Episode 96 - THE TRUE NATURE OF SENSUALITY with Renaissance Woman Sharron Rose

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 Sharron Rose.  Sharron is an amazing multi faceted ongoingly creative woman with an incredible life who is the author of the book The Path of the Priestess, a DVD Yoga of Light, who’s just about to release the film Infinity, and who also is the director of 2012: The Odyssey and the film Timewave 2013. She is a filmmaker, she’s a worldwide film distributor and a scholar of ancient traditions throughout the world, as well as the first American disciples of Sitara Devi, and I’m so delighted to have her here with us. Welcome Sharron.

Sharron Rose: It is a pleasure to be with you. Your show is about one of my favorite subjects.

Francesca Gentille: Isn’t it just? It’s that rich combination of sex and soul and body and spirit and which your life has been such a journey. And it continues to be such a journey about and with and bringing us information. And I wanted to ask you, ‘cause there’s so much I could really talk to you about, what’s really alive in you today? What do you want to share with our listening audience?

Sharron Rose: I really would like to talk about the nature of perception of what it means to be a sensuous person in the west is one subject. And what is sensuality, as opposed to, you know, the overt sexuality. For me sexuality is a divine gift. Sensuality is the feeling of being totally present in the physical body, the senses fully opened and expanded, and every molecule in your being becomes alive with the vital energy of creation or we would call it shakti in the east, the divine feminine current. I mean the reason we’re in bodies is so we can feel, so that we can use, you know, our senses to experience the beauty and power of the blessings of our existence. And I think that understanding that is one of the first steps to true nature of sensuality. It has nothing to do with controlling other people, dominating other people. It is a sacred gift. Sexuality between, you know, partners is one of the greatest mechanisms for reaching enlightenment actually. But in the west…

Francesca Gentille: Well lets slow this down a little bit ‘cause there’s, I want to be sure that we’re taking this in because this is big, is that what I hear you saying that sensuality is and it’s purpose is to have us be our embodied souls, to be here on the planet, to open to life itself and to feel. But in a sense it’s sensuality is our life itself or could be.

Sharron Rose: That’s right. Well the problem that I see now is, especially after speaking with the Shaman healer Alberto Villoldo and Jose Argauaes, and Rianne Isler and others about the nature of, you know, some people call it the cultural trance, the dream spell, she called it, Rianne Isler called it the dominator trance… I think, you know, it goes back to when, the whole denial of the body, you know, as a vessel for spiritual enlightenment, denial of nature, denial of the feminine, a, how we have been cut off from nature herself. I mean, most people, many people today are, you know, walk around with a bluetooth in their ear and are not even present in their body, and I think this has caused some serious problems. We can see them; they’re here everyday. And for me, you know, I’m always being asked because of my association with the 2012 prophecies, you know, “Well what can we do? What needs to happen?” We are clearly in times of great shifting and great turmoil; you just have to open your eyes – and great, and a lot of suffering. And I feel that the way to deal with that is, as you said, open our heart to each other, look into each others eyes and see that we’re all longing, longing for connection, and what is true connection. And also we have to begin by reconnecting with nature herself because just as our physical body exists, the body of the earth is the body of the God, we are one with the earth, we cannot exist without the earth. And so once again, and I feel it happening particularly, you know, there are young people I’ve been, that have been appearing in my life that really are, have desire for teaching and have desire to understand the true nature of sensuality and sexuality and relationships and are, have been very confused by, you know, what they’re getting from MTV and all these other media projections that really bring sexuality as a very overt sensationalist activity that has nothing to do with the heart.

Francesca Gentille: You know, that is a huge problem, the way that tantra and sacred sexuality are really marketed in this country, have, or in the west – not just in the United States but in the west – is this, you know, quick fix to a faulty sex life, whether you don’t have one or whether the one you have isn’t working. And that it’s really, it’s that tantra and the path of sacred sexuality, which you said earlier, is an embodied path to divine union, is something so much bigger than sex itself, it’s a real spiritual path. And I want to talk more about what that is from the vantage point of your experience, because I just have to tell you, to our listening audience, that Sharron has had such an incredible life and has studied in India and has worked with amazing teachers and really has had opportunities that some of us can only dream of and I really look forward to your telling us more about what the tantra and the sacred sexuality is, the sacred living path is, when we come back from a break and a word from our fabulous sponsors, who we encourage you to support so that shows like this can 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 with Sharron Rose, filmmaker, author, a dancer, sacred being extraordinaire, a disciple of Sitara Devi, I mean just so many things. And I had asked you before the break from the vantage point of your up close and personal experience with amazing teachers around the world, where is the west going off base and what is this path really about?

