What has Tantra got to do with healing and trauma?

Here, we’ll explore some of the theory behind embodied trauma release: what does Tantra have to do with healing and trauma?

Health is circulation

Tantra understands that health is when our life energy, our sexual energy, can circulate around the body. Moreover, this circulation is essential to progress on our spiritual path: to dissolve this restrictive sense of “I”, to experience interconnectedness, being part of and separate from this vast web of life, choosing to move and be guided by this intelligence. This is what Tantra calls Enlightenment and we will explore this in more depth later in this series.

The three blocks

In tantric traditions there’s a lot of emphasis on removing blocks that stop energy from circulating. Those blocks are understood to be:

• Trauma that is stored in the body
• Repressed emotions
• Physical tension

Tantra’s somatic approach

Tantra offers many techniques for removing these blocks:

De-armoring techniques for removing trauma physically from the body, which is a kind of trigger point massage.

Cathartic meditations are highly effective at releasing repressed emotions. Emotions are energy in motion: when stuck, we experience problems; when flowing, they transform into pure potency, potentiality and pleasure (think how good it can feel after you have had a really good cry).

Yoga postures for releasing physical tensions and opening the chakras (energy points in the body, a concept we will explore later in this series).

The roots of somatic trauma work

That trauma is stored in the body is now accepted in mainstream discourse through books like The Body Keeps the Score. These practices have been Westernized and called ‘somatic trauma work’. But the roots of these understandings and approaches are Tantric.

We owe a lot to Tantric traditions. And personally, I’m very grateful to the healing that they have provided me.