang Mai, wherein she healed herself of the painful and chronic condition of endometriosis which she had for 15 years. She went deeper into CNT and became a trainer of the specialized massage and also learned Karsai Nei Tsang massage. For the past eight years, she has lived in Koh Phangan, Thailand, developing the program and leading award-winning yoga teacher training programs under Open to Bliss, her own company. She has taught over 2,000 students to be yoga teachers and also Chi Nei Tsang practitioners.Satyama has a deep personal interest and love of the authenticity of tantra and Osho's work. The merging of yoga and the mysticism often involved in tantric study is the topic of her new book, The Tao of Tantric Yoga. This book is to be launched this year as the development of Open to Bliss, evolves in Koh Phagnan, Thailand.Open to Bliss is now specializing in Tantric Yoga Teacher Trainings with healing as a purpose and pleasure as the bonus once the healing has occurred. Satyama is currently flowing with teaching yoga classes to women with the use of the jade egg for womb health and healing of the yoni, as well as changing the limitations of society and conditioned beliefs about the innate erotic nature of woman, when not suppressed.Satyama is known for her full-power truth delivery, ability to promote openness in others, determination and her laugher.www.opentobliss.com

Book preview

acknowledgements

MANY TIMES, I FEEL ALONE IN MY CREATIONS. A BELIEF THAT I MUST AND will do everything myself. In writing this book, and in my own maturation process and evolution, this old belief has changed. There is no way I could have written this book on my own.

I am deeply grateful for the support of the Koh Phangan community and all its characters, lessons, and opportunities.

I am grateful to the generous funders of this project:

Lisbeth Johansen, Colleen Thornton, Sonal Karamchandani, Marie-Eve Barnes, Minke deVos, Shashi Solluna, Julia Grasser, Sandra Shore, Satjan Santos, Eric Hughs, Eyal Matsliah, Richard Kahlig, Jacob Bliksted Sørensen, Shaun Jensen, Beat Zuber, Julian Jorgensen, Martin Fussel, Rick Smith, Eric Hughes, David Dankers, Scott Taylor, Edwin de Lepper and Buddha Café, Footprints Café, and those who chose to remain anonymous.

Gratitude to my parents, Ellen and Ronald Lasby, for creating me, however it happened in ’73. What a karmic ride it has been. I even asked to come through you, to have a look at the unwanted and adopted, at children taken away from their parents, at how we learn to love through it, to do our best. Since my deconditioning, which is never complete, I have learned how we can overcome negativity, judgement, even cancer (from which you both suffered) by changing our beliefs, especially about sexuality and spirituality combined. You inspired me to jump on this path and help others by diving deeply into things others are afraid to reveal, just by being you. Gratitude to my favourite communities, Pachamama, Tamera, Osho, Afroz, Inanitah, Indriya Sangha; and to my Dharma friends for their support in living in groups while remaining an individual on the Path.

Vernon friends, especially Dan Irvine and Patrick Allen, always there for me.

Amihai, Frederick, Amanda, Paul Hapke, Julio, Maizy Andersen, Daniel Muller, Gwenivere, Osho.

Students of Open to Bliss and Samma Karuna.

Brian Gruber, my editor, book designer Alexandru Oprescu and cover designer Shivan Bruce Skipper.

The Tantric Yoga Teacher Training crew of March 2020—what a COVID initiation into the world of courage, and how life is Now.

preface

LIFE IS LIKE A MYSTERY TEMPLE WITH MANY DOORS . The Tao means The Way. The way you go about living your life is your way. Perhaps something in this book helps you to make your way even better.

The Tao of Tantric Yoga has been created with the intentional message of my own belief: you cannot experience the intensity, intelligence, or the sacred depths of tantra without knowing yoga. Becoming proficient in yoga has the effect of making you tantric, and tantra should spark an interest in yoga, so that your experience will peak and elevate.

I completed this book about the practice of Tantric Yoga in the time of COVID (as if this time will ever come to an end now!) In this time, many find themselves in a place of wanting or needing safety, support, touch, and Love. These human desires are not new, we always want something, but when it doesn’t happen, we find ourselves in a place of suffering. We reach for or do things to alleviate the suffering, although these are usually a distraction from the root cause. If we make conscious choices, we can do yoga as a path of self-improvement and empowerment. We look at tantra because as conscious people, we know there is something more in life, and we want to refine it as evolving beings with drive.

