182: Demystifying Tantra with Yogiraj Alan Finger

Namaste, it's Sahara Rose. And welcome back to the Highest Self podcast, a place where we discuss what makes you your soul's highest evolvement.

Jai Gurudev, thank you to all of the teachers who have come before me. Thank you to all of the teachers who have come before us to make yoga accessible to everyone. And Yogiraj Alan Finger is a wonderful example of one of these teachers. He was born and raised in South Africa and was a student of Yogananda himself, Krishnamacharya and BKS Iyengar, among others.

Crazy, right?

He.

He's the founder of Ishta Yoga, a style of yoga that blends ancient and contemporary sciences of Hatha, tantra, Ayurveda to create a complete and comprehensive system of self development. He teaches all over the US And I personally have taken his workshop on tantra at the Yoga Journal conference, which was very, very empowering. And his beautiful wife, Sarah Splatfinger, is Deepak's private yoga teacher. So that's how I was connected with him. Deepak introduced me to Sara and from Sarah, I participated in their workshop. I led a workshop at their studio as well in New York, which was amazing. And Alan is someone with so much wisdom that I honestly couldn't ask for a better guest to be teaching us about tantra today. So he recently wrote a new book called Tantra of the Yoga, Essential Wisdom for Living With Grace and Awareness. And this book is really making the yoga sutras accessible. So if you don't know what the yoga sutras are, they're Patanjali's classical test on how to experience oneness, samadhi within the yoga practice. And yoga is much more than asana practice, but really the process of yoking with Brahma, universal source consciousness. And samadhi is not something, the ultimate freedom is not something that's only reserved for those in the Himalayas, but rather it's something that we all are capable of simply by breathing, because that is how we access our true nature. So in this conversation, we discuss tantra. What is tantra? Is it a sex practice? What does it really mean? We dive deep into how we can balance our Shiva and Shakti energy within ourselves. And I also guess what Alan's dosha is, which I'm sure you'll be able to figure out pretty quickly when he starts speaking. But he is someone that really is a well versed yogi who is walking the talk and illuminating the path for all of us. So without further ado, I would love for you to welcome Yogiraj Alan Finger to the highest self Podcast.

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Welcome Allan to the Highest Self podcast. It's so good to have you here.

Thank you, thank you for having me.

The first question I would love to ask you is what makes you your highest self?

So Sahara, we're always our highest self. Our highest self purely becomes colored and covered from what in Tantra and Yoga is called avidya. The belief patterns that we become, we make our own. And that coloring starts to change the way we see we believe we are. So the goal of tantra and yoga on all these practices are really to try and remove the belief patterns, to allow that which is our higher self, called the Atman in yoga, to reveal itself.

Yes. So beautiful. Just to remove the Vidyas, everything that we've taken on by society, family, other people's perceptions, and just to remember who we are.

Exactly. So all of those things form a false identity. And then that false identity is who we try and keep alive and, and work so hard at. And it's not even real.

So true. Yes. Keeping up these identities that have been given to us that were never ours to begin with.

Exactly.

So a lot of listeners are very interested in tantra, but they don't really know what it is. They know it's not a sex practice. We've moved past that, but they're still not really sure what is the essence of tantra. So can you please explain this lineage to us?

