How Accidentally Finding an Underground Tantra Group Changed My Life Forever
How Accidentally Finding an Underground Tantra Group Changed My Life Forever
A little introduction, my history with Tantra, and my passion for bringing you empowering education around how to harness the brilliant intelligences of your body for transformation.
At the age of 21, I left university to embark on a wild DECADE+ long underground group consciousness experiment…
in embodiment, trauma healing, and transformation with 25ish people. It was called a Tantra Kula (aka family/tribe) back then. Nowadays, looking back, I don’t even know what to call what we did, because we went down so many tangential rabbit holes.
But what I have seemed to end up with after 13 years of spontaneous apprenticeship with the universe and this lovely group of people that I now consider family, is a rich set of blueprints for rehabilitating human bodies and social ecosystems. Something our world is notoriously good at tearing apart.
But before I get into that, I want to give you a brief introduction as well as heartily welcome you to this corner of Substack/the internet!
My name is Annika Knepper. I am a 33 year old connoisseur of embodied transformative arts & science. And dance. And Tantra. And education. My home resides in the Pacific Northwest, but I am currently traveling to consider other countries to live in.
Some of you may have found me through my friend Jennifer and her Substack (check out ‘Radiant Frequency’ here) and have subscribed to my newsletter despite me not having written anything yet, (which I am tremendously surprised and grateful for! I look forward to getting to know you!)
After a year of pivoting my business from ‘Consultant to Visionaries’ to ‘Somatic Transformation Educator’, I am finally ready and excited to start writing for you :) So let’s get to it!
Back to Tantra. I wouldn’t exactly call what I do ‘Tantra’ anymore. You will understand why by the end of this newsletter.
If I were to label it anything, I might try ‘Tribal Somatic Transformational Crucible’
because essentially what we did was learn how to belong in a group while being fully authentic at the same time (whereas many people have to sacrifice their authenticity to belong). This required us to learn how to transcend conditioning… which pushed us to explore and evolve our consciousness through our bodies. Deeply.
But saying ‘Tribal Somatic Transformational Crucibles’ is a mouthful.
Which is why I decided to add even MORE words into the description so that I could shorten it into a cool acronym. TECTONIC. Which stands for Tribal Embodiment Crucibles for Transformation & Ongoing Non-dualistic Inquiries into Consciousness.
The word TECTONIC also conveys a kind of depth that most people don’t dare to traverse. Many layers under the surface, is where this group and I liked to muck about.
But a cool acronym like ‘TECTONIC group’ still doesn’t quite explain what we did, so let’s rewind a little bit and break down what Tantra is.
And let me tell you, that in itself is a greeeaaattttt and mysterious question. I promise you, nobody really knows. Not even the anthropologists and scholars of the holy text called ‘Wikipedia’ can agree on where it exactly came from. Nor can they clearly define it, its rituals, and traditions.
However, fear not! Not knowing what it is did not prevent us modern day Westerners from plowing forward and using the name to create our own definitions of what it is! No, it did not deter us one bit! ;)
Hence, the birth of Neo-Tantra. What once was a thousand+ years of coalescence of spiritual technology, texts, rituals, and oral traditions from people who were alive bt 600AD & 1800AD (and beyond) who populated Kashmir (a territory that encompasses parts of India, Pakistan, and China) Nepal, Tibet, and Indonesia…
was sort of kind of hijacked by American hippies of the 60’s and 70’s and distilled down to…
S.E.X.
*face palm*
How very sexually repressed of us, I know.
Nowadays, Tantra is synonymous with terms like ‘conscious sex’ or ‘sacred sexuality’ and there seems to be several portals into Neo-Tantra in the west.
People stumble across ‘intimacy’ workshops at yoga studios or music festivals. Internet gurus will advise people to stick jade eggs up their vulvas to heal sexual trauma. Sex therapists will recommend education for couples to create more intimacy in their partnerships. People go to Burning Man and get their minds blown by the radical sub-culture there. Or dancers brand new to Salsa or Zouk will learn how to breathe and read subtle energy so their dances suck less…
Whatever portal people enter from, they usually all end up eventually sitting in a room on pillows in a circle.
They share their feelings, pair up with people, and do some combination of the following: breathwork, eye gazing, emoting, consent training, meditation, trauma healing, communication training, touch training, learning about attachment theory, polyvagal theory, etc.
