Knowra Neotantra Neotantra Neotantra is a modern spiritual movement that adapts selected ideas and practices from Tantra, often emphasizing sexuality, personal growth, and embodied experience.
Tantra : A diverse set of South Asian religious traditions and practices that use ritual, mantra, visualization, and embodied techniques. Neotantra selectively reinterprets traditions grouped under this broad name.
Swami Sivananda : An Indian spiritual teacher who founded the Divine Life Society and influenced modern yoga internationally. His teachings helped circulate simplified accounts of Tantra and yoga beyond India.
Kaula : A group of Tantric traditions associated with ritual lineages, transgressive practices, and the worship of divine power. Historical Kaula ritual is far more specific than modern teachings that use Tantra as a broad label.
Tantra massage : A modern bodywork practice using touch and Tantric language, with methods varying widely among practitioners. Some neotantric settings offer it as an embodied practice for intimacy or awareness.
Cultural appropriation : The adoption or use of cultural elements by people outside the culture, especially amid unequal power relations. Critics question whether neotantra detaches South Asian practices from their histories and communities.
Hatha yoga : A family of yoga practices that use posture, breath control, and bodily discipline. Its embodied methods helped shape modern interpretations of Tantric practice.
Osho : An Indian spiritual teacher whose movement combined meditation, therapy, and critiques of conventional sexual morality. His writings and communities helped popularize spiritual approaches linking sexuality and liberation.
Kashmir Shaivism : A medieval nondual Shaiva philosophical and ritual tradition centered on consciousness and divine manifestation. Its textual and philosophical system contrasts with neotantra's often therapeutic, experiential emphasis.
Somatic psychotherapy : Psychotherapy that attends to bodily sensations and movement as part of emotional experience and treatment. Neotantric facilitators may borrow its language of embodiment and nervous-system awareness.
Orientalism : A Western tradition of representing Asian societies through exoticizing and often reductive ideas. Popular accounts of Tantra can reproduce fantasies of an timeless, sexually liberated East.
Show all 26