Tantra vs. Yoga Explained
This episode is all about understanding how yoga and tantra are similar and how they are also separate. In this episode, Chandresh shares how to maximize the benefits of yoga and also maximize the benefits of tantra. He shares how yoga and tantra can go out of hand if we do not handle them in a conscious, aware way.
There is so much information about tantra and yoga out there, and this is a take from Chandresh’s experience and insights. How he sees yoga and tantra, and how yoga and tantra have been seen in the eastern traditions.
Episode Transcript
What is tantra? What really is yoga? Is there a connection between tantra and yoga? Does yoga help you to be better in tantra or does tantra create the doorway to be a better yogi? In this episode, we are going to explore the similarities and the difference between tantra and yoga. And I hope by the end of this episode, you will arrive at a clarity about where you want to go and what feels right for your growth. I am Chandresh Bhardwaj, and this is Break The Norms. Namaste, everyone. I hope you're doing well. Before I get into the episode for today, a quick reminder, and you know what that reminder is. Join me every Sunday on the Leela Gurukul Instagram page for the meditations. And do sign up on leelagurukul.com so that you could be one of the first ones to join the Leela School, to join the offerings, the courses, the community that we have been trying to build on it. A few more weeks and it's going to be all out with you. And what I'm going to share with you today has a lot to do with the foundation of Leela Gurukul. It's the discussion of tantra and yoga. The more you read or the more classes you attend online or in person the more confusion starts to build around what really is tantra and yoga together? Are they separate? Are they one? Which one is better? Which one is challenging? So first step I believe in this episode is to really define what is not yoga and what is not tantra. What you see in most yoga studios is not yoga. It's just set of asanas, the physical postures, and what you hear about tantra is not tantra. And most of you hear only the sexual aspect of tantra, which is that there is a great deal of sexual energy present in the tantra teachings, but not in the indulgent way that you read and hear about, but in a more of understanding the sexual energy so that you can go beyond it. But the way marketing gurus have been selling you tantra is that you can keep indulging into it until your last breath. And somehow it makes you feel more powerful, because the social narrative says the more sexual you are the more stronger person you are. The motivation behind this episode happened through this conversation I had with a student. She was my student before, and we have been in touch since then, and she's moving from London to L.A. And she's a great yoga master and she spoke to a few yoga studios in L.A. and they asked her, "What kind of yoga do you teach?" and she shared her experience of 17 years of yoga teaching. And the leading yoga studios of L.A. told her, "You can teach yoga, but you cannot share about the spiritual or the Indian context with it. You have to stick to just the physical postures." And she said, "The names of those postures are Sanskrit." And they said, "No, we have our own branded names for it so you have to use those names." And it obviously left her a little disappointed and a little vulnerable. And I decided to do a podcast on these topics of the tantra yoga, and a major episode will come soon on the cultural appropriation of tantra and yoga. That's a conversation that I wanted to avoid for a long time, but it looks like I really need to talk about it. But I'll save that for the next episode. This is just about tantra and yoga and how they are similar and different and how you can maximize benefits from them. So the most beautiful similarity in yoga and tantra is that they both will take you to the same destination. They both prepare you to attain samadhi. Samadhi means the highest state of consciousness. That's the most beautiful part. Now, the routes they both take, they are different. And that's really the essence of this episode, that the destination is same, the routes are different, but there is a very beautiful similarity in those routes, and that's awareness. And if you take the knowledge you have of driving, imagine you leave from New York and you have to reach L.A. And the one of you is using Google Maps, the other one is using Apple Maps and they both had recommending different routes. Ultimately, you will reach L.A., and they both have one requirement, just drive safe, drive with awareness. That's pretty much what it is. They both are asking you to follow the route with absolute awareness. It sounds very easy, but it's not so easy only because we make our lives complicated. I'm going to take one statement and then we'll dive deeper into that one statement, and hopefully that will help you to understand the difference between yoga and tantra.