Sharron Rose: The path is really about deep connection. It’s about love, it’s about compassion, it’s about power, but power from a sense of integrity. It’s not about the deception. You know, there are all these stories about, you know, the old stories of the witches, which are ridiculous and, you know, it goes really, I would say goes back to the whole Adam and Eve, the fall situation where, you know, it’s somehow Eve’s fault that everything is gone wrong, which is ridiculous ‘cause she was just looking for knowledge. So I feel that that’s changing on the grassroots level, but when I – I don’t watch television very often and I was in a hotel recently and turned it on and it was, I couldn’t believe what was going on there; it looked like, you know, just dark, very dark. And that isn’t what I was trained… See actually, recently I was at an event where I saw this young woman dressed up as Kali, the goddess Kali, and she was doing a pose in which she had her hands in this devil mudra, you know, gesture, and I was appalled, because it meant that she had no understanding of who this goddess is, if Kali can appear fearsome. You know, she’s, at the same time Kali is the goddess who dispels the demons. She’s not hanging out with the demons; she’s the great mother who gets the, you know gets rid of the demons, shows you the path to true inner strength and integrity and how to work with these demons, whether they be, you know, thoughts in your mind or events that come. So there is a complete misunderstanding that I found in the west because there’s not tradition. I had this great, great privilege, you know, and I’m grateful to, you know, the American government for giving me these fellowships – I wrote these fellowships proposals to go to India – and I had the great opportunity to live with a living legend of North Indian classical dance, Sitara Devi, who was in her 80’s still performing and just won a major award from the Indian government for her contribution. But she also, she taught me, she brought me into a tradition that’s thousands of years old, a tradition of tantra, which means, you know, embodiment. It’s, tantra also means continuum; it’s the continuation of the mind, the nature of the mind that’s always at it’s essence pure and all thoughts become kind of ornaments of the nature of the mind. But, you know, I went into this, I went to live with her and I was in my 30’s, I had gone to college during the feminist movement – I was fighting like everybody else for our rights. At that point when she looked at me she said, “You know, you are dressed like and talked like what I would say as a man. That’s what your culture has taught you. They have not taught you what it means to be a goddess, what it means to really embody the essence of pure femininity.” And over the course of, you know, time she led me down this amazing path of what it really means to be a woman, and particularly in the area of sensuality. It was pretty heavy duty teachings, because I was having to learn how to transform, you know, into all aspects of female, from young virgins to women longing for union with their beloved and women completely saturated with the divine nectar of union and all of these ways of being and interacting. There is a text called the (unintelligible), an ancient text, they call it the (unintelligible), for all Indian dancers in theatre it’s kind of their guidebook, and there are 45 different expressions of the eyes, all connected with an emotional state. And what I was learning was not just the way that the goddess would interact and use her expression, but how that differed from what I had been trained as a woman in the west. And so these teachings had a very powerful affect on me as a woman. As I went deeper into these energies, you know, a part of me couldn’t believe it. The other part was really terrified because I was learning to feel and express deep, deep feminine energies and I had this whole sense of power and magnetism, you know, but at the same time I had not gained what is really important and what is the key to understanding sensuality and sexuality and that’s called discernment. And it’s a very, you know, as I learned to awaken and control these energies, of course I had men attracted more than ever, and I came to realize as they say, you know, with the path of tantra, it is like being handed this stick of dynamite or walking the razors edge, and it takes quite a long time and a lot of self examination to really understand the how to work with this energy in the most loving and positive way possible.

