What Is Tantra? A Clear Beginner's Guide to the Tradition
Quick answer: Tantra is a family of spiritual traditions that took shape in India more than a thousand years ago. It uses meditation, breath, mantra, ritual, devotion and philosophy to bring about awakening, a direct recognition of your true nature, within ordinary embodied life. Intimacy is a small part of the classical tradition. Most of what the West calls tantra comes from a modern branch, often called neo-tantra, that developed between the 1960s and 1980s.
Maybe you met tantra at a weekend workshop. Maybe you met it in a book, or on a retreat flyer, or in a joke someone made at dinner.
Ask five people what tantra is and you'll get five answers. A spiritual path. A relationship practice. Breathwork. Something exotic and a little suspect.
They're all holding a piece of it. Very few of them have the whole picture, and honestly, for a long time neither did we.
Here's the clearest map we can give you in one post.
What tantra means: the short answer
Tantra is a family of spiritual traditions that took shape in India more than a thousand years ago.
It includes:
Meditation and contemplative practice
Breath, sound and mantra
Ritual and devotion
A detailed philosophy of consciousness
Practices for living all of it in an ordinary human life
Its aim is awakening, meaning a direct recognition of who you are underneath your stories. The tradition treats the body, the senses and everyday life as places where that recognition happens. You don't have to leave the world to find it.
Is tantra about sex?
Mostly, no. Intimacy and desire show up in tantra, and a few classical lineages included ritual practices around them. But they make up a small slice of a very large body of teaching.
Most classical tantra is about attention, devotion, and how consciousness works.
So how did the West come to treat tantra as mainly a bedroom practice? That's where the history gets interesting.
How tantra split into two paths
Our understanding of this history owes a lot to the scholar and teacher Christopher Hareesh Wallis, who has been Ben's primary teacher.
Roughly, one historical pressure produced two separate versions of tantra that grew up without ever really talking to each other.
In India:
During British rule, colonial writers often pointed to tantra as proof that Indian spirituality was too strange or too transgressive.
That created real pressure to present a cleaner, more respectable version of Indian religion.
When Swami Vivekananda spoke in Chicago in 1893, the version he presented had the tantric edges smoothed off.
In the West:
The same Victorian discomfort that judged tantra also made people curious about it.
Early translators, especially John Woodroffe, brought real tantric texts into English.
Popular interest locked onto the sexual material.
Figures like Pierre Bernard, who called himself "Oom the Omnipotent," sold an American tantra that was part yoga studio and part scandal.
So one path became respectable and quiet about tantra. The other became loud about tantra and mostly about sex.
We go deeper on this split in Classical Tantra vs Neotantra: How One Tradition Became Two.
How the modern tantra workshop got invented
If you've been to a tantra workshop, much of what happened in the room has a surprisingly recent origin.
1960s: The Esalen Institute in California developed the experiential workshop format: eye gazing, structured touch, group sharing, and emotional release used as a spiritual tool. Nobody was calling it tantra yet.
1970s: Osho's community in Pune, India, blended Esalen-style group work with tantric language. It drew thousands of Western seekers.
Mid-1980s: That community collapsed, and its senior teachers scattered and started teaching on their own.
1989: Margot Anand published The Art of Sexual Ecstasy. Neo-tantra became a genre.
If you trace most Western tantra workshops back far enough, the trail tends to stop somewhere around the 1970s.
Ben walks through this whole story, from 1893 Chicago to the modern workshop, in a free masterclass called Building Castles on Top of Dragon Mounds.
Does that make modern tantra fake?
We don't think so.
A short lineage can still produce real results. Plenty of what came out of Esalen and the decades after it genuinely helps people feel more, connect more, and live more honestly in their bodies.
The classical side has gaps of its own:
A large share of classical tantric texts has been lost.
Some of what survived was likely edited over the centuries.
No living teacher, including us, can trace an unbroken line back to the great classical masters.
What we ask for is truth in advertising. Ask two questions of any practice:
Where does this come from?
Does it work?
Answer both honestly, and then do whatever serves you.
As Ben puts it: "I am not the governing authority on what's Tantra and what is not Tantra." Nobody is. What you can do is know what you're practicing.
What tantra is actually for
If you remember one line from this post, make it this one, also from Ben:
"If awakening does not take precedence, it is not Tantra."
Better intimacy, more pleasure, deeper presence and stronger relationships are all real benefits of tantric practice. In the classical view, they come along with the main purpose, which is recognizing what you are.
In daily life, that means:
You use the practice in traffic, in conflict, and in grief, as well as on the meditation cushion.
Your body becomes a way to learn about yourself, where before it was mostly something to manage.
Your relationships become a place to practice, where before they were mostly something to get right.
Where to start
If you're new to this, here's how we'd suggest beginning:
Learn the map before the techniques. Practices make more sense when you know what they're for and where they came from.
Ask where a teaching comes from. Good teachers can tell you, including when the honest answer is "we don't know."
Start small and stay consistent. Five minutes of daily practice will teach you more than an occasional peak weekend.
Look for teachers who name their limits. If someone sounds certain about everything, be cautious.
Take the next step
We built Intro to Tantra for anyone who wants the whole map before going deeper.
It's four recorded sessions, taught by both of us. They cover where tantra comes from, what got lost in translation, and how the pieces fit together into something you can actually live.
Two paths, three tools, four pillars, five layers. That's the whole shape of it, and by the end it'll be yours to work with.
4 recorded sessions
Lifetime access
$197
Not ready for the full course? Start with the free masterclass. Building Castles on Top of Dragon Mounds is Ben's deep dive into how tantra split in two and how the modern workshop got invented.
With love, Ben & Larinda
Frequently asked questions about tantra
How old is tantra?
Most scholars date the earliest tantric texts to roughly 1,500 years ago, in India. The tradition developed over many centuries within both Hindu and Buddhist practice.
What's the difference between tantra and neo-tantra?
Classical tantra is the older Indian tradition, focused on awakening through meditation, mantra, ritual and philosophy. Neo-tantra is the modern Western branch that grew out of the 1960s to 1980s (Esalen, Osho, Margot Anand). It focuses on intimacy, emotional release and the group workshop format.
Is tantra a religion?
Tantra developed inside religious traditions, mainly Hinduism and Buddhism. Today many people practice tantric methods without any religious affiliation.
Do I need a partner to practice tantra?
No. Most tantric practice is done alone: meditation, breath, sound, attention and daily-life practice. If you would like to practice as a couple, our Couples Immersion is a three-day intensive built for exactly that.
Can I learn tantra online?
Yes. The foundations, including history, philosophy and solo practices, can be learned well online. Our Intro to Tantra course covers them in four recorded sessions with lifetime access. If you would rather learn one-to-one, our private sessions are available online and in Colorado.
About the authors
Ben & Larinda are the founders of Authentic Essence, a tantra and embodiment school based in Boulder, Colorado. Together they've run more than 50 workshops, led retreats, and taught thousands of students in the United States, online, the UK and Bali.
Larinda has been teaching for five years. She completed the Tantra Practitioner Training with Embodied Awakening Academy and has studied with scholar and teacher Christopher Hareesh Wallis for two years.
Ben has worked with Embodied Awakening Academy for four years and has studied classical tantra with Christopher Hareesh Wallis for ten years.
Both have trained in somatics, yoga and breathwork, and they keep learning through daily practice, ongoing study with Hareesh and other teachers, and trainings around the world.
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