On Relationships and Tantra: The Energetic Debt You Carry

Bespoke Tantric experiences that provoke you to the core while transforming your life - by revealing the karmic debt you've been carrying and how to finally release it.

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On Relationships and Tantra - The Energetic Debt You Carry

I, Michael, founder of Forbidden Yoga and goofy guru, rarely speak about relationships like modern coaches do, because the work of Forbidden Yoga does not distinguish between people in relationships and people who are not in relationships when it comes to Tantric rituals. We give everyone the same practices, the same rituals that have existed for thousands of years. These practices were preserved in secret traditions precisely because they worked, regardless of your relationship status or sexual orientation. The rituals themselves do not care whether you are partnered or single, straight or gay, binary or non-binary.

What matters is the masculine and feminine as energetic principles, not as social categories or sexual identities. These principles operate at every level of organic existence. In a single-celled organism, masculine and feminine appear as anabolic and catabolic processes, as the tension between building up and breaking down, between expansion and contraction. The cell membrane itself maintains polarity through electrical charge differentials, creating the fundamental inside-outside distinction that allows life to exist at all. Without this polarity, without this separation of charges that simultaneously demands connection, the cell dies.

As organisms become more complex, this polarity elaborates but never disappears. In sexual reproduction, it becomes explicit in egg and sperm, in the receptive and the penetrating. But even in organisms that reproduce asexually, the masculine-feminine dynamic persists in metabolic cycles, in predator-prey relationships, in the oscillation between activity and rest. The principle is not about sex. It is about how energy moves through living systems, and energy always moves through differentiation and exchange between poles.

In human beings, masculine and feminine operate simultaneously at biological, psychological, and energetic levels. The confusion in contemporary discourse comes from collapsing these levels into social identity categories, which obscures the underlying energetic reality. A biological male can carry primarily feminine energy. A non-binary person still participates in masculine-feminine dynamics at the energetic level. The social performance is irrelevant to the underlying structure.

My Method of Observation

My work is observational. During the rituals, I watch what happens. Milton Erickson, the founder of modern hypnotherapy, trained himself to observe micro-movements in facial muscles that revealed unconscious processes invisible to the conscious mind. A slight tension around the eye, a barely perceptible shift in jaw position, a change in breathing pattern, these told him what was actually occurring in the person’s internal state, not what they believed they were experiencing.

I observe the same way during Tantric practices, but what I track is not psychological. The body does not lie during ritual work. The energetic reality reveals itself in gesture, in breath pattern disruptions, in the quality of presence or absence. When someone claims they have released attachment to a former lover but their body contracts at a specific point in the practice, the energetic debt shows itself. When someone insists they have forgiven a betrayal but cannot maintain breath continuity through a particular sequence, the unresolved charge reveals itself. These are not psychological symptoms. These are energetic facts.

I do not judge relationships. I do not comment on whether you should stay or leave, whether your partnership is healthy or toxic by conventional standards. Those are questions for therapists and relationship counselors. But from the Shakta Tantra perspective, there is something you must understand about the energetic reality of relationships, and this has nothing to do with modern psychology or conventional morality.

The Balance of Masculine and Feminine

There are relationships where the balance between the masculine and the feminine is relatively even. This does not mean perfect equality in some idealized sense. It means the energetic exchange flows in both directions without chronic debt accumulation. Think of it as a metabolic system. In a healthy metabolism, anabolic and catabolic processes balance each other. You build tissue, you break down tissue. You store energy, you expend energy. The system remains in dynamic equilibrium.

When such relationships move into different configurations, when the molecules decide to expand into different combinations, when human beings decide to move in different directions, when you divorce and move on to new partners, you must investigate whether the previous relationship was energetically balanced when you left it.

Or is there a debt? A debt of energy hanging in the air.

If there is a debt, either the masculine or the feminine has been undervalued, exploited, dismissed, or damaged. It depends on which pole in the relationship bore the greater burden. From this undervaluation of masculine or feminine energy, if we move on to a new constellation without resolving the debt, that debt travels with us.

