Tantra is the 4,000-year-old art of combining sexuality and energy, and it’s hellbent on helping you reclaim sexual intimacy in your life. Apart from being an ancient belief system, it’s also a sex-technique Rolodex that’s full of steamier tips than you’d like to give your great-great-great-grandmother credit for.

Tantra is the 4,000-year-old art of combining sexuality and energy, and it’s hellbent on helping you reclaim sexual intimacy in your life. Apart from being an ancient belief system, it’s also a sex-technique Rolodex that’s full of steamier tips than you’d like to give your great-great-great-grandmother credit for. You don’t need to believe in energy, chakras or that you were a Nordic seal in a past life for it to work for you. All you need is a warm body and a healthy interest in having better sex. We went out and talked to Tantric therapists Dawn and Gerard Gatz of Boulder’s Tantric Sacred Journeys to get some tips to help you do just that.

1. Don’t Wait Until You’re in the Mood

Unless “Eyes Wide Shut” is playing in your home theater, most couples aren’t DTF at the same time every time. Tantric ideology actually sees non-arousal as beneficial because it invites you to experiment with what turns you on and encourages you to think outside of the box when it comes to arousal. Next time you’re in a situation in which one of you is rock hard and the other “needs to feed the cat in two hours, so no,” try one of these Tantric arousal tricks.

First, spend a few minutes together, touching, talking and looking into each other’s eyes. Ask each other how your days where, and how you’re feeling. Talking to each other and allowing yourselves to be vulnerable with each other is the starter coal to intimacy. And connecting emotionally makes other things connect. Get it?

If the basic human actions of touching and talking aren’t your style, practice being both the giver and receiver. Usually, one person is used to being one or the other, but when you switch it up, the panties hit the floor.

A third way Tantra teaches you to get yourself in the mood is to take the pressure off of the other person to do it for you. So often, we place to responsibility to cultivate arousal on the other person, but become disappointed when said person doesn’t deliver. Instead, Tantra asks you to turn yourself on. Think hard about makes you wet or hard, and picture it happening as your partner begins to touch you. Ain’t no shame in using that imagination for more than picturing what you’d look like with double-D boobs and Juggalo makeup.

Even if you end up more asexual-feeling than you did before; you win because you still learned something valuable about your sexuality, which is what doesn’t turn you on. The fact that you spent a few minutes intimately connecting with each other in an effort to bone means sex has an important place in your relationship. It doesn’t have to end in some xxx-combination of cowgirl and doggy style, but if it does, then, well, you’re welcome.

2. Take Away the Goal

In Tantra, the culturally appropriated goals of orgasm and ejaculation are made secondary to the goals of exploration and having fun. It’s just like that commemorative shot glass at Senor Frog’s says in Comic Sans font: “It’s about the journey, not the destination.”
When you have sexual expectations, like needing to orgasm or receive at least 12 lashes with master’s whip, you set yourself up for disappointment. If your expectations aren’t met, someone “fails.”

When you begin to see sex as as a process of exploration and play, doing the dirty becomes more about learning what your mutual likes and dislikes are than it does about meeting expectations. And when you remove expectation, you create a situation in which it’s impossible to have bad sex.

Instead of trying to get off the entire time, focus on what’s in front of you in the present. The process of bringing about an orgasm can be just as pleasurable as the orgasm itself.

3. Breathe-Pulse-Relax

When most people are about to come, they hold their breath, but that brief lack of oxygen actually dilutes your orgasm like unwanted ice in your beer. However, there’s a Tantric technique you can use to make sure that if you’re about to come, you come hard.

It’s called Breath-Pulse-Relax, and it’s based on the Tantric belief that orgasmic energy moves on breath and sound. When you feel an orgasm on the horizon, take a deep breath in through your nose, hold your breath for a few seconds, and then squeeze your PC muscle. Pulse it few times, and then exhale as you relax that muscle. As you do, let whatever sound seems most natural come out.

In Tantra, the sound of “Ah!” is favored because it’s the one that most engages your throat. Several studies done about the cellular makeup of the throat indicate it’s very similar to the vagina, so when you allow the vibration of sound inside of your throat, you allow more vibration of pleasure inside of your vagina. That definitely does not suck.

4. Ejaculatory Choice and Control

Remember two minutes back when we told you Tantra was about letting go of the goal of orgasm? For men, this comes in the form of something called Ejaculatory Choice and Control. Also called “semen retention,” it basically describes a man learning to control when he comes. According to Tantra, the best way to do this is to strengthen your PC muscles.You can literally do it anywhere, anytime, whether you’re sitting at your computer or lifting weights while making awkward eye contact with the person next to you in the mirror.

If you take that muscle and pulse it, you can feel exactly where it is. There should be a little indentation in your perineum. Once you’ve figured out where it is, learn the 1-10 scale of Ejaculatory Inevitability. One is aroused, 10 is a glorious spillage of seed.
Say you’re getting aroused, and you’re around five, meaning if you keep making sweet love to that microwaved cantaloupe, you’re going to bust. Take a deep breath in, then find your PC muscle with your finger, and press into it. Envision yourself sucking up the energy from your dick up to your chest. This short-circuits the energy and reigns in your dick’s desire to come so you can keep going. You can do this up to level seven or eight on that scale, but once you reach nine, it’s actually unhealthy to try to rein it in, so let ‘er rip.

