The Human Experience · Episode
Episode 41 – Stuart Sovatsky PhD
A conversation with Stuart Sovatsky Ph.D.
Stuart Sovatsky PhD (AB, Ethics/Psychology, Princeton University; PhD, CIIS), was first choice to co-direct Ram Dass’s “prison ashram” and first in the US to bring meditation to the homeless in the 1970s that…

The full conversation continues here.
Episode field notes
Show notes
Stuart Sovatsky PhD (AB, Ethics/Psychology, Princeton University; PhD, CIIS), was first choice to co-direct Ram Dass’s “prison ashram” and first in the US to bring meditation to the homeless in the 1970s that led to being selected to the 1977 Princeton University Outstanding Alumni Careers Panel. Copresident of the premiere professional organization for spiritually-oriented psychologists in the US, the Association for Transpersonal Psychology since 1999, he was a board trustee for the California Institute of Integral Studies for 20 years and in 1999, recipient of its Most Outstanding Alumni Award 1978-2008. He has consulted with the Chair of the Association of Unaligned Nations of the World and been in private audience with the current Perfect Master of Meher Baba Sufism in India.
In 2006-08, he was initiating co-convener of the forty country World Congress on Psychology and Spirituality in Delhi, India, supported by the Office of the Dalai Lama and where BKS Iyengar, SS Ravi Shankar, Jack Kornfield and Robert Thurman keynoted. Author of Eros Consciousness & Kundalini (US, India and Russia) Words From the Soul, Your Perfect Lips (US and Russia) and numerous articles on romantic love, ideal marriages and families, the therapeutic use of admiration, spirituality of infancy and Buddhist dissolution of suicidal thoughts. A serious scholar-practitioner of tantra yoga with NUMEROUS academic publications and university presentations throughout the US, India and Europe, he now leads couples retreats and trains therapists in the US and in Russia and is a faculty member at Moscow Psychoanalytic Institute, Lifelong Marriage and Kundalini Yoga.

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In this episode we discuss Dr. Sovatsky’s new book, tantra, kundalini awakening – marriage, relationships and what it means to connect with another human being on a spiritual level.
Editorial Reviews
“I highly recommend this book to any spiritually minded person or couple looking to awaken their creative potential, deepen their life partnership, heal the emotional scars of past relationships, or mature their emotional-sexual being beyond the impulses of adolescence. This book would be a valuable asset for any couples therapist or marriage counselor who wants to offer a yogic spiritual component in their practice.” (Merikah Robertson, Common Ground, September 2014)
“Advanced Spiritual Intimacy is a cultural critique, tantric sex manual, and an astute primer in verbal and nonverbal communication. While most psychologists dismiss romance as infatuation, Sovatsky’s brilliance is to take it seriously as the ground of a highly disciplined but unique Kundalini-inspired approach to erotic intimacy.” (Seth Farber, Ph.D., author of The Spiritual Gift of Madness)
“Stuart Sovatsky’s well-researched and experimentally validated teachings, shared in Advanced Spiritual Intimacy, will surely be a great resource for empowering married couples around the world to find true spiritual happiness, as well as helping contemporary yogis and yoginis actually achieve the exalted goals of yogic adepts of ancient times.” (Robert Thurman, Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies, Columbia University,author of Inner Revo)
“Stuart Sovatsky’s Advanced Spiritual Intimacy is a tour de force. He takes us beyond the texts to demonstrate how the ancient path of spiritual growth may extend across a whole lifetime. This book expands our Western hermeneutic of tantra toward engendering a paradigm shift in the methodology for all who have been teaching its ways for years or decades. And as years and lifecycles unfold for persons of all walks of life, this study may help to honor the depths of Indian marriage from the depths of SanÄ tana Dharma itself.” (Purushottama Bilimoria, Ph.D.; Chancellor’s Scholar, UC Berkeley; post-doctorate fellow, Oxfor)
“This book reveals tantra’s most central and powerful aspect: converting sexual energy into a higher, consciousness-altering vitality. Stuart Sovatsky’s vast knowledge and four decades of practice of tantra yoga and his lifelong work as a relationship therapist is a perfect combination for his book Advanced Spiritual Intimacy. A must read for all who aspire to a spiritual way of life and are wondering just where sex fits in.” (Georg Feuerstein, Ph.D., author of Sacred Sexuality, and Brenda Feuerstein, author of Traditional Yo)
“Through decades of pioneering service projects, writings, and his kirtans arousing of Kundalini, Stuart has uplifted the academic and spiritual landscape of the West. For those who long to meet a lifelong yogi, master, beloved of Lord Shiva, you will find such a one in the pages of Advanced Spiritual Intimacy.” (Swami Adi Narayan, author of The Beloved: A Song of Eternal Love)
“Advanced Spiritual Intimacy is an excellent book that will help couples and individuals to grow and master themselves.” (Frédéric Luskin, Ph.D., author of Forgive for Good and director of the Stanford Univer)
