Personal Life Media

Transcript

Woman: This program, brought to you PersonalLifeMedia.com, is suitable for mature audiences only and may contain explicit sexual information.

[musical interlude]

Beth Crittenden: Hello, and welcome to “A Taste of Sex: Guest Speaker Interviews”. I'm your host, Beth Crittenden, coming to you from One Taste Urban Retreat Center, the San Francisco version and we're an intentional community that runs a national business now. We have centers in San Francisco and New York, and also a vibrant online community that we invite you to visit at www.OneTasteSF.com.

This show is for Personal Life Media which you can find at www.PersonalLifeMedia.com and our guest for tonight is Julia Tindall.

Julia Tindall: Hi.

Beth Crittenden: Hi, welcome.

Julia Tindall: Thank you, thank you for having me.

Beth Crittenden: You're welcome. So you will be our guest speaker tonight at One Taste in San Francisco. She's leading a workshop and there will be another recording of that but for our interview tonight, we're going to talk about a couple of different things. One is how presence can completely influence your sexuality and sexual interactions to encompass the whole range of experience. You'll hear more of what we mean about that a little bit later. We're also going to talk about how self-inquiry can enhance your sexual experience? How people can get past any shame that’s blocking them from having amazing sex? So you may ask, “How does Julia know these things? These things aren’t important” and they are.

She has a great background, a lot of diversity which we so appreciate here. She is a Tantra teacher, she studied with Margot Anand, and now that Margot’s retired, Julia is one of the few people so far who is carrying on her work. So I'm very pleased to have you here representing that. Also, she teaches classes on self-inquiry and she's also a hatha yoga teacher and has written two books. One is called “Your Presence is Enough” and the other is called “Twenty Questions for Enlightened Living”.

[musical interlude]

Julia Tindall: It's when we let go of our control to the point where the energy is moving us and we float in that surrender into the most beautiful, blissful state, to me that’s orgasm and it doesn’t have to be genital for you to experience that.

Beth Crittenden: The essence of Tantra is presence in that it allows people to embrace the whole being that they are. So talk about that and what interest you about that?

Julia Tindall: Yes, well, we will being in situations where people haven’t been present with this. We can think about through our teenage years, I'm sure maybe even years, the 20’s, when we went into situations with people where they just weren’t there, and it becomes all about the physical and we don’t feel the heart opened. Certainly as a woman in those circumstances, I have had a sexual experience like that and then I felt that sense of just emptiness afterwards and the sense of feeling unloved and unappreciated because my partner wasn't present with me. I would say through a lot of my younger years, that’s the kind of experience I had because I didn’t attract men who were present. That’s because I myself wasn't very present, I didn’t know what that was. I didn’t know how to really feel my body and always, I didn’t know how to breathe, how to make eye contact, and all the things that we teach in Tantra.

So for me, I've been on a journey of having very unsatisfactory sex within my early years. Then realizing this, “There's got to be something more than this.” Luckily for myself, I did discover Tantra and I discovered Margot Anand and spent a few years with her doing teacher training and also doing some assisting with her. From that study and reading books and connecting with other great people, I've learned the importance of breath and eye contact and all these other little tips that can help us be more present in our bodies and then, therefore, help us to feel more fully and to flower into our true capacity as sexual beings.

Beth Crittenden: Tell us about one of the first moments you remember when you discovered what a difference presence could make. What was the before and after?

Julia Tindall: OK, so I'm thinking about two of the time when I was with a very tantric man, this is early on in my discovery of Tantra.

Beth Crittenden: What does that mean very tantric?

Julia Tindall: Great question. It means a man who was holding what we call the “Shiva space”, Shiva being the essence of emptiness and it's actually--Shiva is an Indian word for the god that holds the male energy as opposes to Shakti who is the goddess, she's holding the feminine energy. In Tantra, we work with the energies of Shiva and Shakti and Shiva holds a place of empty presence for Shakti to sink into and dance. She needs to dance, move and flower and express herself and that really is the essence of how to balance the masculine and feminine energies and to create polarity and, therefore, sexual attraction. So in Tantra, we work with that.

And when I'm with what I will call a “tantric man”, what he's doing for me is he's holding that space of beautiful empty presence where he's allowing me to express and flower and he's not at all interested in his own needs, it's all about helping me expand. And in my expansion and my pleasure, that becomes his bliss and his pleasure.

So the first time I experienced that, I was just blown away because here's this man, he keeps his eyes open the whole time, he's looking into my eyes, he's got all the time in the world for me, he's constantly checking in and communicating with me. “How does that feel? Do you like the way I'm touching you? What would you like more of and less of?” So what happen is great communication I'm feeling really safe, and in the safety that I felt with the container he held for me, I could relax deeply and experience more of my sexuality and my pleasure. He found parts in me that I haven’t been discovered before and that was really exciting.

