Episode 85 - ANCIENT EROTIC WISDOM – WORLD SACRED SEX with Francesca Gentille
ANCIENT EROTIC WISDOM - WORLD SACRED SEX with Francesca Gentille, SSC. Award winning co-author of "The Marriage of Sex & Spirit," Sex Counselor, Cross Cultural Minister, Director of "The Sacred Courtesan School of Feminine Mystique & Power," section leader for "The American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors, & Therapists." And Guest Host: Inara De Luna, Director of the Temple of the Red Lotus, Priestess of Sacred Sexuality, published author, practitioner of Native American Drum & Chant.
In this episode, Inara offers catalyzing questions while Francesca illuminates the ancient world of sacred sex. Uncover the naturalness of sacred sexuality as your birth right. Learn the scientific wisdom of the body as teacher. Discover how to integrate ancient sacred sexuality into your home tradition. Delight in the blessings of the sacred secret garden of sexuality in the Middle East, China, and Europe. Pillow Book OR Taoist Sexuality, Kama Sutra OR Tantra: Learn the mysterious difference between sacred sex manuals, and the path of the sacred. Be called to the divine in the already always sacredness of life & love.
At every instant and from every side, resounds the call of Love:
We are going to sky, who wants to come with us? - Rumi
Transcript
Transcript
Francesca Gentille: Welcome to Sex, Tantra and Kama Sutra, bringing you the soul of sex. I’m usually your host, Francesca Gentille, but today I’m going to be interviewed by a wonderful guest interviewer Inara de Luna. Inara practices in Atlanta Georgia and parts of the rest of the country. And Inara has been a priestess of sacred sexuality for almost ten years. She runs discussion groups, training programs, Native American drumming. She’s also working toward her license as a marital family therapist, and I am delighted to have her here with us today. Welcome Inara.
Inara de Luna: Hi Francesca. It’s so good to be here.
Francesca Gentille: And, you know, you and I are cooking up wonderful things and teleseminars on healing with sacred arrows, and I’m so excited that you’re willing to today interview me and get your feet wet in the interviewing world about the wide world of inner sacred sexuality and magical sexuality. So what do you have to ask me today?
Inar de Luna: Well, you know, I come from a Pagan background, and so a lot of what I know about sacred sexuality comes from that perspective. And I know a lot of people have heard about tantra, which comes to us from East India, and I’m wondering if you can tell us anything about some of the other sacred sexuality practices that come to us from other cultures in other areas of the world. For instance, did the ancient Europeans have anything like sacred sexuality?
Francesca Gentille: Well I love that you asked that, and I want to weave in a little bit about how you introduced yourself as well as Pagan, is that the term pagan originally meant the country dweller, the person that was living in, more in harmony with the earth. It wasn’t something that was technically against Christianity or against any other way of being. It was really looking at how can we live in harmony with. And as things happen, we often get into arguments and wars and debates around our differences, and in this show we really like to come into harmony around what we have in common and how we can learn from one another. So the ancient Europeans did absolutely have sacred sexuality. They, in a way sacred sexuality is part of our DNA. It’s our birthright. It’s our natural life force that moves through our body. It moves from our genitals up to our hearts, and we naturally want to connect with one another, we’re, it’s literally encoded. I often say what if God didn’t make a mistake? What if goddess didn’t make a mistake? What if our emotions, our desires are actually meant to be sacred? So with the ancient Europeans - which for many of us are in this country have some European blood - if we go back a couple thousand years, we end up with the temples of love; temples to Venice, temples to Aphrodite, temples of Isis, temples of Sybil, where there were beautiful, beautiful traditions – and I know you know – beautiful traditions where people would go to the temple similarly like, you know, we go to church, a sacred place where we want to reconnect with spirit, everything is already always sacred but we have spiritual practices and we have really just ceremonies that remind us to connect with the sacred that’s already always there. And sometimes when we’ve been suffering, we forget about the sacred, when we’re in anger we forget about the sacred, so we go to our churches, we go to our temples, we do our spiritual practices. And in ancient Europe, some of those spiritual practices also included our bodies and our sexuality, where we literally could be touched in ways that helped energy and breath and moved throughout our bodies, that we might see beautiful artwork – some of it still exists today in museums – where we would look at the body, we would look at the genitals and we would say, “That is sacred.” So for all of us, these roots of sacred sexuality really do exist in our own, in our own cultures. And if we know where to look, there’s the archeological shards, I like to say, of sacred sexuality definitely in our artwork, in our language. The word venerate actually comes from the word Venice. So to venerate someone is, is in a sense to see the Venice, to see the goddess of love and beauty in them. Or the God of love and beauty in them.