Tantric Yoga is a devotional and ritualistic path of spirituality to evolve our bodies, souls and consciousness. It is a method to expand the mind and liberate dormant energy. The principles of yoga form the base of authentic tantric practices that can be done, clothes-on.

Tantric Yoga is the lifelong study of energy, and this rendering of Tantric Yoga is my way of progressing on a deep journey into spirituality and into Love.

My entire life changed from being a business professional to one who slowly discovered, year by year, what yoga was doing for me. I was so curious about the body that I just kept going, turning yoga from an interest to a passion. While simultaneously being athletic and fit, and working as a fitness instructor, I also became a teacher of yoga twenty years ago. I loved the slow revelation and transformation so much that I went into a deeper study of meditation through Vipassana retreats, eventually having the courage to leave my money-making position as the General Manager of the Chamber of Commerce in a city in Canada to being a traveller with a mission to really know meditation. Meditation changed everything. I found out about tantra along the way. It was my way of the Tao. It dropped in naturally very early in my life and never left. It just grew as I evolved and became free of my Canadian-learned conditionings.

I am still finding out about life—about tantra and yoga—by going slower, sharing, and dropping what I think I know. I am a student of tantra, continuously. The combined elements of spirituality and community inspire the dedication of time to pursue a spectacular and evolving life. When I made a commitment to live a tantric lifestyle from a yoga perspective, everything changed in the most inexplicable ways. Life became better, shocking, like a great game. I became free from the past, people, and societal expectations, I trust.

The Tao of Tantric Yoga shares some of my personal experiences in tantra and especially as a free woman in order to depict the possibilities offered by the divine when yoga and tantra are studied, practiced, and embodied. I know I repeat some themes about love and connectedness in the book, it is for a reason. Spirituality embraces repetition in order to embody it.

May your life may also change, in ways you can never imagine or expect, with regularly dedicated practice, and a community that you support and supports you.

Although this book is trying to tell you that tantra isn’t sex, sexuality and sexual positions are referenced in order to help open certain centres of the body for spiritual benefit and unlimited pleasure. Great healing on the planet is necessary on the topic of sexuality. Firstly, we need more education on how to get, give, and simply have sex (let alone tantric sex.) So many wounds are created from people not understanding the feelings or needs of the opposite sex. The cycle of misunderstanding, lack of communication, and poor systemic education continues. Blaming, shaming, manipulations, and projections occur. The changes on the planet are now setting us up for success, as people open to the power of vulnerability. Together, with such a demand for education about intimacy, we can gather and rise, helping each other have what is longed for by every human.

Women play a big role here, you can feel how their power is slowly revealed in society, how they love, manoeuvre, struggle, and exist. I try to unveil the truth about women’s divine nature. First her power will need to be accepted, understood, and then met by the Shiva power innate and learned also in men. Big love is on its way as big power and responsibility is no longer pushed down. Her sexual prowess and simultaneous compassion are slowly being untied and acknowledged, also loved, and will eventually be used to heal the planet.

The first half of the book focuses on the depths of yoga; the second half flows into tantra in tandem with meditation in order to alter the stigmas and secrets associated with the word TANTRA. Traumas that have occurred via repression and ignorance require healing through the Tantric Yoga pathway.

NOW is the time for this magical way of living to occur.

CHAPTER ONE

Sex is Not Tantra

IT IS HOT . We meet in the open air, an innocent play time between two people, in a meditation community in Greece. I am trying to rearrange my bungalow, put the dresser to the other side of the bed, and I need help. I walk outside to see a gorgeous man with a yogi body in goofy sunglasses arranging his tent.

I can be so direct.

Do you want a ride on my broom? I am carrying a broom to clean my not-so clean-at-the-moment room. Amused by my offer, he jumps on the back of the broom and cackles with me. Not really knowing why, I tell him I need a real man, and that I am a good witch.

He helps me arrange my bungalow furniture and we get to know each other through the topic of Osho meditations. We talk about our interest and experience with tantra.

I have been teaching Neo-Tantra and yoga for many years. He is taking trainings with elders such as Margo Anand and Ma Sarita. It’s obvious we are attracted to each other, and I am ovulating. Sexuality is in the air. It is one of those experiences where you are thinking, I wonder what is going to happen here; I hope something good!