Once they get going, they will also somehow, never, ever shut up about chakras and astrology for the remainder of their lives. T’is a common side effect.
And even though I like to joke about the tropes of the Neo-Tantra culture and poke fun at how nobody (including myself) seems to know how to describe it, or where it came from, I also have a deep respect and gratitude for whatever IT is that many people from many cultures have been ushering in, and iterating over thousands of years. It absolutely changed my life for the better, forever.
Because you see, from another potential perspective, each one of us could be mini gods who are playing with reality. We are in a never ending dance with the universe, traveling through time and space, through different cultural eras, constantly forgetting who we are, and then trying to remember again.
Fortunately, our etheric and physical bodies hold memories and roadmaps of how to ‘go home’ even when our conscious minds forget.
We just have a bad human habit of trying to label, safeguard, and control spiritual technologies that we ‘newly discovered’ that are actually as old as time and are universally available to everyone if they have the courage to just explore a little bit. That is why we have a thousand different cultures and professions creating a thousand different names for the same damn thing.
But I digress. What I am ultimately getting at, is that…
traditional Tantra itself was forged in the same way that American hippies borrowed and bastardized it.
As in, different religions and cultures took the tools they learned from Tantra and created their own versions of it to fit their own motivations and views of the world.
For example, scholars surmise that the first evidence of tantric practices arose in 600 AD. Ascetics who lived around cremation burial grounds might have borrowed the worship of gods from both indigenous Indian religions as well as the polytheistic Vedic religion (a religion that arose in India around 1500 BC and eventually evolved into Hinduism) and didn’t shy away from transgressive rituals (i.e. taboo behavior that violates moral and social boundaries) centering around the worship of fierce deities (esp. female), secretive initiations at sacred sites, pleasure, sorcery, death, sex, fashioning spiritual tools from bones and skulls, and consumption of bodily fluids from gurus, etc.
People from the Saiva tradition (a branch of Hinduism that worships the god Shiva as the supreme being) and Buddhism were said to have appropriated and incorporated practices from these ascetics as well as one another. They would take certain elements in and leave others out. In order to avoid persecution, certain rituals would be dulled and kept symbolic vs. literally performed.
Some people tried to take out the representation of fierce, destructive female goddesses and replace them with sweeter, more loving counterparts (common world-wide religious trend eh?)
From there, Buddhist flavors of Tantra spread to Tibet, China, Korea, and Japan, and Saivism flavors of Tantra evolved into different branches of Yoga and Hinduism. Sikhism, Daoism, Sufism, and western ‘New Age-ism’ all borrow from these tantric practices too.
So as you can see, much like Christianity was shaped by gatekeepers who decided what aspects of Jesus’ teachings were acceptable and which weren’t depending on the cultural landscape of the time…
which then branched off into a bazillion sects, so too was Tantra disseminated and shaped by various cultural landscapes. That’s just what we humans seem to do. We take in information and shape it to match our worldview.
To summarize this long spiel, Tantra was a melting pot of different spiritual technologies. Eventually it coalesced into a loose body of identifiable characteristics that include the following:
Ritual worship and devotion to deities
Visualization & identification with deities
Initiation, secrecy, esotericism (aka spiritual knowledge for small groups of people)
Passing on of information from guru to student
Use of Mandalas (symbolic diagrams of universal forces)
Use of Mantras (syllables, words, phrases that direct consciousness)
Use of Mudras (hand gestures that direct consciousness)
Ritual sexual acts
Transgressive acts
Use of taboo substances
Ritual purification
Acquisition of supernormal powers
Embodied practices like yoga (using breath and postures to move and align subtle energies in the body)
Meditation
As you can see, many of these elements are included in other religions as well. The only big differences I saw between Tantra and other spiritual technologies is that bodies, paradox, and sexuality is embraced instead of demonized. But sexuality is a small part of it, not the whole enchilada.
“So did you practice these elements of Tantra in your group?” You might ask..
Well what we did in our ‘Tantra’ group contained maybe 30% of these elements. The other 70% of what we did was ‘channeled’.
As in, our mentor was more interested in meeting us where we were at, than teaching us tradition that we had little to no cultural context for. He built a unique bridge, tailored to this small group of 25ish people, from our current understanding and worldview to an ancient and universal one. He customized exercises for us that our minds could grasp. And to be honest, I didn’t realize how special what he did was until much later when I became a teacher. I’ll say more about that later.
