Tantric Secrets for Men: What Every Woman Will Want Her Man to Know about Enhancing Sexual Ecstasy

Preface

Imagine having a partner who says that she couldn’t possibly have a better lover than you, that she can’t wait for you to come home each day. Imagine being in a relationship that is exciting, sexy, and emotionally nurturing; being able to make love as long as you want, as many times as you like, at any age, and knowing absolutely that you can satisfy your partner, not just physically but on every level of being—body, heart, and soul.

Imagine continuing to explore and create together fulfilling and profound lovemaking experiences; continuing to grow and bond with greater intimacy, loving feelings, and communication. Imagine feeling more pleasure, with deeper, stronger orgasms, for you and your partner.

Lovemaking that will bring more love, joy, and pleasure into your life is possible.

Held within these pages are secrets and practices that will turn this dream into reality, secrets you will treasure for a lifetime. The secrets I share in this book are not theoretical—they are practices that my wife, Diane, and I have developed through actual experience of working successfully with thousands of people over many years. I am not suggesting that by reading this book you’ll never have another problem in your relationship. Diane and I have been married for more than twenty years and we have three children: I know that difficulties will continue to arise! Yet I’ve also invested many years of my life finding out what it takes to sustain love and sexual passion with the same woman. The old proverb Blessed is the man who has found his work and one woman to love rings as true in our lifetimes as it ever has.

This book is for any man of any age who desires to be an extraordinary lover. Any man who knows he can satisfy a woman feels ten feet tall. Much of a man’s self-image is tied up with how good he feels he is as a lover. Every man wants to be good in bed. For my father’s generation that was relatively easy: you just moved in and out until you felt an explosion of energy. That’s all there was to it. The only challenge was in finding a willing partner.

In the 1960s, my older brother’s era, everything changed. Men began to realize that their pleasure in sex was magnified when their partner was also experiencing a great amount of pleasure. Men realized that in order to be good lovers they needed to warm up their partner with lots of foreplay. While men were suddenly challenged to bring women to orgasm, there wasn’t a lot of pressure to succeed because, throughout the previous two thousand years, women’s sexuality had been suppressed. It was common for women to be uncomfortable with their sexuality and to have difficulty reaching orgasm. If orgasm happened, that was great, but if it didn’t, it wasn’t such a big deal because it was accepted that good girls don’t do it anyway. Lovemaking continued to be mostly about the man’s pleasure.

Today, being a good lover is more challenging than it has ever been. Women are on the other side of a sexual revolution. Women today don’t simply want sex; they want great sex, which includes emotional as well as physical nourishment. Many men go into lovemaking concerned that they won’t be able to meet their partners’ needs.

I would suggest that what we must do as self-aware men is work with our partners as teammates in continuing to support and nourish this opening of women’s sexuality. One of the best ways we can do this is by becoming extraordinary lovers. The message of Tantric Secrets for Men is powerful and yet simple—truly great sex is much more than just physical contact; it combines sexual pleasure with love and deep intimacy. This book will show you how you can reach heightened states of ecstasy and pleasure together. It contains information that can make any man not just a good lover, but a truly extraordinary and caring lover. And the truth is, that is what every woman yearns for in a man.

So often in lovemaking a woman doesn’t ask for what she wants, either because she’s not sure of what she wants or she’s afraid she will hurt her partner’s feelings. Often the man doesn’t ask because he’s supposed to know. And we wonder why sexual loving loses its original spark after several years, or even months, with the same partner! Sexual love is the fuel for a passionate relationship. Without this it’s like having a car without gas: you have the car but the engine doesn’t spark and you can’t go anywhere. We can all do with some new fuel in our love lives.

I believe that there is a new man in the world today, one who wants to experience sex at its full potential, who desires to make love in such a way that it opens the door to the greatest joy for his loved one and himself and fulfills his deepest yearnings. This new, aware man realizes the importance of learning about love, sex, and relationship. He is strongly conscious of the centrality of these matters in his life, and he wants to learn all there is about lovemaking. Yet there is very little good education available on how to become a good lover. And contrary to what the ego would have us men believe, we are not born naturally great at lovemaking.

I am not talking about intercourse here; anyone can do that. I’m talking about learning how to make love so that you can nourish a woman on every level of her being—body, heart, and soul. I am speaking about making love in such a way that your woman not only experiences levels of physical pleasure beyond anything she has ever known before, but also feels a deep love in her heart and experiences an ecstasy that transcends her sense of time, space, and thought.