Inar de Luna: Well great. Well that’s incredibly informative. I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about how the body is sacred and how that, you know, is part of the reconnection process we go to church for, you know, how does the body play into that? Because that’s not something that we generally think about in, you know, today’s culture we go to church to connect with spirit but we don’t connect to our bodies.
Francesca Gentille: I love that you brought that up. In our culture – and I don’t think that it was meant to be this way – we’ve gotten a little top heavy, so to speak; the mind, the mind, the mind. And the ancients believed that the heart was actually the seed of wisdom. And I’m placing my hand right now, and you can try this at home, on my heart chakra, that’s the energetic center in the center of the chest. So the same latitude as the heart itself, but in the center of the chest, and if you place your hand there you kind of feel, “Wait, that’s too high. Oh, that’s a little low. Oh, that’s a beautiful place.” And there’s forty thousand synaptic neurons, so the, you know, we have synaptic neurons in our brain that carry information back and forth. And there’s forty thousand of them in the heart. That’s the largest collection of synaptic neurons outside of the brain. And then we have synoptic neurons after the heart, it’s the gut has the largest concentration, so it’s brain, heart, gut and then along the spine. And that’s where we have that feeling, you know, in the back of our head where we feel like somebody’s looking at us, or our gut truth where we can feel, “Hmm, that doesn’t feel right to me.” Or we feel in our heart, literally our heart feels moved. And then sometimes we have that lump in our throat, that our body is speaking to us, that our body has a wisdom. And I like to think that the ninety percent of the brain that they say that we don’t consciously use is synaptically connected to the universe itself, to all that is, and that like each synapse in my brain is a part of me, yet it’s unique, I myself am a synapse in the consciousness of God, that I am part of the God-ness so to speak of the universe. And my body has a wisdom; it’s speaking to me unknowingly. So I love that even in the Christian tradition now they’re starting to do things like body prayer where the whole body prays and, you know, Yoga, in a sense, is a body prayer. Some… in the East we have walking meditations, the Sufi’s have dancing meditation. Some of us already know that dance can be a prayer for them. And if we think of the body having the potential to pray, the entire body synaptically wired, giving us information and capable of prayer, then sexuality can become a prayer as well, can’t it?
Inar de Luna: I guess it can, yeah. I love how, I love how you’ve gone in the, you know, the scientific side of things in talking about our neurons and or synapses. You know, a lot of the older cultures, you know, like in East India, had the very complex healing modalities that had a deeper understanding of a lot of these things, both the energetic and the more biologic or scientific aspects of healing and sacred sexuality. And so I love how you have seemed to have blended those. I… I’m sorry?
Francesca Gentille: I was just laughing in joy, in joy and delight and breathing in the appreciation. Our world spends a lot of time on criticism, you know, what’s not working, you know…
Inar de Luna: Right.
Francesca Gentille: condemnation, which, you know, John Gottman in his work on marriage says that, you know, criticism, complaints, condemnation and contempt are the killers of relationship, and our world spends very little time on appreciation, adoration, acknowledgment and affection, so I’m just breathing in how wonderful that feels. And I’d love to talk more about some of these, that combination of health and science and ancient knowledge when we come back from a break and a word from our sponsors. And I encourage our listening audience to support our sponsors because as you do it keeps wonderful shows like this 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 with today Francesca Gentille as the guest and Inara de Luna as the host, Inara who is a wonderful priestess of sacred sexuality, who has developed a Qadishtu training program, which is the middle Eastern path of sacred sexuality, and who’s also studying to be a family therapist. We are so lucky to have her. And what other questions do you have for me today Inara?
Inara de Luna: Well Francesca I wanted to ask about some of the Eastern Asian sacred sexuality practices a little bit. I know that China as an ancient, their sex pillow talk, sex talk books that are out there… I can’t remember what it’s called off the top of my head. But there’s a very ancient set of practices from that part of the world, and I was wondering if you could talk about that just a little bit.
