The Art of Sexual Ecstasy by Margo Anand: Complete Guide to Sacred Sexuality

Overview and Significance

Published in 1989 by Jeremy P. Tarcher, The Art of Sexual Ecstasy: The Path of Sacred Sexuality for Western Lovers became one of the defining texts of the sacred sexuality movement in the West. At a time when most books about sex focused on technique and most books about spirituality avoided the body, Anand bridged the two domains with a comprehensive, practical program that treated sexual experience as a legitimate and powerful spiritual path.

The book is lavishly illustrated with photographs and drawings that demonstrate the practices, making it one of the most visually detailed guides to sacred sexuality ever published. Its scope is ambitious: over 400 pages covering everything from basic self-awareness exercises to advanced partner rituals that aim to produce transcendent states of consciousness through sexual energy.

Anand's influence extends beyond the book itself. She trained thousands of practitioners through her SkyDancing Tantra Institute, and her approach has been adopted and adapted by numerous subsequent teachers of sacred sexuality, making her one of the most significant figures in bringing Tantric principles to Western audiences.

Who Is Margo Anand?

Margo Anand (born Margot Anand Naslednikov in 1944 in Paris) holds a degree in psychology from the Sorbonne and trained extensively in bodywork, bioenergetics, and Reichian therapy. In the 1970s, she traveled to India and spent several years studying with Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (later known as Osho) at his ashram in Pune, where she was exposed to the Tantric and Taoist practices that would form the foundation of her life's work.

Returning to the West, Anand synthesized her training in Eastern practices with Western therapeutic approaches and her own experiential discoveries to create SkyDancing Tantra, a method she has taught through workshops, retreats, and teacher training programs for over four decades. She has authored several books, including The Art of Everyday Ecstasy (1998) and Love, Sex, and Awakening (2017).

The name "SkyDancing" references the Tibetan Buddhist tradition of the dakini, a feminine embodiment of enlightened energy described as "dancing in the sky" of pure awareness. Anand's choice of this name signals her intention to connect the sexual practices she teaches to the broader Tantric understanding of feminine creative energy (shakti) as the dynamic force of the universe.

SkyDancing Tantra: The Method

SkyDancing Tantra is a progressive method that builds from individual practices to couple practices, from basic body awareness to advanced energy cultivation, and from ordinary sexual experience to what Anand calls "the ecstatic response": a state of expanded consciousness accessed through the body's energy systems.

The method rests on several core principles:

The body is not an obstacle: Unlike ascetic traditions that treat the body as something to be transcended, Anand follows the Tantric understanding that the body is the vehicle for spiritual awakening. Physical pleasure, when experienced with full consciousness, becomes a doorway to the sacred rather than a distraction from it.

Energy follows attention: Where you place your awareness, energy flows. By directing attention to specific areas of the body (the heart, the belly, the crown of the head), you can consciously channel sexual energy to produce different qualities of experience.

Breath is the bridge: Breathing is the link between the involuntary (autonomic nervous system) and the voluntary (conscious control). By modifying breathing patterns, you can directly influence the body's energy state, moving from ordinary arousal to expanded ecstatic awareness.

Sound amplifies energy: Vocal expression, whether sighing, moaning, toning, or speaking, amplifies the movement of energy through the body. Anand encourages uninhibited vocal expression during practice as a way of releasing blocked energy and intensifying the ecstatic experience.

The Twelve Steps

The SkyDancing program proceeds through twelve stages, each building on the skills developed in previous stages:

Steps 1-3: Awakening to Self

• Step 1: Awakening Your Inner Lover. Self-awareness practices including body mapping, breath awareness, and the cultivation of a loving relationship with your own body.
• Step 2: Opening Your Inner Flute. Learning to breathe energy through the body's central channel (corresponding to the sushumna nadi in yogic anatomy), creating the pathway through which sexual energy will later be circulated.
• Step 3: The Art of Erotic Touch. Developing sensitivity to the full range of touch, from feather-light to firm, learning to give and receive touch as a form of energy exchange rather than mere physical stimulation.

