Embodiment, Tantra and Kissing
Iinterview with Cherie Byrd, MA by Diana Cristina
Last month I joined my sweetie upon a nest of pillows and blankets and we spent the day kissing. This wouldn't be so unusual, except that, as if in a strange dream, we were in a schoolroom with several other couples doing the same thing while learning tantric embodiment practices: breathing exercises, energy meditations, sensual heightening, and touch training. Everyone was either grinning, looking love-drunk, or weeping, hearts cracked open.
I later met with the instructor, a wild woman named Cherie Byrd, to learn more. I began by telling her that I'd felt slightly wicked even considering coming to the class, but that the idea of being in school learning how to stay in my body and run energy while making out was just too deliciously weird to pass up.
Cherie: That's right, the whole idea of going to school to learn the arts of loving is pretty radical in this puritanically engendered day and age! It's not unheard of in other cultures, however, particularly in the past. I find that the process of being taught to love while engaging the energy of Spirit often rings a bell in our soul memories, echoes from past lives; there's the tug of something familiar.
I'd bet that a large piece of your "slightly wicked" curiosity comes from your teenaged subpersonalities. Remember that our teenage days were most likely thick with hungry desires that were not only unschooled, but were ultimately dangerous. You could be suspended for kissing in class. Sex? You could get pregnant, diseases even. Do you think your whole self would want to be present for that possibility? Not likely, so we contorted our full-bodied bodaciousness into what we felt kept us safe. Furtive loving was the rule; peer training consisted of, "Be quick, be quiet and be cool." Much of this early training stuck; consider for a moment the bound-up sexual and creative energy this non--education has generated over your lifetime.
Diana: Are you saying that these past experiences continue to block our energy?
Cherie: All our past models of experience that are too small for how we desire to be "here and now" block our present experience. We create energy habits based on those experiences and project these into our future, which we then unconsciously live out. They become our underlying definition of what's possible.
When we're young and beginning to explore the paths of romantic love and sexuality, we have experiences, and from these we make decisions about how we are going to function. We make choices, not necessarily consciously, about how open, how experimental, how free we'll be with our sexual energy. We decide whether we like it or not, that it should be done in just this way, and if it should it be meaningful. We sculpt our thereafters based on very little real education.
We certainly didn't go to class to learn to be powerful and trusting and loving with our sexual energy. We probably never even heard that it was possible to integrate our spiritual self into our sexual energy! I think one of the things we figure out pretty quickly as teenagers is that sexual energy is hard to control. In an interesting way, it's not meant to be controlled, which is a very scary thought at first glance.
The energies of both sex and creativity are the focus of second-chakra energy, and this is the chakra in charge of "flow." It stimulates flows within our whole psychophysical energy system: not only the flow of the bioenergy, but also our mental, emotional, psychic, and spiritual energy. The flow of our manifestations, or what we create, is inherently tied to this regeneration chakra. Both sexual energy and creativity are meant to take us into the unknown.
For a sexually unschooled teenager, this is troublesome, so we make second-chakra decisions about safety and power, and judgments about sexual goodness and badness, and arrange our subtle energy bodies to hold these, to block the flow as directed. These energy distortions, this holding, becomes our norm until the pattern becomes too small; then it becomes our suffering.
Consciously changing these energy habits opens us to the possibility of choosing again. Working intentionally with your energetic process while cultivating the art of kissing expands your relationship with your inner lovers, realigning that second chakra in relation to your whole presence. You begin to move into a more richly embodied, trusting, and powerful relationship with yourself, which frees your ability to access your loving nature and your deeper self.
You've probably noticed that most sexual stimulation in this culture tends to come from outside of ourselves; the other person turns us on, or the picture or video does it to us. Tantra is a practice that offers us internal access to our energy, sexual or otherwise, which brings our power and choice back to our self.
Diana: Let's talk about the idea of embodiment. I've heard about people walking around not being in their bodies, but I can't figure out if I'm in mine or not.
Cherie: Not knowing whether or not you're in your body usually is a sign that you're not there! It's often easier to see this in someone else. Have you ever kissed someone and wondered if there was actually "anyone home?" What are you noticing? Maybe a lack of presence, a kind of robotic or automatic response? No electricity, no juice, no chemistry.
The odds are good that the person is energetically disconnected from his or her subtle energy bodies, and from the here and now. We have to be in the here and now to be in our body, or else we're in the "there and then." Have you ever caught yourself driving down the freeway and all of a sudden "coming back" from being spaced out and wondering just where you are and whether you passed your exit? We often drive on "automatic pilot." When we learn to do something well, we frequently decide not to be there for the execution of it, and we miss it.
