A workshop or retreat can spark real, long-lasting transformation—but only if it’s paired with reflection, practice, and follow-through. Without that, it risks becoming just a feel-good moment dressed up as inspiration. True change isn’t in the event itself; it’s in what you do once you leave.
The reality is that we’re always both a little bit like a wave in the sea. There. It swells up on the ocean and it goes, oh, I’m a wave, I’m a wave. I’m. I’m all alone. And after a period, it crashes back down into the sea. And it’s true. It is a wave. It is in a different form.
Sex Positivity, Conscious Sexuality, and Tantra—What’s the Difference? Sex positivity, conscious sexuality, and Tantra are often spoken about interchangeably, but they are three distinct things—so why is Tantra being used as a catch-all term for everything from sex parties to conscious sexuality workshops? Let’s break it down. Sex Positivity: The Philosophy That Sex is Intrinsically Good Sex positivity is the idea that sex is an intrinsic good, much like food is an intrinsic good. That doesn’t mean we can’t misuse it—just as eating takeaways every day will make us ill, unhealthy sexual dynamics can have negative effects. But that doesn’t change the fact that sex itself is an intrinsic good, something natural and valuable. Conscious Sexuality: Awareness, Consent, and Healing Conscious sexuality is the idea that we can approach our sexuality consciously. Under this umbrella, there are many practices that support people in letting go of shame, developing a clear focus on consent and boundaries, and reclaiming autonomy and pleasure over their own sexual experiences. Tantra: A Spiritual Path, Not Just a Sexual Practice And Tantra—Tantra is a spiritual path. It is a set of practices and a worldview that sees sexual energy as life energy, something we can work with to dissolve the ego and experience a deep, felt sense of interconnectedness—a way of accessing an intelligence beyond the self. Tantra understands that trauma stops energy from circulating. Within Tantra, there are many techniques that can help release trauma from the body, release repressed emotions, and let go of physical tension. It is a spiritual path. These are three very different things—so that begs the question: Why is Everything Called Tantra These Days? Why are so many conscious sexuality events called Tantra? Why is a sex party—for want of a better word—called a Temple? I think the reason for that is both interesting and sad. Conscious sexuality wants to differentiate itself from sex parties. And it does that because of internalized societal shame. Sex parties are seen as bad, so conscious sexuality wants to say, “We’re not that.” By appropriating spiritual language and calling itself Tantra, it ends up internalizing the very shame it was trying to challenge. But conscious sexuality is important. We have the right to enjoy our sexuality and our bodies in whatever shape or form feels right. Conscious sexuality creates spaces and practices that allow us to do that. And I think it’s time that conscious sexuality calls itself what it is. We are consciously sexuality, and we are important. Not Tantra. Conscious Sexuality. And maybe, just to end on a positive note—sex positivity is wonderful. It’s a wonderful philosophy. We should be positive about sex and see it as an intrinsic good, even if, for various reasons, we can sometimes use it unwisely—just like food.
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.
And we assimilate it. So at the moment we’re only allowed to practice this. Within the framework of self-improvement. I’m fucked up. It’s my responsibility as I’m separate from everybody else and everything else, to sort out my fucked up. This, to be a better person, to be a healthier person, to be a better worker, to be able to achieve and be successful and worthy.
To the people that we massacred and slaughtered and culturally killed, you know, the indigenous peoples who somehow, despite hundreds of years of annihilation. Held on to this non dualistic understanding. In a previous video, I talked about assimilating. So they have managed to whisper back to us these other ways of understanding the world and these practices that can give us this non dualistic experience of reality.
This question is really dear to my heart and relate to another project that I’m doing called organizing from elsewhere. You’re really welcome to to read more about that on our website.
We have a physical body and we have an energetic body. And we have ways that energy, sexual energy, life, energy circulates around the body. Its physical manifestation might be understood or conceptualized as how? Nervous system. Yeah, but energy also circulates in particular ways around the body. And there are various maps that are of how that happens and how that works, linked to various traditions.
I wonder if this clip is going to get past the censors or our big right wing tech billionaires. Again, I think it’s important to define because these terms are used often, and for a lot of people off.
The more clearly a ritual is marked with a beginning and an end and ritual space and ordinary space delineated. The more powerful the ritual. Now, that may sound quite woowoo to a lot of you, but we’ve been using ritual, I think, for as long as human beings have been around, because it works and we use them every day.
It’s a it’s a pathway, within which life energy, sexual energy can travel up. And we have another sort of front channel that runs also down. And it’s a little bit hard to conceptualize. But the reason I think it’s worth mentioning is that people can talk about Kundalini as if it is an energy. It’s not an energy.
So just, a small question for me. There. I’m not going to try and answer what the divine is, but I think it is helpful to talk a little bit about what I understand the word divine to point towards. And the for me. Whether you are a rationalist, a scientist, spiritual or religious, I think we all have these moments in life.
