Episode 84 - DEEP SEX: DARE TO LOVE YOUR SELF with Rabia Erduman

Transcript

Francesca Gentille: Welcome to Sex: Tantra and Kama Sutra: Bringing You The Soul of Sex. I’m your host, Francesca Gentille, and with me today is Rabia Erduman.. Rabia was born and raised in Turkey and then in Germany and was very sick for a long time, and it was tantra and it was the tantra work that really helped her heal. She’s a certified Hynotherapist, a visionary craniosacral worker, a teacher of intuitive touch, polarity therapy, tantra and spiritual awakening workshops, and I’m delighted to have her with us today. Welcome Rabia.

Rabia Erduman: Thank you.

Francesca Gentille: Rabia one of the things that intrigued me so much, and I’m imaging our listening audience will be intrigued as well, is how did you experience that tantra actually helped you heal?

Rabia Erduman: When I bumped into the chakra system through the tantric work a long time ago in India, I could feel how my chakras, chakras are energies in the body. The term chakra means a wheel, they’re like circular energies in the body. If lets say the heart, chakra is disconnected from the third chakra, which is right in the stomach area, which is fire, there was too much fire in my system, not enough water and earth. So it created this imbalance in my system, which created a lot of illness in my stomach area. Learning about the chakras, I understood, “Oh, I need to do the healing, help the fire energy in my digestive system balance with my water in my genital area and the earth right in our sixth bone area, it slows it down and brings it all into balance. So that’s what took, took place.

Francesca Gentille: Now let me, lets go a little deeper into that because the chakra’s are those wheels of energy in the body that line up along the, the spinal, the spinal column, are very inalgous to the organ…

Rabia Erduman: Right.

Francesca Gentille: in terms of the importance of the body, and in the Asian cultures they studied that, as well as, as the body, the heart, the lungs, and they, they have a more spiritual and energetic way of looking at it. So when you say that you started to hear about the chakras, there was something that this brining in the more spiritual, the more energetic, that really, and that sense of disease being, disease being out of balance and coming into balance that really helped you. Now was it, what was it? Was it breathing? Was it visualization? Was it certain foods that are aligned with the chakras? What was that pathway? How did the chakras become a map in a way of noticing what was out of balance and a pathway to bringing yourself into balance?

Rabia Erduman: That’s a wonderful question. It was almost, it really, it was feeling like a certain stuck area in my body, then getting a sense of what chakra that connected to, like the organ of a stomach, you know, and then getting a sense of what feelings are stuck there. It was, for me it was repressed anger. I had to be a good girl as a child to get my survival needs met and approval from mom and dad and all that. So all the natural childhood anger couldn’t be suppressed, so then my stomach started accruing and at the age of 19 I ended up with hernia surgery, you know. So that got me to really looking, “Hmm, what’s wrong here, you know?” But then when I looked at the chakra system through tantra, I realized, oh, repressed anger. Then I started playing around with it, you know, with the breathing exercises of tantra, the tantra Yoga techniques, movement, and connecting then the fire. What happens is when we breathe love from our heart chakra into the anger, the suppressed anger in the stomach, then the anger starts transforming. So the fire then starts being able to transform into this healthy laughter, without the fire it’s this exciting inspiration, you know.

Francesca Gentille: You know, this is, this is so resonant for me, so it really relates to me at this moment in my life because my mom died about a year ago, and what surprised me so much was I, it wasn’t a surprise that I grieved and I felt sad and that sometimes a moment of joy and then I’d be crying because I’d think of her and think how she would enjoy something or how much I enjoyed it with her, but what surprised me the most was the anger…

Rabia Erduman: Yes.

Francesca Gentille: The anger that came up, that feeling, like you said, that you have to, have to be a good person, have to be, suppress myself in certain ways, and I think this is very common for many of us is that we literally cut off, suppress, reject or deny pieces of ourselves in order to be liked or loved by our family, by our friends, by our loved ones, and then, and we wonder why we’re sick and we wonder why we’re depressed and we wonder why we’re irritated. And its just been so stirred up in me this year. So maybe, I’d love to go through all the chakras, but perhaps we could start with the heart. Do you have an exercise or would you be willing to guide us through that, something around that transmuting the energy of anger into something that can move in the body or be transmuted into love or laughter?

