Why Tantric Yoga Soul Gazing is Your New Favorite Practice
Communication occurs on many levels beyond talking and listening. Magic happens when the energy lines between people open. Soul gazing is a tantric technique that gives practitioners an altered state of consciousness by staring into another person’s eyes for ten minutes.
“Like iron filings being drawn to a powerful magnetic source, we experience ourselves as being ineluctably drawn closer to a shared feeling of union, relatedness and love. Where formerly we were two separate beings, we join together through the practice and become something that neither of us could quite be on our own.”
~Â Johnson, “The Spiritual Practices of Rumi”
What is Tantra Yoga?
The Tantric practice aims to expand beyond perceived limitations of yogic philosophy and the asanas. When one meditates it is the space between thoughts where one begins to find a glimpse of inner peace. As yogis, we cultivate that space until the thoughts become less and less obtrusive, and the space between them becomes vast.
The exploration of the subtle energies within the body and their connection to the universe provide the opportunity to understand the purpose of life and the principles of union in new dimensions.
Try a Soul Gazing Excersize With a Partner
- Settle into a loose, cross-legged position (typically the larger person in Sukhasana first). Your partner then sits on your thighs and crosses their ankles behind your back.
- Touch your third eye centers (space between the eyebrows) as you both lengthen through your spines. Gaze lightly into each other’s eyes as you inhale and exhale through the nose.
- Place your palm on your partner’s heart center and have them place their palm over yours.
- Together, take five breaths, allowing a natural synchronicity of breath to emerge.
- Begin gazing into each other’s eyes. It may seem uncomfortable at first, but persist.
- Surrender to the intimate experience of both your and your partner’s heartbeat. Try this for 10 minutes.
Expand Your Capacity for Intimacy
If you’re practicing Tantra Yoga on your own or with a partner, you’re expanding your capacity for intimacy and union. With practice, we’re able to get up close and intimate with the beliefs and behaviors that hold us back from the intimacy we desire. In addition, Tantric techniques are provided to evolve beyond these barriers so that each and every one of us may thrive and prosper.
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5 Yoga Tactics to Elevate Every Moment
In each moment there can be beauty. In every experience there can be mysticism. It all begins with noticing. Read on for five yoga tactics to elevate every moment.
In Tantra, everything is sacred. The air you’re breathing. The device you’re reading this on. The challenges you faced today. Matter meets spirit. Life unfolds as sadhana.
Elevating each moment begins with the recognition that all moments are sacred. And we can also get much more practical.
##5 Yoga Tactics to Elevate Every Moment
1. See the magic in the mundane.
You are here. You are alive. You are inhaling each new moment and exhaling the one that came before. You are fueled with awareness, a force of nature. Carrying within you the innate capacity for infinite possibilities. Free to choose.
Life is your canvas. You get to paint it any color that you like. Isn’t that kinda magic?
2. Live in your body—not your head.
The purpose of yoga asana is to still the movement of our mind. From this simple teaching we understand that the mind is not the ideal place to live from. Eckhart Tolle, Byron Katie, and probably even Oprah would agree.
To get out of our head and into our body is simple. We begin to feel our body. Beyond thought. Beyond emotion. Physical sensation. We notice what’s there, without judgement but with great compassion and curiosity. And we begin to emerge into a landscape guided by acceptance.
3. Experience your senses.
We’re gifted with our sense of taste, smell, hearing, seeing, and touch. We are innately able to deeply experience each moment. Each pleasure. Each pain. All equal. All sacred.
When we shift our awareness to what we can taste, smell, hear, see and feel, we shift from worry or fantasy about the future. We drop away from clinging to the past. And enter into the only moment we ever have. The one we’re living right now. And it becomes a thing of beauty, because we fully recognize and live what’s happening.
4. Presence. Aka: Being in the now.
In the now, we move from past remembrances and future fears or fantasies into the moment we’re in. This is a moment saturated with sensation. Rich in subtleties.
In this moment, we shift from ego to atman. Anchored in our senses and in our body, we begin to travel inward, traversing the five koshas or sheaths that cradle the Self: the physical body, mental emotional body, energy body, wisdom body and bliss body.
In the bliss body we are light. The wisdom body guides us. The energy body sustains us. The mental-emotional body helps us process our life. And the physical body carries us.
In the now, we can access bliss because becoming deeply present takes us beyond our physical body and the other koshas, and brings us there.
5. Transforming from within.
When we notice what is within us and accept it all, we begin to see how we create our experiences. By exploring without judgement we see how our reactions in our mental-emotional body dictate how we perceive what happens. And we realize we can change things.
We start within our own selves. By feeling what we feel and dropping out of thought we arrive at a place of peace. And from that place we can move forward. No longer hindered by old limiting beliefs. No longer shackled by ancient misperceptions. We are free to create what we desire.
And we begin by creating the feeling of it within ourselves.
