Episode 69 - DANCING IN THE ORGASM: THE PATH OF THE SEXUAL SHAMAN with Dr. Kenneth Ray Stubbs

Transcript

Francesca Gentille: Welcome to Sex, Tantra and Kama Sutra: Bringing You The Soul of Sex. I’m your host, Francesca Gentille, and with my today is Dr. Kenneth Ray Stubbs. Ray, as he’s often called by friends who know him well is an author of many erotic how-to books, but today we’re going to be focusing on the cutting edge of his practice, his ever evolving practice, which is the path of the sexual shaman. And he’s becoming a teacher of the, of the approach to this path and someone who is very much wanting to share that with us and the world. So…

Francesca Gentille: Welcome. Welcome Ray.

Dr. Kenneth Ray Stubbs: Thank you.

Francesca Gentille: I wanted to share with our listening audience that I’ve had the honor and the pleasure of having a phone session with Ray in this path, and even though it was on the phone, even though there were periods of silence, there was a field of energy that happened during that call in which all the physical pain that I have in my body disappeared, and I felt my heart open and a reawakening of compassion that’s been somewhat missing since the death of my mom a year ago. And I wanted to have you Ray let us know, what is this, what is this path, what is, how is it different from tantra or Daoism or some of the other things we’ve talked about on the show, and how do we pursue this path, how do we walk it and become that sexual shaman? So lets start with, what is it? What do we mean when we say ‘sexual shaman’?

Dr. Kenneth Ray Stubbs: Well first I want to give you how I came to use that term. In ’95 I edited and published a book, Women In The Light: The New Sacred Prostitute, where 9 women shared their lives about doing what they were doing, which was a more compassionate, a more spiritual, more energetic approach to facilitating people’s growth around sexuality, or in general, image of what people do when they do hands-on approaches to sexual growth and well-being. And then, after that I did a documentary that I entitled “The Sacred Prostitute”. And I used that term, “The Sacred Prostitute” was in the subtitle of the book and to title the documentary, because that is a term in the literature. It is not the best term given the connotations of the different words. And so I been looking and looking and looking, and over time the word that I’ve come to use instead of the word in the literature is ‘sexual shaman’. And I think that in ancient cultures they embrace sexuality as a part of the ritual and as a part of their spiritual practice in different ways, of course at different times, that what they were really doing is doing what we today in the contemporary west refer to as ‘shamanic’. And what that is, I think what it characterizes something that is shamanic in particular is not necessarily the symbols that people are using, although that’s a way of getting there, is much more the ability to direct energy. And in a technical sense, the way I define a shaman is someone who has the ability to access and then direct energies through other dimensions into this dimension. And it’s not just being able to think a nice thought, it’s about literally having an intent that one, because they’re energetically developed in certain ways, that that intent comes through another dimension into this dimension. And that’s why I use as the word ‘shaman’. And even though a shaman may be using different external behaviors, chanting or using a rattle or a drum, which are all important, but what makes a person effective as a healer, as a ceremonialist I really think is the ability to affect the energy flow, and it basically was their intent that they’re doing this. And that’s how I use the word ‘shaman’. And in the area of sexuality I started to use that term because I really thought that enough of these people that I know who are doing some pretty powerful, effective group work or individual one on one type of things around sexuality, as I began to read their energies, I began to see that they had some same energetic structures developed that I had perceived with the Native American medicine people. I live in the South West here, so I’ve had an opportunity since I’ve been living here in the last 15 years to have interaction with the people who are defined as medicine people, in Hopi, Navajo, to Hana Odum, Comanche, Cherokee. And when I would observe them, when people were doing their ceremony, is that people were using their energies in certain ways that was not unlike, to some extent, what people were doing to define themselves as a sacred prostitute or as a Doka Dakini or a sexual energy professional. So it was my way of coming to terms with a concept that I felt was misrepresented by certain words to try to reframe the perspective, and so the word ‘sexual shaman’ is not something that I think is traditionally used in any culture, but someone who in a contemporary culture is using shamanic approaches to facilitate their own and other people’s growth, particularly around the arena of sexuality, and I mean that in a very broad sense. So that’s how I use the term.

