Episode 53 - THE TANTRA OF TENDERNESS: KINDNESS & COMPASSION KISSING with Dreaming Bear Baraka Kanan

Transcript

This program is intended for mature audiences only.

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Francesca Gentille: Welcome to “Sex: Tantra and Kamasutra,” bringing you the soul of sex.  I'm your host Francesca Gentille and with me today is Dreaming-Bear Rocketenan [sp?] .  Dreaming-Bear is an internationally renowned spoken word artist.  The author of seven books, including his latest, “Wild Love: Kissed [0:38 inaudible] Consciousness.”  A peace an environmental advocate who traveled the world speaking the message of Earth-centered awareness and interpersonal peace. 

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Dreaming-Bear: Well, I'm doing what I call “getting high on being my higher self.”  I think that if we could all take a hit of that narcotic, which is just the narcotic of being kind, it would be a huge shift in our consciousness.

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Dreaming-Bear: Welcome to the tree of life!  Let's climb the vines of each other's minds and go out on a limb of love together where we can more easily rub elbows with eternity as we carve each other's names into a heart of light.

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Francesca Gentille: Welcome Dreaming-Bear. 

Dreaming-Bear: Aloha beautiful Francesca.

[laughter]

Dreaming-Bear: Such an honor and a privilege to be here with you.  You know, I want to honor you for being a woman who is setting a standard for women across this world.  Thank you for holding space the way you do, for rising into your fullness and for being unashamedly you.  I honor you.

Francesca Gentille: I'm going to breathe that in, that honoring that you gave me and that, in a sense, I gave you in the beginning.  There's a journey that you bring... 

I just want to say to our listening audience that I kept hearing about Dreaming-Bear.  Friend after friend after friend would say, “Oh, you have to hear him, you have to talk to him and that there's something about [2:36 inaudible] destiny as De Touch Oprah [sp?] says that's always guiding us to people. 

This message that your spirit has been called to bring around love, around relationship...  Could you tell us a little bit about what you feel that is?  In fact, before we even go there, Dreaming-Bear has said that he had a transmission for us and I almost forgot, but now I remembered. 

[laughter]

I want to invite him to just fully share his spirit with us before we go a little bit deeper into questions and queries and inquiries into the full journey of sex and relationships.

Dreaming-Bear: Welcome to the tree of life.  Welcome to the tree of life.  Let's climb the vines of each other's minds and go out on a limb of love together where we can more easily rub elbows with eternity as we carve each other's names into a heart of light etched from the funny bone of the moon. 

One drink from this cup of destiny and you'll disappear with me into the mystery of why our hearts refuse to be apart and so keep on sending each other love letters of light in the form of falling stars, fireflies and your smile to light up the night.  While our souls dance the hula hoop with the sparkling rings of Saturn.  One kiss, just one kiss is enough to have us giving birth to planets and dancing, toe-to-toe, with the sun. 

So, come on in dear one and let's make out with life like we mean it.  Just dive in to this infinite womb of belonging with me and you're likely to become a love crazed lunatic whose lips are wet and always ready for a candy communion kiss.  Wet with wonder as all our tears somehow become a chorus of tenderness that is always singing so sweetly into the ears of every broken heart saying, “Your salvation is already within you.  Your salvation is already within you.” 

So, just play hooky from your “have to's.”  You know you want to.  So, play hooky from your “have to's” and take one more sip of these ruby red lips.  We'll become the voice of the wilderness and the innocence of every creature playing hide-and-seek with the one behind the billion blazing suns pulsating in the indescribability of each movement of lip and tongue. 

Quickly, while noone else is looking, let's slip into the shadows of another dimension together where our daydreams are making love to our fantasies and giving birth to whole new realities inside each breath and heartbeat. 

A frontier of forgiveness where your happiness is my Garden of Eden.  The paradise of smiling lips is where we tongue wrestle each other's tenderness into luminous star shine waterfalls whilpooling their way into infinities glowing, giggling naval. 