Rabia Erduman: So when you think of the heart, the heart chakra is the whole chest and upper back. The physical heart is to the left side. Then right in between our breast is the heart that can feel feelings and emotions, and a little bit above that where the timeless gland is, is what we call the spiritual heart filled with emerald green color right in the spiritual heart like it goes all the way from front to the back, covers he whole chest right there, and that’s where unconditional love sits. Always that unconditional love is always right here. And I really believe in self-love, you know, loving myself first. So then feeling this beautiful emerald green unconditional love, coming down to your stomach area where the anger itself. Imagine this emerald green love is just spreading and embracing this old anger. It’s being loved, the anger energy, that fire energy’s being loved, total accepted, and yet through the love we don’t have to be destructive or self-destructive with it anymore. So that emerald green love from the unconditional heart threading into your stomach/liver area just embraces that old anger, the fire energy that was stuck in the old anger is allowed through the love to transform into the laughter, into inspiration, into that sense of, “Yes, this is my life and I can do this”, to feel that joy right there.

Francesca Gentille: Hmm, I’m just breathing that in, breathing, relaxing the jaw, relaxing the belly and breathing that sense of this emerald green love and acceptance, total acceptance going throughout my entire chest and down into my belly, and ah, that feels, that feels wonderful. I could do that for another hour.

Rabia Erduman: Great, me too. I love it.

Francesca Gentille: I want to do more, these are beautiful exercises, things that we can, you know, take home right now, do right now, take home right now, share with our beloved or share more deeply with our self. I love that idea of the self, the sense lover and want to go deeper into that after a break and a word from our fabulous sponsors. And I want to encourage our listening audience to support our sponsors because that allows shows like this to keep coming to you. And we’ll be right back.

Francesca Gentille: Welcome back to Sex: Tantra and Kama Sutra: Bringing You The Soul Of Sex. We’re talking with Rabia Erduman, delicious tantrica, originally from Turkey, Germany, now with us in Monterey California, who has found that tantra helped heal her and now uses that among her many modalities to help heal others. And when you and I were talking, before the show we were saying that that, there was a template of self-love that really, and then meshing that with the tantric system, that really brought beauty into your life. Could you, could you share more about, you know, how that works? What does that mean?

Rabia Erduman: Great question. So what happened is when I was younger and wanting a relationship, and I really thought if a man loved me then that would make me good enough. And really break-ups and difficulties and hard heart breaks, and I realized one day, “Oh wow, I’m not loving myself. So how can I even draw a loving man into my life?” There was a big opening, realizing, “Oh, I need to love me first.” That part in this inner make, inner lover into my life, like the feminine part of me, then met inside of me the masculine part of me. And then, being in this tantric union inside of me together created this incredible ecstatic experience inside of me. Then what happened is because I wasn’t needing a man to be happy outside, I was happy already inside, then I could be open to men, to receive love and sexuality with them and sensuality and intimacy’s really the word in tantra. I go for intimacy in a big old chakras kind of way, yeah? So…

Francesca Gentille: Now, what you’re saying is so brilliant, and I long to hear you say more about that, is that idea that if I turn to you as my beloved, like you’re my sixth, you’re my addiction, you’re my, save me, fix me, change me, that’s a lot of pressure on you, and…

Rabia Erduman: That’s right.

Francesca Gentille: And you’re probably going to fail. You’re not going to be everything that I need. How could you be? How could you be that mind reader that knows in every moment what I need? And so there’s this journey that you’re talking about to turn inward and say, “How can I be my lover? How can I… I’m the one who knows what I want. I’m the one that feels what I feel. How can I bring that to myself?” And how do we do that? How, what are some, you know, it’s a beautiful idea, but are there some practices that we can take on that would help us heal the anger sometimes if we didn’t get the love we wanted as children or in the past, and really allow ourselves to come home to our own bodies, to our own throne heart?

