About Tantra Yoga

This is an extract from Christopher's book, The Yoga of Wealth

Tantra

Tantra has several meanings, all of them indicating aspects of its approach to life. Tantra means liberation through expansion, this shows that it is through immanence, through material involvement and inclusion that freedom arises.
Tantra also means technique, this indicates its means of cultivating wisdom which is to create specific parameters of practice within which the practitioner will experience gnosis. Another meaning is weaving, here the practitioner weaves together their strands of gnosis and practice and recognises the interweaving, the warp and weft of all life.
Tantra can also mean 'touched by grace',and it is the flow of naturally arising wisdom, the kosmic intelligence that moves through us, as us when we can deeply surrender to what is, as it is, that also facilitates freedom.
Tantra accepts all of the ground of being and all of phenomena as Divine Totality. Radikal Freedom or liberation involves the inclusion of all of life and continual expansion into greater consciousness through this acceptance, beyond any splitting into the duality of spirit and matter or purity and impurity (which is all a relative view).
Techniques provide the experimental basis of practice as each practitioner, following appropriate practices, experiences their own existence as this omnipotent Divinity
It is through the vast range of techniques used, that the dawning of wisdom-freedom emerges.
Wisdom-freedom is the lived experience of the interconnectedness and interweaving of all of life into a seamless whole. Wisdom-freedom is realising ones own and every beings Divinity, all as pure Beingness.

Techniques used include:

Mantra; vibrational practice using chanting.

Yantra; sacred geometric diagrams as maps of the universe and tools of power, used in meditational practice.

Meditation for training and freeing the mind and connecting to the totality of reality.

Movement practices including Yogasana, Dance and spontaneous movement to experience the freedom of bio-energetic flow.

Massage to cultivate sensitivity, sensuality as meditation,  and healthy relationship.

Ritual as love feasts to focus individual and collective attention onto the Totality.

Lovemaking practice to liberate beings from the sense of bio-energetic exclusivity, delusions of duality and to recognise the primary energy of Prana Shakti as unified with Consciousness as Shiva.

Through these techniques and the experiences arising, all of life experience is felt and known as both personal and transpersonal and all as sacred Divinity.

“All of life is grist to the mill”

As the great Tantra teacher Abhinavagupta said.

Liberation from the ego-illusion arises as the practitioner becomes more fully established in their awareness of the continuum of the absolute-relative and their real identification as this expansive, all-inclusive, all embracing, totality of reality, Divinity.

Tantra offers valuable practices and amazing insight into the processes of ego transcension that can easily be incorporated into a contemporary, bio-philic, evolutionary and developmental Yogic practice in a way that is meaningful for western practitioners not wishing to revert to a medieval, non-rational or ascendancy based worldview.
To deeply engage in this material world and celebrate its abundance and wealth, changing and impermanent as it is; to encourage a prosperity that lifts each of us from the realm of material suffering into wealth and plenty; to fully explore our identity as pure beingness we need to be radically free. Radical Freedom is the freedom to be one with and as the source and ground of being and all its manifestations of phenomena. Anything less is partial freedom. Radical freedom is Engaged Yoga and this is also the Yoga of Wealth.