Barbara Carrellas: Conscious Kink, Tantra & Energy Orgasms
Podcast Transcript Season 2 Episode 21
Interviewer: Liz Goldwyn
Illustration BY Black Women Animate
Today, our guest is Barbara Carrellas, the founder of Urban Tantra, an approach to conscious sexuality that adapts and blends a wide variety of sacred sexuality practices from Tantra to BDSM. Barbara and Liz talk about conscious kink; that one time she had an energy orgasm in a tree; how Tantra can prepare you for death; and so much more.
The following is a transcript of the interview from the episode:
Liz:
Hi, Barbara. Thank you for being here.
Barbara:
Hi!
Liz:
You sound very energetic this morning. Have you had an orgasm already, or are you all ...
Barbara:
No, I'm saving that one for after this chat.
Liz:
Oh, you are? Oh, good. Well-
Barbara:
With the energy leading up to it.
Liz:
Well, let's build up that energy so you can have a really good one after this.
Barbara:
Great.
Liz:
I know you actually told me a great story about one of the first energy orgasms you ever had.
Barbara:
Which one? Which one? Which one?
Liz:
Which was in a tree.
Barbara:
Oh, true. Yes, I think that was the first one. Yeah, it was. My parents attempted to raise me Catholic, and after an incredibly disillusioning and disappointing spiritual non-experience at my first holy communion, I was extremely upset and feeling very betrayed and bereft because all the expectations I had for First Holy Communion, which the way the nuns described First Holy Communion, was nothing short of a cosmic orgasm with God. And needless to say, it didn't happen in our little local parish. So I went out into my favorite tree, climbed my favorite tree, and wrapped my little legs, seven-year-old legs around it and cried and cried.
The combination of emotion and bereftness and the scratchiness of the tree and the sexiness of the tree, I just went into this expanded orgasmic, although I didn't know the word or the concept at the time, this expanded state where all I could feel was something holding me and telling me, "It's going to be okay. It's going to be okay. There's something better. It's going to be okay." It was a profound energy orgasm that provided all the things, all the feels that I had been hoping to have at First Holy Communion earlier that day. I guess my path was set out then, wasn't it?
Liz:
So did you start experimenting with rubbing yourself against lots of different trees and plants after that?
Barbara:
Oh, well, that was my favorite tree. I really didn't need to change trees. That one was just perfect.
Liz:
Did you ever get discovered in the tree?
Barbara:
I was never discovered in the tree, or at least it just looked like I was climbing the tree and playing. They weren't thinking of that. But actually, you're right. It did. It did feed my lifelong interest in ecosexuality. I would say now I find the sexiest ... I think it's a toss up. The two really sexiest earth-based lovers would be moss and redwoods. Those two are ultimate turn-ons, but of course for me, it's usually the ocean.
Liz:
Can you define ecosexual for us?
Barbara:
People who find a direct erotic connection to nature. And ecosexuality right now is a movement as well that invites people to think of the earth as lover instead of mother, because many people don't have a great relationship with their mother, but people generally have pretty good relationships with their lovers. The theory goes, if we think of the earth as a lover as being in danger or compromised, we are much more likely to spring into all sorts of kinds of action that we may or may not if we regard earth as mother. But ecosexuality in its pure form is simply making love with nature.
Liz:
Yeah. I think I was telling you last time we spoke that I definitely have that feeling with the ocean, and I love to go sit on a rock or a cliff at the edge of the sea and just open my legs up and receive the ocean's power into my vagina. Not literally, but metaphysically, and I definitely feel that energy. I come away with it. It's a great release, too. Right?
Barbara:
Totally. Totally. That power, yeah. It's amazing.
Liz:
So all of this, you're obviously an expert on all things esoteric, consciousness and sexuality, but in particular tantra. We get so many questions about tantra, and I think in the West in general is very curious about this ancient practice and people don't really know where to start. Can you break down your version of tantra, which you outline so beautifully in your book, Urban Tantra?
Barbara:
Yes, thank you! Tantra for me is a spiritual practice that says that we can have divine connection, what some people might call enlightenment but I'll take divine connection, a connection with something much bigger than ourselves, and spiritual wisdom, pick your phrase, by going into everything on this earth playing completely and totally. Meaning you don't have to die to reach connection with God or pray to a source outside of yourself. Simply by going completely into what life gives us, everyday life, going into it with total consciousness of commitment, you can reach spiritual realization, and you can do that with just about anything. You could walk the dog tantrically. You could do the dishes tantrically.
