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Margot Anand is an internationally acclaimed authority on Tantra and best-selling author of The Art of Sexual Ecstasy, The Art of Sexual Magic and others. A native of France, Margot received her degree from Sorbonne University in Paris and has spent decades studying with many
of the world’s prominent masters of Tantra

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Guy Spiro: Your work is so interesting. How did you get this involved with sexuality?

Margot Anand: It all began when I made love for the first time. I was eighteen, and I had a out of the body, transcendental, enlightenment experience. I saw and felt myself as that which has always and will always exist before I was incarnated in this body and after I will leave it. I experienced a total spiritual freedom unbound from the limitations of culture, time, place, parental education or university teaching. I experienced my essential nature which was light and freedom.

GS: The very first time you had sex? I guess that was an incentive to keep going.

MA: It was an amazing and unexpected thing that happened. I was very much in love, mind you, but making love was a springboard to a spiritual experience of quite unexpected dimensions. I understood then that my path through spirituality and awakening as a woman would go through sexuality, and I became very interested in the cultures of sacred sexuality around the world. Finishing my degrees at the Sorbonne and my studies in psychology and philosophy, I started to travel. For seven years I studied with all sorts of teachers and masters in Europe, America and India. I was already a trained therapist and teaching workshops, but at the same time I was researching Tantra. I was teaching workshops in bioenergetics and various forms of therapy, and eventually got to the point where I put all the pieces together and developed a method called Skydancing Tantra. In the process, I received many teachings and transmissions from various enlightened beings, and brought together the understanding that the ecstasy of the body is the sexual orgasm, and the orgasm of the spirit is the ecstasy you experience when you meditate or when you make love. But the originality of my approach is that I modernized very ancient, not very accessible and very complicated forms of practice which combine yoga and many other approaches. A person can start from the sexual center when they make love, and learn how to heal their sexuality to maximize their orgasmic experience, and channel this energy from lust into bliss. You can transform the nature of orgasmic experience into an expanded spiritual experience.

GS: Your first book was The Art of Sexual Ecstasy?

MA: My first book was a book on American counter-culture when I was a journalist. It was written about the time of Woodstock, which I attended. It was about that time I decided to drop out from Europe to America because I fell so much in love with this country. The second book was called Le Chaumand de L’Ecstaz which was never translated in English. It was written in French because I was originally a French writer. The next book was The Art of Sexual Ecstasy.

GS: Which exploded for you.

MA: Yes. It has sold about 800,000 copies in twenty countries and is still selling strong. The one after that was The Art of Sexual Magic. Once you experience ecstatic states, what do you do with them? During this time I met Deepak Chopra, who was also working on a book on magic, and we really hit it off quite well. So I started working with him and I developed the training around The Art of Sexual Magic. After that I wrote The Art of Everyday Ecstasy which is how you can take the qualities you develop as a great lover in the bedroom and apply them to your daily life. This is the philosophy of Tantra in the broader sense, not just in the sense of sexuality, but in the sense of lifestyle and knowing how to be a better and happier person.

GS: It’s interesting to watch how attitudes towards sexuality change. Of course we had the sexual revolution in the 60s and 70s. Then HIV slowed things down considerably. Now you find Tantra coming above ground.

MA: The reason why this path, this method, can never die, is because it’s so powerful. I have worked with 40,000 people and started nine Skydancing Institutes in the world. I have trained 100 teachers that are teaching my method with great success. Many of these Institutes, I’m not even going there to teach anymore, and the trainings are full and still working.

The love and ecstasy training, which is sort of the essential aspect of my method, is taught over a period of three weeks over one year’s time. You have the first week which is sexual healing. People have three months to practice and then there is the second week which is the multi-orgasmic response, which is a unique approach and is very powerful. Even though it might be the same words used for other methods, this one is uniquely mine and different from others. In this second cycle, people learn how to expand their orgasmic capacity and open up their chakra or energy centers and transform their sexual energy. The third cycle is riding the wave of bliss which is the Tantric art of lovemaking. People learn how to transform love into a meditation which is very blissful. This training has been explored by three universities that followed the participants over a year and a half with fifteen questionnaires per person and interviews, and statistical analysis of the results. It was published and was very positive. This method in the field of tantric and sexual teachings is probably the most scientifically studied, and the one that has touched the most people. I’ve been very dedicated to that. I just finished the second cycle of the love and ecstasy training here and it is really miraculous what happens. The healings that people go through, the feedback we get is incredible. So I’m delighted that this training works so well for people and I’m hoping to be able to bring it to other parts of America besides the east and west coasts.

GS: Tantra comes originally out of Tibet and India.