“Few people are as well positioned as Stuart Sovatsky to contribute to the West’s understanding of yoga and tantra, and he has done so with Advanced Spiritual Intimacy. This book adds a new dimension and another level to the understanding of our ultimate potential.” (Philip Goldberg, author of American Veda)
“Sovatsky’s work brings the depths of India’s spiritual path of marriage and family love to the Western world in keeping with India’s core vision of Vasudhaiva kutumbakam–the world is indeed one Family–and reveals the devotional dimension of yoga in the truest voice of the Indian spiritual soul.” (Sunil Saini, Ph.D., president of Indian Association of Health, Research, and Welfare)
“The extent of Sovatsky’s knowledge is breathtaking. He makes an important and persuasive reframing of Brahmacharya as an ‘inner marriage’ rather than celibacy, with yoga as its own love affair with prana. He completely transforms what is currently understood as ‘practicing yoga’ and provides a fresh way of re-envisioning intimacy for anyone on a spiritual path.” (Ira Israel, marriage and family therapist and yoga teacher/therapist)
“Sovatsky guides us with a master’s hands to open the portals of devotional worship in yoga and in love. His book is a tour de force, beckoning lovers deeper into the seed mysteries of devotion and worship.” (Tina M. Benson, M.A., transpersonal/Jungian-oriented coach and founder/creator of the Soul Speaks Pr)
“The Age of Aquarius begins right now with Stuart Sovatsky’s new sexual (r)evolution. Get out your surfboards and anchor yourself on the crest of the wave with Advanced Spiritual Intimacy. Don’t forget to enjoy the ride!” (Lisa Paul Streitfeld, cultural critic/philosopher, Huffington Post Arts)
“Stuart Sovatsky’s Advanced Spiritual Intimacy bravely walks the cutting edge of tantra and blasts us open into spirit consciousness, while enlivening us to the potentiality of matter and flesh.” (Katie Silcox, author of Healthy Happy Sexy: Ayurveda Wisdom for Modern Women)
“Sovatsky’s forty years of spiritual practice, erudite scholarship, and clinical experience radiates throughout Advanced Spiritual Intimacy. This book shows a way to lifelong love that lives within the hidden depths of tantra and the inner marriage of yogis, saints, and sages.” (Ken Wilber, author of The Fourth Turning: Imagining the Future of an Integral Buddhism)
“Advanced Spiritual Intimacy is like an attic trunk packed with treasure-garments, with gowns and capes that must perhaps be shaken out and worn, gotten accustomed to, before their full value is revealed.” (Craig Comstock, Huffington Post Blog, June 2014)
Ideas worth returning to
Quotes
Five substantial excerpts from the published transcript, lightly edited for clarity without changing their meaning.
“The reproductive body contains extraordinary biological information and the capacity to create life. Semen retention is only a mechanism, not the destination—like putting fuel in a car but never leaving the garage. The practice is intended as an opportunity to study desire, vitality, embodiment, and the meaning carried by the capacity to reproduce.”
From the conversation“The meeting of sperm and ovum connects an individual life to an ancient continuity of incarnation. Retention offers some practitioners a way to attend more deeply to that continuity. Its value, in this view, is not accumulation for its own sake but reflection on how the body participates in the creation and transmission of life.”
From the conversation“Falling in love with someone who loves you is a remarkable gift. The deeper possibility is that love might endure through fifty years of financial strain, moves, conflict, and imperfect communication. Mature love asks whether the intensity of the honeymoon can become a durable commitment rather than simply fading when difficulty arrives.”
From the conversation“To fall in love reciprocally and create a sacred container for that bond is different from treating intimacy as frivolous. It involves respect for the other person and responsibility for the relationship itself. The emotional experience matters, but so does the form built to protect and deepen it.”
From the conversation“Western religious history often framed sexuality as morally problematic, while Indian and Tibetan sacred art could portray deities or couples in union, facing one another in an elevated state. These images show that a culture’s symbols profoundly shape whether erotic experience is understood as shameful, ordinary, or spiritually meaningful.”
From the conversation
About the guest
Stuart Sovatsky PhD
Stuart Sovatsky PhD (AB, Ethics/Psychology, Princeton University; PhD, CIIS), was first choice to co-direct Ram Dass’s “prison ashram” and first in the US to bring meditation to the homeless in the 1970s that led to being selected to the 1977 Princeton University Outstanding Alumni Careers Panel. Copresident of the premiere professional organization for spiritually-oriented psychologists in the US, the Association for Transpersonal Psychology since 1999, he was a board trustee for the California Institute of Integral Studies for 20 years and in 1999, recipient of its Most Outstanding Alumni Award 1978-2008. He has consulted with the Chair of the Association of Unaligned Nations of the World and been in private audience with the current Perfect Master of Meher Baba Sufism in India.