However, unsurprisingly, a whole lot of people like to do sex tantrically. Sex is something that they're deeply committed to going into completely. However, it really could be anything. Tantra's been around for 800 years, possibly more. Well, tantric-like practices have been around for thousands of years. People often ask me, "But why is it all about the sex?" Well, in fact, tantra isn't all about the sex. There's so many different schools and branches and lineages of tantra, many of which are still untranslated, hidden, oral tradition only and exist in the Far East, and that we've never heard of.
However, because it's a spiritual practice that says that sex is one of the ways that you can find spiritual truth, it is embraced by people who have been shamed or made wrong by other religions that are sex negative. So it's not surprising that in the West, when people say tantra, most everyone thinks they are talking exclusively about an Eastern meditative form of sexuality. I used to get really upset about that. Now I kind of go, "Oh, Barbara. Just go where the need is." The need is around an intersectionality of sacredness and sexuality, so that's where most of my work focuses.
Liz:
Because in tantra, from what I understand of the ancient practice of tantra, which you're correct, it's thousands of years old. There're so many different versions of it and a lot hasn't been translated is that, one, it means weaving. Right?
Barbara:
Yes. Yes. Weaving and weaving together. It's a practice that, when applied to sexuality, invites you to slow down, become more mindful, become more aware of sex as an energy rather than as an action or an activity. The weaving is consciousness and physical. It can be the energy you weave with a partner. It can be the energy you weave with the divine. But in tantric sex, we focus more on the energy and less on the how to. People often say, "Give me some tantric sex positions," to which I can say, "Pick any position you want and I'll teach you how to do it tantrically." There are no specific tantric sex positions with the possible exception of Yab-Yum, which is the one you'll see with one partner facing another partner sitting in their lap with all the chakras lined up. Alright, I'll grant you that that is a tantric sex position for sure, but it's about the only one. Anything else can be done tantrically, which is to say more mindfully, slower and without goal.
That's the other wonderful thing about tantra. In tantra, we try to keep goals to a minimum and ideally to eliminate them altogether. For example, you might have an intention. You might have an intention to meet your partner in the deepest place of love you can find, but that's not a goal. A goal is we're both going to have an orgasm, and our orgasms are going to last thus and such long, and we're going to get to that orgasm by a specific kind of sex, like penis in vagina sex, and if we don't reach orgasm with penis and vagina sex, we have failed because we didn't make our goal. But if our connection was to go into love as deeply as we could together, that could look like anything. As you move toward that intention, because you're not focused on a specific goal post, you're able to follow something that feels wonderful and magical wherever it takes you. You're being led by the experience rather than you trying to lead the experience.
Liz:
It also takes it away from being heterosexual sex, from being penetrative sex, from being, as you said, orgasm-based sex. It can be touching. It can be eye gazing. It can be licking. It can be breathing. What I find interesting about classic tantra that's taught is that a lot of it, I mean, I think many people study for years just working on their own pelvic floor exercises and breathing and meditation and spiritual practice before they're deemed ready to practice with another person, in the classical sense.
Barbara:
And that's, to some extent, good advice today. I know when I first started practicing tantra, I very much focused on just being able to stay with my breathing while erotically aroused instead of holding my breath. I practiced being able to imagine, until I could feel, imagine energy moving in particular patterns in my body. Let's say like a wave moving up the chakras. Chakras really are just energy centers. They're nothing deep and mysterious. I mean, except that life is deep and mysterious, of course. But chakras are an Eastern Hindu-based way of looking at the energetic body, and they're technically-
Liz:
Shall we go through them for people who aren't familiar?
Barbara:
Sure. In my book Urban Tantra, there's an entire chapter of what chakras are about, "what your chakras can do for you." But chakras, for people, you don't need to know all the Sanskrit words. Just think of it this way. Let's go based on where they are on the body. Chakras are seen as spinning wheels of energy a few inches out from the body, like here's the body placement. Perineum. This is the root chakra. Perineum, that's the spot between genitals and anus. Moving up, lower belly. Second chakra. Third chakra: solar plexus at the diaphragm. Fourth chakra, and the bridge between the lower and the upper chakras, the heart. Then the throat. Then the third eye, that spot on your forehead right between your two physical eyes, and the crown.
