Tantra for Lovers & Couples: 10 Practices To Build Intimacy

Do you sometimes feel like you and your partner are living parallel lives, going through the motions but lacking that deep soul connection? The spark that drew you together can fade as responsibilities, distractions, and past hurts build emotional walls. Intimacy can become elusive, but tantra for lovers can bring the fire back again.

The ancient eastern practice of tantra offers a path to rekindle the sacred fire. More than just a set of techniques, tantra is a way of relating that honors the divinity in yourselves and each other. Through its teachings on energy, breath, and presence, couples can melt those walls and come together in profound union.

How Tantric Practices Can Positively Impact Your Relationship

At its core, tantra encourages open and vulnerable communication between partners. Through practices like intimate dialogues and bond-enhancing games, couples learn to share their innermost feelings, dreams, and fears without judgment. Practicing tantra in relationships builds trust, empathy, emotional safety, and a deep connection.

What is tantric love? Tantric lovemaking expands sexual experiences beyond the physical into a transcendent act of divine union. Mindfulness practices like sensual massage, synchronized breathing, and energy circulation make physical intimacy more satisfying by heightening sensitivity and awareness. Couples become more present with each other.

In my 7-level Soul Mate Series, couples embark on an in-depth 500-hour journey of tantric theory and practices. There is an ancient saying that the tantric path for couples is the fastest way to enlightenment, but it is also likened to walking a razor’s edge.

Progressing to higher levels of intimacy can trigger pitfalls like unconscious relating patterns from childhood, tumultuous emotional storms, destabilizing projections, jealousy, possessiveness, sexual dysfunction, and including misinformation about sexuality. Working with a knowledgeable tantric guide is essential to navigate these challenges skillfully.

When partners can open themselves fully, shed limiting conditionings, and harmonize their seven chakras, the ultimate fruition is the soul-mate union - a merging of feminine and masculine energies into divine ecstatic bliss. Tantra acts as a powerful catalyst for this sublime joining by addressing root problems and educating couples in the sacred art of soul communion.

How to Get Started With Tantric Love Practices for Couples

Set the Intent and Do an Opening Ritual

Like planting seeds of intention in the fertile soil of your union, start by co-creating a sacred space and ritual to align your energies and invite the divine essence of love and truth into your tantra for lovers practice. This could involve anything from candle lighting to reciting heartfelt intentions. Let your intuition guide you in designing a ritual that resonates for you both.

Understanding and embracing sacred sexuality is crucial in tantra, as it emphasizes the spiritual connection and deep love that can be achieved through dedicated practice and commitment.

Basic Breathing Techniques for Achieving the Tantric Circle

At the core of tantra for lovers lies the art of circulating sexual energy up the spine rather than simply releasing it down and outward. This is the basis for transcendental lovemaking. A foundational practice is learning to breathe in union through methods like alternate nostril breathing and the inhale-pause-exhale rhythm or using circular breathing techniques.

As you coordinate your breath cycles in this conscious way, focusing on the present moment, your mind-body awareness builds the charge needed to ignite kundalini and enter the tantric circle of ecstasy.

Eye Gazing

When practicing tantra for lovers, eye gazing is revered as one of the most powerful and immediate ways partners can melt the veils between them and connect soul to soul. Spend time simply gazing with soft, unwavering attention into your beloved's eyes, almost as if you could see their essence shining through those windows to infinity.

Mindful Touch, Conscious Touch and Massage Techniques

Tantric massage involves much more than physical technique, it’s a meditation in embodied, sensual awareness and worshipful presence between you. Explore giving and receiving slow, oiled massages while holding the intention of pleasuring every cell rather than seeking a release. This practice is not solely about sexual pleasure but about creating a deep, mindful connection. Caress and or massage with full-body mindfulness, tuning into your partner’s subtle energy shifts and adjusting touch with intuitive sensitivity. Depending on the technique of Tantra Massage being used, the main focus may be any of the following:

• The art of raising vital energy in and up rather than down and out.
• The harmonious blending of Yin and Yang energy within the receiver
• The harmonious blending of physical pleasure with expanded consciousness
• Harmonizing the chakra system
• Unifying body, mind, emotions and soul
• Releasing energetic stagnation and opening up a dynamic flow of ecstatic aliveness on all levels.

