Tantra Levels 1 to 5

What this ladder is

A description of scope

The five rungs below describe a range of contact, from no touch at all to penetrative sexual contact. Each rung states what is permitted at that rung and, just as usefully, what is not. Read as a whole, the list is a scope document: it exists so that two people, or a room full of people, can name what they are doing without guessing and without negotiating from scratch every time.

What the studio does and does not run

Tantra Studio writes from this framework. It does not offer or run the practices at the top of this ladder, and this page is a description of a framework rather than an offer of anything at any rung. There is no price here, no level to book and no version of this page that can be read as a services list. Nobody is invited at any point in what follows to sign up for a rung.

The five rungs

Each rung is stated once. The wording is fixed, because vagueness in a scope is what gets people hurt.

How a consent agreement is made

Before any contact starts

Every rung above presence rests on an agreement made before contact begins. The agreement names the rung the room is working at, which areas are in scope and which are out, and what happens when somebody wants to change it. At level 2 the agreement is short, because the scope is narrow and easy to state. At level 3 the agreement has to name which areas are in scope over clothing, since the rung allows sensual contact and rules out skin-to-skin. At levels 4 and 5 the scope covers more, so it has to be spelled out in more detail before anything starts. Level 1 asks for no agreement about contact, because there is none; what it asks for is agreement to stay present and to leave whenever you want to.

Staging touch so that intercourse is deliberately held back is not a local invention. Sensate Focus, the staged touch practice developed for couples therapy, works in the same order: non-genital touch first, then genital touch, with intercourse deferred rather than treated as the point of the exercise.

Per-person, per-moment

Consent belongs to the person who gave it, for the moment they gave it. It does not transfer to anybody else, and it does not carry forward from one occasion to the next. A yes at level 3 on a Saturday is not a yes to the same thing at level 4 on the Sunday. A yes from one person in a room is not a yes from anybody else in the room. In practice this means asking again rather than assuming, and treating every boundary as live for as long as contact is happening. The Wheel of Consent, a widely taught consent framework, draws the same line: what is being offered belongs to the person offering it, applies to that act and that moment, and can be changed by them at any time.

Stopping and stepping down

Anybody can stop at any rung, at any point, and stay in the room doing less. Stepping down is an ordinary move rather than an exit. A person can go from level 3 back to level 2, or from contact back to presence, and remain part of what is happening. Because a rung describes what is going on, when what is going on changes, the rung changes with it, and nobody has to justify that to the room.

Where group spaces usually cap

Level 3 is a legitimate place to live

Many group spaces and communities cap at level 3 and go no further. That cap is not a waiting room for the rungs above it, and it is not a shortfall. For plenty of rooms, level 3 is the whole practice, and people stay there for years. A community that holds its ceiling at level 3 is doing the same work as a community that holds one at level 5, applied to a narrower set of things: agreeing the scope, keeping it current, and enforcing it when someone tests it. Group containers that publish their own rules land in the same place: theatre intimacy policies, for instance, restrict contact to what has been agreed for a particular scene and require agreement again before anything beyond it, with nothing lost by holding the narrower scope.

A higher rung is not a rank

Nothing is required and nothing is earned

The rungs are not a progression to complete and the higher numbers carry no standing. Level 5 is not a promotion, level 1 is not the beginner's table, and nobody owes anybody a reason for where they stop. There is no requirement to work up the list and no credit lost by staying put. The rungs grade contact, and grading contact says nothing about the people doing it.

What the list is not

Nothing above level 1 requires any rung below it. The list states what contact is permitted at each rung and nothing else. It is not a curriculum or a test, and it measures nothing about how far anybody has come. Where a rung assumes something about the people in a room, what it assumes is capacity: that the people present can name a boundary, hear somebody else's, and hold one that changes. Where that capacity is missing, the answer is a different room rather than a different rung.

How other ladders number themselves

Two, three, four, five, seven and more

Published tantra ladders do not agree with each other on numbers, and the numbering is each school's own. Tibetan Buddhist classification publishes four: Action (Kriyā), Performance (Caryā), Yoga, and Highest Yoga (Anuttarayoga) Tantra. A meditation centre in British Columbia teaches four of its own, opening with Action Tantra, which it compares to a smile, and closing with Union Tantra. A studio in Vancouver runs five, its last rung a group ceremony rather than a private session. An Estonian school numbers twenty-four levels and folds them into the first of four modules. Two-rung and seven-rung structures are published as well.

The number belongs to the school

A ladder of four in one school and a ladder of four in another share a count and little else. Some ladders number levels, some number parts, some number modules, and one school's twenty-four levels sit inside a single module of a larger curriculum. When a jam, a workshop or a training carries a level, that number belongs to the place running it, so it is worth asking which system the number came from before you use it to compare one room with another.

The ladder on this page is the framework this studio writes from. No other school's ladder produced it, no rung above is drawn from one, and none of the four sources below sets out the scope listed here.

What the studio's own jams do

The studio runs its own jams in four cities: Ubud in Bali, Goa in India, Koh Phangan in Thailand, and Miami in Florida. A jam carries a level, and the level for a given jam is confirmed in the conversation. That is the whole of it: no date, venue, figure or facilitation for any jam is published here, and the jams page covers the format itself.

For the wider picture on what this studio will and will not do, the limits page sets it out directly, and the practice page covers sessions, which are a different thing from this ladder.

The sources behind this article

• Tantras (Buddhism): the four-class Tibetan Buddhist classification, used here for the shape of one tradition's ladder.
• The four levels of tantra: a meditation centre's own four-level sequence, used for its numbering and its rung names.
• Tantra workshops: a Vancouver studio's five-rung workshop series, cited for the count and the group ceremony at its top rung.
• Curriculum of Somananda Tantra School: an Estonian school's twenty-four-level tantra yoga module, cited for the count.
• Sensate Focus: a clinical description of staged touch practice, cited for the order in which touch is introduced and for intercourse being withheld at the earlier stages.
• The Wheel of Consent: a published consent framework, cited for the position that what is offered belongs to the person offering it, for that act and moment.
• Touch guidelines for production work: a university theatre policy, cited for a group container setting its own ceiling for contact and requiring agreement again before anything beyond it.
• A tantra practitioner code of ethics: cited for the consent and boundary conventions that tantra spaces publish for themselves.

The first four are other schools' ladders, listed for how many rungs each one publishes. The last three are published consent and touch frameworks, cited for the staging and consent conventions described above. None of them is where the ladder on this page comes from, and no rung wording here is taken from any of them.