How To Bring Deep Joy And Emotional Safety To Sex: An Interview With Tantra Expert Grant Shepherd [Ep 122]

[social_warfare]

Listen to the podcast here

Whether single or coupled, sexually active or not, we can use the ancient tools of tantra to create deep friendship between our humanity, our spirituality, and our sexuality. That experience is the key to sexual healing, spiritual growth, and deep interpersonal intimacy. In this amazing, inspiring interview with tantra expert Grant Shepherd, you’ll learn practices you can use right away to create that remarkable and joyful inner state.

—

How To Bring Deep Joy And Emotional Safety To Sex: An Interview With Tantra Expert Grant Shepherd

We can use the ancient tools of tantra to create deep friendships between our humanity, our spirituality, and our sexuality. Stay tuned to this interview with tantra expert Grant Shepherd to learn tools, so that you can do that in your own life.

—

Hello, everybody and welcome to the Deeper Dating® Podcast. I’m Ken Page and I’m a psychotherapist. I’m the author of the bestselling book, Deeper Dating®, and the Cofounder of DeeperDating®.com, an online environment where single people can meet in a way that’s warm, inspiring and connected. Today, I am thrilled to be able to share this interview, with you, with Grant Shepherd who is a dear friend and a personal teacher, and who is just an enlightening expert on love, tantra, sexuality, and the deep integration of spirituality and sexuality. In this episode, we’ll also be talking lots about tantra for single people, not just for couples. In every episode, I’ll be sharing with you the greatest tools that I know to help you find love and keep it flourishing, and heal your life in the process, because the skills of dating are nothing more than the deep skills of intimacy, which are the most precious skills of our lives. If you want to learn more about the Deeper Dating® path to real intimacy, just go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com. If you sign up for my mailing list, you’ll get free gifts and learn more about how to use these ideas to transform your search for love. You’ll also find a complete transcript of every episode. I also just want to say that everything that I share in this podcast is educational in nature. It’s not medical or psychiatric advice or treatment, and if you think you might need help, please do seek professional help concerning any significant psychological or psychiatric conditions that you might have. Finally, if you like what you’re learning here, I would love it if you could subscribe and leave me a review. Thank you so much for that. Without further ado, let’s jump in. Now I get to introduce you to my dear friend and teacher, Grant, because I will share with you that Grant is the teacher to me and my husband, Greg. He has taught us just, you know, tons of beautiful, beautiful deep connection work. Thank you, Grant, for that. I’m just so excited to share his knowledge base with you. Thank you too. Grant is not just a teacher of tantra. He’s a deep, deep student of meditation for decades now, which is part of the reason I so deeply respect his work. For twenty years, he traveled the world living in Australia, the US and India, and serving in spiritual communities dedicated to meditation and the enlightenment process. Along the way, he studied a Master’s in Religion from the University of Sydney, specializing in Kashmir Shaivism which is an Indian tantric philosophy of consciousness. Grant delivers ancient Eastern spiritual wisdom grounded in modern practical teaching to diverse people, both singles and couples in New Zealand and throughout the world. His practice, and I can attest to this, is heartfelt, kind, safe, practicable, practical, doable and fun. The teachings and the practices that he shares bring deep change and healing to his students. Welcome, Grant. Ken, thank you so much. What a beautiful introduction. Thank you. It’s wonderful to be here. It’s great to have you. I’m really excited to have the community learn from you, especially the singles community, because so many people are taught all these tantric practices for you and your partner. What about when you’re single? Maybe you’re not even dating. How can you integrate your deep spirituality, and your sexuality, and your romance, and your capacity to love before you find your partner and while you’re looking? Let’s just begin with, if you could just give everybody a brief overview on what tantra is. I love what you were saying about connecting as a single person because in tantra, that’s very, very important. A lot of the time, when I’m teaching at retreats or workshops, one-on-one, people will say to me, “Intimacy means into-me-you-see.” I say, “Yes, that’s true. That’s absolutely true on one level.” Also, there is someone very important that we tend to miss when we say that. Intimacy is into-me-you-see, we forget ourselves. We forget to look at ourself first. What tantra actually does is it teaches us how to look at ourself first, how to examine our heart first, how to understand what we want. What it is that we want out of a situation or out of a relationship, and it’s really quite paradoxical, but the deeper we do that, the deeper we go into ourselves, the more available we become to relationships. We’re much more available because we’re looking at ourselves first.

