Urban Tantra by Barbara CarrellasCelestial Arts (Crown/Random House), 2007 (Originally 2005)

This book, whose subtitle is “Sacred Sex for the Twenty-First Century,” is refreshingly queer-friendly, kink-friendly, poly-friendly, and body-positive. I’m skeptical about some of the concepts Carrellas presents, but that didn’t really keep me from enjoying the book. Take chakras: I can see the usefulness of them as metaphor/visualization technique, but I’m less convinced about things like blockages of energy in particular chakras as a literal thing—like, if you’re feeling stuck, I can see that it may be extremely useful to think of your stuckness as having a place in your body, and then to visualize your energy moving through that place and getting things unstuck, and I can believe in the efficacy of that kind of visualization, but that’s different from thinking my energy is actually stuck in my throat chakra, or wherever. But, right, I can get behind other things in the book, like this, from a section called “Why Ecstasy is Necessary”:

Ecstasy (also referred to as bliss or ecstatic bliss) is a peak experience. Peak experiences expand our possibilities. They give us permission to reach higher and receive more. (17)

Carrellas takes her readers through the basics of tantra, followed by “tantra for one,” “tantra for two,” “tantra for the adventurous” (this includes group experiences and kink), and “tantra: the next dimension,” which is about what Carrellas calls “sex magic.” Interspersed with tantric exercises that include breathing, movement, and massage are Carrellas’s stories of her own experiences of ecstatic bliss, which are pretty great.

I think the best thing about this book, for me, was the way it made me think more about things I’d maybe thought about before but hadn’t fully articulated. Like: ecstasy as involving a sensation of timelessness, of the present as the only moment; ecstasy as often involving a moment when we feel that “boundaries dissolve” and being “deeply in ourselves and aware and simultaneously outside ourselves and not ourselves” (18). Or the idea that when we match our breath to someone else’s, we “begin to be able to read each other’s bodies” (25). Or the idea of what Carrellas calls the “Resilient Edge of Resistance,” which reminds me of what I think of as “the edge of too much”: as Carrellas puts it:

When pressure is applied to the edge of resistance—whether that pressure is breath, touch, or tension—you expand a bit. This creates a new edge of resistance. Yoga postures are a good example of this. If you are seated on the floor and bend over to try to touch your forehead to your legs, it may at first seem impossible. Then, with each breath, you relax into the stretch a bit more. You don’t force it, you just open up a bit more with each breath.
[…] By staying at the Resilient Edge of Resistance, you are able to go much deeper into the pose than if you had not gone to the edge, or if you had pushed past the edge into pain. The Resilient Edge of Resistance is the place where you feel safe enough to surrender and go deeper. (61)


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