They both encourage you to live life with awareness. A major difference is yoga will tell you, "Suppress everything with awareness," and tantra will tell you, "Indulgent everything with awareness." If you take out the awareness part, what remains is indulgence and suppression, and they both are terrible, scary, damaging. That's why awareness has to be there, and this is one reason. Whenever a yogi has gone all over the place or when a tantra teacher has gone out of their zone, it's only when awareness is not there. A good way to understand this example is sexual energy, anger, these human emotions, indulgence in anything. So let's say you are someone with strong sexual energy or just the sexual urge and that's a major component of you. Along with sexual energy, there's also anger, just anxiety, anger, and these are heavy emotions in you, if you go into the path of yoga, the yoga will tell you, "You absolutely cannot indulge in your sexual energy. Sex is bad to begin with and you cannot go into that element at all. Anger is bad. You cannot go into that." The true yoga will also tell you drinking alcohol, eating meat, all of that is also very damaging to your senses. There's a word in Sanskrit, indri, that means you could say the chakras, the nardis, the senses within you, there are many names for it, but the point is, if you indulge in alcohol, meat, sex, anger, or those heavy human emotions, yoga will say, "That's just not allowed. It just makes you an unethical yogi and you are not qualified to be yogi." So what you have to do to be a better yogi, you have to practice discipline. You have to suppress these emotions, but suppress with absolute awareness. How do you do that? You practice all the elements of yoga sutras. What you see and hear about yoga in all the popular magazines, blogs, fancy yoga studios, they miss out on 95% of yoga. They retain just a very little bit of that, which whatever sells the classes that's only allowed. A true yogi is an extremely rare being. Why? Because suppression with awareness is not everyone's cup of tea. There are many challenges that start to show up. One of the challenges is the yoga practices can make you extremely masculine and very hard. And this is why sometimes you may come across yoga teachers who don't smile a lot, they are not playful enough, they get angry very quickly. They could be very dry. Even when you go back and listen to the ancient yoga teachers, some of them may feel dry to some of you, and that's not their fault. It's just sometimes they miss their train and what remains is a yogic, a yoga teacher, who could be great in the asanas, in the postures, but there's no playfulness left. They become too hard, physically, mentally, emotionally. They do attain the suppression, but there's a price they have to pay for it. That suppression, if there's no awareness, it can make them very angry. That's why, wherever you come across people who are practicing any sort of abstinence or any sort of discipline on food, sex, meat, alcohol relationships, anything at all, sometimes they do end up just messing up the whole thing. Because if awareness is not there, you will be in a deep, long tunnel with no light there. And yoga wants to make you a warrior. And a true warrior is that who's leading with awareness, who's in the battle field with absolute awareness. That's why I say a true yogi is a very rare being. You may come across teachers who can talk about yoga, who can do the asanas, but a true yogi is rare, because they have to blend the awareness and the suppression of certain senses. It's not an easy task. Also, when you cultivate that fight, it cultivates the ego in you and ego loves a fight. Why? Because anything that can make you feel important, it creates ego. That's why there are lot of jokes about vegan people. The last one I heard was that, "How do you know there's a vegan person in the party?" And the answer is, "You don't have to find out. They will tell everyone that they are vegan." And I hope I can say this joke and no one will be offended. I have been vegan since 2000, so we are 21 years and I hope it's okay to crack a joke on something that had been practicing. And the reason I call myself vegan probably once in two years, it's because of the same joke. There is immense amount of ego, arrogance that comes with these practices. When people start to do something, they want to make sure everyone knows about it and they are rewarded for it. It's just human mind. I hope you don't make judgment
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against those who come across as egoic or arrogant when they portray how spiritual they are or how vegan they are. It's just human minded. It wants to feel important. That's the driven force behind many of these actions.
Now come to the other layer, tantra. I think it's safe to call yoga and tantra are the opposite sides of the same coin. Now the journey gets very interesting with tantra, because if yoga tells you that you have to be a warrior and you have to suppress it all with awareness, tantra will tell you, "Drop all the fights. You are not here to be a warrior. You are here to be a lover. You are here to be a poet. You are here to be
childlike, to be playful. You can absolutely do it all, but do it with awareness." And that's where the tantra becomes its own universe. This is why in tantra there are so many layers. Tantric is someone who practices tantra, a master of tantra. Not the student, but the master. A student would be called [shisha 00:14:05]. Shisha means someone who surrenders their ego. That's what the word means, shisha. Shish means head, the mind. So a tantric, the tantra practitioner, they come in all shapes, sizes, forms.
They may be extreme, intense, or they may be as normal as someone you randomly come across in Starbucks. A tantric could be a person that you randomly come across on a street, or they could be someone who's living in the jungle for more than 100 years and they could look like a 22 year old, young. That's just how a tantric is built. It's immensely powerful. And trust me, that day you will know the real possibilities of tantric your minds will be blown. Everything you can imagine, the most powerful things that can happen in spirituality, that's happening in tantra as we speak. Many of those things I will never put on podcast, and that's why Leela Gurukul is being built. That once there is the vibration of safety, warmth, and trust, then we will be sharing some really intense things about tantra. Because I do feel that the time for tantra is here. I have never seen the hunger for spirituality as much as I've been seeing now.
There is immense collective darkness and anxiety, but also collective willingness to dive deeper. And this is why I am in favor of tantra obviously a lot more, because this is also something I have been practicing. And that doesn't take away the importance of yoga. That's its own beauty. If you feel you can dive deeper into the absolute yoga with all your awareness, go for it, because we need the true yogis. There are many posture experts. Now we need more yogis. Now, tantra will tell you, "Do it all." And we know what that means. We don't know how to handle the freedom. When I started doing this work and started sharing about tantra, at first, I was a bit hesitant. Then I started sharing more and then I started sharing even more, and I didn't realize when that teaching started taking its own form. And I saw there were people who would manipulate the teaching for their own comfort, for their own benefit, and there were a few moments where I felt it was almost about to do a lot of damage and I had to stop sharing the tantra work openly.
