What Happened to Tantra in the West?
True tantra dissolves into pure freedom at the peak where nothing feels “real” ~ and you feel it in your toes, not just your heart or head. Walking this path is completely different than thinking about it.
This is a living fire that burns through pretension and leaves only simple, embodied truth. The more you try to hold it, the more it slips through your fingers ~ until only presence remains.
I write this in August 2026. The neo-tantra movement began fifteen minutes from my home here on Maui ~ thanks to the brave and inspired Charles and Caroline Muir, who first offered group puja and tantric retreats in the 1980s. Most newcomers arrived because they already loved sex ~ sometimes perhaps too much, hence the wish for greater mastery.
My situation was the opposite. At 21, I had developed vulvodynia in the second of my nine-year marriage ~ a marriage that was otherwise genuinely ideal. When kundalini hit in the ninth year, I left my wonderful husband and moved to Maui, visiting India for months at a time, still quite young, with a complete revulsion toward sex rather than desire for it. I wanted moksha.
So I decided to learn everything about sex, God and metaphysics ~ and how they all relate. I eventually healed the vulvodynia and have helped many women with that condition since. The deeper gift was that my energy transmuted early toward a more etheric routing. Less became more ~ as in the film Cocoon! It kept me from being pulled off that razor’s edge that real tantra demands. Like Odysseus strapped to the mast to resist the sirens ~ I had no choice but to reroute upward. And by the time I cracked that code and healed ~ I knew far too much to play around foolishly.
Tantra Deletes Itself
What you most want is what you most cannot have.
And what you most cannot have ~ is what you already had and lost.