As a shameless display of my affection for you I have graffitied your essence into every cosmos, river, tree, rock, atom with the skill of an ancient artist.  For you, my dear, I have willingly jumped off the cliff of consciousness without a parachute of reason.  Diving, face first, into the even horizon of every black hole.  Fishing for bits and pieces of forgotten truth, which I have fashioned for you here as this priceless verse and golden honesty. 

Now here I am upon bended knee proposing, “Will you marry freedom with me?”  Will you marry freedom with me?  Come on.  Let's elope into ecstasy.  We can have a honeymoon on the blissful shores of Venus, complete with angel winged excursions into the mystic oasis of Mars.  Or better yet, take one more drink with me from that fountain of fascination and let's become the intoxicating wine of intimacy and spike the whole world's reservoirs with equal parts of magic and mischief until everyone is naked of the need to fit in.

Naked of the need to fit in and marathoning themselves into kamikaze kissing and hugging contests where everyone wins in the end.  If we love each other without shame everyone wins in the end. 

So, come here you.  Come in close and let's start a lovolution with our lips and leave this dry world drowning in the drink of a desire to kiss this life like it were a love affair and every being our beloved.

Let's kiss this life like it were a love affair and every being our beloved.

So, there's a sweet, tender drink from this overflowing heart.

Francesca Gentille: There's a part of me that just wants to breathe that in and just sit with that for a while because it was so rich and the heart of Tantra.  The heart of weaving everything together into be in love with it all. 

Dreaming-Bear: Exactly.  To be in love with it all is the key and people, somewhere along the way between being a fascinated youth, a hormonally driven young person and becoming a full-fledged adult with responsibilities, we lose that romantic connection with life.  We lose that desire to awake in the morning and to kiss the light as it enters your eyes and to embrace the afternoon and to literally, as we said earlier, to dive into the womb of the night with reckless self-abandon.

You know, the prophets of old knew this.  Rumey, [sp?] if you were to ask him, he would say, “Whatever you do, wherever you go, be a lover always.  And if you have not loved,” he would say, “and been loved in return, then count not your life as having been lived.  For it will not matter in the end.”

Francesca Gentille: I want to say that that takes so much courage.  That... I myself, it's been quite a year.  My people who have been with me know that my mom died this year.  My relationship of six years ended around her death and there's a new beloved in my life. 

I'm afraid to love.  I find myself pulling back.  So, here's one circumstance but we've all had so many.  We share the lost love, the wounded love of the times that we may have been deeply hurt or rejected.  Sometimes over years for various reasons.  We might still be living with our beloved but having this experience of being rejected, time after time, when we reach out. 

How do we find this sense of being in love with everything in the face of, really, as the Buddhists say, “the common universal suffering?”

Dreaming-Bear: Exactly and you think about this... The ancient mystics of the past, you can look at Buddha as an example.  He was not exactly what you would call, quote on quote, lover. 

Buddhism is what's the science of the mind.  It's an intellectual approach to detaching oneself from suffering and the desires that lead to suffering. 

What I propose is a science of the heart in which we re-center ourselves away from the mind and into the heart space.  Not necessarily a way, but we realize that the electromagnetic volume within ourselves, inside of our heart is 5,000 times that capacity of the brain.  It's in falling, quote on quote, rising, I'd like to say, as a replacement to that word, in love, so deeply in love, first and foremost with yourself.

Now there's a part of that transmission where I said there is a sense of peace when we learn to love each other without shame.  It begins with loving ourselves without shame.  A big part of the problem that we face as people living in an ordinary world is that we've forgotten to be in love, first and foremost, with ourselves.  Unashamedly even to say to ourselves, “You are so beautiful.”

To listen to the voice of the wilderness that is always saying, if you just closed your eyes and shut down all your senses and heard beyond your hearing.  What would you hear the great universal lover saying to you?  You would hear existence in every molecule, every cell, saying, “My love for you is infinite and everywhere.” 

The key to being in love with life...  The key to being in love, despite the bestial nature of life... The sense of having a beloved that may not be in tune with you or living in a constant cycle of sick self-destruction or cycle in which happiness and joy are always suffocated...  The key to resurrecting a sense of love is to resurrect it first and foremost for yourself.