Beyond the conversation
Selected work
Official sites, books, research, and institutional pages verified for this guest.
The complete conversation
Transcript
Archival transcript · Published on the canonical episode page
This archival source does not include reliable passage timestamps or consistent speaker attribution. The wording and any labels below are preserved from the original transcript page; no speakers or timing have been inferred.
welcome to the human experience podcast the only podcast designed to fuse your left and right brain hemispheres and feed it the most entertaining and mentally engaging topics on the planet as we approach our scent please make sure your frontal temporal and occipital lobes are in their full upright position as you take your seat of consciousness relax your senses and allow us to take you on a gym we are the intimate strangers thank you for listening the
human experience is exploring the realms of sexual intimacy as we speak to my guest dr. Stuart savate ski short welcome to hxp thanks Xavier you’ve spent 40 years studying this material but I really like to just dig in to your book I was I really liked your your writing style 3 to the point and I was kind of wondering where the book was 10 years ago and I need to read it in the book you detail your own yogic awakening that happened 40 years ago what what led
you to yoga and what happened when when you realized that this was so powerful well it’s a beautiful question and thanks for asking it does take me back to my hippie era I was in college from 1960 72 71 which was maybe now ancient history but it was the peak era of campuses were just alive with psychedelic exploration and in peace movements and I was like a good number of my friends actually it was at Princeton University on that campus I
was having you know mystical experiences majored in religion switched from pre-med its biology and chemistry mainly because I wanted to understand what these psychedelics were all about and the chemistry was not giving me as good answers as religion courses so I ended up majoring in east west religion but it wasn’t until about two years after graduating I went to a yoga class and in one of this is 1972 yoga was barely known and through my first class
I realized that I was in a much more balanced state but equally impressive as the psychedelic type subjects explorations so I went to every class that that teacher provided and eventually he invited us to something called an ashram a word I’ve never heard of that was probably nineteen seventy three or four and started going to retreats with something called the guru who was a totally new kind of person to me too he was just so loving to everyone
in way he pronounced my name I can still remember it was with more love and appreciation that I could remember ever before so one thing after another i did at all that the yoga guru was describing getting up at 4am doing yoga with the sunrise fasting once a week for a day to let the digestion cool down all kinds of things and then he offered an initiation must have been around 75 and that just changed everything you whispered a
mantra in my year along with about 20 of my friends and my body sensations have never been the same it’s now 40 years later I can feel it to the second and I just kept following the other suggestions that you would make and that’s roughly you know the answer to you know I wet where did all this begin it’s very very interesting just only because I eat several years ago I had I I guess I didn’t know at the time it was a Kundalini awakening base my spine
activated and I mean I found it a harrowing experience it was incredibly difficult and wide why do you think this is so important like why why is this intimacy between a partner through sex such a sacred experience well the extent the expanse of that kind of connection can be very simple to very profound it can be not that much different than just mutually arousing each other and it can go all the way to those you could say the secret of life
because nobody really gets conceived and born without the semen and ovum connecting to one another so as soon as we’re with another person that way yeah it could be anything from simple kind of hookup which they weave that word already points to kind of a just a kind of a very Elementary connection but it can go all the way to certainly making new life do you feel like just the casual kind of hookup as you said do you think that’s damaging to the more subtle
bodies well not nothing is only you know only one way certainly it has an effect of detaching the sexual activity from a committed relationship and that will have certain kinds of side effects but the it’s kind of challenging to find a partner that you can set a high standard with and and some people do they set a higher standard and will only be go to bed with someone that they feel very close to and other people will only go
to bed with someone after they’re married so you know each of these choices has its own strengths and limitations I think I fall into the category of not being able to have sex with someone less less I’m deeply connected into the person so I mean how there’s a bunch of stuff that I want to I want to go over and apologize if I’m jumping around but how important is semen or tension for the mail in your opinion yeah that’s it that concept is
come come from India maybe about 30 or 40 years before ago before that the idea of semen retention with the only considered kind of pathological so it’s a just getting it to be acceptable for the mail to delay or per completely not have the typical ejaculation that’s a whole new concept but that where I’m coming from is more that it’s a reverence for the seed it’s not merely the mechanics of being good at not ejaculating for a long period of time or
for months and months at a time or years or decades it’s it’s what is the seed in what relationship can we have with menstruation for that matter and for spermatozoa and I think the essence of this Tantra really is not mechanical it starts out being taught just the mechanics but really that’s just the first level it’s really to do with respect for life that the seed is a very powerful thing the body can create and in that the man in this case develops a