Tantra

That’s a great question that you brought up, Ken. Thank you for that. Now, tantra, let’s talk about tantra versus neo tantra. Neo tantra is something that’s relatively recent. It’s a lot about practices that you can do with your partner, breath and sound and movement. It can be very, very valuable. A lot of it is also elements of talk therapy in there. There are elements of being very, very centered and learning how to be centered, so it can be very, very valuable. Classical tantra or traditional tantra is quite different. The great thing about classical tantra, which started roundabout 3,000 to 5,000 years ago, is it honors sex and give sex its seat. It actually says, “It’s something important. Don’t push it away. Don’t not look at it. It’s something that’s very important and nourishing to you.” If you didn’t have this energy, none of us would be walking around on this planet, because the sexual energy is the thing that creates all of us. Orgasms of the heart are real. Click To Tweet Tantra started about 3,000 to 5,000 years ago in the Indus Valley in India. From there, it developed into a beautiful, beautiful practice that encompasses all of life, not just sex. It was a reaction against, “God only belongs to the priestly caste.” It was saying, “Actually, consciousness or understanding yourself belongs to you. It belongs to everybody, and here are the things you can do to understand it.” There are lots of practices. There is breath, mantra, of course, there’s working with your sexuality in a conscious way, and I love it. I love it. I started practicing tantra itself about 25 years ago, meditation longer than that. What it has done for me is really, it’s connected me deeply to myself and I have a deeper understanding of my life as a result. Tantra as a term literally means technology. It’s tools. It’s tools to help us expand our awareness, and these tools work and they’re simple, and they can be done on a day-to-day basis. Now, we don’t have to run away to the mountain top. I was lucky, I got the opportunity to do that. I made the decision in my life to do that and live in an ashram, but so many of us don’t have that. We need to be in the world, so tantra teaches us how to do that in the world, and how to understand ourselves at a deeper level. Grant is going to be teaching everybody exercises that you can take away with you and begin to practice in this episode. Part of me wants to ask you to talk about meditation, but I want to ask you something else first. I want to ask you to just speak, I guess any of the key thoughts that you want to share for single people first of all, who maybe are just wanting to grow sexually, wanting to grow in terms of say more specifically, integrating their sexuality with their deep spirituality, which God knows we are not taught. Could you just speak about the kind of practices that do that, and just kind of give us some overview of what those tools look like?

