Yoni Trataka: Gazing at the Source

On the ancient meditation practice related to the female organ of birth and pleasure.

The Hatha Yoga Pradipika (15th century) and Gheranda Samhita (17th century) both describe Trataka among the six purification techniques called Shatkarma. The practice is straightforward: steady, unblinking gaze at a single point until tears flow. The Hatha Yoga Pradipika states:

“Looking intently with an unwavering gaze at a small point until tears are shed is called Trataka by the Acharyas. Trataka destroys eye diseases and removes sloth. It should be carefully kept secret like a golden casket.”

The texts list various objects for external gazing: candle flames, the sun, moon, stars, water, darkness, sky. Each object represents a principle. Fire embodies transformation. Sky represents emptiness. Water demonstrates flow. The Gheranda Samhita describes Panchadharana, five elemental meditations, where practitioners contemplate earth, water, fire, air, and ether through specific visualizations and mantras within their own subtle body.

These external practices prepare the mind for concentration. Trataka appears simple but demands extraordinary capacity. Maintaining unwavering gaze without blinking while tears stream down your face requires witness consciousness most people haven’t developed. The mind constantly wants to look away, blink, shift attention. Trataka trains the practitioner to maintain focus regardless of physical discomfort or mental restlessness.

The texts also describe internal Trataka, where after gazing externally, you close your eyes and hold the afterimage in your mind. Eventually, practitioners work directly with internal visualization without needing external objects. Shadow gazing, Chhayopasana, represents another specialized form where the practitioner’s own shadow becomes the object, though this practice belongs to a different category of techniques we’ve explored elsewhere.

WHAT THE SHASTRAS DON’T PUBLISH

Traditional published texts describe Trataka on natural objects. What they don’t describe, what remains transmitted only through direct lineage, are practices involving the human form itself. Specifically, gazing meditation on the yoni, the female sexual organ.

The reasoning behind this omission is obvious. Publishing such practices invites immediate misunderstanding, misuse, and condemnation from those who cannot distinguish between spiritual practice and voyeurism. Yet the logic extending Trataka to the yoni follows directly from Tantric cosmology.

The Yoni Tantra, an 11th century Bengali text, states explicitly:

“Prostrating himself like a stick on earth, he should then display the Yoni Mudra. Durga becomes pleased with a Sadhaka who is devoted to the yoni. What point is there of many words? The yoni which has bled is suitable for worship.”

This text, rarely translated and less often discussed honestly, describes yoni worship as central to certain Vamachara practices. The left-handed path, Vamachara, deliberately uses what conventional spirituality rejects. The term Vama has dual meaning: left, but also woman. Some scholars argue Vamachara more accurately translates as “the Path of Shakti” rather than simply “left-hand path.”

THE COSMOLOGICAL FOUNDATION

In Shakta Tantric philosophy, the yoni represents far more than biological function. It symbolizes the cosmic principle of manifestation itself. The Yoni Tantra continues:

“Naganandini, listen closely! Hari, Hara and Brahma, the gods of creation, maintenance and destruction, all originate in the yoni.”

Every human who ever existed emerged through this gateway. But Tantra understands the yoni as representing where consciousness itself takes form. The unmanifest becomes manifest. Potential becomes actual. Pure awareness condenses into individual embodied existence. The physical yoni serves as the most direct, tangible representation of this cosmological principle accessible to human perception.

Tantric temples contain stone yonis receiving offerings. Yoni symbols appear throughout sacred art. Not from primitive fertility worship but from recognizing what direct observation reveals: this is literally where creation happens. The abstract principle of Shakti, the creative force generating all phenomena, finds its most concentrated physical expression here.

Consider what the yoni actually does. It creates boundaries between interior and exterior while remaining simultaneously opening and enclosure. It receives, holds, transforms, releases. It bleeds according to lunar rhythms, connecting individual physiology to cosmic cycles. It experiences pleasure intense enough to dissolve ordinary consciousness. It endures pain that would break most people while bringing forth new life.

This makes it functionally equivalent to the cosmic creative principle operating at human scale. The Yoni Tantra doesn’t suggest worship because of superstition. It suggests worship because clear observation reveals this structure’s role in manifestation.

YONI TRATAKA AS PRACTICE

The practice itself follows the same logic as other forms of Trataka but introduces complexities that explain why transmission remained hidden. External yoni gazing requires two people: the practitioner who gazes, and the woman whose yoni becomes the meditation object. Both must maintain specific states of consciousness.

The woman positions herself so her yoni is clearly visible at comfortable viewing distance for the practitioner seated in stable meditation posture. Lighting matters. Traditional texts specify oil lamps or candles providing enough illumination to see clearly without harsh brightness that prevents sustained gazing.

The gaze begins. Not aggressive staring. Not casual looking. Soft, steady attention maintained on the yoni itself. Not the woman’s face. Not her body. Not wandering to other thoughts or objects. Just the yoni.

What happens separates this from anything sexual or voyeuristic. The practitioner must maintain witness consciousness while inevitable responses arise.

Sexual arousal comes first. The body responds to visual stimulus exactly as biology designed. The practice requires witnessing this arousal without acting on it, without elaborating mental fantasies, without suppressing the response. Simply continuing to gaze while desire moves through the system.

This alone demands capacity most people haven’t developed. The impulse to act on sexual arousal is extraordinarily strong. Cultural conditioning around sexuality makes maintaining meditative awareness during arousal nearly impossible for most practitioners. Years of preparation in other practices prove necessary before this becomes workable.

As concentration deepens, visual perception sharpens. You stop seeing “genitals” and start perceiving extraordinary complexity. Subtle color variations. Specific tissue textures. Tiny movements from breathing or muscle contractions. Moisture patterns catching light. What begins as one thing, “a yoni,” reveals itself as intricate, beautiful, infinitely detailed.

