Eros, Consciousness and Kundalini: Deepening Sensuality Through Tantric Celibacy and Spiritual Intimacy

In this extraordinary celebration of the erotic, Dr. Stuart Sovatsky, introduces us to the Tantric art of sexual sublimation, in which sexual is redirected toward achieving higher awareness and an erotic satisfaction far beyond that possible through intercourse. The potential reasons for exploring Tantric celibacy are many— including the desire to deepen a life partnership, to gain a new level of mastery over one's body to heal the emotional scars of sexual abuse, to practice safe sex, or to explore the intimate relationship between spirituality and sexuality. Exercises based on yoga, kundalini and chakra meditation make Ems, Consciousness and Kundalini a practical guide to the world of Tantric celibacy. By transcending the boundaries of conventional sexuality, one can learn to harness the divine energy—glimpsed for only an instant by most people—that is at the heart of all erotic yearning.

Stuart Sovatsky PH.D., has been a practitioner of kundalini yoga for twenty-four years and is the director of two psychotherapy clinics in the San Francisco Bay Area. A former presenter at the World Congress on Sexology in India and the International Kundalini Research Network, he teaches at JFK University and the California Institute of Integral Studies.

ang-Meng Hsiung, who provided me with much technical support, as well as Mr. Soegiharto Terta and Mr. Qihong Zhang, who helped me in taking the pictures. I would also like to express my special appreciation to Ms. Joanna Willis, the editor, for her patience and her careful examination of the book.

Tantric celibacy is based upon a profoundly spiritual understanding of bodily maturation and Eros that includes definitive stages of psychophysical development beyond genital puberty. Kundalini awakening, the first of these stages to become known in the West, involves far more than is now conveyed by the popular, but overly simplistic, definition of kundalini as merely a "spiritual energy." Given the impact kundalini can have on an individual's identity, sexuality, sense of life purpose, and neuroendocrine alterations, I suggest that such an awakening is, in effect, the long-developing puberty of first the spine and then, later, the hypothalamus and pineal glands, as well as the cerebrum. As a spiritual phenomenon that fully includes the physical body, kundalini helps our basic sense of identity mature from one connected to only our plucky—but lifetime-limited—egos to one that is based in our eternal souls. This book, previously entitled Passions of Innocence and now, more directly, Eros, Consciousness, and Kundalini, is my studied—and lived—answer to that most practical of questions: "How do we, living our ordinary, daily lives, reach this place of higher spiritual enlightenment?" The goal of tantric celibacy is not merely to live a contented celibate life (although for some this will prove a worthy enough goal) and to gain enhanced health and intimacy, but also perhaps to reach and enjoy some measure of the safe and gradual awakening of the supremely creative force that for most of us lies dormant at the base of our spines. It is possible that in the coming years these deep spiritual potentials residing silently within us might awaken and come to life, just as the awesome potential of fertility and sexual passion awoke within us when we were teenagers. As I give you over to the tantric alchemy described in this guidebook, I do so with no small degree of envy. After some twenty-three years of travels upon this path, I recall with fondness my earliest of yogic alchemical experiences, experiences that you will soon read about and, perhaps, pursue. In recalling the tumultuous passions of spiritual longing, the mixture of zealous certainty and utter wonderment, and the ecstatic sensations of transformation themselves, I can only hope that if there is such a thing as reincarnation that this book will be around in the future so that I might take this journey again and again and again. May those great ones before us who have tread this path—Rumi, Lakulish, Patanjali, Socrates, Buddha, Christ, Hildegarde, Theresa d'Avila, Dalai Lama, Mirabai, Moses, Anandamayama, Thich Nhat Hahn, Saint John, and unknown myriad others—bless all who go this way.

Contents and Sample Pages