If you want to learn anything from Lessons From a Tantric Tango Dancer, the new book by Carla Tara, then skip directly to the appendices in the back.Â  Marketed under the “Sexuality/Spirituality” category by its publisher, Ecstatic Living Publications, Lessons is more like Carla Tara’s personal memoir, with the occasional breathing exercise thrown in every few pages.Â  Tara uses her personal experiences as a child in a small farming village in Italy to springboard into lectures about the various “faces of Eve,” listed as “curiosity, innocence with imagination, courage, creativity, honesty, trust, and balance.”Â  The problem with this approach is that Tara, much like most self-help authors, assumes that her experiences are an accurate indication to the experiences of the rest of the world.Â  But her advice is so general and non-specific, I felt like I was continually being told to “just try harder.”Â  For example, here is the beginning of a lesson called “Puja,” which is supposed to enable lovers to “see the divinity in one another.”

“The woman stands or sits in front of her man and looks at him with a completely different eye; the eye that looks beyond personality and into the essence of who he is at the core.”

Sounds fantastic, but really, did I need to spend twenty bucks on a book to be told this?Â  And how, exactly, do you see with a completely different eye?

Throughout the book she mentions how proper breathing, and proper alignment of chakras can enable men to have full body, non-ejaculate orgasms, yet nowhere are the instructions for this listed.Â  There is the occasional breathing exercise, but these mostly advise the reader to breathe from the belly while lying on the floor, ten minutes a day.

The portions of the book that I found most practical were some of the appendices.Â  In appendix B, “Becoming Fully Potent,” Tara follows her advice with the reasons why it works, and the desired tangible effects.Â  What is curious about this appendix, though, is her insistence on calling the penis “lingam,” and the vagina “yoni,” while she has no problem using the words “hot sex,” “cock ring,” or “mutual masturbation.”Â  The end of appendix B could be an indication of where Tara should direct her next authorial efforts, as it reads like little more than a hippie’s account of “love-making” in a typical romance novel.

The most helpful appendix would be F, “Tantra and Nutrition.”Â  Her advice in this section is straightforward and logical, and can be applied to anyone who needs nutrition advice, whether or not their final goal is intense sexual pleasure.

So, should you read this book?Â  Maybe.Â  If you like stories of young girls overcoming the close-mindedness of an old society to become a supremely sexual entity who occasionally Tangos (the only real connection made throughout the book), then yes, it’s for you.Â  But if you are coming to this book for actual helpful sexual or spiritual advice, you’re probably better off going somewhere else.

You can get your own copy from Amazon.

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