Francesca Gentille: I want to go a little bit deeper into that and make sure that I’m understanding it and our listening audience is connecting to it, so I’m going to reflect back that what I think I hear you saying is that throughout time, from very ancient times up ‘til the present, there have been people who have sometimes an innate skill set, something they were born with, something, sometimes something that they were trained and developed, that was the ability to move energy, heal with energy, direct energy through their intention or their consciousness or their will, and that sometimes these people have been called healers, sometimes they might’ve been called faith healers, sometimes they may have been called priest or priestesses, sometimes they may have been called, you know, Raki workers, sometimes they may have been called Daka’s or Dakinis in the far east, or tantric or Tantrika’s, and sometimes they may have been called Shaman’s. And that there’s, this is a human capacity, we may not have developed it, but it’s a human capacity, an opportunity for us to contribute to one another in our energetic wholeness.

Dr. Kenneth Ray Stubbs: You say it perfectly. That really is it. I’m using contemporary language to sort of point in a direction, and it’s about the energy and being able to direct that energy is what is the important factor here, and we put different labels on that. Exactly. And as I look into people today as they’re developing, as I look at tantra and Daoist practices and Shamanic practices, I kept finding more in the shamanic, areas that would involve shaman, shamanic or shaman, as seemed to be a little more developed in that than some of the other areas, and so I just sort of started really intuitively using that word as an alternative.

Francesca Gentille: I love it. I love that word. I love that you’ve created a term that’s new and that the minute we hear it we wonder what is that, because what is that is a door opening…

Dr. Kenneth Ray Stubbs: Yes.

Francesca Gentille: If I know what it is, if I go, “Oh, I know what that is”, the door closes. If I say, “What is that?”, now my spirit is awakened for information to be received. And lets go even further into that. So there’s this, there’s this shamanism, this multi-dimensional reality of energy. There is a way that it apprise to sexuality, the life force itself. And how do we, the listening audience, me, the average human being, how do we get on this path, where do we start and where do we go?

Dr. Kenneth Ray Stubbs: Well, there’re many places to start, but what is needed is energy, to build structures and to run the structures so to speak. And for our physical body we need food, sunlight, water, air, like that. But those type of energies, what we call energy, are not the type of energies that are that useful for developing what we might call our ‘subtle bodies’ or our ‘subtle energies’, and that’s a different type of energy. And what I, I want to make a really oversimplified statement to make a point, but the most powerful, most prevalent way for the average person to access this, I’ll call it primordial or elemental incarnated energy, energy that we need for this incarnation to develop the different parts of ourselves that are not just the physical body. The most available source to all of us is a sexual orgasm, and I mean that absolutely literally. And I’m trained as a western psychologist, and a primary definition for many years has been from Mashes and Johnson, and the way they define orgasm basically was with their operational definition of, if it’s tummy full of contractions along with some other physiological signs, then we would call that an orgasm. Well that is accurate I would say in terms of a sexual orgasm. But there are other factors going on too, and part of that is literally a manifesting or generating of energy. But I want to go on to say that the physical body is not the only body that, of which we are made up of, that has orgasm, there’re other bodies too, and some of these other bodies have orgasms in ways that people would not necessarily think of orgasm unless they thought about it in that way. I, many years ago I heard about (???), who was a Catholic nun I think about the 15th, 16th century in Spain, and she was real mystic and she would go into these unusual very expressive states, and when I was told about this, this was about 40 years ago, I said, “Oh, she’s having an orgasm.” Well I didn’t realize that I was intuitively thinking up something that 40 years later I would understand, that what I said was really right on. But it’s another body, another system of ours having an orgasm.

Francesca Gentille: You know, I want to talk so much more about this, and at the same time I want to support our sponsors and go to a break, but I’m going to encourage our listening audience to support our sponsors who help support fabulous shows like this in the world. And I’m wondering how many times I can say the word ‘support’ in a sentence. And when we come back we’ll be talking more with Ray about these, this orgasm and the energy, and how it supports our journey of vital living in the world, when we come back from break and a word from our sponsors.

Francesca Gentille: Welcome back to Sex, Tantra and Kama Sutra: Bringing You the Soul of Sex. Talking to Kenneth Ray Stubbs about the path of the sexual shaman, and energy and orgasmic energy. You know, I want to go back to that, we’ve heard about calories and expending calories and the energy that we need to survive and how important that is, and those of us who have orgasms know how enjoyable those are. Why is an orgasm important? Is it as important as water and food and sunlight and what does it do for us?