So who was this mentor? Well, out of respect for his desire to remain more…mysterious shall we say, I will just reference him by the nickname Dumbledore. He would not approve of this reference lol, but that’s only because he’s never read the Harry Potter books and doesn’t realize how much like Dumbledore he really is. Understandably so, he doesn’t like people revering him because that means you’re giving your power away to him, something he emphatically rejects. Which kind of makes you love him even more. He can’t win ;)
Much like the character Dumbledore, he had a power that came from love and respect, not from fear, manipulation, or control. You could feel this magnetic forcefield when you were around him because he embodied deep wisdom and balance. Many people were inexplicably drawn to him. But he could also be a chameleon and remain completely invisible to people who weren’t tuned to his frequency. He had a way of being powerful without needing to flex it, irreverent and silly while honoring the sacred, and creating safety without saving or coddling you. Darkness and death didn’t scare him. He was free of any need for approval and acceptance. People projected all kinds of weird stuff onto him (devotion, fear, parental stories, guru stories) but he never tried to control your narrative of him, and would just give your power and stories back to you.
So I think it was safe to say that how this whole underground ‘Tantra’ group consciousness experiment started, was that a handful of us were simply drawn to his way of being and wanted to learn from it. He didn’t have a website, he didn’t have an ashram, there was no official ‘Tantra program’ that he created and advertised.
We just pestered him into teaching us what he knew until he finally gave in.
Thus began our 12-year-long (and still alive today) apprenticeship!
I will never forget the first day I sat down on my pillow in a circle with him and he began to put into words what we were about to do. He said… (the following is paraphrased)
“Most religions and spiritual practices of this world, will teach you that you need to ascend by transcending the human experience. That there is a lot of sinfulness inherent to your human nature and embedded in your animal body that you need to stamp out, or leave behind, in order to connect with ‘god’. That there is a morally right and wrong way to be, a morally good and bad way to be. What we will be doing in this group is the opposite of those teachings. Instead of trying to ‘transcend’ up and out of the body, we are going to go ‘down and into it’, like a hand fitting inside of a glove. We are going to practice FULLY embracing our animal bodies and FULLY embracing the paradox of this world so that you know what it feels like to be a whole being instead of a fragmented one.”
Little did I know how hard that path would be and what it would actually entail. But that day, all I knew was that the ‘truth goosebumps’ that erupted all over my body was enough to get me to dive in and explore.
We met once a week for 3 hours in the evening FOR YEARS. Sometimes we did deeper weekend or week long immersions.
He led us with respect, curiosity, and love, always meeting us where we were at and using his intuition to build a bridge to the next step.
There was no dogmatic explanation of god. He didn’t tell us that we needed to believe in anyone or anything. We didn’t worship deities. We didn’t chant mantras, nor did we use mudras or mandalas. We didn’t do any special initiations or rituals. He refused to be regarded as a Guru, and we weren’t supposed to be devotional to him in any way. We simply began the slow and arduous, but highly rewarding work, of re-inhabiting our bodies with our conscious awareness. Every exercise we did was like a scientific experiment. We would just notice the impacts on our consciousness, which inspired us to ask more questions and conduct more experiments.
That is why I say that we embraced 30% of the elements of Tantra (meditation, embodiment, embracing of paradox, embracing Eros, embracing and alchemizing ‘taboo’ acts, and some acquisition of ‘supernormal’ powers were the core elements we utilized). The rest we let go of.
After some time, I began to realize the genius in his teaching method. Because he wasn’t teaching us. Our bodies were.
Our bodies have built-in mentors and guidance which speak quite loudly if we care enough to learn their language. He was just holding space for us to slow down enough to listen. Our bodies guided us ‘back home’... Something we soon found out was in itself VERY TRANSGRESSIVE behavior in comparison to the suppression of emotions and lack of embodiment that was insidiously interwoven in every aspect of Western culture.
“What kinds of things did you try?” You might be wondering.
Well, in order to understand the practices we did, you have to understand several things about bodies, group psychology, and consciousness and how they all impact each other.