Each chakra has a specific physical property. They're placed at the locations of the endocrine glands so they have a metaphysical property, a physical property. They're assigned a color and a tone, and like that have all sorts of different qualities that you can explore and play with and empower and heal. But just for the sake of placement, you can imagine breathing energy from, say, your root chakra to your heart or your lower belly, your second chakra, to your heart, connecting sexual and spiritual energy. I used to spend a lot of time doing that.
In the West, many of us have typically have some kind of split off between sexuality and heart energy. People conditioned male often report that they feel a stronger one than those conditioned female, but eh. It can be anybody. We just spend a lot of time getting in touch with how sexual energy moves in our body. I have a workshop simply called Urban Tantra, like the boo, where we spend the whole first part of the day just, as I say, check your genitals at the door. You will not be needing them today.
And we spend the whole morning seeing how high, I mean as in altered state high, we can get just by using the energetic building blocks of sex like breath and sound and imagination and movement. People are often amazed at how much of sex turns out to be energetic-based as opposed to simply what happens to your nervous system when your genitals are touched. Sure, that's a part of it, but you can actually have an orgasm, a full-body orgasmic like feeling that goes on and on and on and on and on just by breathing with add-ons of the other little energetic building blocks of sex like breath and movement and sound.
Liz:
Yeah. That was a game changer for me learning orgasm breathing a number of years ago. I wish that I had known it when I was 13, actually.
Barbara:
One of my favorite things to do is go to college campuses and teach that technique under the title "How to Have a Gender-free Orgasm." That title allows it to get into gender studies classes, but it completely changes how people basically starting out on their lifelong sexual journey, it can really change how people view that for the rest of their lives.
Liz:
It's true because it takes the pressure off. It takes the pressure from having a partner, and you get to learn your body, your needs, your reaction to things first before you introduce someone else into the mix.
Barbara:
The breath, whereas masturbating, traditional masturbation is quite a physical activity, if you add the breath with it, it becomes an emotional activity, so one of the uses of orgasm in the body is to release tension. If you can have an emotion-gasm as well as a physical tension release-gasm, it's a much bigger, fuller release, and it's in those moments when emotions are orgasming as well as bodies that you start feeling that connection with something a whole lot bigger than you. For instance, in a cry-gasm you sometimes feel like you're not the only one crying, but you're crying for everything sad that ever happened to anybody else in the world. That's an important feeling of connection and empathy, which obviously in today's world we could use a whole lot more of.
Liz:
Do you lead people in your workshops through primal therapies, like scream-gasm and cry-gasm and ...
Barbara:
I do breath and energy orgasm and tell people whatever they're feeling, they can express as fully as they want to. Yes, in times of real deep sorrow or around tragic events or violent events or whatever, or happy events, we might do a dedicated kind of breath and energy orgasm. For instance, I led one for about a hundred, recently ... Well, a couple of years ago, for a hundred gay men, many of whom were HIV positive survivors of the epidemic, and others who were younger and were not survivors of the epidemic, per se. We did a breath and energy orgasm group event to connect with sacred brothers who had died in the epidemic. That was incredibly powerful for both the men who were not adults during the plague and equally or more so for the survivors who had been living with survivor guilt and shame. That was off the charts, beautiful and intense.
Liz:
Isn't that how you got into tantra, actually, around the time, the height of the AIDS crisis?
Barbara:
Yeah. That's exactly when. I went to a healing circle looking for a way to cope with losing up to four friends a week for years and years and years, and [crosstalk 00:20:20] ...
Liz:
This was in the 1980s?
Barbara:
Yeah, late '80s is when I finally was hitting the death wall really hard and there was no end in sight. At the healing circle in New York, I met Annie Sprinkle, who is now one of the world's premier performance art/ecosexuals. Then she was a feminist porn star. And Joseph Kramer who founded both Body Electric and Sex Electrical Body Work. Our question was, "What are we going to do about sex?" Because people are going to start having sex again when the fear dies down a bit more and this virus is going to spread and spread and spread and spread. But how can we have sex safely? And beyond how can we have sex safely, how can sex provide us with a feeling of healing, a feeling of connection?
