What is polarity?

If you’ve been to a Tantra workshop, you may have been told that polarity is about masculine and feminine energy—that men should be decisive and grounded, women should be shaky and emotional.

It’s a load of bollocks.

Three different things

I think there’s a lot of confusion between three different things:

Sex: What genitals do we have? What sexual organs do we have? Do we have a penis, do we have a vagina, do we have breasts, don’t we have breasts?

Gender: The personality traits which we are told are associated with having particular genitalia. If you have a penis you’re supposed to be aggressive or to be decisive. If you have a vagina you’re supposed to be caring, nurturing, emotional.

And then there is what is often termed masculine and feminine energy. So what do we mean by masculine and feminine energy? What do we mean by polarity?

The real polarity

If in Tantra everything is experienced in the body, then these energies, these polarities, are not gender qualities.

What is the experience of polarity?

Form and awareness.

There is this word and there is awareness of this word. There is this hand and there is awareness of this hand.

If there was no hand here, there’d be nothing to be aware of. So this hand is an example of the polarity of form.

If there was no awareness, I wouldn’t know what I was saying. I wouldn’t be aware of the existence of the hand. So the awareness that must be there for me to experience the hand is an example of the polarity of awareness.

There is always this dance between form and awareness. Both are there. Always.

Practicing the dance

In Tantra, we learn how to train our attention so we can identify with both polarities consciously.

We learn practices to expand out somatically—a felt-experience of expansion, of becoming simply consciousness within which we witness forms arising, objects, bodies, emotions, thoughts appearing in the loving blue sky of our awareness like clouds. And this polarity, this energy of awareness, has a slight ordering quality. Forms take shape within awareness.

And we learn practices to go somatically in—a felt experience of birthing into experience, not aware that we are aware, simply fully, viscerally surrendering into joy, pain, thoughts, touch, taste, time, movement, life, death.

And in Tantra we practice this dance by separating these things out. And when you consciously pull these energies apart–put space between them–a powerful force is created trying to draw these energies back together. An explosion of energy tries to force these two polarities back together, an explosion of orgasmic pleasure, that we can use for healing and shift consciousness into deeply expanded and profound states where we can connect to vast interconnected wisdom.

We practice this dance within ourselves and the energy it creates. And we practice this dance with others. And it’s a really powerful principle.