For me, organising the Estonian Tantra Festival for five years has gone hand in hand with discovering my own path. In the following, I will share what the creation of the Tantra Festival has meant to me and what my favourite moment of the festival has been.

The Estonian Tantra Festival was born without much planning and quite last minute in the spring of 2020. My partner Margus and I were curious to organise something new and bigger in the tantra world and were looking for an outlet. We didn’t have a plan to do a festival, and different collaboration plans didn’t lead to the goal, and suddenly we were faced with the choice of either scrapping the creation or doing a new festival. By then, we had already caught up with Igor and Bella’s creative fervour and the decision had to be made quickly.

From the moment the decision was made until the festival took place, we had just 4 months to organise it. Today, we organise the festival for 9 months in a row. Initially, I was inspired by the opportunity to challenge myself with the festival, having organised events with more like 50 participants. The total number of participants at the Estonian Tantra Festival is around 400.

For me, the Tantra Festival has never been about promoting tantra. Nor do I call myself a tantrist. Tantra as a spiritual system has deeply appealed to me and I use the practices there because they just work for me. I notice how I have made my life more and more rewarding. And it has been incredibly subtle and sensitive.

Tantra translates as ‘thread’. For me, tantra doesn’t happen in a workshop or a lecture, it’s something that happens deep inside a person, it’s an alchemical process.

For me, the most important part of the Tantra Festival is the time between the workshops and lectures, when nothing seems to be happening. There is just being, laughing, silences, noticing. In this moment, magic happens because everyone has come back to a common space, but each time with a new inner quality and being, a radiance that everyone shares. An invisible thread of experience is born, which can carry on beyond the festival if we can bring the practices of the workshops that spoke to us into each of the following days.

It is also good to remember during the festive season that genuine and touching experiences often hide in the simple things. In the midst of seemingly ‘important’ things.

Kristiina Saul