Episode 89 - TALES OF A SACRED PROSTITUTE with Selena Truth

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 Selena Truth. Selena has worked as a sacred prostitute for over nine years, and she started a temple. Today she is a sexual healer and an erotic pleasures coach. And I’m delighted to have her with us and to be in this reclaiming something so important, which is that the sacredness of this concept prostitution. I know it’s edgy for some of our listening audience and I want to read something from Dr. Kenneth Ray Stubbs book, Women of the Light: The New Sacred Prostitute, about this exchange that our culture’s so frightened of. He says, “In some way most of us enter somewhere into the equation of time, attention, affection, security, and other indirect exchanges for sexual connection, marriage being the most predominant form in our culture. What makes this sacred prostitute, the women and men of the light unique, is that they exchange consciously. Throughout the centuries and across cultures they might have been known as sacred prostitute or temple priestess or sexual healer or sacred whore or tantrica or fire woman or fire man. Even more important, they provide a context of compassion and wisdom in exchange for goods or services. They’re teachers of the heart. They’re visionaries stepping outside the constricted traditional beliefs about women or about men, and their bodies are their temples to which they invite others. Their purpose is to support the deeper discovery of the spiritual flame that burns within us all. Sexual energy itself in a broad sense is this spiritual flame.” Welcome Selena, and is this something that you resonate when you are, you know, living your life as a sacred prostitute or writing your amazing book, Tales of the Sacred Prostitute?

Selena Truth: Oh yes. Yes, that book actually was my original inspiration. I read it many years before I ever got up the nerve to become a sacred prostitute, but something in me resonated, I felt, I felt an excitement run through my body when I, when I read that and this kind of curiosity and longing for that, but it took, it took a lot of years before I got up the nerve to do it, because I’m a product of this culture, you know, and this culture does not recognize prostitution as holy, which is something that….

Francesca Gentille

: Lets look a little deeper into that, ‘cause I think that there’s a big issue and, you know, and part of me from the paradigm of our culture just tightens at the word ‘prostitute’. And I want to let people know that the word ‘prostitute’ in its Latin word means to stand in on behalf of. And so a secular prostitute or kind of a mundane prostitute would stand in on behalf of the girlfriend or the wife or the lover. But that a sacred prostitute literally stands in on behalf of the divine…

Selena Truth: Mm hmm.

Francesca Gentille

: that there’s the divine connection that this sacred prostitute is standing in for, is channeling in. And lets look at this. Lets look at this Selena. What are these fears? Like, what has us feel from this kind of old way of thinking that prostitution’s evil? What do you think we’re afraid of?

Selena Truth: Well, we’re afraid of being shamed, I think. I know when I first started the first year or so, I would walk into some place like a Safe Way or, you know, some place in public and I would look around at the people and just wonder what they would think of me if they knew what I was doing and imagine the condemnation, that, the moral judgment. And I think that that touches something really deep, you know, this fear of being isolated from the tribe, from being shunned. You know, it’s, and even more deeply than that, you know, also they, the history of burning at the stake, of being stoned as an adulteress, you know, it’s dangerous to step out of the norms in many ways…

Francesca Gentille: Well, lets go even deeper in a way than that, because that’s, I mean, and I want to breathe that in… What Selena is talking about is that for a woman, a sacred woman, a spritiual woman, to say that she feels called to bring forth spirit through her body and perhaps through her genitals or to the genitals of others, she’s literally constricting and fearing that she’s going to be burned at the stake or shamed, and we wonder why, you know, women are confusing to me and why they’re confusing to themselves and why there’s this Madonna whore concept and why we’re so disconnected from one another and push/pull about sex. And I want to go into the other side of that; it’s not only the side of the fear of being in it, but the side of, the side of a cultural wounding. But I’m going to invite us to breathe this in, the cultural wounding that says that sex in and of itself is somehow evil, bad, wrong or shameful. That sex in and of itself is evil and somehow will lead us to the devil and this whole concept that the body itself, rather than a creation of God, a reflection of the divine as in the Sistine Chapel, that rather than that God made a mistake; oops. God, you know, somehow made a mistake about sexuality and everything else about is divine, the world is a divine reflection of God and sex is somehow, you know, evil and shameful, and this is not – I really want us to breathe this in – this was not a part of Judhism, this was not a part of any religion of any culture that we live in; if we’re Japanese, if we’re Chinese, if we’re Native American, if we’re European, if we Middle Eastern or Shametic, every single culture that we came from had thousands and thousand and thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of years – twenty, thirty thousands of years – where sex is considered sacred and that it’s only the last maybe fifteen hundred years, compared to thirty thousand, where somehow – I don’t want to blame anyone in particular – but somehow this got really twisted around and we got killed, shamed, told we were going to hell, over sexuality itself. And I think this is an under pinning of, you know, how could you possibly have prostitution be sacred when sex itself, you know, to start with is evil.