Beth Crittenden: What did it feel like for you to discover your sexuality like that?

Julia Tindall: Well, it was really mind blowing for me because I didn’t know I had a G spot at that point. He was the first person to find it for me and I go, “Wow, what's that I'm feeling there? That feels very different.” So having somebody to take the time with me to experience what I can feel inside myself was unbelievably precious. My experience is that once we've had that, it's like riding a bike, our body opens and then it knows how to feel it more and again and it has a greater capacity to keep flowering deeper and deeper.

Beth Crittenden: So how do you teach people to get them walk over that first bridge to be able to feel that deeper and deeper?

Julia Tindall: Yes, well, I believe in baby steps and I believe in really getting grounded in the basics when we start. So, if I were teaching basic Tantra to somebody, we’ll start with the real simple thing of even just staring into the eyes and just noticing what comes up as we look at each other deeply. We call that “soul gazing”. So we're really looking into the essence, the soul of the other person.

And as somebody looks into our eyes, what's coming up for us, and very often, we'll find that it's feelings of unworthiness and self-judgment and self-criticism and all these things need to be experienced and felt and communicated for us to drop into deeper presence. Otherwise, we'll get stuck at that level and we'll be so conscious and that will take us out of deeper presence.

Beth Crittenden: How do people know when they're in deeper presence?

Julia Tindall: How do they know? I think it's something that you'll know over time as you practice this, and it's also something a partner will reflect to you if you have a conscious partner. So anyway, we would start with something like the eye gazing and then we could create a little ritual. I really believe in the power of rituals to help us disconnect from the rest of our worldly life and to bring us into what we might call “sacred time” with our beloved where nothing else exists, just you and the beloved, the Shiva and the Shakti. Well, the Shakti and the Shakti and the Shiva and the Shiva, whoever it is, it doesn’t matter but the beloved. So what we might do is we might, for example, call in the directions, you could use the native American way of doing that.

Beth Crittenden: In the ritual.

Julia Tindall: Yes, it's a ritual. We could walk around the room and just voice all the negative energies that we ourselves would like to release. Like I want to release shame, I want to release anger, I choose to release jealousies and uptightness. Then, they would walk again in the opposite direction and bring in all the positive energies that we want to create through the ambience of the room like love, sensuality, spontaneity, things like that.

Then, I think it's really beautiful to sit down with your partner and to honor them in some way because again, when we're appreciated, we can flower more deeply. So I teach my students to do a blessing, and we will bless our partner’s shockers or just their body parts and say something really sweet. Like for example, if I was going to do it to you, I would say, “I bless your beautiful eyes and the presence that they hold and their wisdom that shines through them and their beauty” or something like that. So you can just “Haa!” feel that and drop into feeling appreciated and when we're appreciated, we then feel more connected to and more present in our body.

So we could start out with that gentle little ritual, each appreciating the other, some simple eye gazing, maybe a little communication of anything that’s going on and then maybe working with some really gentle simple touch on a really erotic part of the body like, for example, your left arm just to practice. We might practice just really gently touching in different ways and then practicing feedback with our partner, “How does it feel?”

This is for a couple of reasons. First of all is to get people used to feeding back to the partner so that it doesn’t become anything weird. When I was very young, I didn’t say a word to my partners. They had to read my mind and get it right, and that was the end of the story because I was going to say nothing. It's a precious thing but maybe it's [xx]. So I myself needed to practice saying gently to my partner, “That’s nice, so how about trying this? Oh, yes, that’s nice” and then feeding back the positive feedback of something you really like so that the partner can get used to what is your cadence, your rhythm and what works for you as far as touch. Also, for you to tune in and feel deeply in your body, “Yes, that feels good. That feels erotic. That’s sensual. Oh, that doesn’t feel so good” and learning to be present in any part of the physical body as deeply as possible.

Beth Crittenden: Nice.

Julia Tindall: Yes.

Beth Crittenden: I'm breaking away to take a short break to support our sponsors. If people want to study with you, how can they find out more about your work?

Julia Tindall: Well, I have a website and it is www.JuliaTindall.com. So they can do that or they can email me, JuliaTin@AOL.com or call me, I have an answering system and you can leave a message if you have questions at 916-486-4620.

Beth Crittenden: Great. Thank you, Julia Tindall. We'll be right back after a short break on “A Taste of Sex: Guest Speaker Interviews” on PersonalLifeMedia.com from One Taste Urban Retreat Center.