It’s not so often I meet people with an interest or experience in tantra. I’m excited about this connection. We make a date to do some massage exchange and energy work. This is common in these spiritual circles and I am familiar with how massage and tantra are doors to open into sexuality. I don’t want to use these doors to having sex, I would prefer time, love, intimate experiences or conversations, or direct conversations on the topic of whether or not to be sexual with someone. But I have not had erotic touch in a long time. I go for the experiment, knowing where it might lead. See where it goes and if it flows, as the spiritual world tends to say. Sometimes I play in this spiritual world. Sometimes I cry about its paradox and hypocrisy, and how people use it to manipulate the unknowing ones.

I can tell that tantric practices/ meditations are a new phenomenon for him and that I have more experience in this world. He left his job one year ago, I left mine fourteen years back. I am in a place of surrender, though. I’ve been living on the island of Koh Phangan, Thailand. It’s quite a feminine place, and I feel like I wish to BE more feminine there because I teach many groups, yoga and tantra, and teaching is a masculine thing to do. I am enjoying the talk about my ability to receive. He brings his harmonium and plays it for me as a gift. I like this gift, an offering to break through masks, quite gentle and subtle. I feel safe, not like this man is trying to get something from me. Like sex.

We forget to consecrate our actions before beginning the massage, but in this moment, we don’t need to be too much in the mind. A consecration is an offering of action to the divine, and it can be done before doing something important, such as making love. No one wants to be a teacher in their personal life. Not me anyway. I long to surrender to someone that is more a leader than I, and I know it is a big request. I just drop the idea of having to consecrate, as taught in tantra workshops, and try to be present with this moment-to-moment experience.

Naked, slightly sweaty, I am surprisingly opened by his gentle touch on my spine and on the back of my heart. He has a light touch and chooses to do chakra activation going upwards. Energetically, I am elevated, feeling light-headed. He is sweet, my chakras like it and are smiling.

We switch places and roles. Now I am in my masculine giving strong strokes with a firm grip on his toned body, his skin soaking-in the oil. I can feel in his innocence that he is in disbelief of this experience. He is breathing heavily. I can feel the formalities dropping, interplaying roles as he touches me while I near completion of the massage. I don’t mind lying beside him and finishing this part of the experience with some light touch. I create goosebumps on his skin, which leaves him wanting more than just a massage.

Now he makes a big gesture, so I know things are changing, taking the Shiva position. (Shiva the reigning deity, partner to Shakti, also known as pure consciousness. In modernized Neo-Tantra, the male disposition is universally honoured with this name.) He happens to gift me oral pleasure for my sacred yoni, which for me, is required in a sexual, tantric experience. He licks and pleasures my inner thighs, my nipples, my armpits. In delight, smiling inwardly and outwardly, my eyes look at him then roll into the back of my head. This is so good, finally! I think, then say it also.

I like our verbal and non-verbal communication. I feel as if I can say anything, and I’m confident enough in these subtle exchanges of power and surrender. I am asking about things like condoms, ejaculation, and if he is having relationships of any kind with women. It feels like an initiation in my sexual maturity with this man. I almost feel like I am the mother, having to take care of the responsibility of what we are about to do. I have learned through tough lessons that it’s not wise to avoid talking about my concerns as a woman before jumping into love-making. I’m concerned that he’s going to be turned off by all these precautionary questions, but I need to know, and I didn’t have time to get into it until this moment.

So, I speak. I speak as a woman, in all my vulnerability, about what this interaction means. I speak from my yoni, valuing it and protecting it. I speak from my heart. I really like this man, but I do not love him. Should I be doing this? Is it too fast? What does it mean to him? Am I thinking too much?

I am open, but I have boundaries. I stick to them.

If it is just sex, I am not interested… and we are in an Osho centre, so this in itself is a contradiction, like so much of my life. So much of the vibe is about free love, which I have seen and experienced in Osho places, tantra scenes and spiritually-inclined sexual hubs in the world, such as ISTA. I seem to be drawn to these places and also appalled at the same time. Life is a paradox. So am I.

I’m happy with the answers I’m receiving. He doesn’t seem like the type of person to lunge from one woman to another. He is in no other intimate relationships. He wants to use condoms. He doesn’t wish to ejaculate, and knows how to sublimate ejaculation for energetic purposes. He really likes me, I feel it. Now the question is, do I really like him? The answer will reveal itself, as we meditators say.

This is great, I say to myself. Someone with tantric potential who really knows what sublimation is. My worry about explaining why I don’t want ejaculation dissipates. I have become so tired of talking about this subject. It’s amazing when you don’t have to convince someone about drawing the breath up and moving energy up in order to have even more energy. It is even better when you don’t have to explain that ejaculation is a loss of energy and that it doesn’t have to happen this way in order to have a great and meaningful time. It’s great when men know the techniques that accomplish this tantric goal.

