A Look at Modern Spirituality from the Lens of Classical Tantra

The Journal · Tantra · October 2026

I was eighteen when I walked into an ashram in India, convinced that spirituality meant leaving the world behind. It took me years of falling apart to learn that the world was never the obstacle. It was the doorway.

I went looking for a meaningful life through prayer, study and meditation. I found discipline, silence and a devotion I still carry. And then I came home, and my body and mind came apart. Physical and mental health challenges, a decade of healing, of transformation, of very deep and very unglamorous learning.

Nobody tells you this part when you scroll through spiritual Instagram. That the path is not a glow-up. That sometimes it looks like lying on the bathroom floor, wondering why all the meditation in the world did not protect you from being human.

That question led me to Tantra. Not the Tantra you are sold on retreat flyers. The "old" one.

The wellness version of the sacred

Modern spirituality is beautiful in many ways. More people meditate, breathe and pray than ever before. But look closely and much of it has quietly become a self-optimisation project in nicer clothes. High vibes only. Manifest the dream life. Transcend the ego, ideally by Friday.

What this version of the sacred cannot hold is the mess: grief, rage, illness, desire, boredom, the body that does not cooperate. So we learn to step over it. Psychologists call this spiritual bypassing: using spiritual ideas to avoid what is actually happening inside us.

Classical Tantra would find this strange. Not because it is darker, but because it refuses to split the world into holy and unholy in the first place.

What the masters actually said

The Tantric traditions I study and teach grew in India over many centuries and came to a remarkable philosophical peak in Kashmir around the 10th and 11th century, with teachers like Abhinavagupta and his disciple Kṣemarāja. Their starting point is radical. One of the first lines of the Śiva Sūtras reads:

caitanyam ātmā — The Self is consciousness.

Śiva Sūtra 1.1

Not "you have a soul somewhere behind the mess." You are awareness itself. And that same awareness, Kṣemarāja writes in the opening sūtra of his Heart of Recognition, is not passive at all:

citiḥ svatantrā viśvasiddhihetuḥ — Awareness, free and autonomous, is the cause of the whole universe.

Kṣemarāja, Pratyabhijñāhṛdayam, sūtra 1

Read that slowly. If everything is an expression of free, creative consciousness, then nothing is outside the sacred: not your body, not your period, not your anger, not your kitchen. The goal is not to escape to somewhere higher. Abhinavagupta puts it like this:

"The highest realization for embodied beings is the revelation that one's true nature is the one Being that is the beingness of everything."

Abhinavagupta, Tantrāloka 1.141 (tr. Christopher Hareesh Wallis)

For embodied beings. Not for monks who left their bodies behind. For us.

No high vibes only

When I first read the Vijñāna Bhairava Tantra, a text of 112 meditation practices, I had to put it down. Among the techniques for awakening, it says:

"Make your mind stable in the various states of desire, anger, greed, delusion, intoxication, or envy."

Vijñāna Bhairava Tantra, v. 101

Not suppress them. Not transcend them. Stay with them, fully awake, until you find what they are made of. Intense emotion is pure energy, śakti, before we turn it into a story about ourselves.

This is exactly what saved me in those years after India. Healing did not come from rising above my pain. It came from finally entering it with awareness: breath by breath, in the body, without making it wrong. The Tantric path encouraged me to embrace my inner shadows and resistance, and to see the spiritual in the mundane.

Pleasure is not the enemy, and not the point

The West heard "Tantra" and mostly thought of sex. The classical texts are both more subtle and more radical. The same Vijñāna Bhairava invites you to meditate on "the joy arising from the pleasure of eating and drinking" (v. 72), or on "the joy of seeing a friend or relative after a long time" (v. 71).

A good meal. An embrace at the airport. These are not distractions from the spiritual life. Fully felt, they are gateways into the fullness that is always already here. Pleasure and pain both become doorways into embodiment, as long as we stay present instead of grasping or running.

The path that is not a path

Here is perhaps the most uncomfortable truth classical Tantra offers modern seekers. We love the next course, the next retreat, the next certificate. But as Christopher Hareesh Wallis writes in his commentary on Abhinavagupta:

"There cannot be a path that leads to one's true nature, precisely because it always-already is our true nature."

Christopher Hareesh Wallis, on Tantrāloka chapter 1

The Kashmiri masters called the goal pratyabhijñā: recognition. Not becoming something new, but recognising what you have always been. Practice still matters (I would not have given my life to it otherwise), but practice is not climbing a ladder. It is wiping the mirror.

Abhinavagupta even says that "it is the Power of Action that is the sole cause of both bondage and liberation" (Tantrāloka 1.145). The same energy that binds us frees us. It depends on whether we act from forgetting or from remembering.

A small practice

Try this today. It comes from verse 116 of the Vijñāna Bhairava Tantra: "Wherever the mind goes, whether outside or within, there itself is the state of Shiva."

• Sit for five minutes. Do not try to stop your thoughts.
• Each time the mind wanders, to your inbox, your worries, your lover, do not drag it back. Notice: awareness is here too.
• Feel the breath and the body exactly as they are. Nothing to fix. Nothing to transcend.

That is Tantra. Not an escape from your life, but the courage to inhabit it completely, and to find the divine exactly where you are.

May this path empower you the way it has empowered me.

Śrī Mātre Namaḥ,
Alexia

References

• Śiva Sūtra 1.1, attributed to Vasugupta (9th c.)
• Kṣemarāja, Pratyabhijñāhṛdayam (The Heart of Recognition), sūtra 1 (11th c.)
• Abhinavagupta, Tantrāloka 1.141 and 1.145, translation and commentary by Christopher Hareesh Wallis, hareesh.org
• Vijñāna Bhairava Tantra, verses 71, 72, 101, 116, translation by Swami Lakshman Joo, ed. Bettina Bäumer
• Christopher D. Wallis, Tantra Illuminated (2013)