So tantra comes from two words, tanoti and trayati. So tan and tra. And they, they mean that everything goes back to the fullest if you liberate it, as we were saying earlier, from the belief patterns, we go back and we tap back in to Brahman, to that unbound intelligence, that quantum field. And that's basically what tanotti means, liberate yourself to tune away from the beliefs so you can tune in to the greater intelligence. Triyati means you want to bring that intelligence back into each moment of your living. And so another word for tantra is also weaving. Like you weave a thread into a piece of cloth you're making, and you stretch it and you pull it tight and then you go again. So you want to bring the greater intelligence and weave it back into your living. So that's what the two words mean. And basically, in tantra, we believe that everything leads us back to enlightenment if we understand how. And there are so many ways to get there. You can get there through different kinds of practices, different kinds of things that lead you back to that freedom. Tantra does have wrapped up in it a lot of the kriya practices, which is kind of like where the subtle, how the subtle electromagnetic fields that we are created from create us to become who we are. So if we can, we can use anything to help us to get back to that state. For example, if one feels the need in life, in a circumstance, even to use something like anger, well, if it were necessary to create that heat was necessary to create something to change, then you need to use it. So the best analogy I have for that is you can use your temper, but don't lose your temper. And if you can learn to everything in life, you can use to create that freedom, a feeling of bringing us back to clarity and bringing us back to love, compassion, to the language of a higher self. One of the major parts to a human being is the part which involves procreation. So we are born to evolve and to procreate, to continue the evolution process. That's karma. Now, because we're born and we have it built into us. The sexual energy is a very powerful energy that taps into mother nature, Shakti, and the mother nature force used to procreate a further life is one of the strongest forces that a human being has. So the tantrica doesn't deny that. We rather look at it and say, well, how do we even create that force to lead us back to something that's to enlightenment? Fortunately, especially in Ishtar, Korea, in Ishta tantra, we have a lot of kriya techniques. And the kriya are tools of where we need to move our consciousness to make it come back to its fullest state or how to even use it, to use it efficiently in life. So the kriya techniques teach us to open the channel between Shiva and shakti. Shiva is the all knowledge, the quantum field. When Shiva and Shakti, Shakti moves away from that to create a birth of a being or birth of a planet or a universe. When shakti moves away from Shiva, matter and form come about. When shakti returns back to Shiva and they're in union, we're in a state of all knowing called enlightenment. In a human being, when we are created, as can be seen in embryonic development, there's a primitive streak that forms. The primitive streak tells the cells what they're going to be. At that point, the cell is the ovum has just been splitting, splitting, splitting. Then in all of that little lump of cells, a primitive streak forms. It creates the cordial and cranial side of the embryo. Very much what brahmanadi is, the primitive streak. As Shakti moves away from Shiva and Shiva resides in the crown of our head, connecting us to the greater intelligence. And Shakti goes down forming our chakras, our body, our being, and secures herself in the tailbone, in the sacrum. And it's kind of strange that science actually calls it the sacrum because it means the sacred bone. The sacrum is the sacred bone.

Wow.

And Shakti lies there. Mother nature. Unfortunately, with the belief patterns, Shakti becomes more and more compressed, congested, that it begins to strangulate the Shakti and aging sets in rapidly. So if we can remove the Avidya and learn the passage between Shakti and Shiva, even during sex, where one has an orgasm, the Shakti releases the Da Vidya, the Kundalini releases. The Kundalini is the coil of beliefs that hold mother nature, Shakti at the base of the spine. So when we release ourselves from Avidya, Kundalini releases. But it releases at the most powerful time of procreation to create another being. But unfortunately, when Shakti releases from sexual activity, she moves into the lower chakras which build selfishness. The three lower chakras, survival, likes and dislikes. And then egos are burnt into us. When that happens, our soul, Ajiva becomes colored and we start thinking we are this other being. So during sex, the Shakti releases an orgasm moves in the three lower chakras, which is really the department for procreation. But if we can learn to bring that Shakti up to the heart, up to the crown, to Ajna, in the midbrain, we learn all sorts of other things. Love, unconditional love and emotional balance between two beings happens when it reach. When Shakti reaches the heart, when Shakti reaches the throat, we have incredible communication between two beings. And when Shakti reaches Ajna, we have like insight, inspiration and intuition that starts to develop between two beings. And ultimately, if Shakti is drawn up at the time of orgasm to the top fontanelle, the top of your head, you will move into samadhi, into the very state of Yoga. The state of Yoga actually means a state of oneness where we're no longer in duality. And if we can get back into that state of Yoga, we're free.

That is so beautifully expressed. Thank you for that.

Yeah.

So how can people know if their Shakti is stuck? You mentioned the benefits. So I feel like most of us are not living in the state of pure yogic bliss. So what are some telltale signs to know if your Shakti is stuck and what chakra it is stuck at?