Look at who you are.  You're beautiful.  You're magnificent.  If you will only allow yourself to look into the mirror of truth, the reflection you see will be the most beautiful thing you have ever seen.  You will fall, quote on quote, rise so deeply into yourself that a new sense of romance will be reborn.  A spiritual romance, which transcends circumstance.

You know, if you were to talk to Romeo and Juliet, in the height of their love for each other...  Though they faced certain death...  Though their lives were torn apart...  They loved and the love was the thing that drove them.

It's what I call a lovolution.  It's an evolutionary viewpoint in which no longer are we allowing ourselves to participate in the old paradigm of being a victim of our circumstance.  No longer participating in the old paradigms of mental attachments and slaveries to ideas that keep us disconnected from our infinite source of understanding. 

A lovolution in which the physical isn't necessarily the primary focus but it's a transformation of heart, mind, spirit into a state of ecstasy that is always saying, “I celebrate what is in every moment.”  Whether it's a moment of laughter, a moment of tears, a moment of joy, a moment of sadness.  Whatever the universe...  Whatever my beloved puts into my lap, I'm going to celebrate it, whether it hurts or feels good.  I think that having that kind of will power, that kind of determination to love first oneself and by extension to love every particle of everything that is.

For me it began with being able to see in each molecule, in each cell quite literally, the essence of that one.  That true source.

Francesca Gentille: You know, I love what you're saying and the words are like a fountain of nourishment off your lips.  I love the way that you put things together.

I want to talk more about that moment where things shifted for you and practices that people can... our listening audience can take.  Whether it's delving into the beauty of the words and re-spelling them for the trance that they've been in, the culture, into a new vision.  After we come back from a break and a word from our fabulous sponsors...  I just want to say to our listening audience that these sponsors have been very hand-selected, wonderful products and services and by supporting our sponsors, you support us and the ability to bring shows like this to you.  We'll be back in just a moment.

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Francesca Gentille: Welcome back to “Sex: Tantra and Kamasutra,” bringing you the soul of sex with Dreaming-Bear [17:16 inaudible] internationally renowned spoken word artist and in a sense I'm going to say, “crazy fool for love.”  In love with the beloved in all that is in the universe.

This was not always the case.  Your own life story started out with a great degree of trauma and suffering.  So, when you're telling us to transmute suffering into love, this is not like just a little airy fairy concept.  This is something real, that you've accomplished in your own life, that you're sharing with us from your own journey.

What was that?  What was that transmuting moment for you?

Dreaming-Bear: Well, just so that people who are listening know that it's OK to come from a place of woundedness.  It's OK to be hurting.  That's the first thing that they need to understand, that it's all right.  Whatever you're going through, whatever you've been through, whatever you're experiencing in this moment, whether it's tormenting you or what not, just know that it's all right.  You're beautiful as you are.

I myself came from a refugee situation.  My father being a refugee.  Having watched my brother die and my sister get kidnapped at the age of eight.  Having come from a very abusive home.  Living through some of the darkest things that humans can experience.  So, I know that life is not all fun and games or roses as someone might say.

The key is not that life has thrown you a challenge.  It's not, “Oh no.  Poor me.  Look at how horrible my life has been.”  There comes a moment when you realize that each pain you've been given is really an opportunity and a challenge in and of itself.  The opportunity is this: Can you perform the magic of transforming pain into beauty?  Can you turn the darkness within you into light?  Darkness is but a womb and light is what is being born within you.

For me, that moment came when I began to realize that I could become a statistic.  I could give into the victimization of my past.  I could literally allow the circumstance of my environment to destroy that beautiful light that had been raging within me since the time of being born. 

Then I discovered something.  I discovered nature.  I discovered this Earth.  I discovered the trees.  I discovered this waterfall that I'm sitting next to right now as I look across this Pacific Ocean.  Mother Nature has a sweet kiss waiting for each lover that is willing to dive into that womb. 

