Women, Sex and Evolution

It’s said that the feminine is rising.  While having developed their 'masculine' capacities over the past 50 years since the onset of the women’s movement, women are re-connecting with their 'feminine' essence.  However, women are often still socialized to be ashamed of their sexuality.  So what can a woman do to fully balance her whole being?  What is her role in the planet’s conscious evolution of the sexual-spiritual integrated human?

Deborah Sundahl points out in her book, Female Ejaculation and the G-Spot, “Society considers it ‘not okay’ for women to be sexual in their own right.  Despite a national media that talks about every conceivable aspect of sex, most American woman over the age of forty were raised with the belief that ‘good girls are not sexual.’  Younger women, raised with the influence of cable TV’s new explicitness… have taken the notion of ‘bad girl’ and made a public display of it, yet still the legacy of the good girl lingers, and it inhibits most women’s ability to let go and enjoy.”

How can the 21st Century woman reclaim and embrace her sexual self, discovering its extraordinary power, while being integrated in her feminine and masculine nature.  Here are some tips to get started:

1.    Become the witness to your beliefs

No change can happen without awareness, so looking at your long held beliefs is an important first step to reclaiming your sexuality.  Begin to witness the unconscious negative beliefs you hold, whether it be from childhood, religion, media, or etc.  Notice that many of these beliefs were passed down generation to generation for millennia. You can choose to create new, supportive beliefs about yourself, your body, and your sexuality.

What separates us from the beasts is our ability to be self-reflective or aware of our own existence, what we call “the witness state of mind.” This uniquely human capacity allows us to rise above the biological miracle of ourselves and recognize that we are at choice in how we live, feel, and act, including our sexual beingness.

2.    Embrace passion and desire

All of us have a current of sexual life force energy – also referred to as “chi” – running through our bodies at all times.  In The Multi-Orgasmic Woman, Mantak Chia & Rachel Carlton Abrams, MD explain:

“Desire is a rich and potent part of our human experience… To be passionate is to be full of chi.  The English words ‘desire’ or ‘passion’ connote a feeling of yearning and fervor that includes sex, but they also reflect our strongest feelings about life.  When we are passionate about anything – our family, our work, our spirituality, an important social cause – we are investing our chi in this experience.  Our passion is what moves us to action and ultimately is what gives us joy.  We are passionate about the things that matter most to us.”

To embrace this energy is to embrace life itself.  As we learn to honor our sexuality, we also can draw on that sexual energy to enrich our lives as a whole.  By learning to embrace passion and desire, we can bring more fulfillment and joy into our entire lives.

3.    Know your “parts”

Many women expect their partner to know how to please them without knowing for themselves!  Knowing yourself and your anatomy is an important step towards embracing your sexuality.

Female sexual anatomy has been a bit of a mystery throughout history, especially in terms of how women experience pleasure and orgasm.  For example, it is widely accepted that the clitoris is an external organ only.  In Eve’s Secrets, Josephine Lowndes Sevely examines this history and reveals “…the female clitoris has deeper structures under the skin.  These deeper structures are the organ’s two legs like parts that run along the lower part of the pubic bones at either side of the lower vagina between the inner thighs.”

The G-Spot is another area of the female body that is still the source of some confusion.  In Female Ejaculation and the G-Spot, Deborah Sundahl explains, “The G-Spot is defined as both the prostate and a network of erectile tissue similar to that found in a male penis.”  She goes on to say, “The G-spot, not the clitoris, is center stage as the area of a woman’s genitals in which she can experience the greatest and most diverse amount of erotic pleasure.”

In addition to the above resources, experimenting with yourself to see what feels good is another great way to get to know your “parts!”

4.    Exercise your love muscle

The pubococcygeus muscle, or the “PC” muscle, is the muscle group that makes up and supports the pelvic floor of the body.  Mantak Chia and Maneewan Chia explain in Healing Love Through the Tao: Cultivating Female Sexual Energy, “…With the exception of sexual intercourse, few exercises strengthen the crucial pelvic muscles.  Pelvic exercises do exist which can increase CHI in these areas, thereby greatly strengthening the reproductive organs and the complex network of tendons surrounding them.”  

