Video Transcript:
Ben: Hello dear beloveds, welcome to Tantra Punk Podcast episode 90, I am on Skype with Jason Tantra and is a leader in the world of Tantra for Gay Men. If you’ve done any research or have any interest in this area of Tantra you’ll probably discover that there’s not a lot out there unfortunately so let’s give Jason some applause and support to extend and grow this technology into all the beautiful dimensions of love that exist. So Jason would you like to tell us about your background, how you discovered Tantra and how it has transformed your life? Then we’ll get into what you offer and what the future looks like.

Jason: Firstly thank you and thank you for inviting me to come and do this podcast with you, I’m really happy to do anything I can to help spread the love, spread Tantra. I look at the world and look at what is going on around me and it’s really easy to slip into being fearful or slip into being angry or to feel helpless. You only need to look at the news headlines for me both in the US and the UK and it’s a pretty scary place out there. For me, one of the things I love about Tantra is that at its core it is about love, at its absolute core its about unconditional, beautiful love and I just rest into that place when I look and see the world and struggling to know what to do so I’m really pleased to have the chance to chat with you.

So you asked about how I got into Tantra. I don’t know about you but I always felt when I was growing up that my life had a certain purpose, through my childhood I had this feeling that some of the experiences that I went through were for a greater good and would have some meaning, some relevance later in my life. At the age of 18 I started attending what we call the Spiritualist Church in the UK where I basically spent 10 years learning spiritual healing, before reiki became fashionable. And I also learned a lot about energy and I learned a lot about spirit, about mediumship and being able to channel energy. I would sit in closed groups and had many many experiences over that decade. I then went on to qualify as a spiritual healer – they even have a qualification for that – and it was interesting, the day I qualified all of my clients dried up. Again it was coming back to this idea that this training was in preparation for something I was going to do later in my life. Probably about a month later, after my clients had dried up, I had that feeling I just needed to trust something inside me, that it’s going to be OK and the right thing is happening. I then went to start work as a voluntary telephone counsellor for a charity in Bristol called Men as Survivors Helpline where I would be taking telephone calls each week for male survivors of rape and abuse and often their phone call to me would be the first time that they had spoken about this. We’re going back about 15-20 years when people got support from telephone helplines rather from the internet as they do today – I feel old now Ben! – at that time phoning a helpline was a thing you did.

My work then grew and I started to work in the prison in Bristol, working with inmates and male survivors of rape and abuse. There’s something that happens, a real cycle of people who have had a traumatic childhood, have been abused, mental cruelty, physical cruelty, sexual cruelty and they then end up in a cycle of drugs, commit crimes to feed the drugs to forget what happened to them. The work that I was doing was about helping them to talk about the abuse for the very first time. During that time I then put myself through university and trained and qualified as a counsellor. And then would you believe that all at some point came to a natural pause but during my counselling journey, I’d had a 10 year relationship with my previous partner – be fair to say he had real issues with alcohol – I was basically living with an alcoholic for 10 years and I just, thankfully, kissed the ground that I had the strength to get out of that situation as I often didn’t think I’d be able to get out of that situation. I had a unique period in my time, if you imagine living with someone with an alcohol issue for 10 years, the minute that that is finished it’s like this huge cloud is lifted off you and I kind of felt like a new spring lamb galloping around the field and I decided – I had a 3 month time window – and I decided to do all the things that weren’t me in the last previous years and one of those was to go on a Tantra weekend workshop.

The first time I met Tantra it was like a hand on a glove. Even though what we were doing was different, the language and the psycho-therapeutic processing of what’s going on was all really common to me as that’s what I had done for the previous decades. I went through and I trained for 3 years in Tantra in Germany and I remember waking up one day and I was like ‘oh shit, OK, I’m going to be a Tantra teacher’. I don’t know how else to say that but I just woke up and I had this much deeper sense of knowing that that was my purpose, that that was what I was put on earth to do. What I do and dedicate my life to is about helping gay and bisexual men to love. to come back to love and back to themselves and to come back to truth. What I mean by truth is what’s beyond the world around us, what’s beyond the things that are going on in our life, what’s the purpose of our life. For me my dedication is to help gay and bisexual men spiritually, energetically, sexually evolve. The biggest thing that I always talk about is freedom. I feel that Tantra is fucking hard work sometimes, in my own Tantra training there were times I was clawing against the floor with my own blockages, my own shit, my own issues and I didn’t know I was going to make it sometimes through the training…I wanted to run out, I wanted to run away, I wanted everyone to fuck off…I went through hell and back and yet in Tantra I found some of the most ecstatic experiences ever. I feel like I visited places that I know exist, that are kind of not on this earthly plane and I feel that I have a much wider sense of who I am and that isn’t necessarily the Jason that is being presented to you but moreso the spirit of who I am, the being of who I am…

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