“Why?” you scream to the sky. “Why would I not want to come?” Two reasons. First, it’ll give your partner a chance to fully experience her sexual energy. Women’s pleasure and arousal is delayed in comparison to men’s and gets stronger over a longer period of time. If you can hold out until she’s been able to experience pleasure, then you’re the President of Sex. Second, when you stop yourself from coming all over everyone’s brand-new silken bedsheets three minutes after she finally touched your penis, it feels better for you when you finally release.

5. Girl-on-Top Positions

As any vagina can attest to, the missionary position is the least-effective position for inviting orgasm. Tantra agrees. If a woman can be on top, it’s most often more effective in facilitating orgasm because sexual energy travels from top to bottom. You can believe the energy thing, or you can ignore it, but when you analyze girl-on-top positions on a physiological level, it makes sense gravity and blood pressure would work together to bring the the most bodily attention to that area women get in this position. And by bodily attention we mean blood, friction/pressure and female ejaculate.

It’s the same story with men. If he’s getting ridden, gravity also works in his favor, allowing him to breathe the energy or tension from his dick up into his chest and back down, which, if you have an attention span longer than a fly, you’ll remember is part of the Ejaculatory Choice and Control bit we just mentioned. Girl-on-top makes it easier for men to control when they come.

In terms of positions, there’s cowgirl, reverse cowgirl, lotus and … shit, just Google them.

6. Get Kinky

It might seem counterintuitive, but Tantra actually highly encourages kink. The two are surprisingly similar; both place less focus on orgasm and more focus on the scenario and process. Both emphasize play and experimentation. Both are about trust, vulnerability, control, giving and receiving, and compromise.

Like kink, Tantra teaches that, sometimes, one of your senses has to be restricted so your other senses wake up. If that has you thinking about blindfolds and handcuffs … then you’re getting the idea. Take some time to explore your fetishes and fantasies with your partner; the process of experimenting will bring you closer together in the same way that connecting emotionally will, sans the daddy issues and crying. When you connect through kink and play, you make sex more intense.

7. Eye Contact

In Tantra, one of the most common techniques for making sex better is eye gazing, where you gently stare, or look lovingly into each other’s eyes. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with closing your eyes during sex, but if that’s the only thing you do, you’re cutting out key pieces of the experience, which include being present and receiving and transmitting energy back and forth using your gaze.

When you maintain this kind of eye contact, you enter what Tantra calls “microcosmic orbit,” where you send energy and receive energy through breath, sound and eye connection, which signals vulnerability and trust. Picture that energy you generate through eye contact flowing to your nether regions, warming and invigorating them. It’s like eye-sex on top of regular sex, which adds another dimension to the mix.

It’s not like “Don’t ever close your eyes or your ovaries will dry up;” it’s more about going back and forth between eye contact and resting your gaze somewhere else.

8. Slow Down

When you speed through sex like an anxious jackhammer on rollerblades, you don’t allow each other to feel the entirety of pleasure. But how slow should you go?

There’s also a Tantric practice you can use to slow things down called Modalities of Touch. To start, one of you lies down on your belly for 10 minutes and just receives touch from the other person. Touch experimentation here should run all of the way from the top of her head to the tip of her toes. It could be very soft, feminine touch, scratches or touching with hair or chest, just exploring the back of her body. Experiment with slowness using that touch; then switch partners. Switch again to the front of your bodies, and then talk about it. What was your experience in giving this way and receiving? When you focus on different modalities of touch and with balancing giving and receiving, it’s not only hot as shit, but it makes you slow down faster than a Wes Anderson movie trailer, you little Speedy Gonzales, you.

9. Sacred Spot Massage

Men and women both have what Tantra calls a “sacred spot,” or what we at Rooster like to call “Holyfuckingshitdon’tstop.” For women, it’s their G-Spot, and for men, there’s a spot inside their rectum, just below their prostate that makes their faces melt. The Gatzes suggest you go at both of them with your fingers.

The female G-spot is located inside of the vagina, toward the pubic bone, and it’s kind of rigid and spongy. It can start out tiny and grow and expand with pleasure, as it fills up with blood and female ejaculate. You might want to start out by rubbing her clit or going down on her so she’s aroused before you go for her G-spot; it’ll be easier to find once it expands.

For men, this spot is inside his anus and toward his pubic bone, about 3/4 of an inch up. It’s silky, and feels like the inside of a rose petal. If you lightly rub or swirl your finger around on it, it’ll make him feel a sort of wet, warm sensation. A lot of people confuse it with prostate massage, but don’t be one of those people. The prostate is further up.

Regardless of which spot you’re going for, doing so sends a few strong messages to your partner, the first being that you care about his or her pleasure. You’re doing something that likely has no physical manifestation of sexual pleasure for you. Instead, you’re selflessly focusing on your partner. Second, the feeling both genders get from having these spots massaged can be emotionally and spiritually liberating, which is probably what Marvin Gaye was talking about in “Sexual Healing.” Third, it also says you know your way around a genital, and that’s hot. Lastly, it gives you a chance to experiment with the roles of giver and receiver.

Wanna know more? Check out Dawn and Gerard Gatz’s website at www.tantricsacredjourneys.com.

To contact the author of this article, email isabelle@therooster.com.