In both men and women, the PC muscle serves important functions in supporting the inner organs including preventing incontinence, maintaining reproductive health, enhancing pleasurable sexual experiences, and increasing aliveness for the woman.

Make it a daily habit to exercise your love muscle and learn to coordinate it with your inhale and exhale. If you’d like to be guided through this practice get our Foundational Practices CD.

5.    Transform desire into rocket fuel

Once you’ve connected to and embraced your sexuality, learn to use this energy to fuel all parts of your life.  In The Multi-Orgasmic Woman, Mantak Chia & Rachel Carlton Abrams, MD lay out many healing techniques and  meditation and breathing practices that can help draw your precious energy up through your body instead of losing it through menstruation or intercourse.  These techniques include becoming aware of the “Microcosmic Orbit” which is a “basic energetic pathway of the body…. “When you circulate sexual energy through the Microcosmic Orbit, you transform your desire into your energetic ‘rocket fuel’ and enhance your vitality.”

Other techniques can be found in our book, Sexual Enlightenment.  These practices include an array of solo and partner exercises such as Yin Yang: Balancing Feminine and Masculine Energy and Heart-to-Heart connection:  Partner Spooning.

This is an exciting time for women to honor and hone their feminine essence and play an instrumental part in shifting the planet’s evolution towards balancing the feminine and masculine in all spheres of life.

Rediscovering Your Feminine Self

The spirit of femininity is generous, graceful, nurturing, supportive, sensitive, intuitive, and oriented towards love and care.  Despite all of these wonderful attributes, feminine energy, especially as it pertains to sexuality, has been suppressed, condemned, and vilified on a global scale for thousands of years. It is no wonder, then, that so often we associate shame, fear, and guilt with sex and sexuality.  Through reawakening our feminine energy, we can learn to celebrate our femininity in all its forms and bring greater joy and intimacy into our lives and with ourselves.

Reintegrating our spiritual and sexual selves is an important first step in rediscovering our feminine self.  Our culture’s separation of these two aspects may be an ill-conceived view and therefore counter to fostering well-being, health, and joy in our bodies, hearts, and spirits. When we bring conscious awareness to the integration of the sexual with the spiritual and the spiritual with the sexual, we return to a sense of wholeness within.

In order to allow healing to occur, we at TantraNova have developed a particular healing practice for the woman that provides her with a rediscovery of her sexual-spiritual connection by teaching her to clear blocks, residual memories, and views that no longer serve her. The word healing is used here in terms of letting go of what keeps her from being fully integrated and whole. She might get in touch with experiences from earlier times in her life that might trigger an emotional process. Energetic blocks, memories, or unpleasant feelings that may have been stored as residual memories on the cellular level of the yoni or vaginal walls may be released so healing can occur and the experience of unity, joy, and harmony within herself can show up. 

When Kristy came to TantraNova, she had been afflicted by gynecological complications such as recurring yeast infections for many years, which made intercourse extremely painful. She shared that she felt like a “broken” woman and wanted to explore ways in which she could express her sexual self despite her physical concerns. She entered the TantraNova woman’s healing workshop feeling nervous, uptight, scared to open up, and afraid to trust. When it came to choosing a partner for the homework healing practice, she partnered with a most supportive and attentive man. She experienced him as patient and felt that she could slowly open up and begin to trust.

The most impactful experience of the healing ritual was that for the first time Kristy felt her male partner was simply present with and for her, absent of any agenda of his own or expectations of her. Being in this space of acceptance and presence, she could let go of the guilt and shame connected with her yoni and release her sadness and frustration with the pain she had been experiencing. Following the workshop, Kristy felt a sense of aliveness, an inner groundedness, and a new found confidence she had not had before. To her great surprise, a lot of her physical pelvic pain subsided along with the frequent headaches that had plagued her.

Learn more about the rediscovery of your feminine and more at www.tantranova.com.