Okay, so I think the easiest is to divide it into three different packages. The three lower chakras very much work together and they deal with developing the false self, the self that needs to survive in this plane. The self that becomes overly involved with likes and dislikes, attraction and repulsion, ragas and Vesa. And then the egos are burnt in. So the three lower Chakras work on building the self which makes us the little self which makes us selfish. The heart chakra. When we have compassion, love, self awareness, awareness, that of our bigger self, we start to feel compassionate, understanding and loving. And we lose the feeling of separateness. And when shakti moves to the two upper chakras, Ajna and Sahastrara, we become selfless. And when we are selfless, people get scared of that because they think, I'm just going to become a vegetable, a blob. But indeed, selflessness opens us up. It's the only way we can reach into that brahman, that unbound intelligence, that unbound, that quantum field where all things exist without time, without separation. It's genius.

That's beautiful. So it's not so much of cultivating more shakti as much as it is allowing it to come through. Would that be correct?

Yes. You're removing the avidya which creates the kundalini, which is described as a coiled snake. And the more beliefs we have, the more the snake recoils itself and chokes the shakti. Then we lose dynamism, vitality, radiance. We become dull.

So really the moment of an orgasm is the dropping of all beliefs. So shakti can naturally just move through.

So the time of orgasm occurs in order to procreate. But it's got to remove, let go the kundalini, the belief patterns in order to do that. So if you think of it, when that happens, one becomes kind of silly, cute. You call each other funny names. You know, you start when you, when you're going to become romantic. You do all of these things that you would definitely not do any other time. It is stupid things to release the belief patterns. Then the kundalini releases. But if it's not directed, if you don't know the channel where to direct it up to the heart, into Ajna brahmanadi, it's going to go in the wrong channel.

Okay, so what can we do to open up our channels for shakti to move through?

So there's two practices, Saham kriya, when you're in life to bring the wisdom of Shiva to shakti. Whenever you inhale, the top of the head moves away from the root. And whenever you exhale, your lower abdomen firms. And there's a distribution from shakti via the headquarters of all the nadis called kanda in front of the sacrum. 72,000 NADIs originate from that point except ida, pingala, shashumna and brahmanadi. They come about at creation. So when all of these nadis when we breathe out, the energy of shakti goes through this electromagnetic body of ours through all these nadis. But it's very hard to feel 72,000 nadis. But what you can feel, every joint of your body is a sub chakra where these 72 nadis happen to intersect. So when you breathe out and your abdomen pulls in, there's a distribution of energy through the subtle body. And these sub chakras become spacious and open. So when you breathe in, the sound of the breath in when you're active is sa. And you feel from the body lengthens when you breathe in, top of the head moves away from the root. Shiva moves down. Brahmanadi to shakti, not Shiva. The intelligence of Shiva moves down and when you breathe out, lower abdomen firms and there's this distribution. And you feel your joints become spacious. This will bring inspirational intelligence into you and into the sub chakras and actually guide you and direct you through your living.

Beautiful. And I've seen you teach this practice at yoga journal.

Yes. So that one is the first one. But we must then learn the next one which is hamsa kriya, the reverse. What happens in hamsakriya now we're going to try and open the passage where shakti, when we are in deep relaxation and still and pratihara has taken place, meaning our senses have come back in like what happens in a daydream. Our energy comes back in and our breath becomes very gentle and slow. The very pressure of the breath changes completely to when you active. When you active, your breath is much more. But when you're very still, very gentle in and out. So when you're very still, you open the passage for shakti moves up to the midbrain and the top fontanelle. And when you breathe out, you can feel the shakti return back down to the root. Hum up and sa down. And the breath is very gentle, happening on its own. The difference between hamsa and saham saham, where you active for bringing energy into life, your breath is more felt more than four fingers from your nostril. So if you feel your breath and feel where it is, if it's more than four fingers from the nostril, you're in life. You should practice saham kriya. If you become relaxed and still and the breath becomes less than four fingers, it's time to bring shakti back to Shiva. Ham sa hum up and sa goes back down.

So how do you recommend we test that with our fingers?

Just feel where your breath is under your nose.

So put our hands downwards or parallel.

Flat first under the nose and then measure where you can still feel the breath as you sit feeling yourself breathing. Once you've got that point, take the other hand and say is that four fingers or more or less than four fingers?

Mine is definitely more. Got a lot of shiva going on.

But at the moment you're leading this podcast so you're on attention. So if you had done Pranayama and especially Nadi Shodhana Pranayama, alternate nostril breathing that makes your senses come in and when your senses come back in, breath goes shorter.