We're not home in the body, which is meant to be the amplifier of the qualities of our experience. Ideally, all of our subtle energy bodies vibrate, fully expanded, in our whole body. If not, we're disconnecting and limiting our experience of our life.
Diana: So what happens with our subtle energy bodies when we're out; what does that look like?
Cherie: Typically, when we're out of the body, the mental body is pulled out of the torso and connected to the two upper chakras ‹ a favorite energy habit for those who love to be in their heads ‹ or even further away. The emotional body won't stick around if the mental body isn't in the torso to keep us safe while we feel what is there, so it's as far away as possible to keep it from vibrating. The psychic and spiritual bodies are usually contracted to their smallest possible state, and the whole system is most likely ungrounded, which short-circuits the whole mess.
All this distortion translates into the physical body through a chakra and meridian system that responds by running on the energy of the past until we've drained our reserves. The majority of us walk around in this state, or some variation of it, much of the time. We're carrying our energy in response to very old ideas about how to be safe, and in our maturity, this can be very limiting, keeping us disconnected from the direct experience of who we really are, as well as eventually making us ill.
It's easy to see that making love or being creative from this energetically frayed and depleted state leaves something, or someone, to be desired. Beyond the second chakra, if one is working on developing spiritual energy, power, or access to one's inner selves, it's really crucial to have tools for integrating and running his or her energy. All these states of vibrant consciousness need the body to be an integrated and resonant container; otherwise, we get into even more amplified states of our dissonance, which is usually not pretty. We really have to "get here" before we can "go there" into higher states of consciousness.
Diana: Is tantra a system for learning embodiment?
Cherie: It can be. Tantra, in its widest sense, is usually considered "energy weaving" or energy mastery. It's a set of beliefs and tools, beyond the domain of religion really, that generates a type of mystical communion through the energy of one's being: communion with one's own subtle energy bodies first, which generates that resonant container for communion with the energy of All That Is.
In the West, tantric teachings are frequently just focused on sexual energy, or perhaps a mix of the sexual and spiritual, instead of the whole energetic system. I see sex as a really fun place to practice embodied energy mastery and the arts of communion. One of my favorite mystic poets, Rumi, comments, "There is some kiss we want with our whole life, the touch of spirit on the body." This can be interpreted many ways, but what I've found is that simply cultivating a kiss that carries the energy of one's wholeness can be a daily practice that brings us sweetly into an experiential attunement with our deeper Self. Sharing this presence with another is a very deep blessing.
Last month I joined my sweetie upon a nest of pillows and blankets and we spent the day kissing. This wouldn't be so unusual, except that, as if in a strange dream, we were in a schoolroom with several other couples doing the same thing while learning tantric embodiment practices: breathing exercises, energy meditations, sensual heightening, and touch training. Everyone was either grinning, looking love-drunk, or weeping, hearts cracked open.
I later met with the instructor, a wild woman named Cherie Byrd, to learn more. I began by telling her that I'd felt slightly wicked even considering coming to the class, but that the idea of being in school learning how to stay in my body and run energy while making out was just too deliciously weird to pass up.
Cherie: That's right, the whole idea of going to school to learn the arts of loving is pretty radical in this puritanically engendered day and age! It's not unheard of in other cultures, however, particularly in the past. I find that the process of being taught to love while engaging the energy of Spirit often rings a bell in our soul memories, echoes from past lives; there's the tug of something familiar.
I'd bet that a large piece of your "slightly wicked" curiosity comes from your teenaged subpersonalities. Remember that our teenage days were most likely thick with hungry desires that were not only unschooled, but were ultimately dangerous. You could be suspended for kissing in class. Sex? You could get pregnant, diseases even. Do you think your whole self would want to be present for that possibility? Not likely, so we contorted our full-bodied bodaciousness into what we felt kept us safe. Furtive loving was the rule; peer training consisted of, "Be quick, be quiet and be cool." Much of this early training stuck; consider for a moment the bound-up sexual and creative energy this non--education has generated over your lifetime.
Diana: Are you saying that these past experiences continue to block our energy?
Cherie: All our past models of experience that are too small for how we desire to be "here and now" block our present experience. We create energy habits based on those experiences and project these into our future, which we then unconsciously live out. They become our underlying definition of what's possible.
When we're young and beginning to explore the paths of romantic love and sexuality, we have experiences, and from these we make decisions about how we are going to function. We make choices, not necessarily consciously, about how open, how experimental, how free we'll be with our sexual energy. We decide whether we like it or not, that it should be done in just this way, and if it should it be meaningful. We sculpt our thereafters based on very little real education.
We certainly didn't go to class to learn to be powerful and trusting and loving with our sexual energy. We probably never even heard that it was possible to integrate our spiritual self into our sexual energy! I think one of the things we figure out pretty quickly as teenagers is that sexual energy is hard to control. In an interesting way, it's not meant to be controlled, which is a very scary thought at first glance.