The secrets in this book will give you the knowledge and skills to be an extraordinary lover for your partner. Every woman wants her man to know these secrets. Once you know how to nourish a woman on this level your relationship will reach new depths of love and new heights of ecstasy. The benefits of knowing these secrets are not only that you nourish your partner’s sexuality better than any other man can, but that you learn how to access higher states of pleasure yourself.

Most men have neglected exploring many aspects of their sexuality with their loved one. In recent years the general focus in sexual relations has been so much on giving women an orgasm that the man’s pleasure is often determined by the woman’s orgasmic response. A lot of men don’t realize this until they learn the secrets of sexual fulfillment and begin to explore, with their partner, higher orgasmic states for themselves. The secrets revealed here are not only about physical pleasure. They will also show you how to open up and feel the love that is in your heart much more deeply while you are making love. Once your partner experiences this heartfelt love she will be more open to making love, she will want to make love more often, and there will be more sexual energy available for both of you.

Very early in my studies I learned a great sexual secret—that it is better to give a woman a little of what she truly wants than a lot of what you think she wants!

By the end of this book you are going to know more about lovemaking than 98 percent of men on the planet, and the woman you have in your life (or the one you attract to you) will love you for it because you will bring to her the love and pleasure she has always dreamed of. In response, her love and sexual energy toward you will know no bounds!

Some men will think I already know all there is to know. I have tried all the positions, I know about the clitoris and the G-spot, and I practice oral sex. What more is there? This attitude is understandable because there has been very little quality education about sexual loving available in our society. Tantric Secrets for Men is about to change that. This book not only explains techniques, it asks you some key questions, such as: Have you explored how much love you can feel while making love? Have you explored going into heightened states of ecstasy, not just during climax but for fifteen-minute periods? Have you experienced using your lovemaking as a devotion, as a spiritual experience? In Tantric Secrets for Men I outline:

How to reach heightened states of ecstasy and pleasure beyond realms you have explored so far.

How to open to love in such a way that your heart opens for your partner and you remember how great it feels to be deeply, passionately in love.

How to transform your lovemaking into a sacred experience that touches you and your woman on every level of your being.

How to create and sustain a fulfilling relationship in which you keep the magic of love alive.

In the workshops Diane and I conduct I often ask the men: What do you imagine you will be thinking about at the end of your life? I guarantee that on your deathbed you won’t be thinking about your best day at the office! You will reflect on who you loved and how much love you allowed into your life—including your sexual loving, one of the most intimate interactions you can have with another human being.

No matter what your age, you are about to go on an adventure, a new journey into sexual loving. There is enough fuel in this book to keep you and your partner charged and in love throughout your lives. Enjoy!

Note: In Tantric Secrets for Men I am addressing heterosexual men and women because this is where my experience lies. However, the same principles can be adapted to suit your preference in sexual relationships; many gay couples tell us they benefit immensely from our tantra courses. They will benefit from this book as well.

1

Lovemaking as a Spiritual Experience

It is written in the ancient texts of China and India that it was common for emperors, kings, and noblemen trained in the art of lovemaking to be passionate lovers in their nineties with up to twenty consorts, all of whom they were keeping sexually satisfied. In the ruling class a man’s power was measured by the number of consorts he could keep satisfied. A husband was respected more for keeping his wife sexually satisfied than for anything else. In the ancient cultures of Egypt, Arabia, India, Nepal, Tibet, China, and Japan polygamy was common, so it was essential for a man to know the arts of lovemaking.

In Chinese Taoist texts it is written that the emperor should make love to nine chosen consorts every night, progressing from the lower ranks to the higher. In their book Sexual Secrets: The Alchemy of Ecstasy, authors Nik Douglas and Penny Slinger quote from an ancient Chinese text: Retaining his semen by proficiency in the Art of Love, the Emperor concentrates powers within. Then, at the full moon, he bestows his seed on the Queen of Heaven. A child born from such a ritual was purported to have magical powers.

Most men these days ejaculate within the first fifteen minutes of being engaged in lovemaking; they wouldn’t have commanded much respect in ancient China. Our education and proficiency in the art of lovemaking is lacking in our modern day, yet every man has the ability to master these sexual skills.

One of the reasons I was attracted to these studies of eroticism and ecstasy is because ancient texts from the East teach that sex was sacred. I like the idea of my lovemaking being sacred. I don’t use the term sacred here in the conventional religious sense of something existing above us somewhere. Such a view tends to split reality into two parts, with a degraded Earth below and a pure holy Heaven on high. Things on this earthly plane can be sacred if we have the eyes to see the sacredness in them: the sacred order of Earth and sky, of life and death, of the mind and the heart and the body.

We can view human existence itself as sacred, and, if we choose, we can see lovemaking as sacred.