Francesca Gentille: I think that what you bring up is very, very important for our listening audience, is that tantra is meant to be a lifelong spiritual path of which literally having sex may be not a part of it or a small part of it, but that it’s a path of communion and union with our body, our life force, the world itself, the universe itself, in a beautiful dance, and as we vitalize our energy in our body, our connection to all that is, we become very magnetic. We become very alluring, male or female. And that there are practices, which we might touch on after a break, on how we might do that, but there needs to be on the one hand our increasing magnetism attraction and allurement, but on the other hand our increasing discernment and self balancing and managing of our thoughts and our mind. The uninitiated don’t know that thoughts matter and that they literally create reality and affect and guide and direct and the initiated, which are all of you who are listening are the initiated or about to be the initiated, you now know that your thoughts matter and that your life and the lives of others in our world itself follows the directions of your thoughts. So what you’re thinking when you make love, what you’re thinking when you’re dating someone, what you’re thinking when you’re talking to them, are you trying to have power over them or are you living your life as a sacred blessing to yourself and others. And we’ll talk more about how to do that when we come back from a break and a word from our 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 divine Sharron Rose, priestess of the goddess, of the arts, filmmaker, multifaceted woman, still growing, still evolving. And we were just talking about that balance that needs to happen if we’re truly going to be people of integrity, of integration, of wholeness, of holiness, between our magnetism and our allure that is our divine connection and charge and our discernment, our compassion, our passion. Would you be willing to give us some practices? Like some nitty gritty chewy practices on how to do both or either? Whatever you like. Or suggestions, resources… where do we go for more of how to do this?

Sharron Rose: Oh well, the first thing, both my book, The Path of The Priestess: A Guidebook For Awakening The Divine Feminine and Yoga of Light, which is a DVD which I’m transmitting these exercises, are devoted to bringing women – although I’ve had many men who’ve loved the book as well, it helps them understand women. They’re practices that really bring you into the true nature of feminine power, of sensuality and of love and compassion as the, as we define the tripe goddess. And goodness, to begin with you have to turn off the television and the radio and I would say if you really, you know, to begin with you need to go into nature…

Francesca Gentille: Except for listening to our show, of course.

Sharron Rose: Yes. This show’s good. And Sacred Mysteries DVD’s, they’re wonderful.

Francesca Gentille: Yeah. Other than that, consciously choosing very high informational, high educational things is fine, but turning off the junk candy on the radio or TV. So that would be one step. And what else?

Sharron Rose: So then, you know, there are practices all over place. The greatest practice really is awareness. And that comes with that discernment; it’s to be aware. You know take a breath before you take an action. You know, there’s so many…

Francesca Gentille: Is it really that simple? Is it that simple?

Sharron Rose: So many of us that are drawn, you know, especially when you’re young, your hormones are going wild and you’re just like filled with this sexual desire. Well, you know, take a breath before you jump in. Make sure you know who you’re jumping in with. Take it out of the realm of sensationalism in the temples, in the ancient temples where women were the initiators into the sexual mysteries and the mysteries of birth and also death and healing. They, the women were the initiators, the men were being initiated, and it would take a very long time before they performed the actual act of intercourse. It was, there was a deep amount of training, of understanding the nature of pleasure, of understanding on many levels. So there was music, there was dance, there was meditation, there was Yoga, there were specific diets in the Kama Sutra, there were certain times when the stars needed to be aligned in a certain manner and they would eat certain foods and they would do certain offerings and this would be all part of the preparation for this act of union. And also they felt that this was the closest you could get in a physical body to the divine union of Shiva and Shakti. Or in the Hebrew tradition – I was raised in the Hebrew tradition, the Kabbalistic tradition. On Friday nights it is required for male and female, husband and wife to have sex, and before they do that they pray that this for, that they are, this is for the benefit of God and his Shekina, which is the male and female principle in the Kabbalistic tradition. And so if one can begin even to see the other – ‘cause in tantra all females are seen as embodiment of the great goddess, the great mother, the nurturer, the goddess of fertility and abundance and joy and bliss and, you know, the men are seen as the emanations of Shiva, the great God of the universe who brings the universe through his drumming and his chanting and his Yoga, you know, into and out of existence. And you know, it’s also about, you know, we live in the place of duality and coming together as, in partnership, in sexuality, you are actually getting a felt experience of non duality. And really the key to it all is to feel, to really feel and allow yourself to completely relax – relax your mind particularly – and just feel. Feel and don’t rush things. You know, I just….

