Sacred Sexuality

South Asian Tantra and its modern reception

Scholars distinguish South Asian Tantra, practiced within Hindu and Buddhist traditions, from the neo-tantra of the modern West. Machipedia's Tantra page covers the Hindu and Buddhist traditions, and this page covers the Western movement. The anthropologist Carine Plancke reports that critical scholarship in religious studies, including work by David Gordon White and Hugh Urban, describes the New Age path of sacred sexuality as diverging sharply from South Asian sources, whose focus was power. Urban is quoted as saying that Tantra moved from an esoteric tradition of harnessing divine power in the cosmos and the body to a popular path of sensual pleasure and sexual freedom.

Plancke summarizes a six-stage genealogy of modern Tantra proposed by Urban: negative portrayals in nineteenth-century Orientalist writing and Hindu reform; positive revaluation in modern European esoteric groups; a Left-Hand Path in modern magic; an early twentieth-century American reworking; neo-tantra in the movement led by Osho-Rajneesh; and the present marketing of Tantra as an art of ecstasy or spiritual sex. Other scholars cited by Plancke, including Jeffrey Kripal and Geoffrey Samuel, ask for attention to continuity and creative synthesis and caution against dismissing Western versions as mere distortion.

Counterculture, Esalen and the Osho movement

According to Plancke, European and American seekers have embraced Tantra as a path of sexual liberation since the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and by the 1960s and 1970s it was part of the counterculture and the sexual revolution. She reports that the Esalen Institute in California, founded in 1962, helped spread reinterpretations of Tantra, and that the Indian teacher later known as Osho, earlier Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, was the most important figure in presenting Tantra to Western audiences as a path of sensual pleasure. He began speaking on Tantra in the late 1960s, called his approach neo-tantra, and cited only one actual Tantric text in his lectures.

After his death in 1990, his methods continued through centers, therapists and facilitators. Plancke notes that the most widely read neo-tantra books come from former members of his movement, and she names Margot Anand, whose book The Art of Sexual Magic praises his approach. The sources reviewed do not describe Barbara Carrellas or the Skydancing method, so this page does not characterize them.

A separate lineage: Chinese sexual cultivation

Chinese literature on sexual practice, known as Fangzhongshu, is a lineage distinct from South Asian Tantra. A 2025 narrative review describes it as a corpus within traditional Chinese medicine that joins sexual practice to health preservation and longevity and focuses mostly on male sexual health. The reviewers call for randomized trials to test its efficacy and safety.

Names in use

Plancke uses neo-tantra for the Osho-inspired New Age form, and reports that the facilitator she studied called her work Western or modern Tantra. Critical scholars describe the same field with the phrase sacred sexuality or sacred sex. The terms tantric sex and tantric massage appear in commercial settings, and the sources reviewed give no professional definition of either. The sources also do not define conscious sexuality, sacred intimacy or transcendental sex, which are treated here as informal labels for related offerings.

Confusable terms

Neo-tantra differs from Tantra as practiced in South Asian traditions. Urban, as relayed by Plancke, describes a curry effect and not a pizza effect: Tantra developed in two directions, in South Asia and in the West, and did not travel out and return changed, as pizza did. Related Machipedia pages include Kundalini, Breathwork, Yoga and Mindfulness, which describe practices that sometimes appear in these workshops or in the traditions they borrow from.

The movement also differs from clinical sex therapy. The sexuality professional body AASECT describes certified educators, counselors and therapists who work under a code of conduct, and COSRT in the United Kingdom maintains public registers of psychosexual and relationship therapists. The sources reviewed identify no equivalent register, protected title or training standard for neo-tantra.

Clinical relatives

Sensate focus is a structured touching approach developed by the sex researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson. The International Society for Sexual Medicine describes it as shifting attention from performance toward sensation and emotional connection. Mindfulness-based sex therapy applies attention training to sexual difficulty in clinical programs. Both are clinical approaches and are not the same as neo-tantra, although writers sometimes compare them.

Workshops and trainings

Plancke studied neo-tantra workshops in Belgium and the Netherlands between 2013 and 2017. The workshop she describes ran three days with about 10 to 15 participants and two facilitators who worked in the wellbeing counseling sector. Sessions combined meditation, bodywork and group exercises that came from the Osho movement and from human potential therapies such as bioenergetics and Gestalt. The fee was 240 euros plus about 150 euros for accommodation and food, which she calls relatively affordable for spiritual offerings. Other organizers vary, and the sources reviewed identify no standard format.

What adherents say the practices imply

According to Plancke, the workshops she studied aim at regaining sexual and vital energy, at treating the body and self as the source of authority, and at releasing pains thought to block energy flow. She highlights themes of self-determination, women's empowerment and revaluing the feminine, and describes a stated emphasis on integrity, safety and consent in intimate group settings. Teachers describe the practices as optional invitations. This page does not describe the exercises.