Here is an example. A man divorces his wife. Twenty years later, he discovers that the way he left the relationship was cruel. It was a selfish act. Perhaps the woman, as a biological organism, eventually recovered. She moved on with her life, found new relationships, built a career, raised children. But energetically, there remains a debt. The man who created this debt carries it with him for twenty years. This is what you call karma.

Karma and Pattern Inheritance

If you are in a relationship, or if you have left a relationship, you must feel into it. Not what other people tell you. Not what your therapist says, not what your friends believe, not what spiritual teachers proclaim. You need to feel into it directly. Is the karmic debt balanced? Can you move forward without dragging this weight?

Because the balance between the masculine and the feminine has to be maintained through energetic resolution. The balance cannot be reached by simply moving forward into the next relationship. It must be figured out, addressed, cleared. Otherwise you accumulate karma, and from karma you create what Sanskrit calls saṃskāra.

Saṃskāra is worth understanding because Western psychology has no equivalent term. We say “trauma” or “conditioning” or “psychological patterns,” but these words describe symptoms without capturing the mechanism. Saṃskāra means something more precise: the deep grooves worn into consciousness by repeated action and unresolved experience. Like a record with grooves that force the needle to play the same song, saṃskāra creates channels in your energetic structure that force experience to repeat itself. This is not metaphor. This is structure.

With karma, things happen to you that repeat the original injury. You leave one relationship. You enter a new one. But because the first was not resolved, the second relationship cannot work, or it becomes even worse than the first. The pattern intensifies because the groove deepens. Each repetition of the unresolved dynamic carves the channel deeper, making deviation from the pattern progressively more difficult.

You must be brutally honest with yourself about how you have resolved previous relationships in your life before you moved on to new ones. Because relationships are not casual interactions. They are not temporary arrangements of convenience. They represent the fundamental structure of the universe

Kṣobh: The Cosmological Origin of Duality

In the Indian Tantric cosmological tradition, there is a concept called kṣobh. This Sanskrit term means impulse, disturbance, the initial agitation that breaks the absolute stillness of non-dual reality. Kṣobh is the push from which duality was created. From this single disturbance, from this primal movement, all manifestation emerged.

Think of it this way. Non-duality is perfect equilibrium. No differentiation, no movement, no time, no space, nothing separate from anything else. It is the state before states, the condition before conditions. Kṣobh is the first asymmetry, the first breaking of symmetry. From that single asymmetry, from that first deviation from perfect equilibrium, everything else follows necessarily. Once there is movement, there must be direction. Once there is direction, there must be space. Once there is space, there must be separation. Once there is separation, there must be relationship.

We are the children of non-duality. Non-duality was the origin. Today, when you go to a temple or mosque or church or meditation hall, the essential practice aims at purifying the distortions of duality so you can return to non-dual awareness. But this has radically different meanings in different religious and spiritual traditions.

Here is why this matters for your relationships. If the entire structure of manifest reality emerges from a single initial imbalance, then every subsequent imbalance carries that original signature. Every unresolved polarity, every energetic debt, every distortion in the masculine-feminine exchange perpetuates the disturbance that created duality itself. This is not poetic language. This is a description of how causality works in energetic systems.

When you leave a relationship with unresolved debt, you are participating in the same mechanism that created manifestation. You are introducing a disturbance, an asymmetry, a deviation from equilibrium. And like kṣobh, that disturbance will not remain isolated. It will propagate. It will create consequences. It will elaborate into increasingly complex forms of suffering until the asymmetry is resolved.

Psychology Versus Tantra

The problem with modern psychology is that sometimes it advances far beyond conventional spirituality in practical understanding. Psychology is a very new science, so it does not carry the accumulated wisdom of spiritual teachings transmitted across generations. Spiritual teachings can seem irrational, even bizarre, because they were preserved through oral transmission and encoded in ritual form. The logic does not always align with our current rational frameworks.

But psychology is mainly based on how the mind works, on the mind’s thinking processes and pattern recognition. In Tantric practice and in Advaita Vedanta, you are trying to destroy the mind. That is why we have the term manonāśa in the Tantric tradition, the destruction of the mind.