very profound relationship with his own body the semen is not something casual even though we might think of it that way in our culture you start feeling well and then what Tantra is saying is that it’s not the final substance that the body makes the semen itself has tremendous amount of information obviously you can create when united with the ovum it will create a human body and bring the human soul into my incarnation so the retention is just
that the bear mechanics it’s like saying well let’s put gas on the car they’ll be good but then just keep it your car in the garage no there’s a lots of places you can go to and that’s what I’m describing first is you can understand your DNA you can understand the body’s capacity to create life and not only that the life that created us and our grandparents great grandparents and great great great grandparents until we get to the chicken and egg problem which
is where did this all start and if that was parents than there had to be parents of those parents until you get to a tracing back and you kind of wonder well maybe God maybe some source created it that was there all along because the chicken and the egg is there has to be another chicken or egg behind it so you feel connected with your own fertility and you do a deep meditation on it which I include and a like advanced spiritual
intimacy book try to guide people backwards in time you start feeling like wow this goes back thousands and thousands of generations and you can feel it not just hear it intellectually and likewise if you have a child there’s the potential in whether heterosexual or the different orientation people can adopt or have them create their own children and their children’s children are inside of their children you start to look at a one’s own baby and realize
that inside of the baby is the potential for that baby’s baby 30 years from now and you get what i call a perception of the big now that now is very popular to be in the present but how big is this now is it just a little tiny thing that you’re in now not at all uh-uh you in the semen and the ovum isab is a place to tune into to feel this now has been going on a long time and we’re part of something each incarnation is part of
something a wave of incarnation that is very profound so this is a broadening of the pecan univ just the practice the ability to retain semen just gives you a chance to tune into it and go very very deeply into the meaning of life itself I mean I i find this topic highly intellectual I mean we’re in the world of tinder and just these casual kind of throwaway plastic cup hookups I mean where would you regard our society as far as understanding how sacred and how
profound these experiences are well I must say you would ask very beautiful questions and I definitely want to thank you for it and you’re putting it in a historical sense to my ear you know the Catholic Church was the power structure in our culture and talked about sexuality for a couple thousand years and they were overdoing it they were making sex fever totally about fertility in procreation but they didn’t really have a well-described path of maturity
where couples would in terms of the mail not just retain semen but be so in such a devotional mood with his partner and she with him and excuse the heterosexual context but let me just stay with it for a while but that the way they would relate to one another that it would be almost really a natural contraception in other words the fertility would be converted into a type of awe emotions of awe and bliss and and that gives a very different kind of of
sexual exchange you can see that this is not taught even in many Tantra teachings but in some it is taught and so if your casual relations will tend to perpetuate not necessarily something people are learning new things all the time but it will not give people a chance to do to mature to the level of what I’m talking about could even be possible Freud came along in the 20s 30s and 40s and and kind of got sex freed up and ever since
the 40s 50s 60s particularly on it’s been like a you know free-for-all to try to be of sexually free because for a couple thousand years if people felt tremendously guilty in the West box according to the or you know the New Testament should say more than the catholic church teachings so frightened took it a big step forward of at least it’s not sinful but and then it’s it’s it’s natural and beautiful but he could only go as far really as this teenage
puberty and what I’m opening up with Tantra with the tantric texts are opening up really is a puberty that comes our whole life long in which this new type of eroticism becomes possible right right there’s a there’s a passage in your book that I really liked I’m going to read it to people chained to one another in endless causality by their reverberating attractions to one another endless irresistibility in citing endless irresistibility chemical
fusions reactions of the entire polarized universe every glistening raid us permeated cell poised aimed at him at her and nothing else is what every living gendered fiber wants has ever wanted a hundred a thousand a million years I mean wow that’s so powerful these words so I mean I I’ve had the chance to have con trick experiences I guess I’m lucky in that sense and I started I started meditating practicing meditation very early on and I would
meditate for hours and hours a day and I guess this sort of opened me up to being more sensitive to energy and the connection that a person has with their lover so when I find myself and and this is also why I feel like I’m as choosy or as picky as i am with who i decide to have sex with but when this is accomplished I feel like a tantric orgasm is I mean it’s it’s indescribable it’s on a whole other level than just the physical sense of having an orgasm
would you agree exactly and it’s it’s helpful because modern science is catching up with being able to name what goes on in this kind of Tantra experience you know that really you would have to say or you could say that the pineal and the center of the brain known as the hypothalamus is the source of this other kind of orgasm and it sends of actually everything from oxytocin which is called the love hormone makes people when you have