Rabia Erduman: That’s a journey I do about the inner lover, like, we’re meeting the inner feminine, inner masculine inside of us, and then really having them mate and merge right inside of us right at the midline of the body. And then any old feelings come up that way of course, then the heart’s chakra meditation I guided you before can help that. What happens is, what happened in my personal life is my acceptance of the man increased. This one lover of mine, bless his heart, he was older than me, like fifteen years older, and in the middle of making love he would get soft at times, yeah. And then I would just totally, because I don’t, I didn’t need him to be hard to feel good about myself, you know. I would be in my ecstasy and loving myself and loving him and having an orgasm just by looking at him, and then I would just play with his lingam, with his penis, and one day he, he said to me this is the first time in his life he’s not feeling intimidated when he gets a soft on. ‘Cause as we’re playing and laughing he would get hard again, and we’d play in different ways, you know. It was such fun.

Francesca Gentille: I love the idea of a soft on. You know, that you could have a hard on and you could have a soft on, and it’s all good that all of it gets to be accepted, there’s not judgment, that it’s like waves of the ocean, you know, it peaks and then it, and then it ebbs, and it’s all, it’s all intimacy, it’s all sensation.

Rabia Erduman: Exactly.

Francesca Gentille: And that sounds like such a healing practice in and of itself, I love that. And is there a meditation or a visualization that you could guide us through about that merging of the inner masculine and the inner feminine? And by the midline, do you mean the heart chakra, in the center of the chest or some other part of the body?

Rabia Erduman: It’s all the way down…

Francesca Gentille: Oh, you mean like the…

Rabia Erduman: Yeah, you know, like…

Francesca Gentille: Oh, you mean the spinal column.

Rabia Erduman: Exactly.

Francesca Gentille: Is that what you mean? Okay.

Rabia Erduman: Exactly, yes. But just imagine our masculine energies in the right side of the body, all the way up and down our right arm and right leg and right side of our trunk. And feminine energy is at the left side of the body, our left arm, left leg, left side of our trunk. Just feeling now, right at the, where you are sitting, if you are sitting, where our tailbone is, our anus is, that’s the first chakra and that’s red in color. Feeling that dark red, earth element. And just move your attention now to your pelvic area and lower back, feeling the vibrant orange of the second chakra, water element. And the dark red and the vibrant orange are now coming together, creating a rainbow of light, rainbow of colors, filling up in your stomach area, solar plexus and mid back golden yellow. That’s the fire element, third chakra. Now all three colors are together in the rainbow energy. And feeling now up in your heart, your chest and upper back, heart chakra, air element, emerald green and pink. Just feeling all colors connecting now in the rainbow. And then the throat chakra, throat and neck is light blue and turquoise, adding itself to the rainbow. And just feeling the third eye is right around the, our center of our forehead in between our eyebrows, dark purple and dark blue, coming to join the rainbow light throughout our body. Then finally at the crown chakra that’s just at the top of our head, is this brilliant white with gold in it, feeling the rainbow cut light of the chakras that are all connected into one rainbow light. It’s extending itself to the right and left. It’s embracing the inner masculine to the right and the inner feminine to the left of your body. Imagine the rainbow light of the chakras bringing in the feminine and masculine to hold hands with each other and to hug each other, to hold each other, to really connect, full body, intimate connection of the inner feminine and the inner masculine merging with each other into this incredibly intimate, ecstatic union.

Francesca Gentille: Mmm. Ah, that is gorgeous. That is so gorgeous. And as I listen to it it reminds me of the power of visualization…

Rabia Erduman: Yes.

Francesca Gentille: that throughout so many cultures, shamanic cultures, indigenous cultures, spiritual cultures, the sense of vision, the sense of journey really, literally transforms our body, that as we experience through vision something our immune system shifts, our internal system shifts. So gorgeous. And I want to go even deeper into more of this after a break and a word from our fabulous sponsors, and we’ll be right back.

Francesca Gentille: Welcome back to Sex: Tantra and Kama Sutra: Bringing You The Soul Of Sex with the delightful Rabia, tantrica, beautiful woman of vision and visualization. And, you know, Rabia here we have, we’re transmitting our anger, we’re coming into a sacred union in our own bodies, and is there a point then where, and what is that, where we get to bring that into relationship with another?