About Dr. Elsbeth Meuth
Dr. Elsbeth Meuth is the co-founder and director of the TantraNova Institute in Chicago. She is an internationally renowned workshop leader, relationship and intimacy coach, and a certified Tantra yoga teacher. She is the co-author of Sexual Enlightenment: How to Create Lasting Fulfillment in Life, Love and Intimacy (January 2014) and co-produced with her partner, Freddy Zental Weaver, the bestselling DVD series Creating Intimacy & Love. They were featured on Showtime’s documentary series Sexual Healing and the Emmy award-winning NBC show Starting Over.

What’s Happiness got to do with it ... women, life and pleasure? Try the Tantric Approach!!!

The illusiveness of happiness! What a rat race to find it and then if you were lucky to get it how to keep it. Marcus Buckingham’s research and findings in HuffPost based on his paper "The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness" inspired me to reflect on my own progression in life to happiness and on the happiness of the hundreds of women I have worked with over the past 10 years as an intimacy and relationship coach.

What’s happiness anyway? The older I have grown the happier I have become. And that does not just have to do with that I now own a business, making a difference in the lives of women and men, and being in the most inspiring relationship with my Beloved and business partner. That’s rather a result of something else.

After all happiness is a state of being! And how did I arrive at that state of being? For me this occurred through two major life experiences that awoke me to that state: One experience had to do with “accepting “what is” at the present moment and declaring that I choose to be happy which I learned through Buddhist meditation at Thich Nhat Hanh’s Plum Village. That philosophy is totally in line with what Buckingham identifies in his findings: “The women who could answer positively to the questions [regarding happiness] …, simply decided that they were going to be happy. They made that choice.”

The other experience had to do with “weaving” or Tantra. O.K. – what did I learn about weaving? It was about reintegrating my feminine with my masculine or the yin with the yang that is frequently out of balance for women living in this time and age. Most of us have learned to develop our masculine side that is required to compete and make it in the world. Great capacity to have! However, if my feminine got dwarfed because of the dominant orientation towards achieving in the worldly dimension I am just not whole any longer.

Here is what Tantra-Kundalini.com says about the feminine and masculine: ”According to the philosophy of Tantra, the entire universe is a manifestation of pure consciousness. In manifesting the universe, this pure consciousness seems to become divided into two poles or aspects, neither of which can exist without the other.

One aspect, Shiva, is masculine, retains a static quality and remains identified with unmanifested consciousness. Shiva has the power to be but not the power to become or change. The other aspect, Shakti, is feminine, dynamic, energetic and creative. Shakti is the Great Mother of the universe, for it is from her that all form is born.

According to Tantra, the human being is a miniature universe. All that is found in the cosmos can be found within each individual, and the same principles that apply to the universe apply in the case of the individual being.”

The aspects of feminine and masculine show up in women just as they do in men. However, they are not merely to be considered as gender qualifications. To illuminate the principles further take a look at this chart and locate yourself on the right or left in various areas of your life: family, intimate relationship, work and career, body, hobbies, etc:

Masculine / Feminine
Creative Focus / Creative flow
Purposeful presence / Open and connected
Desire for truth / Desire for sourcing and sustaining
Oriented towards vision and goals / Oriented towards love and care
In one’s mind and focused / In one’s emotions & flow
Emotion of compassion / Emotion of trust & gratitude
Looking at life from the outside / Looking at things from within
Fear of failure in life / Fear of rejection & loss of love
Work before intimacy / Intimacy before work
Doing Being / Giving Receiving

Reintegrating the feminine with the masculine, the spiritual with the sensuous, the body with the soul, the giving with the receiving wholeness shows up. Experiencing wholeness is the source of feeling pleasure, joy and yes, HAPPINESS!!! It’s up to each woman to return to that wholeness. The tantric practice provides a guide to that wholeness as shown by transformative shifts in many women who have worked with me here at TantraNova.