MA: The difficulty here is that I’m not really teaching tantra. I’m teaching a method that’s sort of Margot Anand’s approach to all the different learning transmission she got on the path of tantra. When people say tantra, everybody has a projection and an idea of what it is. There are people that are not ethically appropriate teachers. There are people that are using their position as tantric so-called teachers to create a harem of lovers for themselves. And I don’t want to be associated with those tantra teachers because I was the first one on the scene, and I am truly a very ethically oriented professional. I teach Skydancing Tantra, and that lineage is associated with Buddha, Padma Sambhava and his consort Yesche Tsogual. There is a book written about her called The Skydancer, and they were the great Tibetan Tantric masters that started the passage of tantra around India around the eighth century. Their teachings are the lineage I’m associated with and the transmissions I received in the body and out of the body. Of course, because I’m Margot Anand and I explored everything very deeply, I brought in other teachings and received blessings from other masters to do this work. In the ancient texts on tantra, the question was asked by the disciples, how do you recognize a good tantra teacher? How do you know that someone is empowered to teach this work? The answers would be, and still should be, that the teacher has received a blessing and empowerment from their enlightened teacher to continue this lineage and continue this transmission.

GS: Do you think tantra will continue to gain in respectability and be accepted more by mainstream society?

MA: It will depend on how the teachers behave. Unfortunately, it is the power that someone has in marketing that very often supersedes the quality of the work that they put out. You can have someone who is the most qualified teacher who doesn’t do any marketing, and they will be the tenth in line in success behind ones that have dubious ethical behavior but who have a great knowledge of marketing. I can give you an example as far as my work is concerned. My work is rather radical. People have an opportunity to really learn hands-on how their orgasmic self responds, and how they can enhance their response with their partners, and so forth. But because the whole thing is packaged in something that is deeply, spiritually respectful to the participants, and immediately opening up the highest spiritual considerations, and done appropriately professionally and ethically, then the people feel safe, satisfied and they can go through this work. This work has kept its good reputation even though I may be even more radical than a lot of the other teachers. Yes, it has a chance, just like yoga. In the beginning in this country, yoga was looked upon like some kind of weird spiritual or metaphysical discipline and now it’s all over the place.

GS: Libraries are having yoga classes. What would you say the benefits of tantra are that are not available to us otherwise?

MA: People often have sexual problems due to an imbalance in their masculine and their feminine. The feminine nature of a person, whether they are a man or a woman, is their anima, their dreamer, the one that doesn’t have any goals, is playful, patient and nurturing. On the other hand, their masculine nature or animus is the one that has a purpose, is goal oriented, accomplishes things, is a leader and takes initiative. We each have both these natures. But when these natures are imbalanced, we have a situation where the husband goes to the wife and says how about it baby, let’s make love tonight, and the wife looks upon him and says, well excuse me, I don’t have time. She is too much in her masculine and doesn’t know how to surrender to the masculine of her husband. She doesn’t do that because the husband, on the other hand, doesn’t know how to hold a strong masculine that gives her trust, confidence and satisfaction. There is all this interplay between the balance and imbalance between the masculine and feminine nature of man and woman that creates sexual imbalances and dissatisfaction in the lovemaking arena.

The originality of my work is that it recalibrates the polarities of male-female in such a way that the woman is able to open up to the deepest level of her orgasmic self, therefore becoming very satisfied and trusting in her powers. Her sense of self-esteem grows immensely because a woman who has experienced a deep level of sexual orgasm and been able to connect that to her heart … trusts in herself more. The same for the man. We have separate men’s groups and women’s groups in my training. The men learn how to really hold themselves in their power, in their presence. They also learn how to cultivate their capacity to be strong lovers and hold themselves strong in their lovemaking for longer periods of time. These are physical as well as emotional ways of practicing my specific tools and methods that help people to be more powerful lovers with each other, and hence, more creative in their daily life. I would say that’s mainly what I bring to people, and I bring it in a way which is more efficacious, directly accessible, with direct strong results after a week or two of work. I teach people how to enter a situation in their lovemaking or in their relationship with a relaxed body, with an open heart and a peaceful mind. When these three qualities are there, they can enter into the fourth dimension, the ecstatic dimension, which is expanded consciousness.

GS: Did you continue to have out of body experiences when you orgasm?

MA: I have changed that to something which is more in the nature of expanded consciousness. In other words, I do have experiences of this nature, but they’re more grounded. They’re more grounded in the body, they’re more grounded in the three areas I just mentioned, and therefore they are more satisfying and I can access them more easily.

GS: Do you find that almost anyone can have these experiences?