Dr. Kenneth Ray Stubbs: Well, it’s a source of energy, and I’m using the word ‘energy’ in a very broad, loose sense right now to save us some similarities. But given the perspective of what I’m calling the paths of the sexual shaman is that if we want to develop these other structures that give us the ability to approach life in a shamanic way, because shaman’s do have abilities that the average person don’t have, does not have, and different shaman’s have different abilities of course. But to do these, to have these abilities, their structures have to be developed. To develop the structures they need energy. One of the main sources of energy for the average person is sexual orgasm, but there’re other types of orgasms as well that people would not call an orgasm, but I would call an orgasm, because as I read the energy that is happening during these events, they are literally bringing in or manifesting or generating a type of really primordial energy, I can call it ‘earth, wind, water and fire’ energy. And that is a very, a form of energy that can be utilized by these other bodies. And it’s this (unintelligible) rather common, one type of these, what I would call a light body orgasm, where people do a lot of intense breathing and they suddenly explode. Now that can happen in a sexual interaction or it can happen in a non sexual context, and for most of us to call it an orgasm it would, the event would have to happen in a sexual context, but I’m expanding this definition because it literally does the same thing as what happens in sexual orgasm, but it doesn’t look sexual. And you can, I mean, you can be on a phone with someone without touching your genitals and turn energetically once you develop these structures and you start intensifying your intensity so that you go into these energetic experiences, which they sure feel explosive, some of them are explosive, some are very subtle, and what that does, in addition to feeling this sensation, there is a, literally a bringing of energy that is necessary to develop these other structures. And we do that in many other ways too. We do it in ceremony, when you do a sweat lodge. And when you go into a ceremonial space it does the same thing, but not as much as the orgasm, what I’m calling an orgasm at least.

Francesca Gentille: I wanted to slow down a little bit because this stuffs really important and really big in a way that it can happen in, in church, it could happen in ritual where, especially in some of the churches that sing and dance and are charismatic, that bring down the spirit…

Dr. Kenneth Ray Stubbs: Yes. Exactly.

Francesca Gentille: People, you know, they shake, they cry, there’s spontaneous healing. It can happen, some people experience that dance, especially if it’s a free form dance where they’re, you know, the Gabriel Roth Five Rhythms or dance jams where they’re just so involved in the energy and the music, and everything starts to flow in their body, and once again, they cry or they shake or they have spontaneous healing. And what I hear you saying is that there’s a way that we can access, a very powerful way we can access it or guide another human being to access it, in high states of arousal. Is that, is that what I’m hearing?

Dr. Kenneth Ray Stubbs: Yes. I, when anything that facilitates people getting intensely emotionally involved with another or a group, whether it be sexual or as we have a very expressive, there’s expressive church services, I’ve actually seen people flop out on the floor, their arms and legs flying all over the place and, yup, that looks like an orgasm to me. But some people would say they caught the spirit, and it’s much more likely to happen in a Pentecostal type church from what I understand. But it’s the same phenomenon. And given that we’re social animals we have context where certain things are permissible, so when you’re at the job you can’t have these, not supposed to have these orgasms obviously, but when you’re at the church service or you’re having sex balling your brains out or you’re doing some sort of meditation with an intense breathing practice and you have these intense experiences, it’s permissible. And so, part of what happens, we have to find context where it’s permissible within the culture without being considered too much of a deviant or they’ll put you in a mental hospital.

Francesca Gentille: So these are healthy. We have a culture that’s sometimes depressed, that…

Dr. Kenneth Ray Stubbs: Exactly.

Francesca Gentille: so we kind of have to maneuver to find the ways that we can release these pent up stores of energy or move energy through our bodies because that’s healthy for us, and I want to talk more about how we do that. And that energetic orgasm, I want more of that, that energetic orgasm, when we come back from our break and a word from our fabulous sponsors.

Francesca Gentille: Welcome back to Sex, Tantra and Kama Sutra: Bringing You the Soul of Sex, with Dr. Kenneth Ray Stubbs, and we’re right at the point of energetic orgasms. Yay! And, how do we do this? How do we bring it into our life, practices, noticing? How?