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So how often should we really be trying to have this more shakti, low and slow breath. Is it just for a 20 minute meditation practice or something that we should be doing 50% of our time?

So in life when we're more than four fingers, we should practice the saham energy down joint spaces in asana practice. Very good. If you're sitting on a train or a bus or waiting for someone, just feel sa and hum. Very powerful in asana practice because on the hum your joints become spacious and you'll automatically realign yourself to perfect alignment. Because your joints, you become sensitive of your subtle body. And you just, you adjust your physical body accordingly. So that's the saham kriya, the hamsa kriya. Everybody should sit every day. It's called your sadhana, your time where you go back to feel who you really are. And one should do that daily to know who you are and get your brain programmed correctly. So in your sadhana you want to maybe do nadi. Shodhana is a good one. And as you, your senses come back in, you start to do hum up, sa down and you travel on it just like if you were in an ocean beyond the waves. And the wave lifts you and lowers you. You feel like that hum up and sa down. Then the breath will start to take a pause. You will breathe up into ajna and just feel it radiate into light. Jyoti, the light. That's the light of transformation. Jyoti transforms us back into to that greater intelligence. So when your breath takes a pause, you do a breath up hum and then sigh. You just feel it expand into light and the breath pauses. You become so still. One more tip. If at that point you put some saliva on your thumb and morse in the point between your eyebrow where you feel the saliva, at that point you just float. At that point your consciousness when in that area is complete. So if we know the second sutra of Patanjali, yoga's Chitta Vritti, Nirodha yoga, the state of oneness happens when the chitter our consciousness is not aggravated by vritti, by thought and mental flux. Yoga happens when there's no vritti. Our consciousness becomes free. So when you moisten the point between your eyebrow and allow your consciousness to move there, the light happens. And then you feel your brain release and you feel samadhi, that state of union with the entire universe and Brahman, the very quantum field that creates it all, you want to sit in that State Sahara for 18 minutes a day is the Tantric number. You want to build it to that. My recommendation for People at first start for three minutes. Try and just get to that place hamsa up and down, moisten ajna, see the light and just try and sit in it for three minutes. Train yourself, surrender into the light, mind wanders, a little bit more saliva. And when you finish your three minutes, it's very important to reground yourself. And the Sanskrit name for that is, is arta vasamyama. You want to bring that divine intelligence back into each moment of your life to inspire your living. So I have on our site@ishtayoga.com the grounding mantras are there that we use. I've developed that for people to bring the energy back via each chakra. But until such a time that it's hard to go through them all now without a diagram. But one can just rub that hands and create some prana and heat tejas. Put them over your eyes and then bring the energy from ajna back down through the chakras, feeling the heat through each chakra all the way down to your feet so that you bring the energy back down into you. And that's where it will begin to inspire your living. How amazing. If we can just learn to get back to do nothing, to feel who we really are daily and be comfortable with it. Begin, try and get to three minutes. Most of us people can sit for half a minute quiet and dead still and their minds, that's like awkward and hard and difficult. My answer to that. Until you learn to quiet your own mind and feel bliss. Imagine, you know, you can see how hard it is to do that. You can just imagine what a pain you must be to all other beings too if you can still yourself.

So walk with yourself.

Not Sahara.

Everyone I like crave meditations. I'm like, I can't wait to go and meditate. Amazing for me. So do you recommend that people start with guided meditations where someone's talking them through or they're not going to get that same experience as they would with just the Soham mantra?

Well, a guided, you know, guided meditations are nice for a beginner because they're giving the mind something to be busy with.

Yes.

So it's taking you and like yoga nidra too for different purposes and reasons. And it's all good. But if you really want to get yourself into a state of samadhi, you need to learn these Kriyas. I have over 450 meditations on the Ishtar sound and Samadhi site where people can join and learn how to do the Kriyas. Of course it's best to have someone teach you these things because they impart the energy with it. So the Kriya yoga was always considered a whispering technique, which meant it was always whispered from teacher to taught because you have to get them to feel their subtle body and there are ways to do it. So usually, yes, if you don't have a teacher or you're not getting the saham or hamsa kriya, first of all, I would come and visit Al in New York. I teach Tuesday and Thursday morning because there we give it to you and I. Everyone gets it in the class. If that doesn't work, of course. And you can do that. I totally understand. Start with, start with visualizations, listen to your breath, just sit and listen to the inhale and the exhale.