Steps 4-6: Opening the Senses

• Step 4: Soul Gazing and Speaking Heart to Heart. Eye contact practices that establish deep presence and vulnerability between partners, combined with communication exercises that build emotional intimacy.
• Step 5: Exploring Each Other's Erotic Landscape. Detailed sensory exploration of your partner's body with full attention and without goal-orientation, discovering the unique map of each person's erotic sensitivity.
• Step 6: Opening to Trust. Practices that build the safety and trust necessary for the deeper surrender that the later steps require.

Steps 7-9: The Dance of Energy

• Step 7: The Streaming Orgasm. Using breath, sound, and movement to extend and expand orgasmic energy beyond the genitals and through the entire body.
• Step 8: Riding the Wave of Bliss. Partner practices that synchronize breath and movement to create shared waves of ecstatic energy.
• Step 9: The Dance of the Senses. Integrating all the senses (sight, sound, touch, smell, taste) into a unified field of awareness during lovemaking.

Steps 10-12: The Summit

• Step 10: Expanding Orgasm. Techniques for extending the duration and intensity of orgasm, moving from peak experience to plateau experience.
• Step 11: The Cosmic Embrace. Advanced partner practices in which the boundaries between self and other dissolve, producing an experience of union that transcends the physical.
• Step 12: Sexual Ecstasy as Meditation. Integrating the entire practice into daily life, treating every moment of physical intimacy as a meditation on love and presence.

Tantric Foundations

Anand draws on several Tantric concepts:

Shakti and Shiva: In Tantric cosmology, the universe is the dance of two complementary principles: Shiva (pure consciousness, the masculine) and Shakti (creative energy, the feminine). Sexual union between partners who embody these principles becomes a microcosmic re-enactment of the cosmic dance, a way of participating in the creative process of the universe.

Kundalini: Sexual energy is understood as a form of kundalini shakti, the dormant creative force that, when awakened, rises through the body's energy centres (chakras), producing progressively expanded states of consciousness. Anand's practices are designed to gently awaken and direct this energy.

The chakra system: The seven main chakras serve as energy processing centres, each associated with specific qualities of experience (survival, sexuality, power, love, expression, insight, transcendence). Anand's program progressively opens these centres, allowing energy to flow freely from the root to the crown.

It is important to note that Anand's Tantra is a Western adaptation rather than a faithful transmission of classical Indian or Tibetan Tantric practice. Traditional Tantra is a vast philosophical and ritual system of which sexual practice constitutes only a small part, and much of it involves elaborate initiation, mantra recitation, and deity visualization that have no counterpart in Anand's approach. Scholars of Tantra, including David Gordon White and Hugh Urban, have noted the significant differences between neo-Tantra (as taught by Anand and others) and the historical tradition.

Breath and Energy Practices

Breath is the foundational tool in Anand's system. Several specific techniques are taught:

Sensory Awakening

Before any explicitly sexual practice, Anand devotes considerable attention to awakening the senses. She argues that most people are sensorily impoverished, rushing through physical experience without fully receiving it. The early steps of the program are designed to slow down perception and deepen sensitivity.

Practices include blindfolded exploration of textures, temperatures, and sounds; slow, deliberate eating with full attention to taste and texture; and body-mapping exercises in which partners explore each other's skin with different pressures and materials, discovering the unique topography of erotic sensitivity.

This sensory awakening serves a dual purpose: it deepens physical pleasure (by increasing the capacity to receive sensation) and it develops the quality of presence (by training attention to stay with direct experience rather than drifting into fantasy or performance anxiety).

Partner Practices

The partner practices build progressively from non-sexual to explicitly sexual:

Soul gazing: Partners sit facing each other and maintain eye contact for extended periods (10-30 minutes). This practice, which initially produces discomfort and vulnerability, gradually opens into a profound sense of connection and intimacy. Anand describes it as "making love through the eyes."

Synchronized breathing: Partners breathe in rhythm, either breathing together (both inhale, both exhale) or in complementary rhythm (one inhales while the other exhales). This creates a shared energetic field and harmonizes the partners' nervous systems.

The Yab-Yum position: One partner sits in the other's lap, faces close, genitals connected or in close proximity. This traditional Tantric position allows simultaneous eye contact, heart contact, and genital contact, enabling the circulation of energy through all three centres simultaneously.