Francesca Gentille: I’d love to. And one of the things that Inara just pointed to is that there are these texts called The Pillow Book in China, there’s The Perfumed Garden in the Middle East, in India there is The Kama Sutra, and I want to separate out for us who are listening to this that there is a difference between the books that, in a sense, we might think of today as sex manuals – you know, The Joy of Sex, that may be similar to The Joy of Sex – and the text or the book that would be literally specifically about the sacred teachings. So tantra is a spiritual path. And in China the have Taoism, which is a spiritual path. And in the Middle East they had, as Inara and I love and adore, the had the paths of Inanna and Ishtar and these wonderful spiritual paths of the goddess. And that’s distinct from these The Joy of Sex books in each culture. Now one of the things that’s distinct from these ancient text, these ancient books and today is that in our world today somehow – it’s kind of crazy – somehow we’ve split sexuality away from the sacred. So The Joy of Sex is not, you know, written or imbued with words that say, you know, “Caress your lovers nipple as if it was the fount, you know, the sacred fount of delight.” It is that we might say Joy of Sex, a book like that, is very sex positive, but it’s not all the way into sacred sex positive, where these The Pillow book, The Kama Sutra, The Perfume Garden actually have a cultural, a cultural understanding that sex is already sacred. So I invite us to breathe that in right now, and imagine or envision or breathe in that you have lived in ancient times and that you feet were sacred and they walked the sacred ways, you have soul in the soles of your feet. Your thighs, your buttocks, your genitals, know that that’s sacred, that that’s a part of the divine, and who your are and your desire itself belongs to you as something sacred, a gift from the divine. And breathing up into our belly and our hearts that our feelings, our instincts are sacred. They’re often meant to be listened to as messengers from the divine itself, that our speech moving up and our speech can be sacred, our eyes can see the divine and one another, and our thoughts can also be sacred. So this is the cultural context, the cultural background, that the ancients had; that in this show we’re inviting ourselves to reclaim, is… And then we get to learn the techniques, absolutely. And we get to deepen into a way of being.
Inara de Luna: That’s an excellent point Francesca. Thank you so much for talking about the difference there between the sacred and the sexual and the, you know, the idea that our ancient peoples didn’t separate the two, that sex is culturally understood to be sacred.
Francesca Gentille: It’s already always sacred. Woo hoo!
Inara de Luna: Right. Well and the, I understand too that those early Christianity and early Judaism had sacred sexual elements as part of their overall understanding of the sacred. Could you, you know, share some of the, some of what you know about that?
Francesca Gentille: Yes. It’s so fun. It’s so delicious. I was raised Catholic, and in Catholicism as it is today, especially in the United States, it, there was a sense of judgmentalism and almost a fear about the body. Luckily in the 1960’s, Pope John Paul I believe it is – pardon me Catholics who are better Catholics than I, may know this – he actually wrote a letter saying that sex was not only meant to be used for procreation, for creating babies, but that sex was meant to be used as a connective, a connective force, an intimate force between men and women, and this was a breakthrough. It was a breakthrough in the modern era that sex could be used as an intimate form of communication and connection. However, if we go back five hundred, a thousand, if we go back to the early days of Christianity, the first few hundred years, this negativity about the body, this fear about the body, was not present. Judaism itself… and this so important for us to know because Christianity is founded really in Judaism, that Jesus is Jewish, he was raised in a Jewish cultural understanding, and he was the, we could even say he was the center of God and he had, you know, communication and vision, and yet at the same time he came from a Jewish context and we put the Old Testament, which is the Jewish text, the Jewish book of the Torah, we put that together with the new testament. And in the Jewish tradition sex is sacred, it’s considered a blessing. And they, Jewish people are not given that same guilt around sexuality, it doesn’t exist within Judaism. And one of the most beautiful, beautiful, you know, in a sense sensual love poems ever written was, it’s the Song of Songs or the Song of Solomon, and one of the phrases is “Let me kiss you with the kisses of my mouth, for your love is more wonderful than wine. The oils of your body are fragrant. The sound of your name is perfume. No wonder the young women love you.”
Inara de Luna: So you’re saying that poem is actually more literal than metaphorical. Is that correct?
Francesca Gentille: Absolutely, it’s both, because once again if we say that sexuality is sacred… So we’re trying this on, “Sexuality is sacred”, then I get to say, “Your lips drip honey. Honey and milk lie under your tongue. And the fragrance of your clothes are the fragrance of Lebanon”, and I get to say that and I get to feel… You know, when you think of your beloved and you say, “Oh, my beloved has such beautiful breasts” or “My beloved has such a gorgeous butt or such great eyes”, and I think of my beloved, I feel this rush of energy going through my body. It literally boosts my immune system. And the ancients knew that love, the fire of love was very close to religious ecstasy, and there are even some who have studies some ancient teaching, especially India, that seem to say that it was the orgasm itself, that timeless moment of being connected to all that is, that was the beginning of religion.
Inara de Luca: Wow! So it’s not (unintelligible).