Conscious Communication Practices

Deep, vulnerable sharing and truth-telling are key to cleansing past imprints and judgements that cloud your clarity of union when practicing tantra for lovers. Engage in tantric communication games or methods such as:

• The Rave, which has you take turns letting loose a torrent of uncensored thoughts, feelings and desires with your partner simply listening without reaction.
• Whole Listening: sitting opposite each other, one shares their deep, innermost thoughts and feelings on a particular subject while the other one only listens. This is then followed by the listener mirroring back what they have heard. Then exchange.

Cultivating a harmonious relationship with your own body is essential in tantric communication, as it fosters self-awareness and self-love.

Books and Resources

10 Tantric Practices To Build Intimate Connection With Your Partner

Breath Synchronization and Circular Breathing

Breath is life-force itself, and by synchronizing your breaths in tantra, you begin melding your individual energies into one pulsating field of awareness. You might begin by sitting cross-legged, facing your partner in a meditation pose, and using eye contact to tap into each other's natural inhale-exhale rhythm.

As you breathe in sublime unison when practicing tantra for lovers, you'll feel your bodies' electromagnetic flows attune in a delicious oscillating dance. From here, you can explore circular breathing—one partner inhaling as the other exhales, perpetually circulating and combining your breaths in an effortless cosmic loop. This loop is normally circulated between the pelvis and the heart or between pelvis and crown chakra.

Chakra Activation and Connection

The tantric map for enlightenment is encoded in our subtle body's seven primary chakras, which are energy vortices housing our karmic imprints and psychospiritual powers. To ignite the ultimate tantric merkaba of divine union, you and your partner will co-activate and combust the elemental forces in your individual chakras until all fourteen vortices fuse into one unified, transcendental column of light.

For example, you might meditate on and stimulate the 7 chakra energies by engaging in tantric lovemaking, riding the waves of rising kundalini ecstasy, and opening progressively to each higher chakra rather than seeking physical release.

As your root (first) chakra opens, you'll heal any stagnation around basic needs and safety. The heart chakras merging opens unconditional love and compassion, while the third eye activation sparks clairvoyant vision. Finally, the twin crowns combust into the thousand-petaled lotus at the crown, revealing your primordial, soul to soul union.

Tantric Massage

Few activities bond partners in such exquisite, languorous intimacy as an authentic tantric massage. This sacred dance of oiled, featherlight strokes and whole-body contact of massage takes you into a timeless trance state as you learn to worship every curve of your beloved's form.

Rather than chasing physical release, the goal is to achieve full-bodied absorption and energetic ecstasy through an extended plateau. During tantra for lovers, as the giving partner, you'll use your hands, hair, skin and even breaths in intricate choreo-graphy to alternately tease, stroke and apply tantric conscious touch that pool your partner's amrita (nectar of love) and circulate this through their chakras.

Sacred Spot Massage

One of the most intimate and powerful tantra practices for couples is sacred spot massage. This involves using fingers, palms, and tantric tools like Tachyonized yoni eggs or Tachyonized Pleasure wands to apply precise pressure and stimulation to each partner's sacred spots and focal points that concentrate sexual energy.

Sound and Mantra

Tantric sages have long known that integrating sound and breath is key to awakening the sacred potential of one's voice. By combining vibrational seed mantras like "Aum" with circular breathing and mindful toning, couples can activate powerful shifts in their co-mingled energy fields.

A practice like Aum Namah Shivaya involves partners sitting in intimate yab-yum embrace, foreheads and lips merged as they breathe and tone the mantra in profound unison. As the mantra's reverberations synergize and build charge between their joined fields, their molecular structures can literally entrain and harmonize until the boundaries between them dissolve into one consciousness humming in sublime union.

Couples Tantra Meditations

Yoni- Lingam Tantra Meditation for Lovers

One pivotal couples' meditation is the Yoni-Lingam practice, which retrains sexual energy to flow inward and upward rather than outward through genital release. In the first steps, partners stimulate themselves or each other through massage and breathing while merging awareness at the third eye. As energy peaks, they may unite sexuality by joining lingam (penis) and yoni (vagina), but without seeking orgasmic release. Instead, the built-up charge is dissolved and circulated up through the chakra system.