In a nutshell, bodies are incredible vehicles for consciousness that house brilliant intelligences beyond what the majority of us are aware of. You don’t have to believe me, you only have to experiment and find out for yourself. But what I, and many of us found for example, is that you can activate Theta brainwaves to read intuitive and psychic information. Your emotions guide you into your true nature. Your nervous system is self-healing. Your heart is a portal into unity consciousness, your spine is a compass for truth, your voice shapes reality, your gut holds your power and boundaries, your erotic energy manifests and births not just babies but entire realities!
Unfortunately, most of us are oblivious to these incredible intelligences because we are severed from our bodies and are scared to inhabit them.
We are scared to inhabit them because of one thing: our primal survival mechanism/need to belong has been weaponized against us into conforming at the expense of our authenticity. This creates a lot of personal and collective trauma. This trauma metastasizes personally into mental and physical disease, and collectively within many institutions (education, politics, economics, religion, etc.) as many flavors of conflict, oppression, and war.
Trauma TRAPS your consciousness if you don’t know how to alchemize and heal it. Because we are deeply afraid of becoming trapped, we AVOID our bodies and go into denial about our circumstances. Which paradoxically entrenches us more into the trap and prevents us from evolving our consciousness.
When we feel trapped, we unconsciously try to trap and police other people, as a means of forcing them to share your experience so you don’t feel alone.
For example, if your parents forced you to override your natural rest cycles in order to be highly productive and accomplished at school, and now you are a boss at your company, you’re most likely going to drive your employees into the ground unless YOU learn how to give YOURSELF permission to rest. We unconsciously don’t let other people have what we don’t have. If you were forced to not cry when you were young, you will also try to stop others from crying when you grow older.
SO all of that is to say… that in order for you to heal trauma and evolve your consciousness, you have to communally agree to stop policing each others’ true nature. You have to practice learning how to be in right relationship with other humans who WANT to de-program conditioning, practice authenticity, and create belonging for you. Because it is very rare for people to be free of trauma by themselves, if they have nowhere where they can FULLY belong.
When people want you to be authentic, and you can find belonging, the energy you once used to suppress your body and authenticity can now be siphoned into restoring the body intelligences you severed yourself from.
The more your body intelligences can be restored, the more you remember who you truly are, and the more your consciousness evolves. It becomes an upward spiral!
Essentially, our group’s goal was to address every area of Western life where conditioning prevented us from being authentically in our bodies and therefore prevented us from belonging, and therefore prevented us from accessing our ‘superpowers’ and evolving our consciousness. Every exercise was designed to liberate us from the following conditions…
Western culture is terrified of emotions…
so we did practices to learn how to stop policing each others’ emotions and let each other rage, cry, be numb, be ecstatic, be goofy, be erotic, etc. with no judgment and with unconditional love.
We are terrified of presence and intimacy…
and instead addicted to ‘earning’ peoples’ attention. So we would practice eye gazing and giving each other attention without needing to ‘earn it’ in any external way i.e. trying to be good looking, or funny, or cool.
We are terrified of not being productive and successful…
so we learned how to rest, ‘do nothing’ and let go of the compulsion to be impressive.
We are terrified of financially and emotionally relying on others…
so we learned how to be vulnerable without being manipulative. We learned to ask for help and lean into each other in healthy and mutually beneficial ways.
We are ashamed of our bodies…
So we practiced uncovering them and loving their natural shape and state in all the noises they make, in all the ways they present and express themselves, (similar to how animals and baby humans are unashamed of their bodies.)
We are terrified of touch outside of romantic partnerships…
so we learned how to unwind trauma in each others’ nervous systems, communicate consent and boundaries and learned how to touch, snuggle, hug, breathe, and play together as a tribe in embodied ways that were respectful of all our relations.
We are terrified of being manipulated and controlled in our relationships
so we learned how to communicate and relate to each other out of an abundance of love and freedom over fear and scarcity and create more options of relating beyond traditional monogamy.
We are terrified of death and decline (both literally and metaphorically)…
so we practiced letting go of identifying with our bodies and egos and learning how to be with the natural rhythms of life and death and the essence that exists beyond all of that.
We are terrified of making mistakes, and being ‘bad or wrong’…
so we practiced speaking our truth and risking people ‘not liking us’ vs being artificially nice and palatable.
We are terrified of having less resources or more resources than other people…
so we practiced empowering manifesting and abundant mindsets so we don’t unconsciously compete or steal from one another.
