The new tantra: Revolution of the soul or just sexual healing?

Oliver Bennett travels to deepest Somerset to explore the resurgence of tantra. What he finds is the ‘revolution of the soul’

People in relationships take their LT1 tools back to their daily lives feeling more vividly, gaining deeper empathy, even resolving conflicts more easily

It’s not every cloudy Tuesday morning that one finds oneself sitting on a cushion in a sarong, touching a stranger. Or then, getting up and dancing naked in a blindfold – and furthermore, to take that blindfold off and continue to dance naked amid 40 or 50 people. This event was Living Tantra 1 or LT1, a workshop by Jan Day in a timber hall overseen by a dragon sculpture in a sleepy Somerset village.

Willowy Day is the doyenne of tantra workshop leaders: indeed, she’s helping to popularise the spiritual practise. For tantra is going the way of yoga or mindfulness. Once a recherche taste at the further reaches of New Ageism – popularly associated with jaded rock stars and coitus non-interruptus – it’s growing, moving and populating all walks of life: from personal development; to dealing with poor body image; as an alternative to psychotherapy, even as a way to improve business practise. Day’s one-day taster workshop routinely receives 60-plus people eager to receive her message of sexuality, spirituality, love, connection and coping.

So popular is Tantra now that people are characterising it as a movement (Getty)