Run Away From Tantra

Why Real Tantrics Have to Meditate on the Graveyard

This essay was written by Michael Perin Wogenburg and is narrated by a digital clone of David Attenborough created with Eleven Labs.

In the past 25 years of studying Tantric traditions, I’m still super stupid and ignorant. This isn’t false modesty. It’s just the truth. Because Tantra is so much. It’s so big. It’s so complicated that 25 years barely scratches the surface. And until recently, I had actually never done what a real Tantric has to do: smasana sadhana. Meditation on the graveyard. Until recently. And it wasn’t even in India. It was in Bali.

I got curious while staying in Bali. Not about the crap they do in Ubud, those “Tantra workshops” that have nothing to do with actual Tantra. I wanted to study the real thing. The definition of bhutas in Bali versus India. Because here’s what you need to understand, dear listener: In Bali, bhutas aren’t some abstract spiritual concept. They’re low-level spirits. Entities you can trap, work with, appease. The Balinese magical tradition has this incredible similarity to the Forbidden Yoga lineage I teach.

A Short Sidestep: What Balinese Actually Do in Their Temples

Let me explain something, dear listener, that might shock you. Or fascinate you. Or both. In Bali, there exists a tradition of flying witches. Leyak, they’re called. Practitioners of left-hand magic who appear by day as your neighbor, your friend, maybe the woman selling you fruit in the market. But at night, they transform. Their heads separate from their bodies, trailing organs and intestines behind them as they fly through the darkness. They can shapeshift into fireballs, into animals, into approximately 35 different forms. And they’re commanded by Rangda, the widow demon, the queen of all Leyak, the personification of raw, untamed feminine force. Her mask sits in every village death temple.

I asked about them. The priests, the locals. And what they told me was sobering: the last one died. The young ones don’t want to learn this anymore. Another lost tradition, disappearing into modernity and fear.

But here’s what you need to understand. In Balinese cosmology, Leyak is not purely evil. It is part of the balance that maintains the island’s spiritual ecology. It is the left-hand current of Balinese Tantra, where knowledge of destructive power is sought not for harm but for mastery over life, death, and transformation. The sacred dramas of Barong and Rangda, performed publicly, ritualize this eternal struggle between protective and chaotic forces, reminding everyone that harmony arises only when both are integrated.

Every Balinese woman wakes up and makes offerings. Not beautiful offerings placed high on altars for the gods. No, these are segehan, humble offerings of rice, ginger, salt, onion, placed directly on the ground. For the bhuta kala. For the demons. The principle is simple but profound: evil cannot be destroyed, only balanced. You don’t fight chaos. You feed it. You acknowledge it. You keep it satisfied so it doesn’t destroy you.

When larger ceremonies happen, there’s blood. The mecaru ceremonies involve sacrificing animals, from chickens to water buffaloes, and the blood must be spilled fresh on the ground. For the demons. To keep them satisfied. To maintain the cosmic balance they call rwa bhineda, where good and evil, light and dark, must coexist in equilibrium. Neither can win. Neither should win.

The tradition of Leyak embodies this darker current. Rituals for learning Leyak knowledge often involve graveyards, human remains, and offerings that invert normal purity rules. The practitioners haunt cemeteries, working with forces most people fear. This isn’t metaphor. This is what the Balinese believe, what they respect, what shapes how they move through the world.

And yet, this knowledge is dying. The young don’t want to learn. The old masters are disappearing. The lontar palm leaf manuscripts containing the formal teachings, they still exist in libraries. But almost nobody can read the archaic Sanskrit and Kawi required to understand them. The tradition has retreated from places like Sanur into the most remote villages, driven underground by shame and modernization.

What remains is the framework. The understanding that sekala, the visible world, and niskala, the invisible realm of spirits, interpenetrate constantly. That you must negotiate with forces you cannot see every single day through offerings, through ritual, through respect. This is what I came to Bali to understand. Not the sanitized yoga workshops. But the real thing. The tradition where death and life, demons and gods, darkness and light exist in constant, necessary tension. We both work with the Mahabhutas, the five gross elements. Earth we call prithvi. Water is apas. Fire is tejas. Air is vayu. And ether, the most subtle element, is akasha. It’s all about working directly with the elements. About cooling down nature. About constant interaction with the animistic forces that surround us.