oxytocin in your bloodstream you’ll you’ll fall in love and feel love for the person you’re with serotonin which is relates to how awake we feel in LSD sent out the serotonin off the map and then even DMT is secreted in the hypothalamus and melatonin which makes us feel our sense of time or you could say timelessness also inner light it occurs when the melatonin is secreted in the brain so what I think we could say your experience that you’re
describing is that when you establish rapport energy with with a partner and you have a tune mint the energy of each other is going to go all the way up your spine the most primitive level would be just two people masturbating each other and not even knowing each other you know just the first Center at the bottom of the spine but when you’re describing is that energy is is moving all the way up and affecting this pineal gland by the
way many philosophers said that was where the soul lives and the hypothalamus which is the center of the sex center of the brain according to science by the way hypothalamus in greek means the little wedding chamber and in yoga that’s where the male and female also have a kind of a union and you feel all kinds of bliss of emerging from that chakra the audrina chakra corresponding to the hypothalamus so in your experience what you’re describing
science would say that your connection heated up you’re not just genitals and heart where you feel connected to someone emotionally but it went all the way up and hit the hypothalamus and a pineal gland and your bloodstream got filled with all these hormones that if rise to the feelings that you described and the abilities of perception that we were describing yeah yeah so I mean would you say you talked about a puberty of the spine and how developing or
awakening the Kundalini can can take couples beyond this traditional idea of Western sexuality how how would you say that this awakening is achieved uh it you see from you see a signs of it and all the different world religions so it’s so deep into the human nature that it’s not just you know you have to kind of say it’s part of human nature that hasn’t been mapped out by modern sexology that if you have the person has many experiences what you’re that you
described having we wouldn’t be able to say that the body is now functioning at that level it’s it’s matured it would be my term not just to ejaculate or have a genital exchange and then also loving exchange which is a heart center but all the energy naturally goes up and down the spine and when we do see this worldwide in prayer forms for sure Jews have a form they called Avenue and their spot they rock back and forth as they
pray it looks identical to Islamic with it’s called Zickuhr they’re rocking exactly the same in Judaism and in in Islamic religion in Buddhism the rocking is brought to a stillness called voodoo kaya and all the Buddhists will meditate with their spines really in what we could call it a certain kind of an erection the spine becomes tumescent Buju kaya roughly means the of the erection of the whole body and all hatha yoga are originated when that energy
going up the spine would also go out though the spinal nerves and make the body dance and we see this in trans dancing and shamanic cultures trans dancing means you’re not your body’s moving itself and these movements are very much like the movements of a baby very young little baby you can see that by babies incarnated himself or herself by the movements they make it very much like what goes on in the womb but this process of energy moving in the body so
that we further incarnate see it in baby see them fetuses it can go on one’s whole lifetime and it’s very spontaneous you’re not in control of it it just happens like labor contractions happen in a mother like the movements of a of a fetus in the womb making fingers making arms you can watch it on ultrasound and babies certainly do it but if you tune into that energy your body will start moving on zone and yoga up today disguises this
fact because all the asanas are done by memorization by imitation but for a much longer time some scholars say should 700 year period in India the spontaneous yoga was much more prevalent than trying to hold poses with your ego and like I say we see these movements and what they call charismatic religions move religions where people are shaking like holy rollers Jake or like even belly dance bellydance is not just an entertainment in a middle eastern
restaurant or merely something that is a kind of a sexual way of for women to dance it can happen spontaneously when Kundalini is active in a female body and the men in those cultures they feel that they’re not just being excited by the beauty of the woman they feel that the aw of the feminine energy which is connected to fertility and to the source that that they’re being energized by that so you start to see that the energy of sex as it keeps changing it goes up
the spine causes the body shake and move about you see a worldwide and all kinds of religions and this very movement simultaneously moves the energy throughout the whole body and what I’m saying it matures the glandular system it matures it so much that we have to eventually admit that the body goes through a completely new puberty that comes after the teenage Kruger so I mean wouldn’t that be an interesting question on a dating site is your Kundalini
activated yes no so I mean these compounds that you talk about in the brain DMT specifically seemed to me as like an evolution compound I mean you’re when you’re activating your pineal gland it seems like you’re orienting yourself to participate in your own evolution through activating these more subtle bodies but to play devil’s advocate here but what would you say the dangers of activating your Kundalini would be well you know in a
holistic way there would be very little danger because your your character would be maturing your value system how fare you are with other people your family history would be you know going well and childhood but you know when in a culture such a bar as ours people can take up a practice it’s sort of piecemeal and just do like a lot of heavy breathing and not pay attention to how am I living my life how am I treated people and you can to