Selena Truth: Mm hmm, mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah. And I think a lot of the shift had to do with shifting, it was a financial consideration, shifting the lines of descent to the male, and in order to, for the men to understand and to know whose children there were they needed to create some kind of control of the woman, and the best way of control is through creating a kind of moralistic “You’re going to go to hell if you do this”, you know, creating it deep in the fibers of our being that we are bad, wrong, shameful, condemned women if we are sexual with anyone but our husbands, and that that was a really great way to govern the lines of descent and to know that that child is indeed that man’s child. And I think it was tricky, you know, it was like…

Francesca Gentille: And the other side of that is the men end up being split, that Madonna whore, so they end up being split…

Selena Truth: Mm hmm.

Francesca Gentille: where they can’t actually be vital and primal and sexy and sexual and expressive with this good girl…

Selena Truth: Mm hmm.

Francesca Gentille: that they’re supposed to marry…

Selena Truth: Mm hmm.

Francesca Gentille: she’s a good girl…

Selena Truth: Mm hmm.

Francesca Gentille: And she’s supposed to be kept sort of safe from the primal sexual urges, except for the moments when they’re trying to procreate, and then all of his dirty stuff, which it’s dirty too, can only be take to another dirty woman…

Selena Truth: Mm hmm.

Francesca Gentille: And now he’s split if he’s going out, you know, he’s, he has these urges, they’re so strong that now they’re dirty. And if he even expresses them he feels dirty. It’s so, it’s so painful what this mindset has done. And I also want to bring in that there’s a normal fear - you know, I think we’re always afraid of losing our partner. I think there’s a normal fear, “Oh my goodness, if my partner goes to, you know, an erotic provider, a sexual healer what if they fall in love with that person? What if they leave me? What if they leave me either emotionally or physically?”

Selena Truth: Mm hmm.

Francesca Gentille: And, you know, I want to breathe in that that’s a tender place. It’s a tender place to fear losing somebody…

Selena Truth: Yes.

Francesca Gentille: It’s a, and it’s a, and what would you say about that as someone whose been the sacred erotic provider?

Selena Truth: Mm hmm.

Francesca Gentille: You know, is it your experience that people come to you and they have less to bring back into their lives, that they fall in love with you, that you run off with you clients? I mean is that your experience or…

Selena Truth: No, not at all. I actually worked with a lot of men who were married and some of them came to me without the knowledge of their wives. I wrote about one of those experiences in my book actually about, he was a very typical man in a relationship that was pretty sterile and his wife wasn’t interested in sex anymore, and he came to me because he was so lonely and he wanted to stay together with his wife; he didn’t want to have an affair. He didn’t want to have the emotional entanglements of an affair, you know, that would tempt him to leave his wife. He wanted to stay with his wife. But he was faced with fairly, the choices that he had were not, were really hard choices to make. He could choose to shut his energy down completely because she wasn’t interested. Or he could choose to have an affair and then maybe fall in love and then what would happen to the relationship. So he chose to come to me to have a little bit of connection and companionship and some erotic energy moving through his body that would keep him enlivened and vital, because when you shut your energy down it’s very, you know, it deadens the body. And so my sense is that in doing that he would go back home with less neediness to his wife. He would go, he would be a little more softened and a little more relaxed and more heart opening because often men’s hearts open when the sexual energy starts moving, so he could take that open heart back to his wife to, and be sweet to her and nice to her. And so, you know, it was, there are many different levels, many, I mean probably each client I saw is a different story. There’s also…

Francesca Gentille: You know, I want to hear more about the stories - I do so much – after we come back from a break and a word from our sponsors. And I just wanted to let our listening audience know to please support our sponsors because that allows shows like this to keep coming to you. And we’ll be back in just a moment with the fabulous Selena Truth.

