On this date, you and your partner will either attend or re-create at home a tantric puja.

In the modern West, tantra has come to mean “spiritual sex.” The ancient practice of tantra has roots in the fertility rites of the Indus River Valley and in Hindu attitudes toward finding the divine in every aspect of life. Westerners associate tantra with sex partly because God and sex are kept so far apart in Christianity and partly because of the intricate drawings of The Kama Sutra. Tantra’s most famous text does show fantastic (and improbable) examples of heterosexual coupling. It also counsels young lovers on a wide array of topics, from kitchen politics to personal hygiene. Tantra has influenced generations of Buddhists, Taoists, Muslims, and philosophers throughout Asia.

Whether tantra has millions of followers or several thousand practitioners depends on how one counts believers. Certainly tantra has had a deep influence on all the faiths of the ancient Indus River Valley, and a quarter of earth’s population follows those traditions. If, however, tantra refers exclusively to the mostly Western devotees who reclaimed the practice starting in the 1960s, then its followers are far fewer.

Tantric practice moves vital force (called chi or kundalini) between centers of the body and between people. Practitioners of tantra, sometimes called tantrikas, think about the body as having seven different gateways to the soul, or chakras. The chakras respond to touch, breath, and invisible energetic connections. Balance between the chakras and a lifestyle feeding each center is the key to health and happiness.

Tantric practice involves poses called asanas and ritual gatherings known as pujas. Pujas often begin by creating a sacred space and cleansing the room of any distractions. The leader or leaders ask the assembled to move about the room, gathering a sense of the place and meeting one another with intention. Participants are invited to pause and gaze into each other’s eyes for a moment. A circle follows and all the potentially negative elements of the gathering are banished. Fear, anger, judgment, and self-consciousness are called out and put aside for the duration of the puja. Different people then offer the gifts they bring to the circle and promise that love, hope, happiness, joy, and acceptance will fill the room.

Individuals might be invited to sit for a moment and imagine light or energy moving up their spine and touching each center. Then, two circles might form with people on the inner and outer circles reaching out to touch each other’s heart chakras and then clasping their partner’s hand with their own hand. The circle moves clockwise until everyone on the inside has symbolically touched the hearts of all of those on the outside.

To practice this tenet, the circle dissolves and pairs of people gather to compliment each other. While one partner is silent, the other describes things he or she likes and admires about the person seated a few inches away. Then the partners often trade places or find a new person to acknowledge as beautiful and divine.

Tantra teaches that we are both masculine and feminine in the same body at the same time. One common exercise is for the group to pair off and work on becoming simultaneously male and female through breathwork. The first step is breathing in harmony. As one person breathes out, his or her partner breathes in. The exercise continues as the pairs figuratively send breath from one person to the other.

Adding sound to the breath enhances the believability of the exercise. Women begin making a quiet sigh (“oooooooooh”) as they exhale. Men move masculine energy with a diaphragm-raising murmur (“ahhhhhhhh”). After a few exchanges, men begin using the feminine noise and women start to make the masculine sound. If so moved, the pairs might move physically closer until individuals are straddling one another in the ancient Yab-Yum posture and the exchange of breath/energy feels as though one partner is breathing into the very center of another person’s body and being.