Couples' practices and clinical borrowing

A 1991 paper in the Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy drew on Hindu and Buddhist Tantric traditions to propose home exercises for couples in sexual counseling, including creating a ritual, synchronized breathing and sustained eye contact. It offered them as ideas for clinicians and not as a tested treatment. Retreats, couples' workshops and sex therapy-adjacent services that use tantric language are offered by many providers, but the sources reviewed describe no common standard for them.

What participants and teachers describe

In the workshops Plancke studied, participants' reflections on what they gained returned consistently to empowerment and getting in touch with sexual and vital energy, and one interviewee said she became more assertive. These are accounts from interviews and are not measured outcomes. Teachers frame the work as releasing sexual energy as a self-directed process and not as treatment for a diagnosed condition.

A spiritual dimension in sexual wellbeing

A 2008 review by the sexual health researcher Lori Brotto and colleagues notes that some writers suggest nongoal-oriented spiritual elements of sexuality might fill a gap that contemporary treatment does not address for women who report unsatisfying sexual experience. The review looked at mindfulness, acupuncture and yoga, found only five empirical studies in total, and described the evidence as sparse but promising. It did not study tantric workshops.

Benefit claims of this kind, such as deeper intimacy or greater sexual vitality, are attributed here to participants and teachers. The sources reviewed do not test those claims for neo-tantra, so they are reported as claims only.

Studies of neo-tantra itself

No randomized trial or systematic review of neo-tantra or tantric sex workshops was found. PubMed searches combining tantra, tantric, neo-tantra and sacred sexuality with sexual terms and with trial or review filters returned 17 records, none of which evaluated a tantric or neo-tantric intervention, and a search combining orgasm or sexual response with breathing and those filters returned six records, none about tantric breath training. The research located is mostly qualitative. Plancke's ethnography rests on 28 interviews about one three-day workshop, with participants who were all white, able-bodied women and mostly middle class, so it describes one Osho-derived milieu only.

A single published case report followed one woman who, after about a decade of yoga tantra training that included breathing techniques, described reaching orgasm without genital stimulation. Prolactin rose 25 and 48 percent after 5- and 10-minute episodes. One participant cannot support general claims about training or about breath.

Mindfulness-based sex therapy

The closest clinical research concerns mindfulness-based sex therapy for women with low desire and arousal. A 2008 group program of three sessions with 26 women reported gains in desire and sexual distress, while measured genital arousal changed little. An eight-session program tested in 26 women in a 2017 pilot reported improved desire and sexual function. A 2021 randomized trial of 148 women compared group mindfulness-based cognitive therapy with group supportive sex education and therapy: desire and arousal improved similarly in both arms, sexual distress improved more with mindfulness, and gains were retained at 12 months. An online version was judged feasible in 30 women.

A 2019 systematic review of 15 studies found improved desire, arousal and satisfaction in women, no significant change in sexual pain, and one study in men, and cautioned that few small studies limit conclusions. A 2025 review of 36 studies of desire, arousal and orgasm treatments found that mindfulness-based cognitive behavioral therapy improved total function. These are clinical programs for diagnosed difficulties delivered by trained professionals, and their results should not be carried over to neo-tantra workshops.

Sensate focus and traditional relatives

The International Society for Sexual Medicine describes sensate focus as developed by Masters and Johnson in the 1960s, and notes that couples often report closeness and less anxiety; its page does not assess the strength of the evidence. Reviewers of Chinese Fangzhongshu texts note that one technique resembles Western sensate focus and call for high-quality trials. Neither source tests neo-tantra.

Consent, power and coercion

Plancke reports that therapies in the early Osho ashram were taken to extremes and drew criticism, and that former followers have since made allegations of sexual abuse that have not received formal legal recognition. The workshops she studied, by contrast, prioritized integrity, safety and consent during naked or intimate practices. Two Vajrayana Buddhist nuns writing in the Journal of Global Buddhism argue that the doctrine of pure perception can silence critical judgment and that hierarchical guru-disciple relationships create a power imbalance, citing cases in Malaysia and Bhutan. Their insider essay concerns Buddhist settings and does not measure prevalence in neo-tantra.

Searches for peer-reviewed prevalence data on misconduct in neo-tantra or tantric massage settings found none, and the material located was journalism and first-person accounts, which this page does not cite. Absence of data is not evidence that harm does not occur.

Professional bodies and the regulated route

AASECT states in its position on touch that certified professionals may not engage in sexual behavior with clients, whether or not the client consents. COSRT holds public registers of psychosexual and relationship therapists and requires members to follow its code of ethics. No tantra-specific register, protected title or training standard was found. Anyone with sexual pain, dysfunction, distress or a history of sexual trauma may consider a licensed sex therapist or a physician, and these workshops do not replace that care.

Sexual health and trauma considerations

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention states that using condoms the right way every time is one way to prevent sexually transmitted infections, that vaccines are recommended for some people to prevent hepatitis B and HPV, that regular testing is a key step, and that most infections cause no signs or symptoms. The sources reviewed do not cover contraception, so a physician or sexual health clinic is the route for that information.

In the 2008 group program, women with a history of sexual abuse improved more on several measures than women without one, in a small sample led by mental health and medical professionals. That finding does not show that unregulated group workshops suit people with sexual trauma.