some degree force these energies to awaken and that forced way of waking it has side effects for many people if it’s not a balanced awakening a gobbie Krishna who is first to publish on Kundalini in the West about 1970 1971 he did a forced awaken he describes it in great detail and that he was sitting for like 15 16 years and willfully trying to do it he didn’t have singing and dancing for example he just was trying to bull himself into this some kind of an
Enlightenment and as a result he his system was too hot willfulness creates heat just like a too much passivity and not much will happen will be lethargic that he was way over on the side of being very forceful and it was he describes how troubling that was he was hot all the time and I had met many difficulties and that was in India so here yeah like many things uh going into a therapy or even a sport we want to go into it in a in a way that balances lots
of aspects of our life not just the awakening of an enemy I’m imagining all the couples listening to this right now and suddenly getting incredibly aroused but I mean you go into some yoga postures how important are these asanas and the mudras what when they’re done with them but with the mood of devotion or like dancing then they’re fun and not just fund on a playful way but it could be if the joy of being devotional of being grateful a feeling of the magic of
the ability to move the body so it’s really the yacht of the mudras all these different bodily expressions can come from an emotional place rather than I’m trying to do a technique and that unlocks there I would call it their deeper significance and they’re just a ways of kissing you can have sex without kissing but you can have sex with kissing it’s not necessarily thought a technique it’s out of LA and you enjoy each other and in an act sense that the
mudra that fits with kissing this involves the tongue and when that when the tongue gets sufficiently aroused for enough months and eight years at a time if we’ll it’s nerves will trigger a kind of orgasm in the pineal gland so it’s the whole body the fingertips could have types of orgasms well if you’re feeling a certain type of joy you can’t see me on your skype screen but I’m moving my fingers and all kinds of you know joyful
ways and start to get totally liberated not just liberated from the guilt ridden sex but liberated to express all cut all these wonderful feelings with a partner was doing it with you that was the poem you read of from my book you know came directly from an experience of with a partner and it was just India that magical interactivity and mudras but with hand gestures with tongue gestures they just come out of the body from where there have been waiting to come
out for maybe a long time hmm interesting I you know I I want to talk about marriage and relationship just because it seems like society has changed and I you know more and more through my parents and my friends who are married and have kids now and I I feel this pressure to get married or move into you know a serious relationship and how how important is is that to what we’re talking about well again you think so if you’re asking these it wonderful
wonderful questions we have to imagine that marriage is the is the prize instead of something that will overwhelm us to fall in love is probably all would agree to find someone who falls in love with you who you thought and with is just a wonderful wonderful thing the the possibility that that type of love could be strong enough to never exhaust even through 50 years of ups and downs and money issues or having me to move around
from one city to another even difficulties and communicating the possibility that love that you feel when you’re not so called honeymoon period you know if we felt that falling in love would last a lifetime and only get better year after year what who would want to start at the ancient like even 18 or 20 you’d be excited to jump right in because the sooner you find each other the sooner you’ll be able to go through all these different stages the
problem is Freud only mapped out human development to the teenager and said that’s what sex is and there’s not much of a change after that and all the scientists since then believe believe him and no matter how much new data they find about the pineal gland and the oxytocin and all of that I’m the first one I’ve been publishing for about you know over 30 years now but you know it takes a while to change a huge paradigm about human met maturity how far can it go but
if we knew that these puberty’s were going to keep happening that we find the partner would be like getting to start with the you know the peak years of being a 20 year old so instead of feeling pressured by culture in which we would be in conflict other expectations why are they forcing this upon us it would be completely the opposite dating sites would be unload that they would just facilitate people they maybe meet five or ten different people but nobody
would waste any time because they feel that energy of attraction and my book hopes to show people hundreds of different ways to overcome problems communication problems the sexual problems problems with money problems with in-laws or parents becoming parents oneself issues about aging of becoming pretty old 40 50 60 70 80 all the way to death tries to map out all the typical issues but show how easy and beautiful can be to go through them with someone
so in that map uh the pressure is much more about enthusiasm how they call it it’s not from it’s not no one needs to tell us to do it or not do it it’s like if there’s a swimming pool on a hot day people are gonna jump right in I mean do you have any do any advice for a person like me my last three dates were terrible and I mean is there a way to move through the more ambiguous kind of because I i essentially am looking for someone who is is as aware as i am and i
just feel like relationships are so ambiguous nowadays and people just kind of are looking for one thing just sex and the the sacredness of of the experience is gone and I just I feel like an alien on a planet and I’m just it’s so frustrating and I no I mean it maybe you can give me some advice not again you know you’re giving me from your very heart the hopes up for love and your very own life this is most interviews it’s much more intellectual