Francesca Gentille: Yeah, it’s not separate. There’s a wonderful book called Love Poems to God, and it has everything from Christian mystics in the middle ages to Sufi sticks to, you know, Hindu, and it’s amazing that even though these mystics are from different cultures – and a mystic is someone who adores God, who loves God, who lets themselves be taken. You know they’ll be swept away with their love for God. And that these mystics from these different traditions all are speaking the same language; if you didn’t know, then you wouldn’t know that one was Arab or one was East Indian or one was, you know, from Italy or one was from France, because the beauty, it’s literally that place where God becomes the beloved. And the terms are extremely sensual. So what if there doesn’t need to be separation? Our body is prayer, our ecstasy belongs to God. And we can feel that way about God and we can have a portal to the divine by my love for you that can take me to that place of loving everything.
Inara de Luca: That’s beautiful. I love it. Well I have two other question. One is you mentioned the Sufi’s and I believe they’re middle Eastern Arabic, is that correct. Is the Sufi…
Francesca Gentille: Yeah, they’re, if we think of Christian mystics as part of the Christian tradition, then the Sufi mystics are part of the Islamic tradition, they are… and I want to talk more about that, I want to hear your question after we come back from a break.
Inara de Luca: Okay.
Francesca Gentille: and a word from our fabulous sponsors. So we’re going to be right back.
Francesca Gentille: Welcome back to Sex, Tantra and Kama Sutra: Bringing You the Soul of Sex. With me, Francesca, your fabulous guest today and Inara de Luna, our delicious host interviewer. And Inara I think you had a question for me before we went to break.
Inara de Luna: I do. It’s related to the Islamic traditions. You know, of course the place that we know today as Iraq and Iran were the birth place of the goddess Inanna of the Sumerian traditions where a lot of sacred sexuality temples were erected. And of course today there’s a lot of ignorance and misunderstanding around Islam and, you know, they way they treat their women and the way that they cover their women’s bodies and all of that. So what I wanted to ask, you had mentioned that the Sufi’s have some of these love poems to God. What, how can we think of, you know, the sacred sexuality around Islam? Can that help us to understand a little bit more about the divine love that’s actually part of that religion?
Francesca Gentille: You know, we can. It’s important to understand that in any religion, including Christianity, including, you know, the Pagani, the earth based religions, including the Muslim or Islamic religions, there are people of spirit, of love and of compassion that are the guides of their tradition. And then there are people that are living more sincere. And there’s, something that happens when we live from love and compassion, and there’s something else that happens when we live from truth. And I really want us to breathe in that religion itself is not the problem, sometime we have a tendency to blame religion, you know, sort of as if we were to meet someone from a particular country, we met one person from a certain country and that person was rude and then we said all Americans are rude.
Inara de Luna: True.
Francesca Gentille: Or, you know, all Italians are rude. And within every tradition there is beauty is to think that God or God-ness are the consciousness of the divine, is part of everything, then it would make sense that we would each have a choice of whether we connect with that or not and that each religion has gifts of beauty. So I invite us to look at that with Islam. We really don’t understand, and to also be aware that our news media is very slanted. And it’s understandable; it gets slanted to make us look great, you know, and to have other cultures maybe look not so great and that’s very common, you know, how we are, we might speak really highly of our own children and somehow might slightly put down other children. And there’s a natural tendency to pick a group – whether it’s our family or me – and elevate them and sometimes put down others. So our news media is slanted. And I’ve actually met women and men from Iran, from Iraq, beautiful, beautiful people who say that in their families, in their homes women are revered. And Mohamed himself, he loved his life and he loved his daughter. So there’s, depending on how the family practices. Some families really elevate the feminine, and women have a lot of honor and a lot of respect, and that sense of veiling is not necessarily meant to be, you know, you have to be controlled, but almost more of a sense of keeping things safe or precious. You know, it’s a very ancient tradition in the Middle East and parts of Europe to have the sacred secret garden. You know, the inner garden where you look at the house from the outside and it perhaps looks very plain, and then you go inside and it gets more and more beautiful. And in the center of the home is this beautiful garden and this beautiful fountain, and the most precious things were kept private for those that whom we really love. So it’s a different way of looking at it. And there’s a wonderful book for people who want to know more about this called Grandmother’s Secrets, and it’s written by a woman from Iran. I actually met her, she’s gorgeous, she was teaching us Middle Eastern dance, and she talked about the beauty of when the women spend time with each other, and wouldn’t you just tell your girlfriend, by the time she was done I’m thinking, “I want to live in a harem with other women. I don’t like it here.” And so, you know, it’s great here. And we get to understand that every culture has its beautiful things and every culture has its limiting things. So definitely in the Middle East. And there is this root, Inara just talked about the roots, ancient, ancient roots in the Middle East of Innana, of Ishtar, of this very, very sacred sexual marriage called The Heat of Gamas where marriage was considered a divine act, and that’s still true, in the Middle East, in those, the Muslim traditions and in the Jewish traditions, that marriage is considered just a blessed thing, sacred thing, and that when a husband and wife make love, that that is a blessing to the world. And in the Jewish tradition they light candles on Friday night and they bring in the feminine face of the goddess, the feminine face of God, the Shahina. And the woman passes her hands across the candle flame and brings in the divine spirit into her own body, and it’s considered soul sacred if a husband and wife make love on a Friday night. And oddly enough Friday is also Freyja, it’s dedicated to goddess of love; you know, Vietanas, Vandra De, dedicated to Venus, in different languages, they’re (unintelligible) these words as their sacred sexuality.