This is not anti-intellectualism. This is recognition that the mind, as the primary instrument of duality, cannot resolve duality. The mind works by making distinctions, by separating this from that, by creating categories and boundaries. The mind is the mechanism through which kṣobh elaborates into increasingly complex forms of differentiation. So asking the mind to resolve energetic debt is like asking a knife to heal the wound it created. The tool is wrong for the task.

Where is the truth beyond the mind and its righteousness, beyond the mind’s insistence that it knows what is correct? Beyond the truth of the mind, there is a higher truth, a truth that exists prior to the differentiating function that creates mental categories.

The Heart Knows What Was Actually True

If you look at your previous relationships in your life, what was really true? Not what you were thinking was true at the time, not the stories you told yourself to justify your actions, but what was actually true energetically?

This sounds abstract, perhaps even sentimental. But the heart, the anāhata in Hindu Tantric anatomy, finds the truth when you meditate on previous relationships. Not the mental reconstruction. Not the narrative you have built to explain why things happened the way they did.

Why the heart and not the mind? Because anāhata is the energetic center where opposites meet without requiring resolution through mental categories. In the heart center, masculine and feminine, self and other, love and grief can coexist without the mind’s compulsion to choose between them or construct explanatory narratives. The heart reveals what was actually occurring beneath the surface story because the heart does not operate through the differentiating function that creates and maintains saṃskāra.

The practice is simple but not easy. You sit. You bring awareness to the center of the chest. You allow the breath to settle. Then you bring a specific relationship into awareness without trying to understand it, explain it, or resolve it mentally. You simply feel what arises in the heart center when you hold that relationship in awareness. Not what you think about it. What you feel as sensation, as energetic reality, as the actual texture of unresolved charge.

If the relationship was balanced when it ended, the heart remains open and spacious. If there is debt, the heart will contract, or burn, or ache, or become dense. The body tells you the truth. The energetic system reveals the asymmetry.

Bert Hellinger and the Observation of Energetic Debt

Bert Hellinger, the German psychotherapist who developed family constellation work, discovered something that validates the entire framework I have described. Working with thousands of clients over decades, Hellinger observed that unresolved trauma, guilt, exclusion, or imbalance in a family system does not simply disappear when the people involved die or when family members move away from each other. Instead, the energetic debt gets inherited by subsequent generations who unconsciously attempt to balance it.

A grandchild develops the same illness as a great-aunt who was excluded from the family. A son unconsciously repeats his grandfather’s pattern of abandoning relationships, even though he never met his grandfather and consciously despises that behavior. A daughter carries rage that belongs to her mother’s unresolved relationship with her father. These are not psychological projections or learned behaviors in the conventional sense. These are energetic structures that transmit through family systems independent of conscious knowledge or intention.

Hellinger’s method involved having clients set up representatives for family members in physical space, then observing what happened. Without being told anything about the family history, representatives would spontaneously move, turn away, feel pulled toward or repelled by other representatives, experience physical sensations or emotions that belonged to the people they represented. The energetic field of the unresolved family debt would reveal itself through the bodies and movements of people who had no conscious information about what they were representing.

This is empirical observation, not spiritual theory. Hellinger was not working from Tantric cosmology or Hindu philosophy. He was a therapist observing patterns that repeated with such consistency across thousands of cases that he had to develop a framework to explain them. His conclusion was that family systems operate as energetic wholes, that imbalances in one part of the system create compensatory distortions in other parts, and that these distortions persist across generations until the original imbalance is acknowledged and the debt is symbolically resolved.

What Hellinger discovered in family systems operates identically in intimate relationships. When you leave a relationship with unresolved energetic debt, that debt does not remain isolated between you and your former partner. It enters your entire relational field. It affects how you show up in your next relationship. It affects your children, who will unconsciously attempt to balance the debt you could not face. It affects your capacity for intimacy, for trust, for allowing the masculine and feminine to exchange energy without chronic contraction.

This is what I observe in Forbidden Yoga rituals. During Tantric practices, especially those involving partnered work, the constellation of unresolved debts becomes visible. Not through verbal disclosure, not through psychological analysis, but through how bodies organize themselves in space, through who can maintain eye contact and who must look away, through whose breath disrupts at specific moments, through the quality of presence or absence that each person brings to the energetic exchange.