Liking Yourself

Sure. For everybody who is watching this podcast, listening, the most important thing is to like yourself, to take the time to really, really begin to like yourself, including all parts of yourself. Often, in the West, we’re given mixed messages about sexuality, “Have as much sex as you can,” but if you do, you’re a bit of a slut. It’s unfortunate but true. What happens is it tends to sink into our minds, and then we start to believe it. The important thing to do is start to really accept our sexuality, and realize that it’s a natural part of us. That goes for any sexuality, you know, gay, straight, bi, intersex or whatever it is. It’s about deeply accepting ourselves. Practices we can do. We can start to connect with our heart. A lot of people say, “How do I do that?” There’s a very simple exercise I’m going to teach you about breathing into your heart center. What that does is that brings us to presence, brings us to awareness, and then we can use that in our day-to-day life, and our interactions with others, and our intimate sexual interactions. It brings us to a state of deeper connection within ourselves. That’s basically it, learn to like yourself. Even if the mind pops up sometimes and the inner critic, which it will, just look at the inner critic and then put it to one side and go, “You know what? I like myself.” You know, I like the difference between liking yourself and loving yourself. They are both very different experiences and for me, that experience of loving myself is this very visceral, wonderful flow of feeling. Liking myself can be a little bit harder. Not that loving myself cannot be harder in a lot of different ways too, but liking yourself kind of means that you like and you accept the quirky and sometimes painful and sometimes not so easy parts of our personality. Like liking oneself as a whole like being in a place where you feel like, “I’m a friend to myself.” That’s an amazing, amazing state. Would you mind leading us in that practice? Let’s jump right in. Let’s teach people an exercise to do just what you described. I’d love to do that. Everybody, take a comfortable posture and if you’d like, whether you’re sitting on a chair or sitting on the floor, if you like, just say to yourself gently before we start this, “I am doing this practice because I truly like myself.” What I’d like you to do is close your eyes, and relax the area between your eyebrows. Let go of all that tension, all the to-do list. I’ve got all this shopping to do. I’ve got this to do. Christmas is coming and all this, you know, lots of things. Let go of your to-do list and just relax, relax. Relax your jaw. Relax your whole being, and your spine is gently elongated, gently elongated. Now turn your awareness to your breath. The breath comes in and the breath goes out. The breath comes in and the breath goes out. The breath comes in and the breath goes out.. Now, place your awareness in the middle of your chest, right in the middle of your chest. In the tradition of tantra, this is your heart center. This is what’s called a chakra, which is a wheel of energy, divine, beautiful energy. Right in the center of your chest is your heart, your heart chakra, your heart center. Now begin to breathe into your heart center. Breathe in and now breathe out from your heart center. Breathe out. Breathe into your heart center and breathe out from your heart center. Breathe into your heart center. Breathe out from your heart center. Continue to breathe in this way, and you bring to mind, a time in your life when you felt completely loved and you liked it. You liked yourself. Bring that experience to mind. It might be being with a loved friend, or receiving some kind words from a stranger, or petting a puppy dog, anything where you felt loved, giving and receiving love, and you liked the experience. You liked yourself at that moment. Now, feel that loving energy. Feel that light and place it in your heart center. Feel it deeply in your heart. Now, breathe into the heart center. Breathe in and breathe out, feeling that heightened, loving, liking energy. Breathe in and breathe out. Feel that loving, liking energy in the heart, and breathe in and breathe out. We’re going to do this one more time. Breathe into the heart center. Now, when you breathe out from the heart center, feel that love pour into all of your body. Breathe out all that love, all that like pouring through your body. It is you. This is your loving, liking energy. This is you. Feel it all through your body, from the top of your head to the tip of your toes. You are saturated and you are loved in your natural like of life. Now, holding on to that feeling, keeping it very gently, and take your time with this. Bring your awareness back to the room. When you’re ready, keeping that love and like feeling, you can gently open your eyes. Beautiful, beautiful. Thank you for that. That was just really lovely. I got a few things I want to say about it, but I’m sure you’d like to say a little bit about what that meditation was, and then I’ll jump in and share my thoughts too.

DDP 122 | Tantra — Tantra: Tantra started about 3,000 to 5,000 years ago in the Indus Valley in India. From there, it developed into a beautiful practice that encompasses all of life, not just sex.

Sure, Ken. This is based on a Dharana. A Dharana is a tantric technique where we actually use our subtle senses, or use our senses to focus our mind on something uplifting, to focus our mind deep within ourselves. It’s a very powerful way to train our senses to go back over and over again to the deep core of ourself, which is always about acceptance, always about love, always about liking ourselves. That’s what it is, a Dharana, a centering technique in tantra tradition. You know, as someone who has meditated for many, many years, many decades, actually, I just want to say that I kind of have a particular appreciation of this meditation because it’s not just about universal love. It’s about liking yourself. It’s not just about unconditionally fully loving every cell of your being. It’s about like learning to like yourself, and it’s always a mixed bag, this liking yourself, loving yourself thing. It just always is, but what I love about it is it cultivates friendliness. What I love about your tantric teaching more than anything is that you begin with friendliness as a path to love, as a path to spirituality, and a path to integration. This was like a friendly kind of like Dharana. I guess the other thing that I think about it is, “Alright, this is going to move from meditation to a sense of connection to our body, our spirituality, our sensuality, and our sexuality.“ There is no better way than starting with friendliness, so I just really love that. Thank you. It’s so insightful of you to say that because tantra teaches that we can’t actually do the practice, unless we have genuine friendliness towards ourself, and towards the person we’re practicing with. It naturally spreads too, Ken. It’s like if we’re feeling that friendliness and that joy and that liking ourselves, we do pet the dog, we do smell the rose, we do have a deep hug, we do have a smiling face. We do have friendly words to say. I love that. Yes, so it creates a beautiful, beautiful world. That is great. That is great. That’s a definition of spirituality and intimacy based on friendliness. I love that. I really, really love that. With ourself first, because often, what we tend to if we go, “I’m going to be friendly to that person and that. I’ve got to be a good person to that person and that person.” What about you? Where do you fit into this equation? “I’ll be friendly and nice to this person over here, but I’m going to say some terrible things in my head about myself right now, which I’d never accept from anybody else, and then I expect to feel good about myself.” It doesn’t work that way. Yes, yes. I just want to take a moment to acknowledge the wounding that we all experience when we do that to ourselves. You articulated it so well, and then that wounding combined with this obligation to be good to the world, and then talking about sex. I think that if we’re not sexually in a friendly space with our own being, sex becomes something else, and that something else hurts. It’s toxic in some ways. I’d love to hear your thoughts on bringing friendliness. This is where I’d love to hear some thoughts in bringing this friendliness into sexuality, and particularly, particularly, particularly for people who are single, who would love a loving relationship, who are out in this dating world which is like, I call it a culture of unkindness. How can we bring this energy to our dating, our sexuality, our search for love? I’d love to hear any thoughts on that. and even, as this episode goes on, maybe even a practice to help people do that.