Inara de Luna: Well thank you Francesca. I wanted to thank you for reminding us about over-generalizing and, you know, to remember to really have a wider perspective when we’re thinking about other cultures, which is a very good lesson to remember. And, you know, we’ve discussed several different practices and cultures and beliefs from around the world. I want to bring it back home a little bit and ask you one last question. How can, well Christians in this country today incorporate some of the sacred sexuality practices from these other cultures into their own love lives without compromising or giving up their own core religious beliefs?
Francesca Gentille: I think that’s so important, is to be discerning eclepticists for gathering information and practices from around the world and yet have a core. When I was studying at the Jesuit University at Market in Milwaukee I took a class on the theology of prayer in practice. And here I was in a Catholic Jesuit University, and yet we looked at meditation and we looked at sacred dancing and we looked at Yoga and we looked at various cultures and the way that they meditated or prayed and said, “How can this support and inform and deepen our own Catholicism and basically deepen our connection to the divine?” Our connection to divine, in me, in you, in my relationship with my sweetheart, that’s what I want to deepen. So I can be rooted in whatever tradition I’m rooted in. You know, I can have my home culture and background that is so precious to me, and yet… Similar to a cook, that maybe I, I was raised Italian, so I cook Italian, but over time I’ve learned to use East Indian spices, I’ve learned to kind of twist it up in certain ways and maybe do a corn tortilla pizza, so that, so that I’m still Italian, I still love my Italian roots, but now I’m expanding the pleasure and delight of food and I’m still Italian. So whatever tradition we are, I invite us to look at, look at these love poems. I’m looking at one right now, “At this very instant and from every side resounds the call of love. We are going to the sky. Who wants to come with us?” And that’s from Rumi. And so that we can look at every tradition and say, “How can the Sufi’s, the Tantricas, the Quadistu Middle Eastern priestesses, the, how can each tradition give me a kernel of divine joy and truth that I can bring back into my heart, into my genitals, into my voice and bring more love to my beloved. So stay in your tradition and look for the roots of it. For Christians, I recommend the medieval mystics; St. John of the Cross, Ventura’s of Ovala. I recommend looking at some of those very early, the first few hundred years, of the Christian church when women were also allowed to be (unintelligible), where women along with Christ, Elizabeth and Sarah, helped travel with him, they helped fund him. You look at some of those things that allow us to feel a delight, if we’re Christian, in our Christianhood, if we’re Islamic to look at Mohamed and his lovely relationship with his wife and his honoring of his daughter, and to embrace that in our, in Islamic faith, there, The Perfumed Garden, that we get to adore sexuality and we get to open our heart. So whatever tradition that we’re in, look at our own tradition, and also be open to the universal pearls of divine truth that have been sort of seeded, have been planted in other traditions as well.
Inara de Luna: Wonderful. Thank you so much Francesca. This has been a lot of fun and very entertaining, as well as informative and I’m so happy to have had the chance to interview you about all of these different cross-cultural sacred sexual practices and how we can incorporate them into our own lives regardless of what our core religious or spiritual beliefs are.
Francesca Gentille: And one of the things I want to make sure that people get a hold of both you and me. So how would people find you Inara if they wanted to learn more about the Middle Eastern temple traditions?
Inara de Luna: The easiest way to get to me is through my website, which is www.templeredlotus.com. And from there they can find my bio, tag a link to my email or they can find all my social network connections on like Face Book and MySpace and Twitter and a bunch of other places. But start at my website and go from there.
Francesca Gentille: And for our listening audience, I just want to thank you so much for being on this path of the sacred with us. Inara and I will be teaching Healing With Sacred Arrows, which is a teleseminar, and if you miss it you can also get the taped version of this teleseminar, and it’s really about those of us who want to be more of the sacred human force and this is for clinicians, body workers, therapists and some lovers. And we want to thank you for joining us on Sex, Tantra and Kama Sutra: Bringing You the Soul of Sex. If you want transcripts, you can find them at www.personallifemedia.com. That’s www.personallifemedia.com.