Let’s get real, there is no goal.

I’m feeling a Hell-yes to the question, should we make love? My mind is at ease, my body is ready. We go for it. Penetration I mean, to be clear. There are a lot of things you can do that are tantric that don’t have to be sex, but in this case, I am open to have penetrative lingham-in-yoni sex.

He is asking me what I like. I appreciate that he is asking, happy to tell him that I love clitoral stimulation and that I have deep interest in g-spot orgasms, as well the possibility of experiencing the expression of amrita, the sacred liquid that releases with direct and consistent g-spot stimulation of a tantrically-initiated or inclined woman during orgasm.

He knows what I am talking about as I explain it to him. I know there is great potential to co-create this experience with him, which is also quite tantric, Shiva and Shakti moving together to balance the masculine and feminine energy in order to offer their love-making to universal consciousness. To move in between surrendering and leading with ease is something else I have been desiring as a woman who is holding space for people in her work. Ever since I experienced and studied tantric massage, I am fascinated by the potential to have sacred g-spot orgasms. It’s the study of a lifetime. I wish it happened more. I always seem to want more.

Women can learn tantric skills that allow them to have many deeper, non-clitoral orgasms and still retain their energy—even if this rare and amazing liquid is released through technique. Men, paradoxically, will have more energy if they do not release. It’s just the way we are built.

Sublimation, or the upward path of flight and energy, is the way of a tantric man.

It is better for the energy of Shiva to withhold ejaculation than to release it. He can have so much more energy and lasting time if he does this, and it also helps keep attraction to his partner. The investment into learning sublimation for a man is worth it, to stay younger, to have better love-making and more creative energy. It is said that a man needs up to seven days to recover his previous level of life force after just one ejaculation.

He looks at me, communicates with his eyes and asks about my readiness. I answer verbally, Almost, stay with me. I am not into doing anything quickly, as I like the slow path. My body, mind, and heart need to be there for me to even come close to orgasm and I am not a person that can JUST have sex. Most women cannot. For me, the pleasure of penetration has such depth attached to it. I love it and fear it simultaneously. At this time in my life, I am limiting partners. In fact, I really wish for THE partner, if you can relate to this longing. I sometimes believe that it may never happen, and then I find myself in situations like this. Do I go for it or not? Sex isn’t what I long for, it’s intimacy. Something special is my order of the moment.

We breathe together for a while, circulating the energy through the cycles and therefore increasing the resonance between us. We decide we want this. We want a divine union and are willing to try based on the information we have collected, theoretically and also experientially.

He approaches my yoni, super slowly, like he is knocking on a stranger’s door. I’m slippery, more so because I’m ovulating and this is likely why it is all happening anyway. It’s hard to hold back my desire to unify but I also want slow sensitivity. It feels like the universe is answering my request. Nature can be fierce with the cycle of the female. If we are ovulating there isn’t too much getting in the way of love-making, as the answer is always a yes in these three days of intense natural fertility. Our bodies are actually sending out a signal and men seem to smell it. I am looking at him with fierceness. I am exhaling with such strength and relief and he meets my request to enter. Slowly.

Our hips are moving, our bodies melting, sliding our bodies, gliding over each other not only has a magical quality, but I am having what feels like an astral vision through my third eye (the spot between the brows identified with the pineal gland) with a combination of oil and sweat in a cabin sitting at 34 degrees Celsius. What I couldn’t see or know before this match was a direct connection to how he thinks and perceives the world. When I look into his eyes, I can read his mind. It’s pulsing and thinking the same as me. At least I think it is.

This experience is amazing—I’m feeling energy spiralling up a channel in my spine as if it were being moved by the pressure of each plunge he makes inside my body.

I am surprised at how quickly I am reaching heightened states of pleasure, these states touching places inside of me that are dropping downward in order to kiss his lingham. When ovulating and having intercourse, the cervix literally drops so that cervical orgasms become easier; also, the female body is more open in order to receive the possibility of bearing a child. We glide into different positions—now to the side and, by raising my legs, this internal kissing of our genitals and externally kissing of our lips are unified. I am soaking in my skin, liquids are pouring out, soaking the bed. We are licking and sucking all of the liquids our actions are yielding. I don’t want any energy wasted, and like the good healer, tantric, and yogini that I am, I am into energy regurgitation.

On the topic of wasting energy, I have drunk my urine for years, as well as my menstrual blood.