Over time, this meditation expands orgasmic capacity from a fleeting genital spasm into a full-body energetic phenomenon that can be sustained for extended periods. Couples learn to experience the divine nectar (amrita) of bliss in every cell, rather than reflexively expending it outwardly. The practice culminates in a reverent honoring of the sacred feminine and masculine energies embodied.

Osho Chakra Breathing Meditation: Version for Couples

Another powerful couples' practice is Chakra Breathing Meditation, which systematically activates energy flow through each of the seven chakra centers over three 13-minute cycles, followed by 15 minutes of deep silence.

The couples version of this meditation was developed by Osho’s disciple, Dhyan Maneesh. Partners begin by breathing into their own chakras back-to-back, then assume an intimate yab-yum embrace, finally coming into full body contact in lover's embrace pose.

With profound, uninhibited breathing into each chakra level, stagnant energy is unleashed in a dynamic vortex. By the third cycle, the combined charge of the chakras is whirling in a rapturous storm as partners open their third eye center together. The meditation concludes with 15 minutes of vibrant, blissful silence and integration.

This meditation oxygenates and aligns all levels of your mind-body being, clearing stagnation and restoring vibrancy. It's particularly powerful for activating the third chakra and releasing control patterns. Many report experiencing the strongest, most transcendent orgasmic energy of their lives through this practice.

Bio Resonance Meditation for Couples

This Tantric meditation is a beautiful way for intimate partners to cultivate profound resonance and harmony. It begins with simple mindfulness of one's breath and presence. Then by placing fingers on each other's energy centers, the meditation creates a palpable energetic resonance between the two people. The humming practice engages the spiritual energy and crown chakra.

Through caressing each other's physical body and aura, the meditation anchors the resonance into the corporeal realm. The circular breathing phase helps awaken the inner masculine and feminine essences within each person. Throughout the practice, the partners remain lovingly engaged yet centered in an objective witnessing awareness.

The meditation culminates in a heart-open gesture of gratitude, bowing to the sacred shared aliveness that has been channeled between them. It's a powerful practice to harmonize the energetic polarities and bring one's whole being into vibrational attunement with one's beloved.

Blue Flame Tantra Meditation for Lovers

According to Tibetan tantric traditions, when a meditative couple is able to immerse so deeply in their lovemaking that all sense of separation dissolves, observers have witnessed a radiant blue auric field appear around their merged bodies - the fabled "Blue Flame" of union.

This meditation sequence works to create the conditions for experiencing this non-dual embrace of polarities. It incorporates intimate eye gazing, chakra-synced breathing, energy circulation up the spine, a "shower of grace" visualization, and finally envisioning the aura of both bodies melting into one unified blue sheath of light.

By focusing single-pointedly on each stage with a shared intention of merging, couples can taste a glimpse of the primordial state of consciousness where there is no separation between the self and the entire universe. The Blue Flame results when inner and outer beloveds become utterly integrated in ecstatic samadhi.

For enhanced impact, the meditation can be practiced with the added catalysis of tantric sexual union during the final two stages. This synergistic blending of polarized energies is key to unlocking the light body's full radiant potential.

Khajuraho Meditation

This profoundly intimate meditation is inspired by the ancient Khajuraho temple tradition revering sexuality's potential for transcendence. It should be practiced over seven sessions to fully immerse in the spectrum of human erotic and spiritual potential.

In the first phase, one partner gazes upon the naked, arranged form of the female in a meditation pose without touching, consciously witnessing all thoughts and emotions that arise over 20 minutes of unbroken eye contact with the body's landscape of shapes, curves, and textures.

In the second phase, the roles switch. The woman lies in a receptive, vulnerable pose with open legs, allowing her partner to bear conscious witness, without physical touch and be "swallowed" by the cosmic womb for 20 minutes.

Finally, the couple makes love wordlessly for 40 minutes, their prior meditative insights expanding lovemaking into a transcendental union of heaven and earth, spirit and flesh.

Over time, by turns unapologetically beholding and being beheld, the Khajuraho meditation helps shed body image complexes, judgments, and psychosexual imprints to ultimately reveal one another as emanations of the divine feminine and masculine essence.