Francesca Gentille: I often will say slow the fuck down, and I mean ‘the fuck’, in that there’s something, when we rush – there are times and places of course for the sacred quickie – but in general we rush too much in our culture, we’re always on high gear. I, you know, can get into that myself as a, you know, multitasking mama. And there’s something sensual just in breathing, in slowing down, in landing; I’m here in this radio show with Sharron and I’m so lucky and there’s these wonderful people that are listening and their lives are being transformed and we’re all together right now in this community of the sense, our ears are tingling, that just landing in any given moment….

Sharron Rose: Yeah.

Francesca Gentille: is precious.

Sharron Rose: It’s really important, it’s really important now. I feel – ‘cause I’m asked a lot about what I think is going on in the world because of my association with the 2012 films – and I really feel that, you know, we could even stay a bodyforcation is going on, you know. There is a strong movement, a kind of back to nature, back to community, back to having a real presence with each other. And yet on the other side there is this total, total push towards war and disturbance and confusion, and we at this time to keep this planet a place where I feel that most human beings are in their hearts, it’s time for us to slow down, sit back, take a deep breath, remember that the privilege of being in a precious human body, all of the tantric teachings and teachings I’ve heard from the Shamans and many, many traditions talk about the power of the physical body as the vessel for spiritual growth. And we need to take care of our bodies, we need to learn how to eat food that does not cause all kinds of reactions. So many young people have a zillion allergies now, you know. We need to find a new way of being that really brings us together, rather than separates us.

Francesca Gentille: That’s so beautiful. And I want to invite our listening audiences to really breathe that in, that when we say we’re, you know, on the surface, “I want to have a better sex life or a better relationship”, the larger umbrella that I feel those who are listening are called to is that we want to have a world of peace and harmony. We want to be in communion with the life that we’re living and the planet that we have. So thank you so much for bringing that up, and there’s a phrase from a song that I love that says “Those that want to put fire to the world, we are in danger.” There is only time to move slowly; there is no time not to love.

Sharron Rose: Yeah.

Francesca Gentille: So Sharron, how do people connect with you? And I have your book and I haven’t had a chance to go to her DVD yet, but I can just, the book I’ve been reading, it’s amazing, such a wealth of knowledge. How do people find you, work with you, connect with the products that you have to offer?

Sharron Rose: I have a website. The film website is sacredmysteries.com. I also have my own website, sharronrose.com, which is Sharron with to R’s, s-h-a-r-r-o-n-r-o-s-e, dot com. We are also beginning a, we’ve begun now a school, online school of sacred mysteries, where I am going to be teaching things like this, teaching the wealth of knowledge I have been given by my teachers. And that you can, you’ll see if you go to sacredmysteries.com there’s a little box on the right that tells you about that. That’s $5 dollars a month, I’m going to be teaching all kinds of things. They’ve got incredible lectures on there and all that. And I am about to teach, I’ve had young girls in my area really want to study, so I am again starting to teach classes. I’m particularly focused right now on the, lets see, the 25th. I’ll be teaching a workshop on the goddess Lakshmi. I feel because of the nature of what’s going on with the economy right now, you know, how would you counter this fear? Well then you dance and sing to the goddess Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, abundance, of spiritual liberation. And also we’re going to be singing and dancing and meditating and embodying Hathor of ancient Egypt who is the fertile cow goddess, the great mother, the center of the galaxy, who fills us with the revitalizing energy because I think that is another piece of what’s going on. We need to find ways to revitalize our self, because if you’re exhausted, you know, it’s harder to be discerning. And we really, so I’m going to be teaching, we’re going, these goddess in particular, the understanding of those, on the way to, I’m working on my first CD on, about the goddess Hoto, which is full ritual from the ancient temples of Egypt all spoken in ancient, sung in ancient Egyptian. And….

Francesca Gentille: You know, there’s so much, and I know you have things for men as well…

Sharron Rose: Oh I currently do.

Francesca Gentille: So I encourage people to get a hold of Sharron. And Sharron I just wanted to thank you so much for joining us here today.

Sharron Rose: My pleasure.

Francesca Gentille: And I wanted to thank you, our listening audience, for being here with us on this journey. And if you want to learn more about Sharron, her services and products, about me, my services and products, to get transcripts from this show, see our pictures, our bios, you can do that at www.personallifemedia.com. That’s www.personallifemedia.com, Sex, Tantra and Kama Sutra: Bringing You The Soul of Sex.