Shakti

Sure, sure – what a wonderful question, Ken. I would say the first thing to do is to really step into seeing your greatness, and seeing the greatness of the person you’re with because essentially, that’s what kindness is. It’s saying, “I’m here, you’re here, let’s play, let’s play.” In tantra, there’s a definition called Shakti. Shakti is energy. Shakti is movement. Shakti is dynamism. Shakti is beauty. Shakti creates everything. In tantra, we see that in each other. We see that energy in each other and we start to understand it. In ourselves, we touch it through meditation and the tantric practices, and then we can share it with other people too. It’s not just in the sexual context but it can be in the sexual context. How do we touch this power? How do we touch this Shakti? We become present. We stop. We pause. We pause for a little bit. When was the last time you paused? What was the last time you actually stopped? “I’ve got this, to do this, to do this, to do this.” Just stop and come back to center. Come back to your love. Come back to your like. That’s a very important and very easy thing that we can do with practice, because it does take a bit of practice. It’s kind of like riding a bike. You have to generally just start. You’ve got your four-wheeler bike, then you go to the training wheels, then you go to the regular bike, then you go to the 12-speed or the 24-speed. You’ve got to start somewhere, but that somewhere is right here and right now. When we like ourselves and tell that to ourselves, it tends to sink into our minds, and then we start to believe what we like about ourselves. Click To Tweet This pausing, I think that our understanding of sex doesn’t include pausing. It’s kind of like very based on images of like intense passion where there is absolutely no pausing, but because sex is such a deep root of our being, parts of ourselves in sex get touched that might be uncomfortable or more profound than we’re used to, or more challenging, or more intimate, or more vulnerable. Maybe we just get afraid, or maybe we just get quiet and get still. How does tantra teach us to hold those parts of our sexuality that are so culturally unexplained, and even disallowed in the sexual arena? Ken, fantastic question. This comes back to the liking and loving ourselves. Whatever comes up in tantra, be with it. That’s like the essence of tantra, right? Is that very thing. Yeah, be with it. Don’t push anything away. Sometimes in practice, you might feel intense love, intense joy. Orgasms of the heart are a thing. They exist, are real, so are orgasms of the crown, so are orgasms of the whole body. Often, people focus on that because they sound so wonderful. The reason they sound wonderful is because they are. There is absolutely no doubt about that. Let’s say, for example, you feel fear, or not only that, you feel fear or you see it in your partner. Your partner is feeling fear. The most important thing at that time is to completely and utterly become present. Don’t do anything else. Just be present. What this being present does is it uncovers our essential nature, and this essential nature according to tantra, this is love. This is deep like. This is acceptance. It’s nothing but. It’s like you are absolutely, 110% perfect, exactly as you are, right here, right now, now own it. Here I am. Here someone is. During a sexual encounter with their partner and they start feeling fear, and the best that they can do realistically is not to love and adore it, but to make space for it. Maybe understand there’s pain here and have compassion for that. Does the person do that in a vacuum? Do you share that with your partner? Do you stop sex to do that? When you’re holding parts of yourself that are hard to hold and not only sexual, but just intimate connection with someone, it’s a wonderful idea to love that part, but probably harder to do. What do you do then? You name it. Name it with your partner. You actually stop things and say, “Can we talk? This is what I’m feeling.” Yes. Very brave, right? Very brave. Very brave. In fact, Ken, I would say nothing more intimate than that. “I feel fear. I feel insecurity. I feel afraid. I feel unacceptable. I feel unlovable.” Nothing deeper or more intimate than that, and because you have an agreement to be together in tantric partnership, your partner will know what to do, which is to become present, and just witness you and your vulnerability, which actually is the most strength you could ever have to be vulnerable and to own those things in yourself, and to share them with your partner. That’s deep vulnerability, deep strength, and deep intimacy. It is and it’s deep safety too. It is deep safety. And not easy, breathtakingly not easy, and not easy for the partner necessarily who might be in a very different place, feeling love, feeling passion, feeling desire, feeling ready to continue and even finish, and there you are, so it’s hard. It can be hard. It can be a stretch, but it’s a stretch that is like the act of real love to do.

