Bloody good question, isn’t it?
Considering Tantra is a nonwhite tradition, rooted in the Indian subcontinent, you wouldn’t think so if you looked around at most Tantra teachers and participants in the West.
There’s a difference between using language to make something accessible to a different culture, time, and place—and appropriating a tradition without recognizing the shoulders we stand on. Tantra comes from people who, despite colonialism, have somehow managed to hold onto a non-dualistic understanding of the world—and practices that support healing and living in that way. For that, I feel tremendous gratitude.
But Tantra in the West has never been allowed to be what it traditionally is.
Tantra is Part of a Web of Meaning
Traditionally, Tantra is not an isolated practice—it exists within a much larger web of meaning. It is part of a wider worldview, just as science offers us a framework for understanding reality.
In its original form, Tantra wasn’t just a tool for self-improvement—it was part of an interconnected system of philosophy, ritual, cosmology, and ethics, woven into daily life, relationships, and spirituality. It wasn’t something you just did—it was a way of being and understanding the world.
Tantra is Not Just a Self-Development Tool
And yet, in the West, Tantra has been extracted from this web of meaning and turned into a self-development practice. It has become something you “do” to develop yourself, to make yourself a better, more effective individual—as if that were its purpose.
But Tantra isn’t a self-improvement tool. It isn’t about making you a better lover. Yes, it has sexual teachings—but they are a tiny, tiny part of the vast body of Tantric wisdom.
And yet, as with Buddhism, as with shamanic traditions, Tantra has been assimilated into an individualistic, Western self-development culture.
With its ‘exotism’ and it’s assoication with the errotic its become a premium ‘label’ to attract middle-class white people with money—those who have the time, resources, and privilege to invest in self-improvement. And because of this the people who access it are predominantly white and privileged.
And that’s deeply sad.
Tantra is a Path to Healing and Connection
Tantra is a powerful healing modality. It offers a path to experiencing the world differently—a way out of the exhaustion of figuring it all out alone.
It can offer a felt sense of being held in love, of being both part of and separate from everything else—something so needed in these times.
Tantra can offer a way to heal trauma, a map of reality that challenges individualism and capitalism, showing us a different way to be and relate.
But instead of being honored as a living tradition, Tantra in the West has become a product—something that only privileged, prodomently white people can afford.
And that makes me deeply sad.