The Streaming Orgasm

Anand's concept of the "streaming orgasm" is one of her most original contributions. Unlike the conventional orgasm (a brief, localized, genital event), the streaming orgasm is an extended, whole-body energetic experience that can last for minutes or even longer.

The streaming orgasm is produced by combining strong arousal with specific breathing patterns (the Streaming Breath), vocal expression (sound), and physical movement (particularly undulating movements of the spine and pelvis). These three elements, breath, sound, and movement, work together to spread sexual energy from the genitals through the entire body, producing waves of ecstatic sensation that are experienced as orgasmic but are not limited to the genital area.

Anand describes this as "learning to ride the wave": rather than building to a single peak and releasing, the practitioner learns to sustain high arousal while circulating the energy, producing a rolling, flowing experience of ecstasy that can deepen progressively over the course of a lovemaking session.

Beyond Technique: Sexuality as Spiritual Path

Anand is careful to distinguish her approach from the "more techniques for better sex" genre. The ultimate purpose of the practices is not better orgasms (though that tends to occur) but a transformation of consciousness. When sexuality is approached with full presence, open breath, and conscious intention, it becomes a form of meditation, a practice of being fully alive and fully connected in the present moment.

"Ecstasy is your birthright," Anand writes. "It is not something you achieve through effort. It is what happens naturally when you remove the obstacles to your own aliveness." The obstacles she identifies, body shame, emotional armouring, performance anxiety, disconnection from sensation, habituation, are addressed systematically through the twelve steps, so that by the later stages, the practices require less technique and more simple presence.

This framing places The Art of Sexual Ecstasy within the broader tradition of Tantric philosophy, which understands the entire phenomenal world, including the body and its pleasures, as a manifestation of the divine. In this understanding, to fully experience the body's capacity for pleasure is to encounter the sacred, not to flee from it.

Scientific Context

Several of Anand's practices have parallels in scientific research:

Breathwork and altered states: The rapid connected breathing Anand teaches is similar to holotropic breathwork (developed by Stanislav Grof) and has been shown to produce altered states of consciousness, emotional catharsis, and physiological changes including altered blood chemistry (respiratory alkalosis) that may contribute to the unusual sensory experiences reported by practitioners.

Eye contact and bonding: Research by Arthur Aron at SUNY Stony Brook (1997) demonstrated that sustained mutual eye gazing between strangers produced feelings of intimacy and closeness, supporting Anand's use of soul gazing as a bonding practice.

Oxytocin and touch: The emphasis on prolonged, attentive touch aligns with research on oxytocin (the "bonding hormone"), which is released during skin-to-skin contact and contributes to feelings of trust, connection, and well-being (Uvnas-Moberg, 2003).

Mindfulness and sexual satisfaction: Research by Lori Brotto at the University of British Columbia has documented that mindfulness-based interventions significantly improve sexual satisfaction and arousal in both men and women, supporting Anand's emphasis on present-moment awareness as the foundation of satisfying sexual experience (Brotto, 2018).

Criticism and Limitations

The book has attracted several criticisms:

Cultural appropriation: Scholars of Hindu and Buddhist Tantra have criticized the neo-Tantric movement for extracting sexual practices from their broader philosophical and ritual context. Traditional Tantra is a comprehensive spiritual system; reducing it to sexual technique misrepresents the tradition and may offend practitioners.

Heteronormative framing: The book is written primarily for heterosexual couples, with the masculine-feminine polarity of Shiva-Shakti as its organizing metaphor. Same-sex couples, non-binary individuals, and those who do not identify with the gender binary may find the framework limiting, though many of the practices can be adapted.

Idealization: Some readers have found the book's tone idealistic, with descriptions of ecstatic experience that may create unrealistic expectations. Not every session of sacred sexuality practice produces transcendent states, and the emphasis on ecstasy may inadvertently pressure practitioners to perform or to judge their experience against an impossible standard.

Despite these limitations, the book remains a significant and influential work that opened the conversation about sexuality and spirituality for a Western audience and provided practical tools that thousands of practitioners have found valuable.

Get the Book

Get This Book on Amazon

As an Amazon Associate, Thalira earns from qualifying purchases.