And I realize it's no wonder the ancient teachers did not put everything out on the table with tantra. They kept it very sacred, very protected, because tantra gives you all the freedom and you could be creating your own illusion with tantra that I'm indulging in everything with awareness. Now, if there is no guru, no teacher, then you could be creating your own doctrine with tantra. You could be creating your own rights and wrongs, you could be creating your own mantras, your own meditations, and spend all your life in this hallucination that you are doing the tantra. But the truth is, you're just beating your own drum, you're just playing your own melody, and that could be damaging to many people and that's not cool. So this is why in tantra we say there is no tantra without awareness and without sankalp. Sankalp means intention. So awareness has to be there and the right intention has to be there.
Intention which is right is the one with willpower. So willpower and intention, they go together. This is where tantra gets interesting, because in yoga, if a yogi is getting married or indulging in sex or indulging in meat, alcohol, they will be kicked out from the yogic school. And I'm talking about the true yogis, not what we hear and see today, but a true yogi who's indulging in all the elements of yoga. They will be kicked out if they do not practice these laws. That's the whole essence of yoga. They have to practice those foundations. Without them they are not yogis. In tantra, you won't be kicked out if you indulge in sex, if you indulge in alcohol or even drugs or anything. Now, the abuse of tantra also starts here because many people walk into the tantra universe thinking that they will be allowed to have mindless sex and indulge in all sort of pleasures, the food pleasure, the physical, alcohol, meat, food, anything at all.
The important point to understand is in tantra, you can do this and still go deeper in samadhi, in meditation. But that's not what tantrics do. It's something you can do, but that's not what make them tantrics. I hope you understand the difference. And how it will be allowed in tantra is almost very scientific. So if you're indulging in sex or indulging in any other form of pleasure or impulsiveness, a tantric would not just unconsciously indulge in that experience. They'll be watching that experience. If they're getting really angry, they will be allowed to be angry, but the group will keep watching and telling them that, "Great, now you're angry. Why don't you scream? Do you want to punch in the rock? Go ahead. You'll hurt yourself, but watch the hurt, watch the blood. You want to indulge in sex? Go ahead. Go for it. But watch every moment, every breath of it." Because guilt should not happen after that. Awareness should happen after that.
And that's why, in the true essence, an experience of sex through tantra gives you so much awareness and understanding that you do not feel the need to release the sexual energy randomly in another few hours or few days. In many cases, it fulfills you for months or even years. That's why I'm telling you we need tantra more than ever. The possibilities are endless with tantra. Tantra is more accessible, more practical, and that's why there are more tantrics than yogis. And those tantrics may not be on google.com. If you look up "best tantric", you may not come across the right tantric. They are still in solitude away from people. There are very few tantrics who are allowed or available to be in people, and they have their own set of terms and conditions before they start helping and taking you in. It has to be that way. There cannot be any either way.
And if you keep indulging in sex or any other pleasure in tantra, ultimately, you will transcend all of that. Why? Because tantra throughout teaches you to understand your relationship with that element. It could be addiction, anger, sexual energy. Tantra will simply say, "To experience the ultimate Nirvana, the ultimate truth, use yourself. Just work with yourself. You do not need anyone from outside." Tantra will also tell you, "Ultimately, you do not need a man or woman to indulge in sex. You yourself are enough to experience that orgasm." That's why many tantra teachers will tell you that a true tantra is orgasmic, but not sexual. It can take you deeper into the layers, but it will still keep you so pure and so powerful. Because see, what happens when you are dominated by any emotion, anger, greed, sexual energy, desires, and when you act on them, you make them more powerful. You train them to be more powerful. And when we have been doing it for years and years, our families have been doing the same thing, those cells and muscles become very powerful.
But when you start to reverse that pattern, you will, of course become much more powerful than those sexual energies, than those addictive patterns, and that changes everything. Because there is no fight in tantra, there is just a playfulness, indulgence with awareness, so there's no anger or aggression building up. So just by playing with those energies, watching them, playing, taking the conscious actions, ultimately, you start to change the script of your life. Ultimately, you change everything that's unfolding. That's the beauty of tantra. And I hope this episode about the two elements, yoga and tantra, were helpful or inspiring for you to go deeper into learning more about them. My hope for Leela is that we do offer definitely a deeper realm in tantra, and hopefully for yoga also there will be outlets. I am not forcing anything in Leela. Whatever is happening, I'm just honoring it for now, and I hope I continue to do that.
Before we conclude this episode, let's take a moment to just visualize the face of Buddha, the calmness, the compassion, the clarity on his face. And if you can visualize the face of a tantra goddess. It could be Goddess Kali. It could be Goddess Durga. The face of the goddess represents calmness, courage, strength, playfulness, but also a sense of conscious warrior. I truly hope that these energies of Buddha and Goddess Kali inspire you, empower you and open up the doors of energy that you didn't know existed in you. May you arrive at your strength in the most organic divine ways. Be safe, be well, and I'll speak to you next week.
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