What makes Tantric Touch different to other kinds of touch?
Tantric touch is often spoken about as if it is something mysterious and special and that’s because it really is! Here we seek to explain how it differs from any other type of touch or massage you might receive.
Tantric Touch challenges our conditioning around pleasure
For a start tantric touch is different from others because it involves giving and receiving touch for purely for pleasure. For most of us, any touch we experience is for nurturing, comforting, playing or fixing sore muscles. Many of us still have negative conditioning around pleasure and this in itself takes receiving (and giving) touch for pleasure to a whole new place. For those of us who recall being told not to touch ourselves in ways that felt good, usually “down thereâ€, agitated grownups would immediately tell us this was, at best, to be kept private or at worst, we were bad or dirty for doing it. Yet how many of us continued to touch ourselves (albeit furtively) just because it felt good? When we did so it was with associated a level of guilt or shame, forever linking these two feelings with pleasure in our psyche, creating subtle but lifelong confusion.
Some of us carry beliefs from religious, cultural or societal conditioning about pleasure not only being wrong or sinful, but it also having scary consequences like pregnancy, disease, getting addicted or being labelled “a slut†(surprisingly there is no male equivalent to that word...). Or we may have been told that rewards have to be earned, or that somehow WE don’t deserve pleasure or even that it is better to give than receive.
So the very idea of receiving touch simply for pleasure can bring up any of this subconscious conditioning, leaving us deliciously excited or nervous and embarrassed. Conscious Tantric touch can be deeply healing by the very fact that it challenges these parts held in shadow, inviting instead a luscious feeling of pleasure, connection and intimacy.
Tantric Touch can involve our ‘Sexy bits’
In most kinds of therapeutic touch or massage our breasts and genitals are kept appropriately covered and separate. In Tantric touch these intimate parts of us are not seen as separate from the rest of the body and may be included (though this is not required), as Tantra is about moving all beyond duality into union. This inclusion brings up even deeper layers of the conditioning for the healing mentioned above. Having said that Tantric touch can be totally delicious simply on someone’s face, shoulders, arm or leg!
There is an exchange of energy
In Tantra it is believed that we are not solid beings but vibrating energy bodies. Tantric Touch activates this energy and as it moves in the body it feels like pleasure. This energy (sex or spirit) moves between the giver and receiver so that neither one feels like they’re actually doing the giving or receiving. The boundaries between them can become blurred, the connection deep and expanded.
For more about Tantric
Touch read on...
Learn the full extent of what is possible through Tantric Touch and much more to bring connection, pleasure, healing and love into your relationship at our Couples Retreat
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