and I really am touched because I can feel your your beauty to fall in love with someone and who will fall in love with you and create a sacred container for it it won’t just be frivolous and you feel great respect for the woman and for you to meet the woman who would feel that reciprocal connection with you you’ve got you you’re ready for it and the sadness is that everybody you know so many people are very scared and scaring each other and so you never get
much beyond the first or second date because people are calling it quits before it even gets started that it’s a marriage therapist for 40-some years I saw this beginning to happen it’s funny you know as match.com got going to help people it also gave people so many possibilities that alone and that’s not the only way but if you have lots of possibilities why stop with the first person and lots of people are entering into it with meeting somebody new people
and they’re dismissing each other well sometimes just because they have ten other people on their on their way to a dating website that they want to check out and by the time they come back to the other one the person is either you know frustrated or they found somebody for a little while or they’re so lonely they are willing to just hook up and at least have some human warmth for one night so it kind of its all fragmented so i’m not i’m not sure a fan of a
Salvador Dali the surrealist he in the late 1920s he he had a very interesting approach he he made a painting called the great master baiter and you can see you can see the evolution of of how we view sex and and you know in the 20s and you’re just you’re looking this this guy and his face is down like the women and I mean he had a really interesting way of kind of classifying how in that period people viewed sex so I mean what I mean in your experience is
there is there anything that struck you as profound or I mean is there something that you can share with us that kind of changed your thinking yeah it’s a very beautiful question you know the Midland I think of dolly is giving us images and but they are very much originated in Western culture where sex in arata scizzum is very problematic from the Catholic Church on but in India for example we know that you can have images of deities making love with each other
in a very different way like in Tibetan cos you’ll see couples in Union and fire and they’re looking into each other’s eyes and they’re in a very high state of union now I think looking at Salvador Dali you’ll get an experience of about the Western unconscious mind of it being very problematic but if you look at a Tonka from Tibet you’ll see images in which it’s ecstatic and we almost the speediest path I can think of is to try
to leave in a not leave but transition from a Western culture which is a very problematic history and all the artists many of the artists sucker onimous basha lots of the artists who tried to depict but what was going on in the West very torturous looking paintings but if you compare it with a Tibetan tanka you go wow you know if you even have an image of Christ even flirting with a Mary Magdalene the Catholic Church will boycott everything that you do
as an artist but India you have temples it’s not it’s a different it is a sacred but not about the type of connection you can’t just call it people getting it on it really is but much more whole and then you see how small of a little pond poor Salvador Dali was living in of course it was fun it was going to come up with a tortured experience where the best you can do is become the great master baiter yeah I really like that comparison I think that’s very accurate
well said so in your in your book you use you talk about sublimated passion to fuel yoga movements and postures getting the body’s prana to move where it is needed what what is sublimated passion and how does this affect prana movement yeah you know these the word sublimation is from psychoanalysis it’s a it’s it’s we know something about it but the sanskrit word would be bored Virata and it translates really is this full blossoming of the seed and so it’s just
a continuity with the genital puberty with the teenagers puberty it’s not kind of a sublimation of it it’s much more of a continuity and if you feel blissful feelings erotic feelings the naming is it want to be sensitive to it so that you can name whatever those feelings are in a way that generates bodily movements could be dancing could be yoga asanas and as you your body kind of you can remove your body just the way that will
make you feel a good feeling and that’s liberation liberation in erotic embodiment is we’re free to move our body not just masterbated like Salvador Dali kind of showed but you can move your whole body I can move my finger just a quarter of an inch over here and smile look until I’m totally free and I start feeling you know I can feel as much joy is nobody’s holding me back you know it’s just in my head and so I start feeling wow you know that’s when I
say I hear you ask me questions and you touch me with your soul nobody’s stopping me from saying that to you my mind might say well you he’s a radio interview but then I’ll say I’m not trapped in that he the Savior’s asking me about his word my romantic life and if I’m not touched by that I’m missing and I’m free to say something about it likewise I’m free to move to and then I do I I spread out the capacity to feel bliss similar to what happens in the
penis or vagina or the nipples but I’m I’m doing it I’m just I’m moving it everywhere and in that movement it changes you start feeling oh it was very limited to only be about intercourse oh just divide it of course I was dancing about intercourse if it was then nobody could put on a ballet or a folk dancing festival because everyone would think it was x-rated yeah that makes a lot of sense you know so we have to collaborate ourselves from this x-rated most it lets
the arrows go everywhere but not reintroduce oh now it’s sexual we know it’s that a ballet performance the women wear tutus but nobody is rushing with their you know band ballets it’s a pornography you know no one you know and so we’re just it’s not sublimation its animation its animation with all kinds of emotions until finally yeah this passion that we restrict really we restrict it to the genitals we restrict that passion to the nipples and it stays