Yeah, totally. You might have to sort of dip your toe in a little bit too, you know. It’s not like you can go right into, “Oh my God, I’m feeling my fear from the past, 30 years, come out.” Just sort of dip the toe in and say, “Okay.” Have an agreement first, of course, with your partner that this is how you’re going to approach things. This is where training in tantra helps because you learn, “Okay, like if my partner is feeling fear or is feeling anxiety or is feeling unlovable, then we stop. We pause. We’re present. I witnessed him in that. We hug. I put my needs to finish secondary because I am 100% there for my partner. I’m 100% there for their process.” So there’s a plan. There’s a plan that is created, beforehand, of what to do, and let me just say something about that too, it’s that the next act self-liking is to share it but then also to formulate, “What do I want from my partner? What now would help me feel really seen and held?“ Maybe it’s just holding hands in bed, or maybe it’s just caressing each other, or maybe it’s sharing what’s coming up for you, but to be able to like give your partner kind of instructions on what would feel most wonderful when you’re feeling least wonderful is. It’s a very, very empowering act. Yeah, and I mean, what is that? That’s true partnership, right? Yes, that’s true partnership. That’s acceptance of where you both are at, and both of your needs. One thing I really, really, really love about tantra is you’re training yourself when you’re working in partnership. You’re training yourself to see the divine in your partner. I mean, in traditional tantra, you deify your partner in a way. You go, “The beauty of consciousness, the beauty of awareness, the beauty of God is in my partner, and I am looking at that right now. I am in the presence of divinity right now.” Your partner is doing that for you too. I remember when I first learned tantra, I learned with a beautiful couple, Oceanus and Icarus, and they were wonderful. She was a goddess, shined like a goddess. He was like a king. They were just amazing, and I said to them, “It’s very obvious to me that you really are owning your practice and love your practice, and what’s the key?” She turned to me and smiled, and she said, “I’m his goddess and he’s my god. That’s how it is. We’ve made an agreement to deeply explore our sexuality and our spirituality together. That’s our agreement.” That’s wonderful, and this was an older couple too, by the way, right? Yes, beautiful, just so absolutely and utterly inspiring those two. It’s wonderful. Let’s talk to the single people who are like on all of the apps and dating, and looking for a relationship, and meeting kind of person after person. You know, it’s the rarest thing in the world that you feel like you could touch any of this kind of stuff with them. I have a few questions around this but one is, how can you evolve your sexual healing when you’re single? I’m going to ask it two different ways. I’m going to ask it for those folks who are single, looking for a relationship, and have sex along the way with people they’re dating or hookups, or whatever they do, like folks who are single looking for a relationship, but have sex in their lives, and then for people who don’t have sex until they find someone that they fall in love with, and they’re not at that place now. For each of those two people, could you share just any kind of tools? For the people who are dating and doing the whole app thing, and trying to connect that way, if you want to start exploring tantrically and that’s what you want to do, be explicit about it. You can say it in your profile, “This is what I want to do. I want to explore this way. I want to find someone who wants to do this with me, and learn the process together.” Now, don’t expect that you’ll get as many responses as you would if you didn’t mention that in your profile. You’re going to get less, but what you will probably get, and I’ve experienced this myself, is you will get higher quality responses. You’ll get people saying things like, “I’m interested in doing that too. I’d like to get to know you first a bit if possible before we do that because it’s such a deep act to work tantrically with someone else. I’d like to get to know you first, or what’s your background? Why do you want to learn this?” It opens up deeper communication immediately if you put that in your profile, “This is what I want to do.” You know, it’s much more than a swipe thing. You know, swipe whichever way. This is much more about a connection. Whether that connection goes anywhere or not, who knows? The thing is you’ve put it out there that you’re interested in connecting on a deeper level. As a result, you’re going to attract people who are more interested in that kind of connection. I hear that over and over again in the retreats that I teach. People are looking for that deeper connection, even if they’re doing the hookup thing, which can be fun at times. A connection is important because it connects us back to our natural love, to our natural like. So yeah, be explicit about it. Say, “This is what I want to learn,” and see what comes up. The deeper we go into ourselves, the more available we become to our relationships we're much more available because we're looking at ourselves first. Click To Tweet I will just kind of reflect on that a little bit. One thing I want to say is that a lot of people won’t mean it, and they’ll just think it’s like new age window dressing on a hookup. It’s so true. There are definitely those folks, and then there are those folks who don’t want real intimacy. They want deeper tantric sex. I think it’s really important to differentiate for yourself if what you’re looking for is a real relationship, that many of the people that you meet in that other way might not be looking for that committed relationship in the same way. I just want to mention those things as well, and then I want to ask you, what about those folks who are single and aren’t necessarily interested in exploring a tantric practice, but are dating and want to be in more friendly alliance with their sexuality and sensuality? What would you suggest for them? For the single people, I would say, if you’re looking for a deeper connection, then one of the ways you can do that, and in my view, the most powerful way you can do that, is connect with your inner sexual energy. Most of us know absolutely nothing about it because we’ve been told nothing about it. We get a manual for our new car when we buy it. We don’t get a manual for our sexual energy when we start to work with it, or we can probably put it another way when our sexual energy starts to work us because we have no idea how it works. We just feel a desire. We feel a heat of passion and then we act on it. We don’t know where it comes from. We don’t know how to intelligently work with it. Tantra teaches us that. A cool thing about tantra, you know, a lot of people think, “Okay, tantra is only for couples.” Actually, most people learn tantra first as a single, as a single person. I love that.