Especially in the gay male community where of any given weekend night, sex and partying was connection. So where can we find that connection more safely? And perhaps as or more importantly, is it possible through sex to find a spiritual connection? Because so many of the men dying of AIDS had been told by their churches of origin that this was God's punishment for living such a wicked life. So it was a pretty big ask, but Joseph started exploring Taoism, and so Annie and I started exploring tantra. Our intention was not to become spiritually realized ourselves or to have better relationships with somebody, but it was simply to find out how to be sexual and to find a kind of sexuality that our gay brethren could use to help heal the situation they were in, so that's what we did.
It's really how Urban Tantra came to be. We did not have the time and no one had the resources while we were trying to all stay alive to spend months meditating in India, much as we would've liked to, so we studied with teachers who would come through. Luckily, we lived in New York and Joseph lived in San Francisco, major cities where teachers would come through, and we would take what we learned. If it seemed to obscure or too woo-woo or too Sanskrit, we would translate it into English and explain it to our gay brothers in terms that were accessible and appealing, and that was the foundation work for my Urban Tantra, which now brings that accessibility and hopefully appealing this to absolutely everybody who's interested.
Liz:
Yeah. It's really interesting because we had spoken before about dying. Right?
Barbara:
Oh, yes.
Liz:
About consciousness and dying, and that's another topic. I mean, sex and death we don't often discuss in our culture, but you're coming into this work at the same time when you're dealing and processing a lot of death and grieving.
Barbara:
Yes. One of the founders of Urban Tantra with me in Australia, Catherine Carter, recently died of a brain tumor.
And I talked to her a couple of nights ago with the help of her hospice care, and I was reminded that she and I used to practice for death under massage tables where people were receiving erotic massages. And we would breathe with them, we would be hidden by the sheet that covered the table and we would be providing energy from below. And when they had an orgasm or did the clinch and hold breath energy orgasm technique, we would take it and practice disappearing, dying, going away. And I reminded her of that and I said to her you know ... her name is Cath, I said, "Cath, actually we practice death a lot, you're really good at it, this shouldn't be hard." And I think that I've explored death a lot through breath and energy orgasms. Yeah, I think once you've done that enough it puts you in a head space where I don't know if any of us know how to die perfectly, I seriously doubt it.
I reminded her of, "Cat, you already know how to do this. We practiced this. Just go back there." Yeah, and she went, "You're right. I do know how to do this." So yeah, because of this time we were in, it was just the logical use for sex, practice for death.
Liz:
I mean, I think also what most people think of when they think of tantra in the West is they think of older, white middle class swingers in like Berkeley in a hot tub.
Barbara:
Yeah. Yeah, I know. Yeah. What is it? White, heterosexual, cisgendered, yeah, workshop junkies. Yup. You got it. Middle class, middle age. That seemed very true for me in the '80s when I started studying tantra, and so it seemed that, and it's still true to some extent, that people who aren't that, which is people of different races, different economic backgrounds, different abilities, different genders, different sexual preferences don't feel welcome in the tantra tent.
I really founded and wrote Urban Tantra to invite more people to the party, not to write a queer tantra book or a kinky tantra book or any one specific tantra book, but to say, "Hey, we could all come together in the same space and feel perfectly comfortable doing so because that which unites us, breath and bodies and spiritual bodies and sacred bodies, is far greater than that which keeps us different." So it's been my real pleasure to watch the Urban Tantra community grow internationally over all these years and keep growing more diverse every year. That makes me very, very happy.
Liz:
Because, you know, I think in our popular culture, it's still very much associated with the musician Sting, tantra, because he's been one of the more famous ...
Barbara:
Is that still, do you think, the image? I guess it probably is.
Liz:
I think if you would ask-
I think if you ask an average person who hasn't gotten much into this area if they've ever heard of tantra, they will probably think, "Oh, isn't that what Sting used to do where he could have sex for hours?" I think that's probably still the common response.
Barbara:
It's really funny. It's like, yes, you can stay in an erotic trance for hours. That's true because in tantra, we look at sex quite differently and what constitutes sex is a vastly expanded arena. I think when people think of having sex for hours, they think of one, two or three activities and that's it. Being in the tantric erotic trance is so much greater than that that you actually do lose track of time completely. Lots of time can go by. But if you don't have that kind of time because you have a life that isn't so privileged, you can also find yourself feeling like the experience you had was much longer than perhaps it actually turned out to be because that's what ... Timelessness is one of the qualities of expanded erotic states.