Many people today are seeking spiritual growth. When I tell them that Diane and I use our sexual love as a way of becoming more spiritual they are quite shocked. This probably stems from the fact that many religions proclaim that if we want to become spiritual we must deny our earthly pleasures. Traditionally in Eastern and Western cultures, celibacy was a requirement for those who sought a spiritual life.

As a child I was taught, as I’m sure many people were, that the way to God was through prayer and going to church. However, these things never really gave me any profound experience of God. In the mid- 1970s I traveled through India where I was introduced to meditation as a practice for spiritual growth. When I practiced meditation it did give me an experience that I felt was spiritual. In the East this was called a mystical experience.

A mystical, or spiritual, experience is foreign to most westerners. A mystical state is not easy to describe, and yet anyone who has had the experience recognizes it. People describe certain common elements in mystical experiences, such as a sense of tranquillity, of timelessness, of intense awareness that everything you see is vivid and everything you touch is very alive; a transcendence from the thoughts of daily life; an expansion of consciousness; a feeling of being connected with the cosmos or at unity with all things. Some say they have a tangible experience of God; others experience the bliss of union with the Divine.

Some of these elements can be present during lovemaking, and when they are it is important to acknowledge this as a spiritual experience. Being in a heightened orgasmic state is a mystical experience. Ancient spiritual systems such as Taoism and tantra readily acknowledge this.

TANTRA AND TAOISM

Tantra, a spiritual science from ancient India, and Taoism, from ancient China, are similar in their basic essence. Both involve balancing the male and female energies to create harmony, and both have an ultimate goal of spiritual unity with the universe or the source or the God within.

The tantric interplay of the male and female energies was represented in Hindu mythology by Shakti and Shiva, and in Taoism by yin and yang. Both tantra and Taoism aim to create union of body, mind, and spirit. In both traditions sexuality is seen and practiced in a spiritual context.

One of the differences between tantra and Taoism is that tantra is filled with rituals and religious deities, gods and goddesses, whereas Taoism is more scientific in its approach. People who are more intuitive or right-brain oriented would likely be more attracted to tantra, while those who are more rational and logical, more left-brain oriented, would likely be attracted to Taoism, although this is certainly not a rule.

In the seminars that Diane and I conduct we find that women are generally more attracted to the tantric approach and men more to the Taoist approach, at least initially. However, as men open their heart centers more and become deeply connected with their women, they move forward into the tantric approach to sexuality.

It is said that tantra is the oldest single source of knowledge concerning the energies of the mind, body, and spirit. It is the origin and essence of yoga, martial arts, t’ai chi, and the grand philosophies of the Buddha, Confucius, and Lao-tzu.

The word tantra means to expand, to be free, to be liberated. If we are to be really free our sexuality should not be repressed; it should be lived in its totality with joy and without guilt. The more we suppress our sexual desires, the more we will be bound by those desires; the more our sexuality is repressed, the more it wants to burst out. The sad thing is that repressed sexuality often bursts out in harmful ways. The evidence of child sexual abuse that has come to light over the past few decades is an example of what can happen as a result of suppression.

Tantra always emphasizes the sacredness in sex; it teaches that there should be no repression or guilt attached to sex. It also teaches that when a man approaches his beloved he should carry a feeling of the sacred, as if he were stepping in to a temple. Tantra claims that, to know the truth about love, you need to accept the sacredness of sex.

Relics of tantric rituals date back nearly five thousand years; tantric texts began to appear within a few centuries of the beginning of the Christian era. It is speculated that Indian tantra, which spread to Tibet, may have originated with ancient Taoists in China, then reentered China hundreds of years later and revitalized Taoist sexual practices. Through the centuries many mainstream religions have frowned on tantra and Taoism because both systems use sexual union as a vehicle to enlightenment, as a way of experiencing a deep connection with God or the cosmos or the Divine or the source of all existence, whatever you call it according to your beliefs. Yet most religious systems make sex taboo, claiming it leads people away from God. This predominant religious approach eventually forced tantric practices underground, where tantric rituals have been kept secret for hundreds of years.

Only recently have tantric and Taoist practices been interpreted, published, and made available for Western study. This has been refreshing and enlightening for many of us because it has helped us to look at love and sex from a different perspective. We start to question our own attitudes and realize how deeply our consciousness has been conditioned by our Christian upbringing, which suggests that sexuality is somehow evil.