Polarity is one energy expressed in two polarities masculine and feminine energy. And masculine energy is decisiveness and leadership and direction, and all the qualities that give men the right to rule the world. And, you know, feminine energy is Shakti. It’s chaotic. It’s this. It’s that and all the reasons that women shouldn’t be in charge. And it’s a load of ballocks.
With this understanding of sexual energy, we start to understand that this shift from the immaterial. If you want to use a scientific language, the wave, the interconnectedness. Into a particular form. This word, this computer, this human being, this baby, this emotion takes a lot of energy.
What is an energetic orgasm? It’s interesting. I notice almost. A reluctance to use the word orgasm, because when I use the word orgasm, I think that for most people, we have a a clear idea of this friction on the clitoris or on the penis. This buildup of energy in the sex and the very, you know, strong, sometimes very pleasurable experience. An energetic orgasm is what happens when that energy is no longer trapped in the sex. So when we’ve used tantric techniques to remove the traumatic blocks and the repressed emotions and the physical tensions that stop sexual energy moving up the body, we experience an energetic orgasm. It’s full body. And it can be very intense. And there are a number of types of energetic orgasm. So an energetic orgasm, when you are circulating the energy either by yourself or with a partner. Is this intensifying state of pleasure and psychedelic experience of expanding out it? The first time that I was really able to do that with a partner, it changed my understanding of what sex could be. You know, time was falling. It was like taking mushrooms. It was very, very powerful. And it’s not peak. It goes on and it goes on and it’s extraordinary. And there are other forms of energetic orgasm where you’re building up sexual energy, and then you’re using sort of tension. Certain techniques to push the energy up. And that’s again very, very intense. You know, it’s literally like you go like, a small mushroom trip. And that is technically or experientially what an energetic orgasm is when you’re moving that angle. But the reason it’s important is it’s a path. When we circulate energy like this and we expand out. We are able to connect with vast wisdoms, vast intelligences. You can understand that in the spiritual sense, or if you like, you can understand that there is just a lot of information, knowing that you are able to receive into the body and to know. But it’s also a buildup of sexual energy. And sexual energy is the energy that that creates things. So from this space, it’s possible to heal, to direct the sexual energy to points in the body or to others, to to create quite powerful healings of physical and psychological and emotional and spiritual wounds. And although I’m nervous to say this, and I will talk more about this later, because it’s a creative energy, it can be directed through energetic orgasm to manifestation. And by that I do not mean, you know, making the world exactly as I want it. Getting my Lamborghini and my million dollars. I simply mean I’m manifesting these words. I’m creating these words. We are creating this video, this movement between the immaterial and the material requires energy and has ways of moving. But I’ll speak to that more, I think, in, in a separate video. So just to wrap that up, an energetic orgasm is what’s happening when we learn how to work with our sexual energy, when we learn how to build it up and then move it and circulate it around our body or around our body and our partners body, it’s very pleasurable. It’s very powerful. Yeah.
In the Tantric tradition, the body is understood to be both physical and energetic, with seven layers of energy surrounding it. I don’t know if that’s true, but I do know there are at least two—because I can feel them. I can feel one layer close to my body, and if I push through, another a little further out. As I do, waves of sensation move through me—subtle yet unmistakable. The energy body is made up of these energetic layers that surround the physical body. What they are, exactly, might be beyond me—but that they exist? That’s something I know from experience. Just like I can feel the breeze, I can feel this magnetic push, this gentle resistance. And with practice, we can do more than just sense them with our hands—we can actually expand out into them. Each layer has a slightly different quality of awareness. A little like how I feel different when I’m watching a movie compared to when I’m talking to you right now, or when I’m meditating. As I expand my attention outward into the different layers of my energy body, I’m still aware of my separation, but my sense of self starts to dissolve—just a little. When you reach the fifth or sixth energy body, that’s where things start to feel like astral projection or travel. For me, when I facilitate this kind of work, I’m often in my second or third body. It feels like I’m stepping aside and being moved, rather than doing the moving. And in these states, I perceive things that I simply can’t when I’m just anchored in my physical body. That’s really the best answer I can give—not as a theory, but as something real, something that can be felt.
Tantra understands that health is when our life energy, our sexual energy can circulate around the body. And Tantra understands how important it is to be able to circulate this energy, to dissolve this sense of I and start to have this experience of interconnectedness, of being part of and separate of this vast web of life, and to start to move and be guided by that intelligence.
The key line for me in the tantra is what is elsewhere is here. And what is not here is nowhere. What that’s understood to mean is that unlike in other traditions, where the body is seen as a block to enlightenment, Tantra believes that in this incarnation, in this dualistic existence, the path is through the body, that everything exists in the body.
Here I am, surrounded by the smell of sage. I find myself in a room covered in mattresses and filled with people dressed in lingerie.
My mobile buzzes in my pocket. It’s my mum. “Hello,” I say, barely paying attention as I clumsily turn over pieces of tofu frying in the pan. “I’m in the hospital,” she says. “They’ve found something that may or may not be cancer.”