Kundalini Shakti

Yeah, most people do because the reason is you start to touch your energy. You locate it. You learn how to move it through the body. You learn how the different feelings that come up with that energy, the different intensities of the energy. You learn how to circulate it. The thing with this energy is in the tantric tradition, they call it Kundalini Shakti. It’s a serpentine energy. It’s a snake-like energy, but it’s the energy that it takes us deeper understanding of ourselves. It’s inherently blissful, delicious and joyful. When you start to touch it, you want to touch it again and again and again, because it’s just so delicious and wonderful. This is great. What will this give you when you’re in a relationship? How, for the single folks listening who want to do this work, who want to like find that manual, and be able to work with their sexual energy in a safe and beautiful way to get them ready for a relationship, when you do that, how does it change who you are in a relationship? What does it give you that’s going to make a difference in the new relationship? You start to accept yourself at a deeper level. You start to accept your sexuality at a deeper level. You realize that your sexuality is something wonderful that you can share with someone. It’s not all about the transaction, “What am I going to get? How am I performing right now? Am I doing a good job? Am I getting the satisfaction I want? Am I giving the satisfaction to them that they want?” No, all of that goes out the window because you just start enjoying the joy of the present moment of sexual expression, because you’re connecting in with that energy. So again, it’s this energy of friendliness, friendly love, learning that for yourself. You’re saying learning it in terms of working with your own sexual energy. I think a lot of people are listening to this and thinking, “I want to do that. I want to learn about that.” I know that people can work with you to do that, and we’re going to be talking about that. We’ll be giving people ways to do that. Are there any books or courses that you also particularly recommend that you think would help people do that? People who don’t necessarily aren’t ready to do private work yet. Are there books, are there courses, anything you respect and recommend? There is a book I love, love, love. It’s a classic really. It’s what really brought sacred sexuality into the consciousness of many, many Westerners and I have great respect for the author. I think she’s amazing. The Art of Sexual Ecstasy by Margot Anand. She has deeply worked with these practices herself. You can tell it when you read the book, but it gives you a whole way to practice. I love what you said, Ken, about you know, if people aren’t ready working privately. This gives you a way to practice by yourself, but it’s very deep and that is very structured and beautiful. It will help you touch the energy. There’s a beautiful practice in there called “Awakening the Inner Lover”, which I love. It’s all about touching that inner loving energy that we’re bringing forward now. That book in particular. Could you tell us that exercise? Sure. Could you do that briefly?