[radio station]

Beth Crittenden: Hello and welcome back to “A Taste of Sex: Guest Speaker Interviews”. I'm your host, Beth Crittenden from One Taste Urban Retreat Center in San Francisco. Tonight, we're speaking with Julia Tindall and we're going to go into for the second part of the show. Healing from sexual shame and how does the process of self-inquiry, which Julia teaches, lead people to be able to explore really deeply. So you've said before that this work really [xx] too often. It's really important to you.

Julia Tindall: Yes, absolutely. I have had a lot of shame in my past that I've had to contend with and I was really very sexually shut down when I was younger. I didn’t even know it until a few years ago. It took a while for to discover that I did in fact carry some shame and the reason I discovered it was I got into herpes [sp] and it turned out to be the gracious blessing for me. But at the time, of course, I was so shocked and horrified and fought my sex life [xx] forever.

But as it turned out, I looked in Louise Hays’ book, “You Can Heal Your Life” and it's said genital herpes is about shame. I thought, “I don’t think I have any shame. I don’t know, I thought I was completely normal.” As I investigated deeper, I realized that I was carrying a ton of shame and it was from incidence in my teen years, my childhood even, my 20’s when on some level, I had been made wrong or shut down around my sexuality.

For example, I remember when I was 19, some guy told me I was frigid, another person told me he don’t think I was made right. Oh, gosh! I was so terrified, and if any man even looking at my genitals because I thought I wasn't made right, for the longest time. Little things like this that people can say to you when you're young go very deep inside and we carry this as shame energy. For myself, I needed to unravel those things and as I've unraveled them and realize that I'm perfectly normal and fine, everything about me is in that affection that it is meant to be. As I've own that place and accepted myself more fully, then my sexuality could open up more and it continue to do so. It's actually an ever expanding journey.

I'm fascinated to help other women with this because I've had it as my own journey so deeply, it's something very close to my heart. In my Tantra classes, we often break up into male groups and female groups where we get the chance to talk about this kind of thing. I'm always so touched on how so many women will tell me, “Wow, this is the first time I've ever been able to open up and tell anybody this.” Then they’ll come out with some secret they’ve been carrying, and once the secret is out and people can talk about what's been bothering them, they find it doesn’t carry the same charge anymore so they can release it and let go of that cellular memory.

Beth Crittenden: What are the most typical types of shame or secrets that you hear from women?

Julia Tindall: It can be so many things, a lot of it, it can be masturbation stuff, it can be feeling oversexual and being shamed for that, being called a slut and a whore. It can be around just the way they judge their genitalia. It could be that they had incidence with animals when they were young and they feel ashamed about that. It can be that somebody told them they were a lousy kisser or they didn’t make love right, and whenever we hear anything negative like that, we're such sensitive beings and we take it so to heart.

So this will requires the healing process and the beginning of the healing process is an airing it out and having other people witness you and you can feel, “Wow, I've said this big thing and these people are still here, loving me, accepting me.” That is probably the quickest, biggest thing you can do to heal it is just share it.

Beth Crittenden: So what would a typical workshop look like that people will get to the point of feeling that it was appropriate or safe or whatever the words would be to have them tell these things they never told anyone else. What makes that work?

Julia Tindall: Well, really [xx] safe container is the main thing. So obviously, we have a confidentiality agreement with everybody, and we don’t normally go straight into the shame as we spend the whole morning creating other exercises for safety and for honoring and trust and building energy as a group. By the time we get to the afternoon sessions, people are ready to really open deeper and that normally works really well.

Beth Crittenden: What specifically changed for you? I asked you before about before and after around shame, how did your experiences deepen or get hotter or whatever it was that happened for you?

Julia Tindall: It's been a process, I can't really say it was any one thing. OK, I can say one thing, all right. When I was [xx] going on one year in her workshop, she does a process which is a hands on process with a man touching a woman and the woman communicating, giving feedback and then vice versa. To my horror, I was volunteered to do this, and I was still terrified at people watching maybe sexual in public. There was just no backing down and I knew this was the [xx] I had to just blast through. So [xx] and said, “OK, I'll do this.”

So 80 people watched me get touched sexually, genitally by a wonderful man and watched me breathe and send energy and get feedback and go through that whole process. It's a very beautiful process, but of course, I was so terrified at being watched. I'd never done anything like this before and I can tell you that it really changed my life because not only did people come up to me and say how much they appreciated me being vulnerable, but they also appreciated the beauty of what we shared. It made me go, “Wow! That was just OK.” It was OK to be seen, it was OK to do what I've learned to do in this way and to share myself with others. My gosh, if ever there was a shamed [xx] for me, that was it.

