Urban Tantra: Sacred Sex for the Twenty-First Century by Barbara Carrellas Page A

Exhilaration Meditation. It is a great way to begin your day. It is also remarkably effective for throwing off the cumulative physical and psychic effects of a workweek in the big city. Just make sure you have a relatively empty stomach. This meditation is best done with eyes closed or wearing a blindfold.
    Part one ( four to ten minutes ). Breathe forcefully and rapidly through the nose, focusing on the exhalation. The inhalation will happen automatically. This is very similar to the Breath of Fire, but in this case your breath can be more chaotic. Allow your body to move with your breath and use those natural body movements to help you build up your energy. The purpose of this part is to build energy that you will release in the next part.
    Part two ( four to ten minutes ). Release your inner two-year-old! Clench your fists and jump up and down while yelling “NO!” with each jump. After several minutes of “NO!” unclench your fists and raise your open hands to shoulder height. Keep jumping, but this time yell “YES!” on each jump. Yell “YES!” with the same force and intensity that you have been yelling “NO!”
    Part three ( four to ten minutes ). Release your inner kung fu fighter. Stand in a power stance with knees bent and feet a bit more than shoulder distance apart. Tilt your pelvis back and tighten your abdominal muscles and your buttocks until you feel strong and invincible. Now throw karate chops in front of you, releasing a powerful karate yell with each karate chop.
    Part four ( four to fifteen minutes ). Stop! Immediately place your body in a manageable sitting or standing pose and then do not move. Do not rearrange your body, just let it be. Focus on your breath or on your heartbeat. Simply witness whatever happens.
    Part five ( four to ten minutes ). Laugh. Begin with a smile. Let the smile grow wider until it becomes a giggle. Let the giggle grow until it becomes laughter. Then let the laughing laugh you. Become laughter.
The Silent Scream
If you just need to scream and you live in a building where that will produce a call to 911, try screaming underwater. Fill your bathtub with nice warm water, get in, put your face in the water, and scream away. Even someone in the next room probably won’t hear you. And you’ll feel so much better. (Just remember not to inhale while your head is underwater.)
    You can do the Cathartic Meditation without risking eviction for noise violations with these modifications: in part two, yell “NO!” and then “YES” silently inside yourself; and in part three, you can throw karate chops with a sharp exhale instead of a yell.
    There are other simple and very effective cathartic meditations. One is pillow beating. If you are feeling angry at someone or something, beat a pillow. If you let your pillow thrashing be a meditation, the anger will turn into a kind of energy phenomenon. You may feel silly, you may feel sad, you may feel elated. You may even have an angergasm. Whatever happens, the anger will be transformed and you will feel calmer and more centered.
    These active mediations will not eliminate all of your negative feelings. That’s fine. You don’t need to eliminate all negative feelings in order to make love consciously. Heck, if we all waited to have sex until we felt perfectly blissful, we’d never fuck at all! What active meditations will do for you is open you up and relax you so that your feelings are not so stuck and binding. When your energy is flowing and your mind is quiet, it doesn’t matter so much what you are feeling; it only matters that you are feeling. And remember: feeling silly is a perfectly lovely doorway to feeling sexy .
    Even a short active meditation will sensitize not only your emotional body but also your physical body. You may notice that you have more feeling in your hands or in parts of your body that seemed numb before you did the meditation. This alive, awake, sensitive state is ideal for learning and practicing a kind of