The conceptual overlay begins dissolving. The automatic categorization, “this is sexual,” “this is taboo,” “this is body part,” starts breaking down. What remains is pure form, pure color, pure texture. Direct perception rather than conditioned interpretation.

This is where the practice becomes genuinely transformative. When conceptual overlay drops away, practitioners report the yoni appearing as mandala, as opening into infinite space, as the cosmic vulva from which creation emerges. Not metaphorically. In direct visual perception.

Time perception alters. Minutes feel like hours. The boundary between observer and observed becomes uncertain. You lose certainty about whether you’re looking at something separate or contemplating your own origin point.

WHAT SHE EXPERIENCES

The woman whose yoni receives this concentrated attention faces equally demanding requirements. She cannot simply lie passive. She must maintain witness consciousness while being observed in the most intimate way possible.

Every impulse toward self-consciousness must be witnessed and released. Every habitual response of covering or hiding. Every desire to know what the practitioner thinks. Every concern about appearance or judgment. All of this arises and must be met with equanimity.

She must remain energetically closed while appearing physically completely open. This sounds contradictory but describes a real state: exposed visually while the subtle body maintains sovereignty and protection. Without this capacity, the practice becomes invasive rather than meditative.

Women report their yoni beginning to feel different during extended gazing. Warmth, tingling, energy movements that correspond to no physical touch. Some traditions claim the woman can perceive the quality of consciousness in the person gazing through sensation in the yoni itself. Whether this represents genuine energetic perception or projection remains debatable, but the phenomenology is consistent across practitioners.

WHY THIS REMAINED HIDDEN

The Yoni Tantra itself states: “Although to be kept secret, it is revealed from affection for you, Lady of the Gods.”

Secret transmission wasn’t about prudishness. The potential for abuse is obvious and immediate. Tell someone without proper preparation to gaze at genitals as spiritual practice and you create conditions for manipulation disguised as Tantra.

The practice requires extraordinary maturity from both people. The man needs sufficient capacity to maintain witness consciousness during sexual arousal. The woman needs sufficient energetic sovereignty to remain present while observed without collapsing into performance or self-consciousness.

These capacities develop only through years of preparatory practice. You don’t start with Yoni Trataka. You start with years of conventional meditation developing witness consciousness. Years of pranayama learning to work with intense body states without losing awareness. Years of other Trataka practices learning concentration itself.

Even traditional contexts required initiation from teachers who had mastered the practice. Strict adherence to preparatory work. Usually occurred within established Tantric communities with shared understanding of purpose and method.

Remove these safeguards and the practice becomes either pornographic voyeurism or spiritual manipulation. This explains why it remained hidden even within Tantric circles that openly discussed practices mainstream society found scandalous.

THE VAMACHARA PRINCIPLE

Left-handed Tantra deliberately works with what conventional spirituality rejects. Not transgression for its own sake. Based on understanding that what we most strongly avoid often holds the most powerful energy for transformation.

Our aversions reveal our attachments. Whatever we compulsively refuse to look at, think about, or encounter indicates where consciousness remains unfree, where conditioning dominates rather than awareness.

Conventional spirituality treats sexuality and genitals as obstacles to transcendence, lower impulses requiring sublimation or transcendence. The body becomes something to escape. This creates fundamental split between spirit and matter, consciousness and physical world.

Vamachara sees this split as the actual obstacle. Reality doesn’t divide itself into pure and impure, sacred and profane, spiritual and sexual. Those categories exist only in conditioned minds. Liberation requires confronting directly what conditioning taught you to avoid.

Yoni Trataka forces this confrontation at the most charged possible site. You cannot approach this practice while maintaining conventional distinctions between pure and impure. The yoni is simultaneously source of life, sacred, and object of sexual desire, profane. Where biological reproduction occurs, material, and where creation itself becomes visible, spiritual.

Holding all of this together in direct perception without collapsing into one interpretation is the practice. Not deciding the yoni is purely sacred or purely sexual, but seeing it as both simultaneously. This reveals how those categories never actually divided reality except in conditioned mind.

THE INTERNAL PRACTICE

Like all Trataka, external practice prepares for internal realization. Eventually you don’t need physical yoni to gaze at. The image becomes internalized, available in meditation without external stimulus.

Internal practice contemplates the yoni as the opening through which your own consciousness emerged into manifestation. Not someone else’s yoni but the cosmic yoni, primordial source from which all individual existence arises.

Where did you come from before you were you? What existed before individual consciousness took form? What is the source from which awareness itself emerges?

Not philosophical questions for intellectual consideration. Experiential investigations. Holding the yoni image in meditation while following awareness back toward its source before manifestation.

Some traditions describe this as moving from external Yoni Trataka to Yoni Mudra practices, though Yoni Mudra typically refers to hand gestures forming a downward triangle representing the yoni. The principle remains: using the yoni as symbol and gateway for understanding how unmanifest becomes manifest.

WHERE THIS PRACTICE LIVES

You can search India for teachers of Yoni Trataka. You probably won’t find any willing to discuss it openly or transmit it properly. The practices that survived did so by remaining hidden, passed through specific lineages under conditions of secrecy that modern culture finds intolerable.

At Forbidden Yoga, we integrate practices like Yoni Trataka into Sensual Liberation Retreats when appropriate for the practitioner’s development and the specific work being undertaken. Not because we’re trying to revive exotic sexual practices. Because these techniques address dimensions of consciousness and energy that other methods cannot reach.

If you book a Sensual Liberation Retreat and this practice serves your particular work, it becomes part of the package. Eventually.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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