Recently I sat down with Mahasiddha teacher Uriel Yariv for a special introduction to tantra podcast.
In an intimate tantra podcast recorded for Humans in Love: A Podcast for Passionate People, Uriel and I discussed a wide range of topics related to walking the tantric path.
If you’re at all curious about tantra, tantra yoga, and what walking the tantric path looks like in practice, this tantra podcast is for you.
Uriel is a teacher at Mahasiddha Yoga here in Chiang Mai. He has spent the last 12 years in various parts of the world, teaching and studying yoga, tantra, and meditation and living in spiritual communities.
Whether you are brand new to tantra, or are a long-time tantric student, I think you’ll benefit from sitting in on our conversation.
In this two-part tantra podcast, Uriel and I discuss:
- What is tantra?
- What is “divinity,” or “divine love?”
- The origins of tantra, and Uriel’s interest in tantra
- Some of the “dangers” associated with the tantric path
- The dynamics of masculine and feminine polarity, and how that plays out in intimate relationships
- Who are Shiva and Shakti?
- What walking the tantric path looks like in practice
- What is sexual continence, and why it is so important for men (and women)
- The neo-tantra movement, and how Mahasiddha differs
- Multiple male non-ejaculatory orgasms (yes, really)
- The differences between “left hand” and “right hand” tantra
- Some tantra “do’s” and “don’t”
- The benefits of tantric sexuality in the context of long-term relationships
- How Uriel discovered (and started walking) the tantric path
- Tantra Podcast for Women
- And much more
Some key takeaways:
“Tantra aims to bring the spiritual in the profane…”
“Once you learn to play the game of polarity correctly, your energy will harmonize. You will learn how to move big energies with very small, elegant gestures…
For example, you have an emotion. Or a desire. Emotions and desires are the feminine–they are movement, change. Normally when people have an emotion or a desire, they search to act on it in one way or another. Well, acting is still Shakti. And [acting] it’s not necessarily what that emotion or desire needs.
Whereas if you understand tantra, you have an emotion, and instead of going further outside the emotion, you bring the other pole. You bring consciousness. And you immerse that emotion in consciousness, in this neutrality. And then that emotion will come to peace. It will enter harmony. That’s one example of how in your inner world you take your inner feminine–the emotion, or desire–and you bring it to consciousness. If you become very conscious of your desire, it is not compulsive.”
“Emotions usually appear in a double-way. There is the story of the emotion, and the physical sensation, the energetical vibration… Only when these two appear, and somehow feed each other, the more it vibrates, the more your mind gets agitated, the more the body enters this particular vibration… To observe the emotion is to observe both. It’s very different when you look at a thought, instead of feeding it.”
“The discipline that’s needed for tantric sexuality, especially for the guys, is immense. And… pleasure is not the goal of tantra. It’s an instrument. Pleasure is not a sin, not a problem. But not a goal… Pleasure is a tool.”
“The wonderful thing about [tantric sexuality] is that it transforms your sexuality from something that is gross, that might be conflictual, that might be selfish, shameful, greedy, violent, unconscious… It turns all these negative things into something wonderful. So that whenever you feel sexual you feel peace in your heart.”
“The main energy we work with in tantra is love… In tantra, you can love much, much, much more. And in tantra you charge your entire life with a tremendous amount of love, and then more love, then more love.”
“The majority of people [in relationships] have profound misconceptions about relationships, otherwise relationships would work… What is the masculine? What is the feminine? What makes the masculine stay in a relationship? … This is a million dollar question. Well, read the tantras. If a woman stays in that state that she is in the beginning of the relationship, if she stays that in love, that feminine, that open… the guy will be totally and continually fascinated by her.”
“As a guy, you simply keep the lights on all the time… Guys have this tendency to go on autopilot… Not in tantra.”