Dr. Kenneth Ray Stubbs: Well, I’ll tell you how I approach it, but that’s not how I learned how to approach it. The way that I would teach it is, literally there are energy fibers that are, if you use our physical body as a reference point, that it can come out from our navel area to connect with another person. And if you’re doing it mutually, then there’s more, it’s more likely just going to happen as we hold our intent to intensify the energy, but not many people have developed that. It’s mainly healers and shamanic focused tend to develop that. The way that I first learned it, probably the very first one was in a Quodoushka workshop, and, where they’re doing a lot of breathing, doing muscle contractions and you’re visualizing your energy coming up the midline of your body. It’s also, I learned it studying in the, with people who were calling themselves sacred intimates, the Daoist body massage approach where they’re doing massage, they’re also doing a lot of breathing. And I’m hearing about people who are really into holotropic breath work, where you do lots of intense breathing, that’s one of the main ways you can bring it on. But the breath is not essential, it’s one of the ways, intense breathing is one of the ways to stimulate that, but it’s not, you don’t have to have the breaths. For example, they can happen quite spontaneously. I once asked a Tibetan llama that he consider me one of his students, and this was a very important step for me, and I was, we were driving away from there, down the freeway, thank goodness I was not driving, ‘cause suddenly I had this very intense build up in my chest, I was, “Oh my God, I’m having a heart attack or something.” It was this huge explosion as I went unconscious, and I was fine afterwards. It’s just sort of like, this particular llama is incredibly energetically developed. We don’t call him a shaman, but many of the really developed llamas are shamanic. And what had happened was, I don’t know totally what had happened, but I had interacted with this incredible energetic field, and something energetically had taken place so that I ended up having this intense energetic orgasm. I call it a orgasm. So there are different ways to learn to do this, but there’s no one way. And I’m simply saying that it, when one develops certain of the structures, one can do it easier simply by intending that, and particularly when you’re doing it with another person and your energies literally merge together, literally.

Francesca Gentille: I’ve seen a photography of that, when they are literally doing a, almost a Corillian photography or an energetic photography of couples in love play. There’s a (unintelligible) where their, we might say their aura’s, their energies, their electric magnetic frequencies merge. And science I don’t think is as developed as spirit, it can be at this point, but even science is pointing to how this merging takes place.

Dr. Kenneth Ray Stubbs: Yes. And I think that what’s being photographed in Corillian photography is still very limited as to what is all that’s taking place, but at least we have some scientific justification saying that, you know, when we’re interacting with another person, whether it be lover, friend, parent to child, in a group seminar, when our energies merged together we become different than we are in our everyday, walking down the sidewalk type person. And that’s why this path is tantra, and especially around sexuality, have focused on learning to be present with a partner and learning to do ceremony, where we go into a focused way of interacting and a focused practice to be really present while intensifying the interaction without necessarily doing a lot of physical behavior, where sometimes gets in our way.

Francesca Gentille: So there are practices before, we’re sadly running out of time here so, I hear that there are practices of ceremony, of ritual, that help create this direction of merging and union. There is, you mentioned the Quodoushka, there’s you. What are, how would people find you Ray? How do they find you and keep working with you? And also, are there additional resources that you would recommend for our listening audience?

Dr. Kenneth Ray Stubbs: My main seminar to go, excuse me, site to go to for my seminars and my individual sessions, it’s called sexualshamanseminars.com, sexualshamanseminars.com, one word. But as I mentioned, Quodoushka, any number of intense breathing of classes or coaches. Now however, a lot of people who are not really involved in sexuality might be really put upon to or feeling comfortable in talking as much as being orgasm. You might want to call it something else, but I really see a lot of similarity. And I once heard a teacher say, “Oh, women can do this better than men”, and I find that not the case at all, that once you become energetically developed, energetically developed regardless of what physical anatomy you have.

Francesca Gentille: Thank you. Thank you. Thank your for, thank your for bringing that up, that male and female. And we’re going to have to close for now, but hopefully I’ll get to have you back again, and, and thank you. Thank you so much. You’re a font of wisdom, and I’ve read some of your books and they’ve really moved and changed my life. Thank you so much for joining with us today.

Dr. Kenneth Ray Stubbs: Thank you.

Francesca Gentille: And male or female, these, what Ray points to are these gifts of the spirit in Christianity, every religion and tradition truly has the, that are accessible to us, this path of the sexual shaman. And I want to thank you, our listening audience, for tuning into this show, for being on the path of soul and spirit, and for listening to Sex, Tantra and Kama Sutra: Bringing You the Soul of Sex. If you want more information about Ray, have the transcripts to get connected to him or me, you can also do that at www.personallifemedia.com, that’s www.personallifemedia.com, Sex, Tantra and Kama Sutra.