Looking forward to your comments and thoughts abut this topic of happiness! Elsbeth

Spooning: Harmonizing Energies & Moods

Here is a Valentine’s gift for you and your partner. The purpose of this connecting practice is to create balance and harmony, to influence the synchronicity between you and your partner and to come into resonance with each other.
Here is how the practice goes:

The couple lays together spoon-fashion on their left side (for reasons of energy flow). The receiver on the inside is enveloped in the arms of the giver on the outside. The giver, holding the receiver, has his/her right hand rest on the receiver’s lower belly (Creation Chakra) and his/her left arm under the receiver’s neck. 

Synchronized breathing:

As you lie together, close your eyes and relax. Quiet your mind by focusing on deep breathing together. Breathing into your nose down your throat into your lungs and extending into your belly.

• Become aware of your partners breath. 
• Inhale together and exhale together. When inhaling, visualize receiving energy into your Creation Chakra from your partner’s Creation Center and when exhaling send energy from your Creation Center into your partner’s Creation Center. 
• Follow this pattern for four breaths. 
• Then the giver places his/her hand on the receiver’s Heart Center. When inhaling, visualize receiving energy into your Heart Center from your partner’s Heart Center and when exhaling send energy from your Heart Center into your partner’s Heart Center. 
• Follow this pattern for four breaths. 
• Then the giver places his/her finger tips with a light touch on the receiver’s Third Eye Center. When inhaling,visualize receiving energy into your Third Eye Center from your partner’s Third Eye Center and when exhaling send energy from your Third Eye Center into your partner’s Third Eye Center. 
• Follow this pattern for four breaths.

Now switch roles. Once you have completed this practice look at each other and share your experience with each other.

To learn more about TantraNova, their seminars in Chicago and across the US go to http://www.tantranova.com or call 773-525-5006.

Valentine’s Prep: Discover the Secrets to Lasting Intimacy

As you may know we are going to Newport Beach, CA, in February to lead a 3-Day Valentine’s Retreat. It’s all about discovering the secrets to lasting intimacy. And we are excited (both Freddy Zental and Elsbeth). Our regional coordinator, Ayanna, has been doing a phenomenal job in organizing the event and spreading the word in Southern California. 
 

By the way have you ever considered your intimacy or love conditioning? It’s already ingrained in your subconscious and if you want to make any changes to this conditioning it's essential to recognize what it is set for. Is it set for fulfillment and total satisfaction or neediness and lack of intimate connection? Is it set for struggle or ease, high or low libido, consistent or inconsistent sexual pleasure, picking winning or loosing relationships or partners? Unfortunately your current conditioning will stay with you for the rest of your life, unless you identify it and change it. 

With this in mind we created this Valentine's retreat so that women and men can enter new realms of intimate connection and fulfillment. Whatever your conditioning may be, you will be enabled in this retreat to unleash your full capacity for intimate connection and joy with yourself and your partner, rekindle your passion, and rejuvenate your body and spirit. 

This is what you will learn in a safe, respectful and joyous environment:

• How to create fulfillment, joy and pleasure in your relationship and life
• How to rediscover the source of your creative energy
• How to let go of blocks that prevent you from getting what you want

We at TantraNova hold that men and women approach sexual and intimate relationships in fundamentally different ways. For men, the feeling for love connection originates in his sexual center, while for women it originates in the heart center. The result is a big disconnect: He’s feeling it here, she is feeling it there, and eventually no one’s feeling it anywhere. TantraNova helps connect men and women to themselves and to each other and discover the magical connection that allows them to open up and fully be themselves. The outcome is an experience of:

• How to rediscover the source of your creative energy
• How to let go of blocks that prevent you from getting what you
• Deeper intimacy and love
• Rediscovered aliveness and spontaneity in your relationship
• Joy and play in relationship for the woman
• Revived vigor for the man
• Connection with your creative energy
• New ways to be with yourself and another
• Harmony and balance
• Expanded pleasure in your work and family
• Integration of your spiritual and sexual being

To learn more about their upcoming Valentine’s Weekend Retreat for Couples and Individuals in Newport Beach, CA, on February 15-17, 2008, go to http://www.tantranova.com or call Ayanna Mojica, Regional Coordinator, at 949-395-3359.