6 Things You May Not Know about Tantric Love Practices

Tantra is Not Just About Sex

While tantric practices can elevate intimacy to spiritually transcendent levels, sex itself makes up just a small part of the vast tantric teaching. The core of tantra involves working with life force energy through meditation, breathwork, rituals, yoga and more - all in the service of enlightenment.

Tantra Has Ancient Origins

Some of tantra's roots stretch back over 5,000 years to the ancient Vedic traditions of India.. Many of tantra's most revered texts like the Vigyan Bhairav Tantra originated over a millennium ago.

Tantra Integrates a Holistic Approach

Rather than separating sexuality from spirituality, bodily desires from enlightenment, tantra views them as interconnected. It embraces the totality of human experience - emotions, relationships, bodily cravings - as gateways to self-knowledge when explored with awareness.

Tantra Has a Variety of Practices

From kundalini yoga, tantric asanas and pranayama to complex visualizations, precise energy-moving techniques, chanting and rituals, the tantric tradition encompasses a vast array of teachings and methods adapted for different paths of spiritual awakening.

Tantra Has a Main Focus on Energy

At its core, tantra is a system of working with the subtle life force energies within and between all beings. Key practices like chakra work, kundalini awakening and cultivation of ojas (physical vitality) are designed to transmute energy to finer and finer levels of consciousness.

Tantra Provides Personal and Relationship Benefits

Beyond the lovemaking arts that many associate it with, tantric methods can spark profound growth and healing for individuals and couples alike. Approaches like chakra therapy and tantric massage release emotional/physical stagnation, while yogas of intimate connection like eye-gazing deepen vulnerability and attunement.

Conclusion

On this tantra for lovers journey, you and your beloved get to shed layer after layer of conditioning, insecurity and limiting beliefs around sexuality, relationships and what it means to be a human having deeply ecstatic experiences. With patience and an open mind/body/spirit, you'll start to experience intimacy in a whole new way.

If reading this has awakened a spark within you to tap into realms of ecstatic connection beyond what you currently experience, I invite you to embark on a journey that will forever change the way you approach love, pleasure, orgasms and human connection. My master lovers course is an immersive training to guide you and your beloved step-by-step into integrating these tantric teachings into your relationship.

Through direct transmission and practice, you'll peel away layers of conditioning to unleash your divine erotic essence and create lasting fulfillment. Say yes to unlocking intimacies you never knew possible and blazing your path as sacred tantric lovers committed to embracing all of life's energies.

If you would like an in-person retreat for you and your partner, Me and my Team offer 7 levels for couples called the Tantra Soul Mate Series. These immersive retreats are held in Bali and Europe on a regular basis.

FAQ

What is the true definition of tantra?

Tantra provides a systematic path of expanding consciousness by confronting, exploring and ultimately integrating all aspects of individual and cosmic existence into an experience of infinite inner union. The "techniques" associated with tantric sex are representative of a vast body of work aimed at helping both couples and individuals on their path to enlightenment. Pleasure and polarity are tapped into to open subtle energy channels and cultivate ecstatic states beyond time and mind.

What are the origins of tantric practices?

Tantric traditions trace their roots back thousands of years to the ancient Vedic, Buddhist and Hindu spiritual cultures of India and surrounding regions. Some of the earliest proto-tantric teachings are found in the Vedas, India's oldest scriptures like the Bhagavad Gita, and the 112 meditation techniques of the Vigyan Bhairav Tantra.

What is soul sex?

Soul sex refers to the tantric ideal of two partners coming together in such complete mind-body-spirit unity that they transcend the bounds of individual identification and merge into one infinitely blissful consciousness.

Rather than sex being a purely physical act of gratifying animalistic urges, soul sex views lovemaking as a sacrament where orgasmic energies are a gateway for the masculine and feminine polarities to dissolve back into their original, non-dual state before conception.

Author

Ma Ananda Sarita

Ma Ananda Sarita is a Tantra master, initiated into Tantra in 1973 by Osho. With over 30 years of teaching experience, she offers courses and retreats worldwide. As the voice behind this blog, Sarita offers readers a glimpse into the power of Tantra.