I stayed the entire lockdown in Bali and never felt drawn to learn the Balinese system. But a few weeks ago, I wasn’t feeling well. Psychological issues I needed to solve. I had an inner voice saying I needed to find answers. I knew this beautiful yoga teacher from my Ayurvedic panchakarma retreat a few months back. She works in Ubud. Over dinner, I asked her where I should go. “You’re Balinese,” I said. “You know everything here. Where should I go?”

“Go to the east of Bali,” she told me. “But I don’t come with you. I’m too scared.”
“Why are you scared? You could show me everything, explain everything.”
“No. No. No,” she said. “This is too dangerous and I’m a woman of the light and not a woman of the dark. You go on your own.”

It took me another two weeks to decide to actually go. I asked ChatGPT: Where do I find the graveyards? It gave me coordinates. But first, I spent those two weeks in Ubud, going to Neo Tantric workshops, yogic chanting circles. Every day I felt more and more depressed. Trying to fit into modern yoga, which has never worked for me. But then I got so depressed that I just decided: okay, now I just go there.

I found the Tumbu Retreat on booking , a beautiful place near the village of Tumbu in central Karangasem. When I arrived, it was empty. Surrounded by nature. You could hear the mosque prayers mixing with the sounds of the forest. The people were so extremely friendly. I was alone. Completely alone in the retreat. Nobody else there.

The next day I met the owner and made friends with him. I told him I wanted to see temples, meet priests, do cleansing rituals. He introduced me to his father, a traditional priest and someone who dances in trance, who is taken by the spirits in the temple. What an interesting man. They even brought a professor of Hindu religions to me to speak with me. I really didn’t know how I deserved all these blessings. It seemed that every interesting person was suddenly coming to Tumbu just because a foreigner showed some genuine interest in the Tantric traditions.

It turned out his father owns a temple dedicated to both Shiva and Buddha, which brought him lots of complications with the villagers for many years because they didn’t want this combination of Buddhism and Hinduism. They explained everything for days, every detail. But my secret goal was somewhere else. Another temple, 20 minutes away.

I took a motorbike there. The temple had open doors. Nobody there. Just a guy who saw me and disappeared on his motorbike. “I want to...” I started to say. “Okay, okay, I come back,” he said. But he never returned. I was alone. I walked into the temple. I wasn’t supposed to go in by myself. I didn’t know this was a secret temple. I didn’t have a sarong on. I just wore black, walked unconsciously toward the center of the temple where there’s a closed golden door with two demons sitting in front.

I sat down and started meditating.

I had a realization. A very private realization I don’t want to fully speak about. But I understood something crucial: these monsters, these horrible creatures in front of the temple door, they’re not there to frighten. They preserve the purity hidden inside. They preserve the highest vibration. They are the guardians of what’s most sacred.

I was praying. Speaking out loud even though nobody was there: “I want to enter this door. I want to go inside. I feel so alone. I am so alone. I want to merge with you, Goddess of pleasure. I want to merge with the feminine energy. I don’t want to be dependent anymore on the feminine energy. I want to have this energy inside of me.”

Then after some hours, I went back to the retreat. A few days later, I returned. This time the priest was there, the same guy who had seen me before. They told me I’d done something very wrong. They had to do a special ritual with me, to cleanse me. I had to drink a certain coffee, eat a certain fruit, to reverse the effects of going into the temple alone.

But they were also surprised. “Why is a bule interested to learn about our teachings?”

The priest got me in touch with what he called a “left-handed Tantric” living in the village. I went to his house. We had a conversation.
“I knew you will come,” he said. “I have seen you in my dreams coming here.”
“I want to meditate on the graveyard. Can you initiate me?”
“Yes.”

He asked the priest for permission, whether a foreigner, a bule, was allowed. They said okay. I came the next day for the first ritual. Several initiation rituals and cleansing rituals followed over the next days.

One night was about the Mahabhutas, which I know very well. It’s a kind of Bhuta Shuddhi, purification of the elements. I do this myself in a different way in the Sensual Liberation Retreats. But they do it in Bali with their own mantras. They also include Buddha in the ritual, along with other Gods representing different energy configurations. It’s not how we do it in India, but the essence is the same.