And you did write this incredible book, Tantra of the Yoga Sutras. So if people want to learn more about this, you've really taken something that, as you mentioned, was whispered upon generations and have allowed it to reach the hands of the people who don't have a guru or someone to teach it to them. So it can help all of us.

And if you read that book and then listen to this tape again, it will make total sense to you.

It is an amazing book. It really just outlines things. I know myself. I've had a lot of questions on Tantra and really just the yoga sutras in general. And I love your understanding of it because it's so multifaceted and rich and philosophical and less, you know. And sometimes in yoga teacher trainings it's very like just passed down generic as that person heard it, without the real understanding that you've had since you were 16 years old of really dedicating your life, of diving into this. There's really no one else out there on this planet, I believe, that is better to teach this than you.

Thank you very much. And Sahara, it's like that because when I was introduced at 16 to it and I'd already been meditating for a year doing three hours, hour and a half meditation, pranayama and hour and a half asana for one year. Then my teacher started, my father and Venkati started introducing me to the sutras. But it was always the science. And then I'd hear other people talking about it and they get, they made it about ethics and beliefs and even about just yoga poses and how to do yoga poses. And it really isn't that at all. It's such an amazing science. And so I always felt I want to really put this down so people honor it and get it?

And can you share with us what your Ishta approach is and what ishta stands for?

So Ishtar comes from one of the sutras and actually means. Ishta is that which resonates with your soul. So everyone has a. In Hinduism, Ishta devata, but also in Tantra, a devata means a deity, but the deity in Hinduism is a God that you worship. And in Tantra, it's something that symbolizes a connection to bringing in that particular consciousness from the quantum field, from Brahman. It's like the vortex that you're going to go through. So everyone needs something that really resonates. Their practice has to resonate with their soul. What is it that they really need? Many people just start doing asana and then want to change their body and sweat and do things of that nature and often get very much. They reinforce their doshik imbalance rather than doing what they really need. So when a person is very excess bitter, they want to sweat and try and do and do better and master every pose. And usually that person needs the opposite.

Yes.

So it's kind of like, yeah, that's where someone who understands that can help one through it. So Ishtar, we do that, we teach people what it is they need for themselves. What, what kind of practice they need. For example, very interesting. If I say, you say, okay, well, how many of these hamsa kriyas should I do every day in my meditation? Well, if it's a person who's weak in mind and restless in their mind, I would say 27. If it was someone who's been practicing regularly and as you said, loves meditation, like you told me you do, I'd say to you, just do it till you feel it do it. One, two, doesn't matter. Whenever you just do it, you do it to bring you back and feel the pause in between the breaths. The moment between two breaths is the moment between two thoughts, and that moment is enlightenment.

So beautiful. And your lovely wife Sarah told me that ishta also stands for Integrated Science of Hatha, Tantra and Ayurveda, the three.

Sister sciences of India, Tantra, Hatha, Asana, and Ayurveda.

So can you tell us the connection between Ayurveda and Tantra?

Well, the connection is that they all are sister sciences, so they all have a common denominator, which is to remove the imbalance from your living, whether the imbalance is in what you eating, how you're living your life, or whether the imbalance comes about from a mental thing or a physical thing. So they all aim at doing the same thing, bringing you back into balance, into yoga, and ultimately even in Ayurveda. Ayurveda has become a little distorted these days because they're taking purely the. The medical element of Ayurveda and really trying to just practice that. Whereas the original Ayurveda was to balance your body, your doshas, so that you can be more comfortable with yourself and meditate and tune back to where we are born from.

Exactly. I couldn't have said it better myself. It's so interesting. People are like, we want to know about tongue scraping. And it's like, well, what is the point of scraping your tongue? What is the point of having healthy digestion so you can be in touch with who you really are. Are.

Exactly. And not everyone needs thumb scraping. If they have a very pure, clean diet and don't have a cover disorder, you don't need to scrape your tongue.

Yeah, I think people like to get busy with something.