Liz:
Also, it brings an interesting thing about just slowing down in general because I know that when I meditate, I mean, the big thing people say is, "I don't have time to meditate." And that's probably exactly when you should.
Barbara:
Right.
Liz:
I say that too and sometimes I think, "Oh, 20 minutes isn't going to do anything." And it really does. 20 minutes can feel like a couple hours of a nap because you're just really forcing yourself, your body and your mind, to be in the present moment, to be here now, which we so rarely do, especially during sex because we often use sex as a means for escape.
Barbara:
And we're often in sex, anywhere but in the present moment, we're like in the past going, "I wonder if it's going to be as good or better than it was before," or we're in the, "I wonder what's going to happen next. Are we going to have an orgasm? Am I going to have an orgasm? Are they going to have an orga- ..." You know. Very seldom are we, just like life, are we just in the moment of it, or at least within the three seconds of it. I have a new puppy and she's going to puppy school. The trainer reminds us to think in three-second increments, that after three seconds, a puppy is off into the next present moment, and I love that because she's really such an object lesson in in-the-moment living. She doesn't have all of these recriminations and guilt and regret from 10 seconds ago, and she isn't too attached on what's going to happen 10 seconds from now. It's just everything is so in the now.
Liz:
That's a hard state to get to. That's a hard state for most of us, I think.
Barbara:
It really is, but one way to practice is take a puppy to puppy school, and you have to get within their present moment thinking in order to work with them. It's quite wonderful.
Liz:
What if we don't have a puppy? What would be one easy lesson that you could give to everyone listening to-
Barbara:
Pick your favorite thing, outside of sex for the purpose of this. Pick your favorite thing. Maybe it's walking on a beautiful sunny day. Maybe you're a surfer. If you're in California, you probably are. I would love to be. Maybe you're anything that you really enjoy doing. It doesn't have to be your number one turn on, but that you enjoy doing.
Liz:
Washing the dishes? Laundry?
Barbara:
You know, I actually really like doing laundry.
Liz:
I love doing laundry.
I'm just trying to give listeners a range of activities, a range of sort of ...
Barbara:
Yeah. Oh, eating. Eating. Eating something you love. That's a super popular one. And go into it totally, not like it's a job to do that, but just like, "What is it I'm really doing here? Let me notice three things about this experience I usually ignore." Three things.
Liz:
Like I really like the sound of the laundry machine. I like the way it vibrates. I like the warmth of the towels when they're out of the drier. Is that what you mean?
Barbara:
I like the way the laundry smells. I'm tactile, so I particularly like the way the water pours into the washing machine. It has a feel to it, like a little waterfall that other faucets don't have. I really could get off into that for a while. Yeah. Food, if you tend to notice the taste, this time notice the texture. If you're outside, what does this particular season, spring, summer, winter, fall, what is the beauty of this particular kind of a day? I'm a summer junky and I want summer to last all year round, so every day during the summer, I go outside and deeply appreciate something about it being summer. That actually makes me feel like I get more out of summer, like summer is more present with me. So all those things are practices for better sex. Every one of them.
Liz:
Well, I'm definitely going to do a couple loads of laundry today.
Barbara:
I am too.
Liz:
How did you begin to incorporate BDSM and kink into your tantric practice, which you go into extensively in the book?
Barbara:
You know how when something's just so present and even though you try to ignore it, you absolutely can't? I would say Annie was definitely the catalyst because Annie, as a porn star-
Liz:
Annie Sprinkle?
Barbara:
Annie Sprinkle. As a porn star, she was the queen of the Hellfire Club, the Hellfire Club being New York City's biggest, baddest, downest, dirtiest BDSM clubs. She was the queen of you can imagine. No, you probably can't, and I won't tell you, but it was extreme.
Liz:
Oh, give us a little. Give us a little taste, Barbara.
Barbara:
Remember, this was before AIDS. Right?
Liz:
So this is like late '70s?
Barbara:
Yeah. This is late '70s, so glory holes, fisting, extreme sex acts. Obviously, whips and single tails and floggers and spankings and piercing and blood play, and just Google anything you can do in BDSM and it probably happened at the Hellfire Club. Down to one of my favorites: blowing smoke rings. Some men could cum if I blew smoke rings in their face. That was a real low energy one that was actually kind of fun, and not to mention master/slave things where you could just throw crumbs on the floor and people would gather at your feet. But enough about that.