We are terrified of losing control and having our beliefs be shaken up or questioned
so we practiced sitting in the unknown, cultivating curiosity and make space for the paradoxical reality of many beliefs and perspectives.
We are terrified of other religions and the stories humans make up about ‘god’ to try to manipulate and control us…
so we practiced supporting each other in discovering and pursuing a direct personal relationship with whatever our name for ‘god’ is instead of being told how to relate to it.
We are terrified of repeating the trauma that we inherited from our families and hurting our loved ones…
so we practiced forgiveness and breaking cycles of punishment, and simulated relational exercises that would re-pattern and heal the attachment wounds we inherited.
Every bit of conditioning we unraveled in our bodies allowed us to love ourselves more, love each other more, create deeper bonds within our ‘tribe’, find more peace and contentment, be released from suffering, download wild psychedelic insights about the nature of reality (without using drugs), create beautiful offerings in our work, heal from pain and disease, and allowed us to cultivate a relationship to ‘god’ in our own private and personal way.
So that is how I would describe what we did and why.
It was a semi-Tantric group that lovingly walked each other Home to our bodies, each other, our true nature, and to whatever our name for ‘god’ is.
SO WHAT NOW? AND WHAT CAN I EXPECT FROM THIS SUBSTACK?
Well after many years of teaching these concepts in support of other endeavors ( I would teach these concepts through the lens of performative arts as a dance teacher and through the lens of entrepreneurship as a consultant for visionaries) I have decided to just take off all the lenses and teach these concepts directly in the raw format that I learned them in… within community.
If you wish, this Substack can be a resource for you to create your own (what I am now calling) TECTONIC groups and experience what my group did for me.
You will learn about somatic tools that can heal your psyche and body, evolve your consciousness, transform your life, and repair the social fabric of the communities and families you are a part of. A lot of the information will be coming at you in a podcast classroom format. Instead of long/meandering interviews, each episode will be a bite-sized lesson somewhere between 15-30 minutes long with downloadable meditations and exercises that can be immediately and practically applied to our life. There will be some blog posts as well, like this one.
If you’re interested in working more deeply with me, I do group online programs, in-person workshops and experiences, and 1:1 coaching/apprenticeship work. I would also like to help facilitate people in jumpstarting their own TECTONIC groups, so if you’ve ever thought about bringing your own community together in a deeper way, or taking your women’s circle or men’s circle to the next level, I would be delighted to assist you in that endeavor! You can find more information here on my website…
https://www.annika-theroadhome.com/
I want to be clear that authoring this Substack comes from a selfish place, not an evangelical one. First and foremost, I love writing about my experiences and sharing the things I learn because teaching helps me become a better student. It helps ME digest and understand these concepts better. It helps me show up better for MY community and tend to the bubble of the world I’m a part of. The icing on the cake is that it might happen to inspire and help YOU with whatever life you are trying to create for yourself! And I’m all for finding win-win situations :)
I am not deluded enough to think that people ‘need’ to experience what I experienced or believe anything I have learned.
I’m not on a mission to ‘save the world’ from any ill fate. It has been through many civilizations rising and crumbling, and many cycles of extinction and regeneration. It just seems to move on with or without us!
I do this work simply because I love it with a fiery passion of a thousand suns. I’m doing it for my own joy, interest, and evolution of consciousness, and I want to share it with my fellow comrades who also find interest and joy in this work!
So with that being said, if something doesn’t resonate with you, you can toss it out and be rest assured that I am not trying to convince you of anything. And if you’re inspired by what’s here, please let me know! I love comparing notes, collaborating, learning from one another, and taking turns walking each other ‘home’.
I will see you soon in your inbox to share a free video course gift with you on 3 potent embodiment tools for transmuting any obstacle you struggle with in your life.
This free video course is already available on my website https://www.annika-theroadhome.com/ if you want access to it sooner! Otherwise I will drip feed it here as well over the next few weeks.
It was so nice to meet you! Thank you for allowing me to introduce myself, and I wish you a wild and rewarding journey home to becoming evermore your authentic and liberated self.
Warmly,
~ Annika Knepper
I opened your article this morning and am finishing it in front of my fireplace tonight. I’d just read a little, get inspired, think about it, read a little more, think about it...So good!