MA: Yes. Because every one of us have been conceived in the same way, and at the moment of our conception, when our father’s sperm impregnated our mother’s egg, that was in most cases an ecstatic moment. This ecstatic dimension is practically inscribed in our DNA. In our programming as human beings, we are ecstatic. We have that as a potential, and accessing the ecstatic dimension is, for me, a spiritual experience that gives us a taste of our divine nature and brings us closer to God. Whether that is accessed within the sexual context or outside the sexual context, one needs to understand that there are two types of orgasm. One is the explosive orgasm of release which is strictly sexual, and the other one is the implosive orgasm of expansion where the sexual energy and orgasmic energy is transformed as it moves to the heart and moves to the third eye, and expands as an energy beyond the boundaries of the body into a sense of spaciousness, just in the same way as we experience it in meditation. When you sit in Zazen, you go in the gap between the thoughts and you experience pure consciousness beyond the mind; that is expanded consciousness. It is a sense of peace and spaciousness that allows you to move through life in a much more integrated and peaceful way. There are ways of transforming sexual energy to that level when it becomes a prayer of erotic devotion. You recognize the divine in your partner, and your partner recognizes the divine in you. This is a very deeply satisfying experience, and this is the way it should be. Just because it’s been distorted by our Christian tradition doesn’t mean that it has to stay that way.

GS: Exactly. What about the person who is single or perhaps has a partner that is unwilling to explore this?

MA: About 70% of the people that come to my training are single people, and many think at first that they could not or should not as singles, because it’s not going to work for them. I explain to them that this training can benefit people that are single as well as those who come as a couple. If a person is able to understand their sexual energy as a life force that is very deeply present in them, understand how to access and cultivate this life force and how to harmonize their three centers and also their seven charkas, their ability to transform the energy through passion, flow, power, caring, truthfulness, clear vision and ecstatic opening, or spiritual freedom, then they have woven their energies in such a way that when they go back out in the world, they become very magnetic and very attractive. And most times, that is when they attract their life partners. When a person comes to me as a single and does the work, they very often go back out in the world and find a partner. They can do the work themselves. The work is designed for a person to do on their own as well as with a partner.

On the other hand, how they would handle it if they have a partner that is reluctant to go into this work, there are certain approaches that are delightful that practically no one would refuse. Not sexual approaches but approaches of delightful sensory awakening ritual, or surprises for the senses, or various things that are in the area that everybody loves, men and women. I think that to approach it this way, and to be discreet and not pushy, but to develop yourself the skills of fun and erotic surprises, and being eminently feminine and seductive, being loving and trustworthy, as the skills are that we teach in my groups, they are definitely doable for people.

GS: Are there any prerequisites or conditions to becoming a student of tantra?

MA: If people want to enter to Skydancing Tantra, they simply have to come with a willingness to show up, being fully present and to be fully interested in the teachings. The rest happens by itself.

GS: How long does it take to become a practitioner or teacher?

MA: People will normally do a weekend and they will decide whether they like this work, and come back to a longer training or a group. They will go to the Love & Ecstasy training, which is two weeks with an optional third week. Then after they have completed that they will go to the Facilitators training, which is another three weeks. In the process of doing all these things, they have to also assist me. They have to be part of the assisting team in the programs that I teach.

GS: In a period of a few months or a couple years someone could become a Skydancing Teacher?

MA: Yes.

GS: Describe the essence of your teaching.

MA: The skills of a good lover are presence, being totally in your actions, being really present in what you do totally without judgment. Having no critical attitude. Being in wonder and acceptance of what’s happening. I would say that these are some of the skills that a lover develops as they do this work. To approach their daily life in all areas of their life with the same attitude is a good thing. The way to approach it, as I teach it in The Art of Everyday Ecstasy, is to understand how the energy centers [chakras] in your body function.

The first one opens you up to passion, being passionate about what you do. The second in the belly area opens you up to flowing. Meaning you’re capable of changing hats, changing roles, changing functions at your job, you’re not a control freak, you don’t have to always be held in the same position. You’re versatile. The third, which is the solar plexus, you’re able to trust yourself to be organizing your work well so that you maximize your chances of success as far as money is concerned, and that requires a certain sense of your own personal power. In the fourth, the heart, it’s a matter of being able to open your heart to yourself and able to accept yourself first. To accept yourself so you can then accept others. In your throat is being a clear communicator with authenticity. Understanding that it’s better to tell the truth even if it’s risky, rather than doing what people want you to do. In the third eye, it’s holding a vision of your path, where you want to arrive, having a sense of the big picture, even when you take care of the details. In the crown chakra, it’s basically asking yourself, is this serving my evolution and the evolution of the planet? Does what I do have a spiritual meaning?

When each of these energy centers is closed or armored they behave differently. For instance in the first center, if a person is closed, they might feel typically that they don’t get enough out of life. They don’t get enough money, they don’t get enough love, their house isn’t good enough and so on. In the second chakra, if they are closed, they want to control everybody and everything, they have a fear of letting go. If they have a closed third chakra, they will feel they are not in their own power and they will fear the power of the partner, so they will want to manipulate them. It will be more a matter of power over rather than power with. So in my book, The Art of Everyday Ecstasy, the philosophy of Skydancing Tantra is taught for people to understand how they can move through life choosing what gives them joy to open the door to spirit. Choose with awareness what gives you joy, and that will open the door to your spirit. That is the essential message of my teaching.

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