Liz:
So you were already in the clubs in the scene at the time?
Barbara:
I was not. Annie was. This is all, I discovered later.
Liz:
You seemed to know a lot about what went down and you blew smoke rings.
Barbara:
That's because I wound up there in my exploration, but I knew nothing of this when I started out except what Annie would tell me, and I would go, "Oh boy, that sounds incredibly like, no, that's not me." One day, Annie came to me and said, "I'm about to do the kinkiest thing I've ever done. Will you help me?" And that scared me a lot. I said, "What is that?" She said, "I'm going to go teach the BDSM people how to have breath and energy orgasms." I said, "Oh, I can see why that scared you. Yes, I'd be happy to help you." Even though I was scared of those people, "those people." Right?
Not only were the people I met friendly, they were willing to try anything new. They were so open, so much more so than all sorts of other groups of people that I'd worked with, and they got it because so much of what they did in their dungeons was energy play. They got energy closer to the way tantric people got energy than the way regular people got energy. Also at the same time, Annie had a really strong spiritual streak. We shared that, and she had become friendly with some people from the West Coast, specifically Fakir Musafar, who with Jim Ward is the founder of modern body piercing. Anything beyond two holes in your ears you can probably credit Fakir and Jim Ward, and [Ray Linn Golina 00:37:19].
They practiced body modification and piercing and branding and extreme sensation states, and what would be called the ordeal path in BDSM, duration ordeal rituals, all of which can be documented in Native American culture, in Hindu culture, the Sundance. There are all sorts of physical tortures, they look like, except you're not being tortured. It's self-chosen, extreme physical states that would be considered extremely painful that these people consider transformative and connected with the earth, connected with the divine. I started talking to these people and realized, by seeing their work, their practice, that what they were doing using, let's say, it's an example I use in my book, I watched [Ray Lynn 00:38:32] piece someone with little hypodermic needles and they tie the needles together with someone else at the heart chakras, and they started rocking back and forth, and they were high as kites and just intensely connected.
I looked at them and went, "Oh my god. That's the physicalization of the tantric heart position. I'm watching it being done with needle and thread, but it's the same damn thing." And I started to realize that there was no separation, except the one I was making in my mind. Now, not all BDSM play is tantric, just like not all two teenagers rolling around in the back of a car on a Saturday night is not tantra. It doesn't come with the same awareness and the same expanded states. However, there is a place at which there is no separation for me between tantra and BDSM, and BDSM players who say for them, there is no separate between what they do and what they consider a spiritual connection with themselves or their partner or something higher.
That sort of conscious kink, sacred BDSM, dark tantra, there are now lots of names for it. It seemed really important that we fold those people into the tantric community for what they could teach us and for how they could expand our awareness of what going into, let's go back to the tantra definition before, that thing about going into something so totally, so deeply, so completely that you actually come out the other side having transcended it. People can do that with service, with submission and with sensation. It was really a very important part of my journey, and certainly an incredibly important lesson in dropping judgment about what other people do and what they experience is for them.
Liz:
Yeah, and even if it might not be something that you want to participate in yourself, you can at least have some empathy or see some parallels to things that you may experience in other areas of your life.
Barbara:
Exactly. Exactly. And accept the fact that there are things that are possible that you haven't seen before, that there's a totality of possibilities far, far outside the realm of your experience or understanding, and that's a good thing because I think that's what keeps us going and growing as human beings is pushing that totality of possibilities higher and wider.
Liz:
We're in a different space now than the early '80s when the AIDS epidemic was really starting to bust out and have a huge effect on sexuality. Now we're in this other place where we're so dominated in our culture with the trauma of sex, a lot of trauma of sex.
Barbara:
I was just speaking on this last weekend. It used to be sex equals death in the '80s. Now it's sex equals abuse, sex equals assault and sex equals trauma.
Liz:
Let's point out that it's not that the trauma is new. The trauma, it was always there. It's just now we're allowed to talk about it openly.
