Within the framework of Highest Yoga Tantra, sexual yoga is situated as an advanced completion-stage method rather than an isolated or central pursuit of sensual experience. It comes only after extensive preparation: initiation into Highest Yoga Tantra, training in deity yoga, and cultivation of ethical discipline, concentration, and insight into emptiness. At this level, practice unfolds within the subtle-body system of channels, winds, and drops, and is framed by vows, renunciation, and the bodhisattva motivation. The practitioner does not relate as an ordinary person engaging in ordinary sexuality, but as a tantric deity in a purified environment, regarding the consort as a wisdom-deity. In this way, the practice is embedded in a complete soteriological path aimed at full awakening for the benefit of beings, not at the pursuit of pleasure.

The distinctive function of sexual yoga in this context is to generate a powerful, refined bliss and unite it with direct realization of emptiness. By harnessing sexual energy through strict control of the winds and drops, the coarser levels of mind are dissolved and the clear light mind is revealed. This non-dual clear light, suffused with great bliss, is then directed toward the understanding that all phenomena, including the very bliss being experienced, lack inherent existence. The union of method and wisdom is thus both symbolized and enacted: method as compassionate, skillful engagement with powerful energies, and wisdom as the insight into emptiness. Traditional presentations emphasize that without such insight and without stable meditative equipoise, the same energies that could liberate instead reinforce ordinary grasping.

Within this broader framework, sexual yoga stands alongside other completion-stage practices such as inner heat, illusory body, and dream yoga, rather than functioning as a shortcut or independent technique. Many lineages stress internal forms of the practice that work with sexual energy through visualization and subtle-body yogas, sometimes using an imagined wisdom-consort instead of a physical partner. Where physical consort practice is employed, it is reserved for highly qualified practitioners under close guidance, with strict attention to vows and to the transformation of desire into the path. Across these modalities, the defining feature is the disciplined use of intense bliss as a vehicle for realizing the inseparability of bliss and emptiness, thereby accelerating progress toward Buddhahood.