Then I was finally allowed: one night on the graveyard with the left-handed Tantric.

First, I meditated next to a grave of someone who died a few weeks ago. The Tantric came to me and said nothing. He just said I should meditate on this grave and get in touch with the energy. So I was meditating, and I was thinking what happened to him. And then I felt like, oh, maybe he was jealous. And it just came out of nowhere. He was jealous. But I didn’t speak.

Then the next step was different. I had to meditate almost inside of fire. Like next to a fire pit on the graveyard and feel this heat until the heat cools down. And he said to me, identify with the fire. This was actually Bhuta Shuddhi with fire. On the graveyard.

And then came the story of the hill. The grave of a priest who’d died a few months ago. A small hill. On top of the hill, I had to stand with one foot, the other foot placed on my knee. It’s tree pose, that yoga position that requires perfect balance. I had to stand in these different positions, and he said this is the feminine energy. Then the asana with the other foot is the masculine energy, and then it’s both of it together, which is obviously the representation of the three energy channels, Ida, Pingala, Sushumna.

But I couldn’t manage it. How terribly I failed. How stupid. I was too tired. Standing on plain earth at 3 in the morning on this grave, always falling.

And then while trying to do this asana, I got incredibly jealous. I got so jealous, and I felt like all my stupid reactions on a certain topic in the previous months were all around jealousy. I was so jealous. And then I was thinking, why do I feel so much jealousy. And before, on the other grave, I felt like maybe the guy died of jealousy.

So then I asked the left-handed Tantric. I said, how did this guy die? And he said he was jealous. His girlfriend went away with another guy and he hanged himself a few weeks ago here in the graveyard. And he said: “You mirrored each other. Thats why I brought you here. Mother Kali brought you here to finally understand.”

At 5 o’clock in the morning, I drove back. I was smelling like graveyard. I went back to Tumbu Retreat, threw everything into the water, cleaning myself. The next day I was feeling so depressed.

Was it right to do this? Was it really right or is this just bad energy? I’m a Tantric, I have to do this once in my life. That internal monologue kept going. I called my Russian psychic healer friend in Thailand. “Please open my energies again,” I said to him. “It feels so horrible.”

“Yeah,” he said. “You are kind of a little weird.”

He worked on me. And strangely, now, almost a week later, I feel brilliant. I’m so grateful that I could meditate on a graveyard and got initiated according to tradition.

Today, Richard called me, my friend from Luxury Wellness, and I said to him, you know what? I was at the graveyard. And he said, why do you want to meditate on a graveyard? Why do you even want to do this?

And I said, look. That’s a good question because everything we do, we are so scared about death. We walk with the inevitability of dying in every action. There’s so much fear, you know? And I was so scared. Oh, I’m losing this person. I’m not together with this woman anymore, and I’m so sad. And I’m getting older, and I’m afraid that I don’t make it anymore, that I die without money under the bridge alone. And you know, I had so many fears in me. Of dying alone. And probably this is a remedy, you know? A remedy not for the luxury wellness industry, but a remedy from ancient mysteries of the Tantric traditions.

See, if I ever do different kinds of retreats again, sensual retreats or retreats related to relationships, I want to integrate this. I want to put people in the right environment. Before they do anything with sexuality, they need to understand something fundamental that comes from the origins of my Forbidden Yoga tradition.

My guru always said: Death comes before sex. Death comes before sex.

First, you have to die. Then the rituals really work. Because then you’re fucking humble enough to receive the blessings of Mother Kali. If not, after Tantric practice, sometimes you just become more arrogant for some time.

I need to integrate the idea of death from the very beginning into the Sensual Liberation Retreats. On one hand, you want to be liberated from the senses. You want to purify the senses with Bhuta Shuddhi. Liberated from the senses through the inevitability of death. And at the same time, or later, you want to enjoy the beauty of the senses. How beautiful it is to have a human life. To experience touch. To experience smell. To experience other people.

But from a state of purity.
Isn’t it?

If you’re interested in my project, don’t hesitate to drop me a message.

love@forbidden-yoga.com