Sarita’s TEDx talk at Almansor Park Studio, December 2025
Hello, welcome. I want to share with you something very special about Tantra. Join me in this initiation on the Tantra path. It can change your life forever.
True Tantra teaches that joy is something we can reconnect with through presence in the body and by meeting our instincts with awareness and love. We may rediscover our natural state of bliss and happiness.
Now, I will tell my personal story just so we’re on the same page and you understand my background.
I was 17 years of age. It was 1973. I had been hitchhiking across America through Europe and the Middle East and into India. What an adventure!
I was crossing borders with a burning quest to find the Essence of Life. I was chasing a mystical truth which I didn’t know I could find. I was often doubtful and insecure about the future. And yet I continued my search fueled only by a passionate thirst to find the essence and to live by it. I crossed the border into India on foot feeling a deep sense of homecoming.
India is known as the cradle of spirituality. Millions of travelers and pilgrims swarm to this country to meditate within the peaceful and spiritually embedded places where awakened masters have come into spiritual alignment throughout thousands of years.
In Mumbai, I was invited by a friend to attend a small gathering of about 30 people. I sat down and found myself face to face with one of the most notorious and also misunderstood spiritual teachers who has ever lived.
Osho, if you’ve heard the name, you’ve probably also heard the rumors or watched the Wild Wild Country Netflix presentation. Maybe you heard of the 93 Rolls-Royces, how he got deported from the United States, and how his commune in Oregon collapsed in a blaze of scandal.
I was there. Now, I can tell you what most people miss is that he was considered dangerous for a far deeper reason.
He asked you to wake up and he taught people how to connect with true happiness and bliss. The bliss that emerges from within through a process of ever-deepening meditation.
He taught that through the body we can access profound awareness – what many spiritual teachings refer to as enlightenment.
One day while sitting with him for coaching about my meditation practice, I suddenly began to cry and I didn’t know what I was crying about. He asked what’s happening. I said without knowing where it came from, “I hate my body.” He looked at me with a deep and penetrating gaze and said with quiet certainty:
“Love the body. Love the body. Love the body. It is through the body you reach the divine.”
What he had indicated through these words is a foundational principle in Tantra – that the body is a temple of the divine. And that was the beginning of how Tantra became my life’s mission.
That moment invited me to turn inward and question: Is it really possible that the body offers the greatest wisdom?
Since then, I’ve dedicated my life to this path. First as a disciple and later as a teacher of Tantra and a lifelong student of wisdom – the wisdom that is inherent in this body of bliss. I’ve lived in ashrams, taught on many continents, and held sacred space for thousands to come back home to themselves. And if there’s one thing I hear over and over again, it’s this: If I had known the secrets Tantra offers earlier, I would have lived a completely different and more joyous life.
Now, what is Tantra truly?
We live in a world where many of us are not fully alive. Our senses are dulled. Our minds are racing. We’re often caught in mass consumption, productivity, pressure, and performance. But when was the last time you fully tasted your food, felt the sun on your skin, tuned into your breath, or experienced profound inner ecstasy? Life moves fast and at that pace we forget to feel.
Tantra invites us to remember that the body is something to honor. It is a pathway to presence and our fullest potential for bliss.
Many spiritual traditions speak of transcendence as moving beyond the physical – leaving the body, emotions, and ego behind to access higher spiritual states. Tantra offers a different view where transcendence happens through the body itself. It’s accessed by becoming fully present and aware with sensation, emotion, and even desire.
Tantra teaches that the divine is not separate from daily experience. It’s revealed by going deeper into your everyday life experience.
Tantra teaches that each cell of the body can lead towards the sacred. The body itself is sacred. It encourages us to listen and become intimate with our desires. Now this doesn’t mean indulging with our desires. It means to listen and become intimate with our desires. This does not mean to indulge your senses recklessly or blindly, but to meet them with reverence.
What if your desires are actually messengers?
In Tantra, desire is a signal that shows you where aliveness is and where there is something special in you which wants to grow, create, connect, or be seen. Desire points us towards what brings real joy and where our next expansion awaits. Desire reveals what matters, what we care about, what we long for, and who we are beneath the conditioning. It guides you forward on your life path. Opens your creative power that’s already waiting to be claimed.
In Tantra, the body is seen as a vessel of awareness, energy, and ecstasy. As we become more attuned to our senses, emotions, and our capacity to love, we begin to feel subtle and yet powerful movements of energy within. Kundalini is described in this tradition as a symbolic life force resting at the base of the spine, often recognized as the source of inner awakening and vitality.
When we come into presence with our sensations, we often discover that bliss is something that arises when we are fully in the here and now.
In Tantra there is a phrase we live by: No mud, no lotus.
The lotus is a sacred symbol – a sacred flower which symbolizes spiritual awakening. But it only grows in the mud.
So what is this mud?