Francesca Gentille: Welcome back to Sex, Tantra and Kama Sutra: Bringing You The Soul of Sex, with the delicious Selena Truth, author of Tales of the Sacred Prostitute. And Selena, I’m so sorry, I get kind of confused sometimes when I’m listening between sacred and secular prostitute. When you said that the married man came to you and it opened his heart because it could be, you know, in some ways sexually intimate with you; how is that different than going to a regular prostitute?

Selena Truth: Well, I think the difference is that there, I am acting as a channel for the goddess. You know, before someone comes in to a session, you know, I set up a sacred space, I have an alter in the room, I light candles, I say prayers, I invoke the goddess to work through me to use my body as her instrument. And so my intent is not just to get somebody off, to make them, you know, to have an exotic sexual experience, although there’s nothing wrong with that. But my intent is to bring through what it is that they really need. Do they need healing? Do they need a taste of the sacred? Do they need… One of my favorite ways of working with being this sacred prostitute is planting seeds of enlightenment. There’s…

Francesca Gentille: Ooh, what does that mean?

Selena Truth: Well there’s a moment, a lot of men would come to me, I was barely on the front lines as a kind of a missionary; I view myself as a tantric missionary. And so a lot of men would come to me with really not much idea of what a sacred prostitute was. They would come to me because they thought they could hace some exotic sexual experience. And so I would give them that and then there’s these few moments at the end when they are lying there in this incredible bliss that they’ve never experienced before, and yet I can drop in a little seed of “This is yours any time you want it. All you have to do is take a breath and this moment is here, this piece is here.” Or, you know, I would, it depended on the person. I would plant, “You are beautiful just the way you are. This is divine energy”, or whatever the message was, it was very individualized. But there’s an opening that happens when a man allows himself to go deeply into a sexual experience, and I would use that opening to plant the seeds. And I often heard later that, “You know you said something two years ago and I’m still thinking about that.” And what,  you know, and ask me about it now; it would take that long sometimes, but…

Francesca Gentille: Wow!

Selena Truth: Yeah.

Francesca Gentille: It did take that long. And I want to bring that, highlight that for our listening audience because it’s so important, is that after we make love with one another in our own temple bedroom, there’s that moment afterwards that can kind of make or break the experience. It’s kind of the completion, the last chapter of the book so to speak, and the, I love that you say that in those moments as we hold our lover, we can speak a word of blessing, a word of appreciation, that can begin to seed more beauty in our own relationships. And one of the things that I want us to try on as we’re listening, listening audience, is how could I be a sacred prostitute, male or female, in my own home? How could I be the healer in my own home? A part of me thinks, “I’d like to go to a sacred prostitute, male or female”, and there are ones for women as well; sacred healers, erotic healers, erotic providers. It’s wonderful to go to a professional, and it’s great to bring this into our own homes…

Selena Truth: Yeah.

Francesca Gentille: And Selena, I would love, two things; I would love to talk about this more, how people bring it into their homes and maybe even your own life story, in your home how that healing, you know, being the priestess of love in your own home made a difference. And also I wanted to ask one other thing - and we’re going to go to a quicker break this time - about religion. I heard you say you brought in the goddess, so does someone need to believe in a goddess or to leave their religion to bring this kind of sacred energy into their lives or to work with a sacred erotic provider?

Selena Truth: You want me to answer that right now?

Francesca Gentille: Yeah. We’ll answer that one and then we’ll go to break.

Selena Truth: Okay. Well, I think it’s compatible with many different kinds of religion if there’s, if there’s a fundamental disbelief in anything but one particular viewpoint of God, then there might be a problem. But, you know, when I talk about the goddess, what I’m really talking about is the feminine expression, you know. I often see we live in a world of duality, male and female, and the female has gotten devalued over the last few thousand years, but I’m not, I’m talking about the goddess as the life enhancing, body enhancing, body worshipping, all those, it’s like heaven and earth and the goddess is like the earth. It’s holy like the earth is.

Francesca Gentille: Oh, beautiful, beautiful. And we’ll come back with more how to be this sacred healing force in your own temple bedroom after a break and a word from our fabulous sponsors.