I am a survivor of extreme abuse. My life today should be impossible. Tantra helped me to be reborn into meaning, purpose, deeply loving committed relationships and pleasure. It’s been a journey, but extraordinary, supernatural experiences of profound rebirth have been a vital part of my healing journey.
This month I am excited to share with you another winter story – an extraordinary experience that happened over the new year and set me thinking about something – I think you will agree – is both important and fascinating! So it’s cold outside, let us once again, gather around the storytelling fire Picture this… A train. A plane. Another train. A 5-kilometer trek in the freezing dark, through a forest in the north of Denmark. The smell of ancient gnarled trees. The darkness is complete, sweet, velvet. My hands, stiff without gloves, my nose stinging in the cold. At last, a house looms. Its lighted windows, ghostly bright in the dark. I have arrived at the Ting Gathering—a conscious event, no drugs or alcohol allowed, anarchist in spirit, no official leadership and all decisions are made in a circle, passing a ‘speaking stick’ from hand to hand. Think workshops, kundalini yoga, and songs of oneness around a fire. And as I stumble out of the night and into the warmth, I find that the group is midway way through the evening circle. The atmosphere in the room is sour with tension. Why? A Palestinian flag is hanging on the wall and a man, holding the stick is demanding its removal: that flag, he says, should be burned. My rib bones feel as if they are being crushed. Before I know it, despite the fact that I’ve just arrived, I’m standing up, words pouring from me unbidden. “My father is Palestinian. He could be shot by a settler or soldier at any moment. How can you say that?” Silence, thick and suffocating fills the room. “It was a joke,” the man mutters. The stick is passed. Another man stands up and says: This flag should be up as a protest against the Rothschilds who are behind these atrocities. Again, I’m on my feet: “My mother is an Israeli Jew who like countless Jews opposes this genocide. How dare you defend Palestinians by spreading antisemitic conspiracy theories?” The next days are a knot of frustration. I am utterly bewildered by the opposition to showing solidarity for the two million Palestinians in Gaza who are being systematically exterminated in the most horrific ways with the support of our governments. I am shocked at the levels of explicit antisemitism tolerated at the gathering. Some spend hours and hours in circle debating the issue. Men and women in their 50s’ and 60s’, acting like three-year-olds, rave on and on while the room slowly empties and people shout for them to pass on the stick. I don’t seem to be able to walk from my dormitory to the bathroom without being harassed about the issue. A man, full of aggression, shouts at me for wanting the flag on the wall. When others intervene to protect me, he starts sticking his tongue out and making farting sounds whenever anyone speaks to him. Another man follows me around, wanting to find out if I am an Ashkenazi jew, trying to convince me that they rule the world. Yet another harasses me telling me to build a “watermelon shrine” for my father. Poor mental health seemed to abound at the gathering: an ambulance is called for a woman who is suffering from acute psychosis. Finally, the conflict over the flag reaches a climax when someone steals the flag. It’s never seen again. Disillusioned and concerned by what I had witnessed and experienced, I chose not to spend New Year’s Eve there.. Why does the conscious community attract people with Far-Right views and mental health issues? Spiritual modalities such as tantra and shamanic plant medicine are powerful tools for healing. They can address PTSD, depression, anxiety, and more. It is no surprise, that those grappling with mental health issues are drawn to such spaces. I was one of those people and I am deeply grateful for the benefit I received from such practices. However, there is a more sinister reason for the prevalence of far-right views within conscious communities. Spiritual experiences often open us up to the possibility that the world is not as it seems. For example: I remember the first time I felt my aura with my hand or when, in a trance, I spoke a language that I did not know. These moments shook me to my core. I’d been told such things were impossible, and yet there they were. I felt I had been lied to. This made me open to the idea that there is more going on than I have been told. Social media companies know that individuals who have had mystical experiences tend to be more receptive to questioning conventional narratives and established explanations of reality. It’s for this reason there algorithms define those who are ‘spiritual’ as ‘persuadable’. We are then targeted with Far-Right propaganda which reinforces the idea that “we are being lied to”. Sophisticated campaigns frame democratic systems that limit corporate profit, as threats to individual freedom and portray women, immigrants, trans people, Muslims and black communities as threats. This propaganda directs anger at scapegoats and diverts attention from the real cause of the crisis: the largest transfer of wealth to the richest 1% in human history. Today, inequality has reached unprecedented levels. Why does this matter? In Europe, nearly all indigenous wisdom was eradicated during the brutal slaughter of Pagans. In the Americas, over 95% of indigenous peoples were wiped out. The origins of the spiritual practices that you may have used will have l roots in indigenous and non-western communities and cultures. These practices survived because of the bravery of those who fought and refused to let their cultures and traditions die. If you’ve benefited from spiritual practices, I urge you to honour their origins and to recognize the courage of the Indigenous and non-white peoples who, despite colonization, genocide, and violence, kept these powerful worldviews alive. If for no other reason than gratitude for the bravery and sacrifice that enables you to now benefit from such powerful healing modalities, let’s confront