there for a whole lifetime and what you find in this kind of permitting movement the energy goes everywhere but it redistributes itself so fully that it’s not the same old sexual energy anymore yeah Stewart that really woke me up a little bit that makes a lot of sense to me so it’s okay so moving on here so in in eros consciousness and Kundalini you talk about tantric celibacy and I I think a lot of Westerners shun celibacy it’s kind of looked at looked down at I
mean how how is celibacy important and what do you have to say about that it’s another super question and it takes a while for my words to sink in because it’s such a huge leap but solid becae is uh in the Catholic Church has very little in common with what Buddha did although he also was a monk it’s just like saying every baby is a little bit different and nobody will argue with that just because it’s called the baby doesn’t mean that they are cookie
cutters it’s equally true of celibacy and so we go over to something like Buddhism or even some of the great mystics like mike meister eckhart or teresa of avila or st. John some of these high-level Saints in the catholic church but they awaken this puberty that i was describing and in that puberty you have a intermarriage we start having the male and female energies interacting inside of one’s own body nothing could be more erotic than that type of
experience of feeling the male and female energies and ones or the genetic background in chemistry in the same body that’s what yoga actually meant yoga was a person in union of the hatha the sun in the moon the two great energies in the body and we’re getting them to interact with each other within your own body and yoga was the outcome was these blissful types of movements blissful types of breathing patterns and finally the whole conscious mind has a kind of a
endless orgasm that’s called that we call in you’re just so awake because the energy is marrying inside of oneself that there’s at like the Dalai Lama he is not repressed he’s a monk people look at him and don’t think over that poor guy the problem is that the priests and nuns and monks and Catholic religion they didn’t have much yoga they had to make good on their vow in a very restricted mode of celibacy and it proved too much for many
of them it was just too much but when you travel to the Indian model of the body and all the puberty’s that I’m describing and this inner marriage you see it’s it’s it’s a joyful thing I did it for at least 30 years you could say in this very soul away and it was completely a wonderful experience yeah yeah start where we are approaching the end here that flew by but I mean do you describe these cultural barriers and I mean how how do you think we are being
affected by this like it Yoga is being practiced more and more through Western society and and people are kind of catching on I mean it’s it kind of seems like you and I are ahead of the curve by about 10 or 15 years well said yeah you know when I just teaching yoga in 72 they confuse the word with yogurt you know the one week lots happened in last 30 40 years but there’s only five percent of the end of tibetan archive has even been translated and it’s a
problem because so many people have become an expert in those five percent get into and they like it they don’t want that there it’s trend it’s a bit threatening to believe oh there’s a 15 times more that i don’t know and that’s what i what i wrote the book is for the next five to 10 years of people who such as yourself that are interested in that we can have to be humble that we own they’re just beginning it’s a whole huge cultural transmission from not just
india by china I whipped out with what they call need on or that’s a Taoist Kundalini Yoga letting all this information in and we need to know how many trillions of dollars were spent on promoting the sexual liberation since the 50s 60s and 70s if all the movies all the music that helps people to least not give guilty about sex we’re going to need some percentage of that to transform pornography for example so that it’s not going back into the first puberty but
it’s deliberating all the chacras that’s a huge area movie songs and then yoga classes will have to radically transform so that their free form and not just flowing but ecstatically flow but I think where we set our eyes something probably won’t be changing the sense of what our marriage is that it’s a joyful thing rather than a ball and chain what a baby is and then the maturity that comes along with it that will eventually eliminate the need for abortions by and
large and contraception that the tremendous maturity would change the world hopefully in the next 5 10 15 20 years until where the world will be now will be just as further evolved as I saw what happened between 1949 when I was born when not for example I’ve never even seen a black king and being until I was about seven years old so huge you know my school was on the first to let him integration you know we’ve come a long way to have a black man in the
White House you know what will happen in the year 2030 2040 I wrote that book for myself if I reincarnate so I’d have a book happen and somewhat like how you didn’t feel about yourself well Stuart this conversation has been enlightening sir I really truly appreciate your time I highly suggest that anyone listening pick up a copy of this it really struck a chord for me the book is called advanced spiritual intimacy Stuart where
can people is there a website that people can go to to find you yes you can get assigned a copy if you really would like that by just googling my name going to my website you get my email address I’d be happy to inscribe personal message and mail you a copy if you can’t we want to go quickly you can just go to amazon.com books a best seller on amazon com almost every week what is what is your site called the outside it would be under my
name so spots key and I think it’s called counseling services okay we will make sure that the link is available for anyone listening Stewart thank you again sir it’s been great this is the human experience my name is Xavier and we are going to get out of here we will see you guys next week
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