Francesca Gentille: Welcome to Sex, Tantra and Kama Sutra, welcome back. And we’re still talking with – I’m so excited. We’re still talking to Selena Truth, who is the author of Tales of the Sacred Prostitute: Revelation of How Sexual Energy Heals. And we’re at that very exciting point where we were saying how do we bring this home and have you had experience of either being the priestess of love in your temple bedroom or having your beloved being the priest of love for you, that personal experience, and can you share how that works at home?

Selena Truth: Yes, I’d be delighted. I have had that experience and the thing that first came up to me when you spoke of it earlier was an experience where I got to receive that holy energy from my beloved. When I came home, when I was doing that I gave so much that it was really a great balancer to come in and receive. And I think – there’s so many ways that you can do that – but I think the most important aspect is the intent, the consciousness to bring an attitude of the sacred and of holding a container for your beloved. So like in this example that I remembered, I’d had kind of a hard time working with clients. I had a client who treated me disrespectfully and, which is part of bumping up of cultures, trying to hold the energy of the sacred prostitute in a world that doesn’t understand it yet. So I came home feeling a little wounded and battered emotionally, and I asked for some healing from my beloved. And he just energetically created a cocoon around me and held me and stroked me and let me cry, and one of the things that is so healing about sexual energy is that it’s a catalyst, it’s, you know, and a chemical reaction; a catalyst speeds up the reaction and that’s true for sexual energy, is sexual energy is moving and there’s any emotions that need to be released they’re going to get stirred up and they’re going to move to the surface more quickly, and that’s one of the ways that sexual energy is the most healing is that it, you know, it acts to bring up those things that might be harder to access in other arenas, and that’s especially true if you have a partner who is ready to hold that space for you to do that who is welcoming all of you and all the parts, even the… You know, a lot of us think that it’s not appropriate to cry when you’re having sex, you’re just supposed to be ecstatic and that’s the only possible expression aloud. But there’s a whole range of expression, there’s a whole range of feelings. And so creating the space, the opening for someone to cry or to rage or to be fearful, and when there is that opening space for that it moves through pretty quickly and clears the way for more joy and more ecstatacy and more aliveness. So I mean there’s many ways you can technically do that by lighting candles or burning incense or playing certain music or, you know, something that creates the environment of the sacred, but the most important part is the openness, the willingness to hold the container for the other person.

Francesca Gentille: And as you say that, “hold the container”, what I’m hearing, and I just want to check in, is that in a way that we’re taking turns. So if I’m your priestess of love tonight, then tonight you’re totally safe. You can totally relax, and I’m going to be listening, listening, listening so closely to your breath, feeling into your energy. I’m not going to do anything before I get either a verbal response from you or a physical response, an energetic response, that what I’m doing with you and to you is supporting you, is nourishing you, is healing you, and I am, you know, tonight beloved, this is all for you, and I release attachment or expectation of how that might look. And is that what you mean by saying “holding a sacred container” for the other?

Selena Truth: Yes. Yes, exactly. That was well said.

Francesca Gentille: But, you know, this is so, this is beautiful Selena, and I just really want to acknowledge and honor you because we haven’t talked about everything about you; it’s a, you know, kind of an everyday woman from Virginia who led a normal life, who, you know, was, wanted to be a healthcare provider in so many ways, and yet had this calling, this deep calling to heal our culture around sexuality. And I know personally that you do this for, with couples, with men, with women. It’s not just about, “Ooh, how could I be this for men, you know, some sexy archetype”, it’s a profound calling. And how can people get ahold of you and find out more about you? How would they do that?

Selena Truth: Well I have a website. It’s called talesofthesacredprostitute.com - that’s the name of my book as well – and you can contact me through there. There’s a contact link. If you go to that website I have a free download of a chapter that didn’t make it into the book that you can get just for going there; so that’s my little gift to you if you would like to take that, I would be honored.

Francesca Gentille: Thank you. Thank you so much Selena for being that missionary, for paving the way for all of us to step more fully into being the priestess or priest of love in our lives and bringing more holiness into sexuality in this world.

Selena Truth: Thank you too. Thank you for what you’re doing as well.

Francesca Gentille: And I want to thank you our listening audience. I really invite you to connect with Selena, to get her beautiful book, she has a blog as well. And if you want to get transcripts from this show, if you want to see her picture and get connected to her website, find out about me and my private practice, you can do that at www.personallifemedia.com. That’s www.personallifemedia.com, Sex, Tantra and Kama Sutra: Bringing You The Soul of Sex.