Find a place to plant yourself.  Go to where there are trees and no people.  Go to where the forest is still alive because in nature there is an infinity, a depth, a lover waiting to embrace you and wrap her arms around you.

I call God “Her.”  Why do I say “She?”  For me, God is a creator and who carries the capacity for creation?  The feminine.  This is why it's so important to honor the divine feminine.  But more than that... 

For those who are saying, “How do I get out of this rut of energetic attachment to my scene and my story?”  Well, this is the part of the movie of your life where the main character, you, decides to give fate a break from calling all the shots and gets to sit in the director's chair seat of your destiny's unscripted docu-drama style love story. 

Know that this love story that you've been set into has been set to explore the skin thin contrast...  Skin thin meaning this body that we wear between our immortal inner energy and that great, uncharted vexes where all expressions of existence merge into a single quintessence. 

It's about tapping into that.  Inside of you there is a voice.  Whether you're crying.  Whether you're empowered.  No matter what, there is a voice.  I call it the voice of the wilderness.

For me, it's the voice of the trees.  You can take me away from the forest but you can't take the forest out of me. 

Find your beloved again.  Within yourself first, then back into this Earth.  Put your fingers in the soil.  Feel what it's like to drown your sorrows in the river and get back in touch with that infinitude that is within you.

Francesca Gentille: So, thank you so much Dreaming-Bear.  I want to go into what you just said but I also want to take us to a word from our fabulous sponsors.  We'll be back with Dreaming-Bear [21:58 inaudible] in just a few moments.

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Francesca Gentille: Welcome back to “Sex: Tantra and Kamasutra,” bringing you the soul effects.  I'm your host Francesca Gentille and with me today is Dreaming-Bear [22:28 inaudible]  who is a peace environmental advocate who travels the world spreading the message of Earth-centered awareness and interpersonal peace. 

We started with that and what you just shared Dreaming-Bear.  That whole sense of going to nature, rooting in nature and the voice within.  There's that Shamonic perspective.  Many cross-cultural spiritual perspectives of ancient medicine say that the Earth herself/himself had everything we needed, has everything we needed, if we return to that.  It has the herbs, everything.

Could you share with us a little bit more?  We have tuning into the voice within and we have that returning to nature...  How people might do that or how people might be that Earth-centered... you know, continue that Earth-centered awareness or that advocate for interpersonal peace.

Dreaming-Bear: Well, it's about, just tuning into the most common denominator between every heart.  I believe that there's one self seeded in every heart.  This self is always saying... If you listen to that voice that we were talking about earlier, it is the same voice within me that is within you.  I believe, on a fundamental level, that we all know the same truth.  As my grandmother would say, “We're all prophets baby.  We just all haven't remembered how to listen to the wind yet.” 

It's about learning to listen to that universal voice.  Your heart is saying the same truth as my heart.  Our hearts are saying the same truth as a child and a refugee's heart might be saying.  It's just about tuning into that authentic voice.

For me, the main lesson that I learned from nature... The main lesson I learned from our mother who literally breast feeds our body into being by touching us in places that have never been touched before...  The main thing I learned is the word “tenderness.”

If I could leave your listeners with one word...  All that the prophets have said.  All that the religious texts are saying.  All that every religion, every spiritual tradition in the world, if you summed it up into one concise word...  For me, that word would be tenderness.

That is to say, if we can begin to treat both ourselves and everything in our environment, including people, places and things with the same kind of tenderness that we would treat our truest lover, that partner, that companion.  What do we do for our lover?  We reach out and we say, “Sweetheart, how can I serve you better?  How can I be more kind?  Then to give your heart what it desires most.  Then to turn this playful, amorous existence into our loving dance partner.”  Then to disappear in each other's hearts as a softly spoken prayer.   

I think it's about that kind of resurrection of tenderness, that kind of touch.  You know, things that aren't touched die sooner.  Animals that are held in captivity live only one third their life's expectancy.  That's why I wrote “Wild Love.”  It's about unleashing, unleashing that wild love that is within.  Untaming.  We're so tame in this society.  It's about tuning in.

