A few years ago, someone asked me a question I still think about.
“How long does it take to learn Tantra?”
I knew what they were asking.
They wanted to know whether it would take three months. Six months. Or a year.
I smiled because I have asked versions of that question myself.
I have been teaching Tantra for more than sixteen years. I grew up around these traditions. I have studied with my own Guru and other teachers who have spent decades immersed in practices most people will never hear about.
And the deeper I go,
the less comfortable I become saying:
I know Tantra.
My Guru casually says:
“It took me twenty years to understand this.”
Or:
“I have practiced this for forty years, and I am still discovering it.”
I love that.
There is something deeply rebellious about that humility in a culture obsessed with mastery.
We want the certificate, title, and the tantric vocab overnight.
We want to know when we can finally call ourselves the expert.
Tantra is uninterested in our hurry.
Tantra is not asking:
How much do you know?
It is asking:
What has your knowing changed about the way you live?
Can you remain present when desire enters the body?
Can you sit with uncertainty without immediately creating a story?
Can you experience anger without becoming violent toward yourself or another?
Can you meet another human being without turning them into a projection of your hunger?
Can you sit in silence without needing silence to give you something?
That is where Tantra becomes interesting to me.
So rather than explaining what Tantra is,
I want to offer seven doors I continue returning to.
1. Shiva: Learn to remain
Shiva is often turned into an image of a deity.
But there is an experience beneath the symbol of Shiva.
Shiva is a stillness that does not disappear when life becomes intense.
Most of us are easy and cozy when reality agrees with us.
But the moment rejection comes.
Or desire comes.
Or you face uncertainty.
In that moment, our consciousness gets kidnapped by reaction.
The Shiva consciousness simply asks:
Can you just remain?
This is why meditation matters so deeply in Tantra.
Meditation is not merely relaxation.
It is a playground for your higher reality.
You sit, breathe, and witness.
So, when a thought arrives,
You remain.
When an emotion arrives,
You remain.
An itch arrives,
You remain.
(Or at least, you do your best!)
Eventually life arrives.
And perhaps you learn to remain there too.
That’s what Shiva represents.
2. Kali: Let something end
Everyone loves transformation until something actually has to die.
Kali is a primal force that reveals what has expired.
Be it an identity, or a relationship, or an ambition, or an old definition of success.
Or a version of spirituality that once made sense.
This is one reason
genuine inner work can feel brutal.
We want rebirth without death.
Tantra does not make that promise.
Sometimes the most sacred thing you can do is
stop resuscitating what has already completed its work.
A question to meditate on:
What am I keeping alive simply because
I am afraid of meeting myself without it?
3. Shakti: Stop treating your aliveness as a problem
Desire.
Creativity.
Anger.
Sensuality.
Longing.
Grief.
We have created our entire systems for managing these energies.
Tantra becomes curious about them.
This is where the concept of Shakti becomes so powerful.
Shakti is movement. She’s a life force.
She teaches us that the more intimate you become with energy,
the less blindly you need to obey it.
She asks:
What wants to move through me,
and can I become conscious enough to give it a worthy form?
That question alone can change your self-expression.
4. Vijnana Bhairava: The doorway is already here
Vijnana Bhairava is one of the most revered texts in Tantra traditions. One of the things I love about it is how radically intimate its meditation world is.
Breath can become a doorway.
Sound can become a doorway.
Stillness can become the doorway.
The 112 meditations in it teach us that
you do not always need to escape
ordinary life to find consciousness.
You need to become intimate enough with ordinary lif
to discover what you keep overlooking.
Notice the breath turning.
Notice the tiny space
before you answer someone who has triggered you.
There are doors everywhere.
We miss them because we are moving too fast.
The sacred is not always hidden. Sometimes your attention is simply elsewhere.
5. Don’t transcend the body. Enter it.
This is where much of modern spirituality loses me.
People become very good at speaking about consciousness
while remaining strangers to their own bodies.
Tantra keeps bringing us back.
Where does your yes live?
What happens in your belly when you betray yourself?
What happens to your breathing around someone you do not trust?
Your body is not an inconvenience between you and enlightenment.
It is part of the path.
This is also where sensuality becomes much more interesting than sexuality.
Sensuality is sensitivity; it’s a capacity to be touched by existence.
If nothing can touch you,
it becomes very difficult for anything authentic to move through you.
A brief interruption before I continue.
I’ll be gathering with some of you in Vancouver soon for an in-person meditation experience and a day retreat.
We’ll meditate, work with mantra, explore consciousness through the body, and create space for the kind of inner listening that is difficult to manufacture in the speed of ordinary life.
If you’re in Vancouver, I would love to sit with you.
Explore the Vancouver gathering
6. Your contradiction belongs too
You can be spiritual and angry.
Devoted and doubtful.
Sensual and deeply meditative.
Grieving and grateful on the same morning.
Tantra does not interest me because
it gives me another ideal human being to perform.
It interests me because
it has continually asked me to become intimate
with the human being who is actually here.
This is harder because
the ego loves spiritual identities.
Reality is much messier.
The goal isn’t to eliminate contradiction.
It is to develop enough consciousness that
your contradictions no longer secretly run your life.
7. Become a student before becoming a teacher
Maybe this is the principle I care about most.
Remain teachable.
I have been doing this work professionally for sixteen years.
I still want to absorb every word from my teachers.
I still want practices that disturb and question what I think I know.
I still want moments in meditation where my explanations fail me.
Because the moment Tantra becomes something I have mastered,
I suspect I have stopped meeting Tantra.
There is an old temptation in spiritual spaces to
collect knowledge and mistake accumulation for embodiment.
But knowing the map does not mean
your feet have touched the mountain.
You can teach nonattachment
and still punish someone for leaving you.
You can speak beautifully about presence
and never truly listen.
So perhaps we need fewer people
rushing to become Tantra experts.
And more people willing to become
lifelong students of consciousness.
That is the Tantra I care about.
Tantra that makes you available.
To your body.
To creativity.
To desire.
To death.
To love.
To whatever reality is asking you to meet today.
And maybe after forty years, we will still say:
I am learning.
I hope so. :)
that is one of the reasons I created Tantric Rebirth.
Rebirth is not a Tantra certification.
You will not emerge with a title announcing that
you have mastered an ancient tradition.
I want something more meaningful for you.
I want you to develop a living relationship with the teachings.
Bring them into your relationships, your nervous system,
your art, your desire, your ordinary Tuesday afternoon.
Season 2 is where we continue that experiment together.
If that is the kind of path you have been looking for, I would be honored to welcome you inside.
I see you,
CB
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Image credits:
Photo by @rnld.jansen
“Bad Dream” by artist Cho Gi-Seok
Eternally bound by @natashawilson.co
Isn’t that the truth.