We are taught at school that the first sin in the Garden of Eden was committed by Eve when she offered Adam the apple from the Tree of Life. But that’s not a sin. What is sinful is that some sexually insecure man invented a God who couldn’t rejoice in Adam and Eve’s sexual nature. It’s a tremendous mistake that the very act on which the procreation of life depends is depicted as a sin. We have been taught that we must be either spiritual or sexual, that we must not be drawn to the devil by bodily pleasures. Even though these days most people would see this teaching as ridiculous, it still subconsciously affects our attitudes toward sex, and we carry this negative conditioning into our lovemaking.

If we were brought up in a culture that revered sexuality it would be much easier to have a healthy attitude toward sex. A tantric attitude toward sex is that sex is God’s greatest gift; that it is sacred; that to have pleasure from sex is a prayer to God, a way of showing gratitude for our existence. Tantra sees sexual union as a way of generating lifeforce through the body that is healing, rejuvenating, energizing; it can be used as a meditation to reach mystical states of love and consciousness.

Because tantra covers the full spectrum of life it accepts and reveres sexual love and pleasure. It does not accept any kind of religious, cultural, or tribal inhibitions. It’s about exploring the extraordinary in your love and your sexuality, with the only proviso being that it causes the other person or yourself no harm. Tantra teaches that we deserve all the love and sexual pleasure we can possibly receive; that sexual loving is a way to reach the mysteries of the heart, the soul, the god and goddess within each person. It also teaches that sex is a way of bonding with a lover—physically, emotionally, and spiritually—to create feelings of ecstatic pleasure, deep intimacy, and expanded consciousness. It’s a way of transcending daily life and the ego to become one with your beloved, to become one with all things, and to invite a tangible experience of God.

Taoists would say that lovemaking is the way to longevity and that by applying certain techniques we can rejuvenate ourselves and awaken our intuitive centers. They also believe that we can use our lovemaking to heal ourselves and our partners, because when we are in heightened states of sexual energy our whole body is charged and the immune system strengthened.

SACRED SEX: THE DOOR TO ENLIGHTENMENT

Imagine how much more we could embrace our sexuality if we were introduced to such beliefs as tantra and Taoism when we first asked questions about sex. It’s important to recognize that any judgments we have about sex reflect our inhibitions and demonstrate that we are not entirely free and accepting of our own sexuality.

What we need is a new ideal for manhood, a man who can take sex back to its original sacredness, who is able to make love in such a way that it opens the door to enlightenment for his beloved and himself and fulfills his deepest yearnings for the meaning of life. We need education in lovemaking because it will increase our choices and our knowledge. We don’t have to assume the attitudes handed down to us by society. We can adopt new attitudes that serve us better and help us have a more fulfilling, happy, healthy love life.

Some aspects of tantra and Taoism may seem a little strange at first, especially the link between sexuality and spirituality, but like anything in life we need to consider all approaches and then select what serves us. Of course, sometimes when a new attitude is presented to us we take it on immediately because it rings true for us. At other times we have to let it sit for a while; we put it on the shelf and perhaps use it in years to come. It’s important to experiment, to play with innocence and openness as a child plays with a new toy. Parents terrorize their children out of the delight of their sexual experimentation. But we are not children anymore. It’s time to choose new ways of exploring sex and love on physical, emotional, and spiritual levels.

A HEALTHY ATTITUDE TOWARD SEX

Having a healthy attitude toward lovemaking makes all the difference to the experience. You can be in exactly the same lovemaking position as someone else, but ultimately it’s the mind that creates the experience. If the mind is saying, I wish this would end, you may have some sort of resistance to pleasure from past conditioning. How could the most sensitive part of the body, with the most nerve endings, not give you pleasure? Have you ever thought about that? If you believe that to make love to reach high states of sexual pleasure is healing, then the experience will be totally different. Our experience of lovemaking is affected by our attitudes. A man who has been conditioned to believe that lovemaking is a spiritual encounter will have a totally different experience from a man who sees it as an opportunity to put another notch in his belt.

Anything that happens in our lovemaking is interpreted first through our attitudes and beliefs. From these we derive our experience. One way to alter our experience is to change our attitudes and beliefs. Some people watching a high tantric experience might see it merely as two people having good sex. So what is the difference between tantra and just having great sex? One of the key differences is where the mind is focused at the moment. It’s the same in life. One’s experience of life depends on where the mind is. We are all living in the same world, but our differing experiences are determined by our perceptions.

In lovemaking it’s not what we are doing that affects us; it’s the attitude with which we are doing it that makes the real difference to our experience. If we can internalize the attitude that our lovemaking is spiritual, then our lovemaking will indeed become a spiritual experience.

WAYS TO USE YOUR LOVEMAKING AS A SPIRITUAL PRACTICE

It is valuable to set aside special times to treat your lovemaking as a spiritual practice. Meditation, prayer, ritual, and ceremony are common practices people use