Barbara:
That’s what we're dealing with, you know? Much like back in the '80s, it wasn't about the sex. It was about the death. Really, it was people were dying and one of the reasons they were dying is that for years and years and years, governments and institutions and leaders and religions wouldn't even acknowledge there was a plague because it happened to be sexually transmitted and in a gay community. Now, we are very focused on the assault and the trauma, and we need to ... Yes, I get it. I get it, but what my talk was about last weekend is we need to start looking not just at consent, but why we're getting the consent. What's the yes? We're very focused on the no, what we don't want. That's true way beyond sex right now. Right now, so much of the planet is focused on what we don't want. "I hate that. I don't want this. That's appalling," that we're having trouble remembering what it is we actually want. What do we want our sex to look like, not just how can we prevent the bad things from happening?
Liz:
And how can we get back to the pleasure? How do we get back to the pleasure potential?
Barbara:
Yes. Yes! Unless we can get clear on the level, the size, shape, taste, flavor of pleasure we want, what are we negotiating for? Safety is a pretty low bar on the pleasure scale. I think it's really time to get back to our yeses. What is it we want to see happen in our lives? I think getting college-age people, let's say, to talk about what they want their sex lives to look like, as opposed to just how to prevent non-consensual sex from happening, will lead to better consent conversations because you're always better when you're negotiating for something you want than when you're negotiating for something you're trying to avoid.
Liz:
Sometimes we don't know what we want because we haven't been given permission or we haven't given permission to ourselves to explore that very thing.
Barbara:
Totally. Could not agree with you more. I would have in Ecstasy is Necessary, but I've also given it away as a free handout, my sexual permission slip. In fact, if you Google it somewhere in the universe because I've given it out a lot. It's a checklist where you give yourself permission to think about sex differently, to do sex differently, to want things that other may or may not want because we really ... When we get caught in the no, we're in a trap. You can see that right now in our governments, particularly in America and Britain right now, in my worldview, but I'm sure in other places as well. We're very fixated on what we don't want, but we're having trouble coming up with what we do want.
Liz:
So that's a good thing for us to all think about. What do we want? What are our yeses?
Barbara:
My book Ecstasy is Necessary is really good at helping people refocus on that. I wrote Ecstasy is Necessary because I believe pleasure is necessary. Our ancient brains keep us safe by telling us all the things that could go wrong, but our future is really formed by our hopes and our wishes and our desires and our pleasures. So having a limited view of what our pleasure is really puts us in a compromised position from growing, from getting out of life what we'd really like to get out of life, so Ecstasy is Necessary is kind of a guidebook for getting back to the yes.
Liz:
And ecstasy is necessary. Literally, ecstasy is necessary.
Barbara:
I think so.
Liz:
I think it was-
Barbara:
It's the fertilizer.
Liz:
It's the fertilizer, yeah. I think it was Prince, the artist formerly known as Prince, may he rest in power, who once said that he wanted everyone on the planet at a certain time of the day to stop what they were doing and have sex, so have these mass orgasms.
Barbara:
Perfect.
Liz:
He was very ahead of his time. Right?
Barbara:
He certainly was. He certainly was. Rest in power indeed.
Liz:
I'm curious, Barbara, what are you still learning about sex?
Barbara:
Right at this moment, I think I'm learning how ... I'm learning to appreciate the daily erotic, the little bits of eroticism that crop up in the middle of a day if we're there to notice them and appreciate them. I'm noticing that erotic pleasure can be little bliss-gasms. Everything doesn't have to be huge and loud, although I love it that way, and long, although I love it all that way. But I'm learning that it can also be quiet and intense inside, and can sometimes ... Erotic states will lead me to these perfect moments of utter peace and quiet, and I am so grooving on those moments. So I'm focusing on, because I love doing things in groups, so I'm focusing on creating spaces where other people can also find that inner ... That little place deep inside that you're not aware of all that often where the, yeah, the orgasmic quietude happens kind of in the dark. That was all very unfocused, but you asked me what I'm discovering, so obviously I have not put it in a tidy word package yet.
Liz:
So it's a quiet contentment, almost.
Barbara:
And it has a real jazz to it, too. It's exciting in its totality of peace. I mean, I don't sit there going, "Oh, isn't this pleasant?" I sit there in the middle of it going, "This is fucking remarkable, and it just keeps going." There's an intensity to the peace. Isn't that funny? Isn't that paradoxical? But it's cool. It's really cool. That sort of like intense peace. That's it. Intense peace.
Liz:
Well, that's a great answer. Thank you so much for speaking with me today.
Barbara:
You're so welcome.