Our spring issue is out now. Editor Alison McEvoy spoke with Tantra expert Nerea Carryon who shares how she came to be on the Tantric path and the amazing discoveries she has made since. Dive on in to learn more…
The Tantric Path
Welcoming The All Of Who You Are
by Alison McEvoy
Interviewed by Paul Congdon
Your True Path Is Seeking You!
So often our mind takes over our journey in life. We forget that our life is a journey of its own, with its own essential purpose, path and intelligence.
Listening to Nerea Carryon describe her Tantra Journey reminded me of this. The Tantric path was walking its way through her life long before the concept of Tantra entered her mind:
“At 24 years old…I discovered my body…I was having the most incredible, long orgasms of my life. We [my partner and I] felt like there was unlimited energy. We didn’t need to eat. We didn’t need to sleep…I had no clue about Tantra.”
Her lover was unable to have an erection and so the couple began to explore sexuality and intimacy in a host of other ways. What occurred was an explosion of pure energy where they were “making love for hours and hours.” Eventually, Nerea googled ‘Cosmic love-making’ in an effort to understand her experience – and the word Tantra popped up.
“I started reading and felt, YES, this is it! We are experiencing this! It was nothing to do with sexuality but it came through sexuality for me…I felt like I got this. I know this. This is what I am. I feel it in my veins. I feel it everywhere.”
It was almost another decade however, before Nerea returned to Tantra.
The Path Will Find You
Living in a big city, London, running several businesses, Nerea took a different turn in her life. She was no longer having the “intense experiences” with any of the subsequent partners/lovers in her life. The life she was living was not serving her body and, after seven years in London, she experienced a “big burnout”: “I had to stop what I was doing. My body was saying no.”
Her return to her path was facilitated by her wise decision, her dedication to her truth, when she closed up her businesses
and left for the mountains.
“I left to meditate and to come back to myself, and ask myself questions about what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. In one of my meditations, asking myself ‘What’s next? What do you want to explore?’, the word Tantra came back very strongly. I Googled ‘Tantra Communities’ and one in Portugal came up.”
Nerea contacted this community, with the intention of becoming a volunteer, and they asked her if she could be there the next day.
“I went there the very next day and I was literally in a Tantra Festival, helping them…I felt so at home…I felt like I had arrived…like you guys have been waiting for me and I’ve arrived… I’m home…I was in heaven for the five days helping them…this was the life that I had dreamed of.”
“That was it for me. I was like, I’m in. What’s the Tantric path?”
She followed the Tantric path to Goa, to Koh Pha Ngan…all of it, and experienced herself be “reborn” into the path. “I’m so excited to be here and to be representing this, which for me was already changing my life when I was 24 without knowing it existed, and now putting words on it, and putting specific practices for people who have never experienced this. I’m like ‘yes please’, let’s do this.”
Space And Time
The feeling of being at home in life and in the body, Nerea describes as a feeling of “spaciousness”. There is space and time to hear oneself, to be heard, to see oneself, to be seen, to respect oneself, to be respected: “Space to say no, space to say yes… to take time to make a decision if I wasn’t sure. I felt respected… I had space to feel myself, to understand why yes or why no…”
If we give ourselves the gift of space and time, all aspects of our being that we have no space or time to feel, know, acknowledge, see or experience, come into view. The full spectrum of our humanity, the full container of our emotions, our creativity, our sensuality, our aliveness… This is the gift of Tantra.
“[In Tantric massage] the whole body becomes so intense and so sensitive and so interconnected…because we create so much space through the Tantric massage and so much understanding and awareness of every sensation, your body starts connecting all the feelings you never had space to connect, or even the time to experience.”
Courage To Be, In Space And Time
“The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain… [sorrow and joy] are inseparable. Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.” (The Prophet, by Kahlil Gibran)
Nerea remarks that, in the beginning, the experience with Tantra can be intense, or painful. This is not dwelled upon and most people associated Tantra with pleasure. However, if we are to last of the path, we must be willing to experience both pleasure and pain as they are two sides of the one coin.
There are barriers in place in many of us, blocking the experience of abundant joy and pleasure. These barriers are our pains, our traumas, our emotional wounds. These are the doorkeepers, and the ones we must have courage and support in facing and feeling. Beyond them is the opening of our hearts, our emotional body, our energetic body and the OH. MY. GOD.
When people like Nerea come to tell us the beautiful experience of being on the other side of pain, after having been through the challenges and barriers, we can be encouraged.
“We have to understand our body has so much potential for love, sensations, orgasms, for all these other things, cosmic sensation… Everybody has to experience this!”
“After those releases [of intense and painful parts], the only thing left is pleasure.”
Join The Path
Tantra might be calling you too. For a day, a week, a year, a lifetime, who knows. Nerea is a wonderful person to join on this path as she is deeply focussed on healing. In her own words, “I like to play it safe and really help people who really need it.”
Nerea led a Tantric massage practitioners training, Level 1, this spring in Northern Ireland. Connect with her on Facebook to find out more.
facebook.com/NereaCarryon