The energies of both sex and creativity are the focus of second-chakra energy, and this is the chakra in charge of "flow." It stimulates flows within our whole psychophysical energy system: not only the flow of the bioenergy, but also our mental, emotional, psychic, and spiritual energy. The flow of our manifestations, or what we create, is inherently tied to this regeneration chakra. Both sexual energy and creativity are meant to take us into the unknown.
For a sexually unschooled teenager, this is troublesome, so we make second-chakra decisions about safety and power, and judgments about sexual goodness and badness, and arrange our subtle energy bodies to hold these, to block the flow as directed. These energy distortions, this holding, becomes our norm until the pattern becomes too small; then it becomes our suffering.
Consciously changing these energy habits opens us to the possibility of choosing again. Working intentionally with your energetic process while cultivating the art of kissing expands your relationship with your inner lovers, realigning that second chakra in relation to your whole presence. You begin to move into a more richly embodied, trusting, and powerful relationship with yourself, which frees your ability to access your loving nature and your deeper self.
You've probably noticed that most sexual stimulation in this culture tends to come from outside of ourselves; the other person turns us on, or the picture or video does it to us. Tantra is a practice that offers us internal access to our energy, sexual or otherwise, which brings our power and choice back to our self.
Diana: Let's talk about the idea of embodiment. I've heard about people walking around not being in their bodies, but I can't figure out if I'm in mine or not.
Cherie: Not knowing whether or not you're in your body usually is a sign that you're not there! It's often easier to see this in someone else. Have you ever kissed someone and wondered if there was actually "anyone home?" What are you noticing? Maybe a lack of presence, a kind of robotic or automatic response? No electricity, no juice, no chemistry.
The odds are good that the person is energetically disconnected from his or her subtle energy bodies, and from the here and now. We have to be in the here and now to be in our body, or else we're in the "there and then." Have you ever caught yourself driving down the freeway and all of a sudden "coming back" from being spaced out and wondering just where you are and whether you passed your exit? We often drive on "automatic pilot." When we learn to do something well, we frequently decide not to be there for the execution of it, and we miss it.
We're not home in the body, which is meant to be the amplifier of the qualities of our experience. Ideally, all of our subtle energy bodies vibrate, fully expanded, in our whole body. If not, we're disconnecting and limiting our experience of our life.
Diana: So what happens with our subtle energy bodies when we're out; what does that look like?
Cherie: Typically, when we're out of the body, the mental body is pulled out of the torso and connected to the two upper chakras ‹ a favorite energy habit for those who love to be in their heads ‹ or even further away. The emotional body won't stick around if the mental body isn't in the torso to keep us safe while we feel what is there, so it's as far away as possible to keep it from vibrating. The psychic and spiritual bodies are usually contracted to their smallest possible state, and the whole system is most likely ungrounded, which short-circuits the whole mess.
All this distortion translates into the physical body through a chakra and meridian system that responds by running on the energy of the past until we've drained our reserves. The majority of us walk around in this state, or some variation of it, much of the time. We're carrying our energy in response to very old ideas about how to be safe, and in our maturity, this can be very limiting, keeping us disconnected from the direct experience of who we really are, as well as eventually making us ill.
It's easy to see that making love or being creative from this energetically frayed and depleted state leaves something, or someone, to be desired. Beyond the second chakra, if one is working on developing spiritual energy, power, or access to one's inner selves, it's really crucial to have tools for integrating and running his or her energy. All these states of vibrant consciousness need the body to be an integrated and resonant container; otherwise, we get into even more amplified states of our dissonance, which is usually not pretty. We really have to "get here" before we can "go there" into higher states of consciousness.
Diana: Is tantra a system for learning embodiment?
Cherie: It can be. Tantra, in its widest sense, is usually considered "energy weaving" or energy mastery. It's a set of beliefs and tools, beyond the domain of religion really, that generates a type of mystical communion through the energy of one's being: communion with one's own subtle energy bodies first, which generates that resonant container for communion with the energy of All That Is.
In the West, tantric teachings are frequently just focused on sexual energy, or perhaps a mix of the sexual and spiritual, instead of the whole energetic system. I see sex as a really fun place to practice embodied energy mastery and the arts of communion. One of my favorite mystic poets, Rumi, comments, "There is some kiss we want with our whole life, the touch of spirit on the body." This can be interpreted many ways, but what I've found is that simply cultivating a kiss that carries the energy of one's wholeness can be a daily practice that brings us sweetly into an experiential attunement with our deeper Self. Sharing this presence with another is a very deep blessing.
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