Exactly. Definitely. And what they can do or take.

Yeah.

And.

And label themselves. Oh, I'm only pitta, therefore only pitta things apply to me. And not understanding that they're all three doshas and they're always changing.

And you know what sahar is very important, is that your prakriti, what you're born with, you're stamped with that and doesn't matter. It's just who you are. It's your makeup. But your vrikriti is constantly changing. And it's the vrikriti that we have to match to the prakriti. So if somebody is in tune, they actually don't have to do anything. They'll be in tune and they'll be there.

Exactly. I get messages from people. How can I become a vata?

It's like, you can't.

But it's our society makes you feel like you must. So this is something I love talking about and I'm sure you've noticed. How is our dosha related to our dharma?

Well, doshas are not really. They related to our dharma, to how we live our life. So if our doshas are in balance, then we live our life most efficiently. Meaning that how long it takes us to work out as samskara, a karmic tendency which we've been born to do in our life. How long we do that is up to us. That's where the free will comes in. So you can work through a samskara with a snap like that, or you can take a whole lifetime or more to get through the same thing. So if your doshas are imbalanced, your pravri kriti with your prakriti, that's when you're in that zone where you're snapping through it and gracefully just moving through it.

Yes, definitely. And I think going back to what your prakriti is and seeing how that's your superpower, that's your gift, that's what you were meant to share with this world and to go back to that, go back to your childhood self instead of trying to become someone else. Yes.

Honor it and let it be full in you. And sometimes I tease people because I've got a lot of kapha. So I tell them I have the deluxe body. Please do not be jealous. It's cuddlesome and it's amazing and a vata is amazing and a pitta is all different. And we've obviously got them all in us too. But a dominance gives us our dosha for sure.

And I think the way that you speak, it's so almost luxurious with your words. You don't rush things. You allow for that, that sacred pause. And I think a lot of us are afraid of that. We're afraid of. If I don't talk as fast as possible, I'm going to lose people's attention. And it's coming out of this ego driven fear. And even the way you speak is reflective of. It's in the pause, it's in the annotation. To really allow that to sink in.

Exactly. The pause allows it to sink in. And if you're not doing this for somebody else, but you're just letting it flow through, there'll be lots of pauses where one can sort of catch their breath and digest it and then move on.

Absolutely. It's very inspiring for all of us to be a little bit more mindful, a little bit more slow and peaceful with our words and not to rush through things, even conversations.

Yeah. And that happens when the consciousness is in the heart center. Mindful means you're self aware. Aware of your biggest self. The jiva is free.

So beautiful. So where can listeners connect with you, get your book and participate in your incredible workshops?

Well, the book is available at Barnes and Noble, it's available at Amazon and I do and with Wendy, who assisted me with the book, we do workshops. So I think people should read the book because the book will give them the basis to it. And then I offer workshop retreats, everything and those that can be seen in.

Ishtayoga.Com well, I highly recommend this book and Alan and his wife Sarah's workshops. They are amazing. Such inspiring souls. And I can't wait to sit with you and study with you again in person.

Wonderful. You come to New York, don't you? Yeah.

Yes. I will definitely swing by the studio and take one of your classes when I come next time. Thank you so much for being on the podcast.

Thank you too. And thank you for letting me to share with you.

How beautiful was that conversation. I swear, while I was recording it, I was like, oh my God, I want to go meditate right now. It was really just getting me excited to meditate because you realize how important it is, how expansive it is, how the most simple thing to sit and do nothing is actually the key to everything that we desire. So thank you Yogi Raj Alan for being on this podcast and be sure to check out his book, Tantra of the Yoga Sutras. If you loved this episode, I would.

Love to share with you the first.

Half of my unreleased book, Eat Right for your Mind Body Type, which is different from my book Eat Feel Fresh. It is my unreleased, never to be released book because it is now part of my Eat Right for your Mind Body Type program. I would love to send it to you absolutely free.

All you gotta do is leave me.

A review in the itunes store, take a screenshot and email it over to me@saharaet feelfresh.com Again take a screenshot of the review and email it to me@saharaatfieldfresh.com.

And I will send you the first.

Half of my unreleased book, Eat Right for your Mind Body Type.

Namaste.

It.