The mud is your instinctual nature. It’s the part of you that wants to feel safe, fed, held, and fulfilled and will do almost anything to get those needs met.
For example, mud can be the panic that rises when the Wi-Fi signal goes out because your nervous system is wired to seek constant signals of safety. And in today’s world, those signals often come from messages, updates, or just being constantly digitally connected. So when that signal disappears, your system may react in the same way it would if you lost sight of your tribe in the wild.
For some, mud might be obsessively checking who viewed or liked your story on social media, especially for younger people who’ve learned to equate love and approval with Likes.
Mud can also be the part of you that longs for closeness and connection so deeply, yet it freezes or checks out when somebody actually gets close. It can be your desire, your sexuality, the impulses that rise in you, perhaps even fantasies you’re unsure how to hold.
In Tantra, we don’t try to clean the mud or to suppress it before we bloom. We use it. It becomes fuel, a nourishment. We honor it because it’s the very soil your lotus of consciousness grows from.
In Tantra, we say, No mud, no lotus. Because these dense parts of you hold the potential for beauty, growth, and transformation. Without seeing your patterns, you can’t shift them. Without meeting your shame, you can’t release it. Without understanding your desires, you can’t integrate them.
You don’t bloom after the mud is gone. You bloom because you’ve learned how to meet it with intelligence and compassion without turning away. You bloom because you begin to see and finally know who you truly are.
Your instincts and desires are powerful tools on the path to awakening. And awakening doesn’t mean escaping from the body. It means going into the body – into the senses – and moving this energy inwards and upwards, leading to spiritual fulfillment.
Awakening energy and expanding awareness is everybody’s birthright.
Many of my clients come to our retreats after years of feeling numb. They’ve tried many modalities, but nothing helped them to feel truly alive. Through conscious breath, sound, and movement, these individuals began to feel again. They connected with parts of themselves they had long forgotten. Many look to me and say something along the lines of, I feel alive to energy and ecstasy for the first time in years now.
Psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk has shown that trauma can live in the body and that healing often begins by reconnecting with physical sensation, not words. Harvard researchers found that people were significantly less happy when their minds wandered regardless of the activity. It wasn’t what they were doing that mattered, but whether they were truly present.
Emerging approaches like Somatic Experiencing and the Polyvagal Theory emphasize how breath and awareness can help regulate the nervous system, creating the safety we need to feel at home in our bodies. Polyvagal Theory, developed by Stephen Porges, shows how the vagus nerve shapes our ability to feel safe and respond to stress. When we feel safe, the body opens to pure presence.
Tantra invites us to use our instincts as raw material for growth. Through conscious awareness, we learn to guide this energy inward and upward towards greater spaciousness and clarity.
Known in Tantric tradition as the rising of Kundalini, as it awakens, it’s said to move through the chakras, illuminating our inner world until we open into a new state of embodied awareness.
Everyone in this world has the potential to become walking divinity, returning to a state of pure joy. It’s when our true soul calling becomes embodied and every part of us is awake, alive, and flowing with consciousness. In that presence, a natural joy begins to blossom within.
Children are born in this state before the conditioning of life pulls them away from presence. They feel fully, move freely, and follow what lights them up. That childlike bliss is a glimpse of what we return to when we reconnect with the body’s wisdom and allow ourselves to be inspired by our true nature.
In the Tantric path, as adults, we meet that innocence again, but now woven with the insight we’ve gained through our journey.
I’d like to tell you: Bliss is within your reach. In fact, it is your birthright.
Now, I’ve walked this path for more than 50 years. I’ve seen people reconnect with joy after decades of disconnection. The most profound shifts I’ve witnessed came from seeing people meet what’s truly within themselves fully and consciously. I have seen over and over again that in the depths of the human experience, love reigns supreme.
Tantra has shown me what’s possible when we tune in and stop fighting ourselves, our true nature.
Now, I’d like to give you some questions to take with you as you embark on your personal Tantra quest.
Where in your life have you settled for numbness instead of joy?
When was the last time you felt fully alive?
And what might become possible if you let joy live in your body?
These questions point to a deeper truth – that joy is something you can very well reconnect with and Tantra may be your pathway to return to bliss.
Ma Ananda Sarita is a world-renowned Tantra master, meditation teacher, founder of Tantra Essence, and author of several books. Immersed in her spiritual path since 1973, she lived and studied for many years with Osho, absorbing the essence of his teachings on love and meditation. Since the early 1990’s, through her school, she has shared the art and science of Tantra across 36+ countries, guiding tens of thousands toward embodied awareness, healing, and spiritual awakening. anandasarita.com
This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. ted.com
Related articles
- In Search of the Essence of Life – Sarita’s extraordinary childhood takes her single-pointedly to India and then to Osho (Interview by Punya 2010)
- More articles by Sarita on Osho News
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