The Shaman would tell you, “Go into the nature.  Listen to the voice of the wilderness.  Don't allow yourself to hear the condescending voices.”  Nature is always saying in that sweet, pollen light like language what every heart longs and needs to hear most.  Words of, “You're beautiful and I love you.”

Francesca Gentille: I'm going to breathe that in.

[laughter]

That sense that each flower, each plant, each weed, each rock is beautiful and unique in itself and so necessary.  I love that you spoke of tenderness.  It's that depth of kindness and compassion together in consideration all mixed into something that we call “moved” and “tender” and “tenderized.”

You spoke of service.  “How may I serve my beloved?”

It's something that I've just started to experiment with are letting myself deepen into that, as the Hindu's would say “Bachti,” [sp?] the path of devotion.  To say to my beloved, literally, “How may I serve you?”  Literally going down on one knee. 

Dreaming-Bear: Yes.

Francesca Gentille: I might make him a cup of tea or something.  I'll go down on one knee and serve him.  Not from a place of subservience, like, “Oh I'm beneath you and I am somehow less than you,” but from a place of heart opening and honor.  There's something in him that melts when I do that.

Dreaming-Bear: Yes.

Francesca Gentille: Both melts and, as you might say, rises.  In a sense, the king in him is evoked...

Dreaming-Bear: Exactly.

Francesca Gentille: ...when I kneel in service to the beauty within him. 

Dreaming-Bear: We're all kings and queens.  It's about resurrecting that divinity, that royalty within. 

Francesca Gentille: Yet, I would say to our listening audience...  You are the ones listening.  You are the ones called.  Someone has to kneel in service of love first.  You as the listeners...  It's you.  Someone has to start this journey.

Dreaming-Bear: I'd like to call it the path of vulnerability, Francesca.  I like to call it that willingness to be vulnerable.

We lost that in a sense.  We've lost that capacity to say, “Here I am.  I'm here as a devotional opportunity to give to my beloved something so beautiful.”  Not as you say, out of a sense of shame or less-than-ness but rather a sense of equality that bespeaks of true love.  

Francesca Gentille: Absolutely.  I just want to thank you so much Dreaming-Bear for bringing this gift of tenderness, of wild love, of nature, of divine nature love. 

If people wanted to find out more about you and your events and get connected and get on your newsletter or web site...  How would they do that?

Dreaming-Bear: Well, I'm doing what I'm calling “getting high on being my higher self.”  I think that if we could all take a hit of that narcotic, which is the narcotic of being kind, it would be a huge shift in our consciousness.

If people want to get involved with what I'm calling the “lovolution,” they can go to DreamingBear.net.  There they'll find a whole host of resources.  They'll find books.  They'll find videos to help them through their day.  They'll find radio shows.  They'll find this very show archived...  A whole host of resources including your own web site and other beings around the world who are holding this space because ultimately it's about us joining hands.  Men and women across this planet saying, “We're in this together.  We're going to do this together.  We apologize for all of our mistakes of the past.  We let go of all of that and in this moment we empower one another as servants, as friends, as partners, as lovers and perhaps most importantly, as each other's teacher.”

We have so much to learn from each other.  I as much from you as in return.  I think it's when we dive into that... When people are willing to say, “I'm going to do that.  I'm going to meet myself and everyone else at a new standard of living.” that things begin to change. 

So, if anyone out there listening to the sound of this voice is saying, “I'm ready for something new.  I'm ready for wings.  I'm ready for the metamorphosis.  I'm ready to expand and emerge...”  Go to DreamingBear.net.  Tune in.  Get in touch and let's have a loveolution.

[laughter]

Francesca Gentille: Let's have a loveolution. 

[laughter]

I want to thank you, our listening audience, for tuning in to “Sex: Tantra and Kamasutra,” bringing you the soul of sex.  You can get transcripts from this show and contact Dreaming-Bear and find out his web site at www.PersonalLifeMedia.com  That's www.PersonalLifeMedia.com

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