TantraPM Blog

Patricia’s been in St. Louis rehearsing. She’ll be singing Micaela in Carmen with the Union Avenue Opera. Tonight is opening night.

She has this to say about the relationship between Tantra and singing:

“In tantra you work with energy in the body. And that’s all singing is about: cultivating and circulating energy. I become a vessel and the music can flow out of me into the audience, and there’s this energetic thing that happens that’s exquisite.”

Go here and scroll down for the whole interview.

We’ll be doing a talk and book signing at Left Bank Books, 399 N. Euclid Avenue, St. Louis, MO 63108, on Monday, August 25, at 7:00 pm.

On Tuesday the 26th, we’ll be at Pathways, 11419 Concord Village Ave. St. Louis, MO 63123. There’s a free meet and greet from 6-7 pm, and then we’ll offer a two-hour Introduction to Tantra. $30.

We had a great time in London and are very excited about the upcoming festival. For more about the event and our visit, see The Generalist, our new friend John May’s blog.

We’re heading to Florida to teach at a conference, and then Patricia’s off to Saint Louis to sing. We’ll be doing a signing and teaching a workshop there toward the end of August. Details will be available soon.

A long article about us has just appeared in Emotion, a popular German psychology magazine. It’s wonderful to get such detailed and serious attention from a mainstream publication. For those who don’t read German, go here for google’s auto-translation, which is less than perfect, but you’ll get the idea.

We’re heading to London next week for a press conference announcing the London Festival of Tantra. We’ll be the headline speakers at this event, which takes place at the Chelsea Old Town Hall on September 27th. More details will be available soon.

From what we understand, there’s already a great deal of interest in the festival. It’s hard not to be struck by the receptivity of the media on the other side of the Atlantic.

We had a great time at the AASECT annual conference in New Orleans. We’re back home and have just taken our old Mercedes diesel in to be converted to run on vegetable oil. We’ve found a source for waste oil, which is getting harder and harder these days, and are looking forward to going carbon-negative, at least when we’re driving.

We had a delightful time teaching in a beautiful outdoor setting for Midnite Oasis (New Jersey) yesterday. The weather was perfect for the all day intensive, in which we covered:

What is Tantra?

The History of Tantra.

Pleasure as Spiritual Practice

The Chakras and Sexuality

The Tantric Erogenous Zones

The day was one of lively discussion, mostly focused on the spiritual aspects of Tantric practice and how to integrate spirituality into everyday life. At the end of the day, someone asked us if there was one thing he could take away from the workshop for this purpose. We replied with a single word - Pleasure. By bringing awareness to what truly gives us pleasure, we can become more authentic human beings, and have easier access to mystical experiences. Pleasure is not something to reject, nor is seeking it incompatible with spirituality. Rather, pleasure  is very useful tool when used skillfully. Focusing on what gives you pleasure – even and perhaps especially something subtle, a sound, a sensation, something you see – can take you into a blissful state, a feeling of union (Yoga).

This perspective is supported by at least one important tantric text, the Vijnanabhairava Tantra: “When the Yogi mentally becomes one with the incomparable joy of song and other such objects, then of such a Yogi, there is, because of the expansion of his mind, identity with that (i.e. with the incomparable joy) because he becomes on with it.

We’ll be back at Midnite Oasis for an advanced workshop sometime this fall.

There’s an absolutely amazing article by Judith Thurman in this week’s New Yorker, which unfortunately is not available online. It describes the current state of research into the cave paintings of Southern France and Spain. What’s just astounding is that the artists who made these paintings did so over millenia – from at least 30,000 years ago until about 11,000 years ago – long before written language emerged. These artists discovered perspective, something that was lost for the next 10,000 years. Thurman cites Picasso, who observed that: “They’ve invented everything.”

The article only includes one image from the caves, but that image alone is a testament to the phenomenal capacities we humans possess.

Here’s a link to a lengthy article on the caves, with a lot of images. Start on page 4 if you just want to see the paintings.

About a year ago, we posted a brief clip from a taping we did for Italian television. The quality is poor, and we had to keep the excerpt very short for a number of reasons.

For some odd reason, the clip has gone viral, and we’ve had over 750,000 views, with numerous comments ranging from the inane to the inspired. It’s odd that our more extensive, informative, and highly rated clip has only had 32,000 views. 

There’s no accounting for what takes off on the net.

Tantra Magic

 
Tantra KATU

We’ve just migrated our blogspot.com blog to our own domain via wordpress, which seems more user-friendly. We’ll be posting on Tantra, our lives, and a variety of subjects that interest us. We welcome your feedback.

Tonight we’ll be attending a Media Bistro event, The Secrets Behind Getting Published, moderated by Susan Shapiro (a college friend of Mark’s). While we’ve already published a couple of books, there’s always more to learn, and we’re huge fans of Media Bistro.

Tantra for Erotic Empowerment has gotten some glowing reviews in the last few weeks:

Gayle Michaels (no relation)

TCM Reviews

Mystic Living Today

It was also selected as a 2008 Indie Excellence Award Finalist in New Age Non-Fiction, which is a great honor given the wide variety of books that fall into that category.