Beth Crittenden: Nice. Do you think if you would have started living in Britain, you would have done something like that?

Julia Tindall: No! I absolutely think I would not. I think I really need to lift my cultural conditioning. I think that’s important for many of us who run a deep spiritual path. If we're going through the self-inquiry process, which is about unraveling our conditioning, then it can be very important for us to break away from the old and across the old, for us very often is parents and hometown. So when I ended up moving some 8,000 miles west and here I am, here in the West Coast. So for me, this has been important. I think it would have been much trickier to break through the shame otherwise.

Beth Crittenden: Do people know, like do the people that held your cultural conditioning know that you've been on this exploration and that you're on this deeper spiritual path?

Julia Tindall: My parents have read my books, yes. In my books, I write all about shame as part of the second book, “Your Presence is Enough”. It's a lot about unraveling conditioning and the same pieces in there. So yes, they have read it and they're actually quite in awe that I have been so vulnerable and declared so much of my deepest self and it's affected them, too. Of course, that’s wonderful. My Dad now has passed away, but my Mom and I have grown much closer as a result of this ability to share more deeply and to be more present with each other.

Beth Crittenden: So it helps sexuality and sensuality but also just across the range [xx].

Julia Tindall: Yes, I guess we started talking about the self-inquiry and we talked about shame as an aspect of it, but really self-inquiry is about finding who we are in our deepest essence, finding who we are as a soul, and getting underneath all the layers of personality and conditioning. It's what in yoga, we call it “Jnana yoga” meaning wisdom yoga actually, but in essence, it's the self-inquiry.

So that’s one of my other passions and I teach that and the two books I've written are about that. Yes, it's worked that, as the [xx] miracle said, it's not optional. We've all are going to have to do it at some point, we're all going to have to dive deep down and discover who we are or we'll keep as the yoga say, going round this circle of lifetimes.

Beth Crittenden: What do you think what people are diving into is an unchanging thing or is that more like water that you dip into and you just see at that moment what it is?

Julia Tindall: Well, the presence that we are is changeless at its deepest essence. So when we touch that even if for a moment, it’ll effect us profoundly and very few people can touch that essence and stay grounded in it. We tend to raise our energy back up and get back into our personalities and our behaviors and it takes a long, long time and lots of dedicated practice to let that go so you can drop deeper down into deeper presence, and our world is hugely worth it. So I encourage everybody to make it part of their conscious spiritual journey and it becomes also part of the sexual awakening, too, because the two are interchangeable. Without deep presence, as we spoke of earlier, you're not going to have deep connected sex.

Beth Crittenden: What's next for you in your work?

Julia Tindall: What's next for me? I've been teaching tonight here. Well, I have a Tantra workshop, I'm teaching with Jim Benson who used to be Margot’s partner, this Saturday in Auckland and we're doing a unique workshop on helping people feel full body orgasm, and that’s exciting to us. It's the first time we've run this workshop. Then I'm taking group traveling this coming fall and winter. I'm taking group to England and then New Zealand in December and Mexico for yoga intensive in January. And I'm excited about all that.

Beth Crittenden: I'm curious, how do you define full body orgasm?

Julia Tindall: [xx] about defining it. I would say it's feeling the energy running from your toes to the crown of your head and even beyond, so you're really involving the whole of the body and the whole of the energy field. It's not just limited to genitalia.

Beth Crittenden: What makes it orgasm in your opinion?

Julia Tindall: What makes orgasm. That’s a very good question. Boy, I haven’t thought about these definitions. I would say it's when we let go of our control to the point where the energy is moving us and we float in that surrender into the most beautiful, blissful state. To me that’s orgasm and it doesn’t have to be genital for you to experience that.

Beth Crittenden: Thank you so much for being here.

Julia Tindall: You're welcome. Thank you for having me.

Beth Crittenden: Is there anything you'd like to add before we wrap up?

Julia Tindall: Boy, I think we've covered a lot here. It's a lot of information, I know I've turned a lot of stuff out for people, so if you want more information, please do contact me, I'd love to hear from you.

Beth Crittenden: Great. So for text and transcripts of the show, you can visit the website, PersonalLifeMedia.com or you can go to iTunes and just search for “A Taste of Sex” and find the show there.

Again, this has been “A Taste of Sex: Guest Speaker Interviews” from One Taste Urban Retreat Center, www.OneTasteSF.com. If you like to email us, you can email OneTaste@PersonalLifeMedia.com and thanks for joining us.

[musical interlude]

Woman: Find more great shows like this on PersonalLifeMedia.com.