You Left the Door Open: On New Age Tantra as Unconscious Feast

The table is set. The guests have arrived. No one knows who's eating.

I see something in a lot of people that practise “tantra”.

They seem expanded at first — glowing, alive with life. But when I tune into them… like, really tune in, I often feel an override happening. Subtler parts trying to communicate that are being taken over by the luminious light of Eros.

And then often when you get to know these people, you realise they are feeding off Eros. Vampirically so. They require it — the practice, the activation, the hit of erotic life-force — the way others require a drink at the end of the day. If they stop and cannot get their erotic needs met, they wither. They do not have the foundations for that luminosity built into their own system and they require it from their “tantric” practise.

This is the tell.

Because genuine Tantric practice — the kind that has roots, that has been transmitted through lineage with care and over time — does not produce dependency. It produces capacity. The luminosity becomes structural. It gets built into the system, metabolised into the tissues, integrated into the nervous system as a permanent upgrade rather than a recurring loan.

What I’m describing instead is energetic debt dressed as awakening. The field is open, the light is real, but the foundations were never laid. And so the practice becomes a maintenance requirement rather than a liberation — a way of managing the very hunger it created.

The feast I am talking about here is not just a metaphor.

In the Vajrayana, and specifically in the Chöd lineage of Machig Labdrön, there is a torma offering — a ritual feast prepared and offered consciously to whatever beings arise from the practitioner's own psyche and field: demons, hungry ghosts, attachments, entities. You cut the body of ego. You become the feast. You offer it freely, with discernment, with full knowledge of what you are doing and why.

The offering in Chöd is not passive. It requires years of preliminary practice — ngöndro, refuge, guru yoga, the development of rigpa, the capacity to recognise what arises without being consumed by it. You do not walk into a Chöd retreat having done a weekend breathwork intensive. You walk in having spent years developing the discernment to know what is demon, what is projection, what is genuine energetic presence — and how to meet each without merging with it.

This is a tradition that understood, with absolute precision, that opening the subtle body without containment is not liberation. It is dinner.

What the biofield actually is

The biofield — what the Vedic traditions name the prāṇamaya koṣa and vijñānamaya koṣa, what Wilhelm Reich named the orgone field, what modern biofield science is beginning to map through biophoton emission and torsion field research. It is a real electromagnetic and subtle-energetic structure that surrounds and interpenetrates the physical body, extending approximately 1.5 to 3 metres from the skin surface.

It is porous by design. The nāḍīs — the subtle channels mapped in detail across both the Tantric and Āyurvedic traditions — are the architecture through which prāṇa is taken in, metabolised, and expelled. They are not sealed. They cannot be sealed. That is not their function.

What they do have, in an initiated practitioner, is gating. The capacity to take in selectively. To metabolise rather than accumulate. To expel what does not belong.

This gating corresponds to what trauma-informed somatic therapy would call nervous system regulation, what the Taoist tradition calls wei wu wei — receptive action, not passive receiving. It is a developed capacity and it requires training. This is what I teach my clients.

Most contemporary “tantra” teaches people how to open the gate. Almost none of it teaches what happens when you do.

The new age reframe and its cost

The lineages that gave birth to what is now marketed as tantra were never casual about initiation. The Kaula traditions — from which much of the contemporary "sacred sexuality" movement draws, however distantly — distinguished sharply between paśu (bound, uninitiated), vīra (initiated hero), and divya (divine). The paśu was specifically warned against attempting vīra practices without proper transmission.

The Trika Śaivism of Kashmir — the sophisticated non-dual Tantric philosophy underlying traditions like Spanda and Pratyabhijñā — was never a weekend workshop. Abhinavagupta’s Tantrāloka, the definitive text of this lineage, contains more than 5,800 verses of meticulous instruction and in my experience, there is a reason for this… it is important when you are working at the level of the subtle body and consciousness.

What happened in the twentieth century — particularly through the lineage cross-contamination of the Human Potential Movement, the Osho schools, and the mainstreaming of Reichian bodywork — was that the practices were transmitted without the epistemology. The how was extracted from the why. The feast was laid out, and no one kept the door.

When awakening is presented as the goal and discernment is not taught as the prerequisite, you produce, then inevitably you end up with a generation of practitioners who are permanently in aperture, permanently in reception, with no metabolic structure to support what they are taking in.

What feeds at an unguarded table

The Tantric traditions, across lineages, were unanimous on a point that modern spiritual culture has almost entirely erased: not everything that comes through an open field is beneficial. Not everything that arrives in an expansion state is benign. Not everything that enters during a breathwork or a sexual energetic practice is yours.

The Vajrayana calls these presences maras and pretas — hungered ones, obstructors. The Trika tradition maps them as grahins — those that seize. The African diaspora traditions, which have some of the most sophisticated biofield hygiene in any living lineage, have extensive protocols for exactly this: what enters, how to know it, how to release it.

These traditions are not being superstitious. They are being precise about something that modern neuroscience is only beginning to approximate in the language of mirror neuron systems, somatic countertransference, and interoceptive overwhelm.

An open field draws. That is its nature. What is drawn is a function of the field’s resonance, the practitioner’s unresolved material, and — and this is the part that is missing from almost every contemporary training — the practitioner’s intention and epistemic relationship to what enters.

Without that — without the capacity to recognise, name, discern, metabolise, or consciously offer — the field accumulates. Energetic experiences are mistaken for spiritual progress. Expansion is mistaken for liberation. What feels like opening is, in the language of the Tantric traditions, āveśa without viveka: possession without discernment.

Taking advice from the Chöd

Machig Labdrön did not teach people to close. She taught people to offer.

The distinction is everything.

The Gcod practice — literally “to cut” — does not retreat from the hungry guests. It cuts through the ego’s resistance to them. It transforms the practitioner’s own body into the feast, offered consciously, so that the hungering presences find what they need and depart transformed. The practitioner is not consumed because the practitioner has become the cook. They hold the knife. They know what is on the table. They know why it is being offered and what it will do.

This is the higher technology that contemporary tantra has amputated from itself in its enthusiasm for the opening.

The opening without the cook is not liberation. It is not healing. It is an accident waiting to be named.

What initiated practice actually provides

The container that the lineages built around these practices was not restriction. It was exactly what the container of a skilled fermenter provides to a living culture: the right conditions for transformation rather than putrefaction.

Initiation — dikṣā in the Sanskrit — is not ceremony for ceremony’s sake. It is a transmission that installs, over time, the practitioner’s capacity to work at the level of the subtle body with precision. The guru-śiṣya paramparā (the teacher-student lineage chain) existed because the development of discernment is not a solo endeavour. It is cultivated in relationship, over time, with someone who has already developed it.

Preliminary practices — ngöndro in the Vajrayana, sādhana in the Hindu Tantric schools — were not spiritual warm-ups. They were the development of the practitioner’s metabolic structure. Their biofield hygiene. Their capacity to take in prāṇa and meet what arose without merging with it.

This is the part that has been lost. And without it, what we call tantra is something else entirely.

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It is not spirituality I am critiquing. It is the absence of craft.

A table set without a cook is not a meal. It is an invitation with no host.

The Tantric lineages knew this. They built entire architectures of discernment around it — not to restrict access to the sacred, but because they understood, with an intimacy born of direct transmission, what happens when the subtle body opens and no one is home to meet what walks through the door.

We are living with the consequences of forgetting this.

The work now is not to close. It is to learn, finally, how to cook.

Want to learn more on the topic of energetic mastery?

Join me this July for the Spinal Attunement Online Training Foundations course in energetic mastery. Applications are now open and we start July 6th.