I watch the same patterns Hellinger observed in his therapeutic work, but they reveal themselves through ritual rather than through constellation setups. A woman participates in a practice with her current partner, but her body orientation keeps shifting as if relating to someone who is not physically present. The energetic structure of her unresolved relationship with her father, or with a previous partner, intrudes into the present moment. A man claims to be fully available for intimate connection, but his breath becomes shallow and his chest collapses whenever genuine vulnerability emerges. The defensive pattern carved by an earlier betrayal still governs his energetic system.

When multiple people work together in ritual space, the constellation becomes even more apparent. People unconsciously organize themselves according to the hidden loyalties and unresolved debts they carry. Someone who unconsciously carries their mother’s unexpressed anger toward men will instinctively position themselves at a specific distance from male practitioners. Someone who carries guilt from a relationship they ended cruelly will unconsciously place themselves in submissive or self-punishing configurations. These are not conscious choices. These are energetic facts revealing themselves through spatial organization and somatic response.

The mechanism Hellinger identified in family systems and the mechanism I observe in Tantric rituals is identical to what I described earlier about kṣobh and energetic debt. An unresolved asymmetry does not remain isolated. It propagates through the system. It creates compensatory distortions. It demands resolution, and if resolution does not occur at the level where the debt originated, the system will attempt resolution through other channels, which means the pattern repeats in different forms until the original imbalance is addressed.

Hellinger’s work provides Western empirical validation for what Tantric traditions have understood for thousands of years. The energetic dimension of reality is not metaphor. It is structure. It operates according to principles that can be observed, that repeat with consistency, that create predictable consequences when violated. Just as Hellinger could predict that excluding a family member would create specific distortions in future generations, I can observe during rituals how unresolved relationship debts create specific energetic contractions and defensive patterns that prevent genuine intimacy.

The difference between Hellinger’s therapeutic approach and Tantric ritual work is the method of resolution. Hellinger used symbolic acknowledgment, ritual sentences that honor what was excluded or dishonored in the family system. “I see you. I honor your fate. You belong to this family.” These verbal and symbolic gestures can shift the energetic field and allow the debt to begin resolving.

Tantric practice works more directly at the somatic and energetic level. You do not speak to the unresolved debt. You feel it. You allow it to reveal itself in the body. You stay present with the contraction, the grief, the rage, the shame, whatever texture the unresolved charge carries, until it begins to metabolize and release. This is why the practice I described earlier, bringing awareness to the heart center and allowing the specific relationship to arise without mental commentary, is not simply meditation technique. It is the method through which energetic debt actually resolves.

The evidence from Hellinger’s decades of clinical work demonstrates that this is not spiritual fantasy. Energetic debt between human beings is real. It transmits across time and through family systems. It creates observable, repeatable patterns of distortion. And it demands resolution through means that go beyond conventional psychological or social intervention.

The Only Way Forward

You cannot outrun energetic debt. You can move to another country, you can change your name, you can find a new partner, you can construct elaborate psychological explanations for why this time will be different. The debt remains because the asymmetry remains.

You must go back. Not physically, not by reopening old wounds in desperate conversations or manipulative attempts at reconciliation. You go back energetically, in meditation, in ruthlessly honest self-examination, in the willingness to feel what you actually did and what was done to you without the protective stories you have constructed.

The method is what I described above. You sit. You bring awareness to the heart center. You allow the specific relationship to arise in awareness without mental commentary. You feel the energetic reality of what remains unresolved. You stay with that feeling until the contraction begins to release, until the heart opens, until the balance begins to restore itself.

This may take one session or it may take years. The depth of the debt determines the work required. But there is no substitute for this work, and there is no way around it. Every attempt to move forward without resolution only deepens the groove, only reinforces the saṃskāra, only perpetuates the disturbance that kṣobh set in motion at the origin of all manifestation.

Only when the debt clears, only when the balance restores, only when the masculine and feminine exchange flows without chronic asymmetry, does the possibility of genuine relationship emerge. Not the repetition of patterns. Not the acting out of unresolved charge. Genuine relationship, where two beings meet in the present without the weight of accumulated karma determining every interaction.

This is the only way forward. Everything else is elaboration of the original disturbance.

love@forbidden-yoga.com