Rabia Erduman: Yeah, excellent question. That’s where a lot of times our old patterns get projected onto our partners. If I believe I wasn’t loved as a child, then I’m expecting my partner to not love me. What happens then in tantric work is the couple, when we’re like bringing the tantric breathing exercises, visualizations, the chakras connecting our chakras, then I feel how my inner child didn’t get loved by my father, lets say, but I’m able to really disconnect my partner from my dad. I realize, “Oh, my partner is my lover and my friend. Those are the two big words in relationship for me; lover and friend, friend and lover. Yup.

Francesca Gentille: Mm hmm.

Rabia Erduman: And in the tantric work I’m able to separate my dad from my partner. Thing is, dad didn’t know how to love me back then, but my partner is not my dad. He’s my friend and my lover. So in the tantric work with the chakras is the chakras are connecting with my partner, especially the heart chakra, we’re able to create friendship first, you know. Imagine you’re totally trusting this person, whether your partner be a woman or a man, you know he or she’s your friend. And I want to be able to share things very differently with this, with this person, ‘cause I know they’re accepting who I am, and if some issues are coming up, then as friends we’re working at them. I’m not saying you’re wrong or I’m not saying I’m wrong, I’m saying here’s an issue in our relationship, how can we create a win/win situation here? So by the chakra work, the breathing exercises, the holding hands, connecting our chakras, well we’re then looking at life, oh, date night. I am big on once a week date night. Even if it’s five minutes, date night doesn’t have to be a couple of hours. Five minutes date night goes a long way. That moment of looking into each other’s eyes, holding your hand, each other’s hands and then maybe the kids aren’t there and you have to have dinner, you know. That five minutes goes a long way. So my suggestion is like starting with five minutes of just holding hands, looking into each other’s eyes, “Wow, he’s my friend”, “She’s my friend”, “He’s not my enemy”, “She’s not my enemy”, yeah? We’re friends here doing this life together, supporting each other, creating win/win situations here.

Francesca Gentille: Mm, Rabia that is so beautiful. So often, whether it’s with a friend, whether it’s with a beloved, whether it’s with a family member, we can forget, “Oh wait, underneath this all really you are my friend. Underneath all of this, you know, drama and trauma and fear of what I might over give or lose, really you’re my friend.” And that’s such a beautiful visualization, to look into another’s eyes, hold hands, just get present for a moment to that friend, the friend in the soul of the other.

Rabia Erduman: Right.

Francesca Gentille: You know, Rabia, it’s been a total delight to have you here on this show, and I hope that we get to have you back again and again, and I’m so glad that I got to meet you through my mentor Steven Brazeman, who also has wonderful interviews here on Sex: Tantra and Kama Sutra. But how would people get a hold of you? How can they learn more about you and connect with your work?

Rabia Erduman: They can visit my website and Steven and I teach couples tantra workshops together also. So my web address, it’s a strange one, it’s wuweiwu, w-u-w-e-i-w-u, dot com. And my phone number is 831-642-2358.

Francesca Gentille: Mm, and you were mentioning to me that some of these visualizations you actually have on tape for people.

Rabia Erduman: That’s right, I wrote a book, it’s my own healing journey in a fairytale form, and I have full guided imagery of CD’s, like my voice guiding you through journeys with some music in the background. One of them is Chakra, Chakra Journey. And then I have a relaxation CD, a meditation CD, an inner guide CD. So the Chakra Journey is really very big part of the tantric work.

Francesca Gentille: Hmm. Thank you so much for living this life, for being on this journey, for being the embodied healer, the lifelong learner, the precious soul that you are, and thank you for being with us on the show.

Rabia Erduman: Thank you so much Francesca. This was fun. This was very delightful.

Francesca Gentille: And I want to thank you, our listening audience, for being on this journey with us because we know that you are and we know that we’re all connected in bringing more harmony, more wholeness, more holiness into our planet in all we do, especially in our relationship and our sexuality. And if you want to learn more about Rabia, read her bios, see her beautiful picture, get connected to her and her work or find out about more, about me, my bio and my work, you can do that at www.personallifemedia.com, www.personallifemedia.com, Sex: Tantra and Kama Sutra: Bringing You The Soul Of Sex.