Yes. I think people are listening to this and so many people are saying, “I want as many tools as I can get.” Yeah, totally. I’m delighted to do that. Everybody, take a comfortable posture. Close your eyes. Now, I’m going to teach you the version that I use from Margot Anand’s book. It’s an adaptation. It’s quite similar. We’re going to meet our inner lover. We’re going to meet our inner lover in the form of our inner loving energy. Eyes closed, jaw relaxed, and visualize standing in front of your perfect lover. Perfect, beautiful, full of love, full of like, wonderful perfect lover. You also recognize that you, for them, you are their perfect lover. You’re perfect for them in every way. Now, gaze upon your inner lover, look with great adoration, with great joy at your inner lover. You see that they are doing that for you, too. They are looking at you with great love, with great like, and with great adoration. You are sharing that with each other. Reach out and your inner lover touches your hand. Feel that loving touch. Completely nurturing and completely loving. Now it’s your turn. You reach out and you touch their hands, giving love and giving acceptance. Feel how you feel as a result of this. How do you feel as a result? Feel how you feel because that’s what we’re trying to get here, that inner loving energy, beyond everything else. That’s what we want to do. How do you feel when you feel that love? That’s your inner lover. Now, hold onto that deliciousness of that energy, that loveliness of that energy, that beautifulness of that energy. When you’re ready, and at your own pace and gently, you can open your eyes. Beautiful, Grant. Thank you. You’re most welcome. I just want to acknowledge that one of the reasons that I love your work is that so much sexual and tantric teaching is not trauma-informed. When I say trauma-informed, I don’t mean just what they call large T traumas, the big deep violations, but the subtle ones. We have so many small T traumas around sex and sexuality, and so the focus on friendliness is so reduced. It’s assumed that it’s going to be there so that you can move on to the other stuff, but that’s a giant, giant mistake because you’re leaving your soul behind. The magic of the kind of stuff you teach, you got to have your soul there. You got to have your heart there. You got to have your safety there to get that like essence, that golden essence, that thing that’s a mixture of sexuality and love, and kindness, and friendliness, which is just the most beautiful thing of all. I love that your work is grounded in that deep safety. It’s like the tantra of friendliness. I think that makes people feel really safe, A, and B, I think it means that their experiences will be more ecstatic and beautiful and heartwarming. I am so sure that people have so many more questions for you. Unfortunately, we need to come to closing, so I want to ask, will you come back again to answer some of the questions that I know the audience is going to have for you? Ken, I would love it. For sure, totally. That would be great. I’m looking forward to hearing your questions. Yes, I’m looking forward to hearing everybody’s questions too. Grant, how can people learn about your work? Where can they find you? How can they learn from you? Give us all of that. Of course, all of this is going to be in the show notes, and I know that if people go to your website as well, they get a free gift if they sign up for your mailing list. Tell how people can reach you. Fantastic, Ken, yes. ConsciousPathways.net is my website, go and check it out. Have a look and see the sort of things that are on offer there. I regularly do blogs too. You can have a look at those. One blog that I’m doing that’s coming up is I’m talking about how to approach tantra authentically, what authentic tantra is. That’s coming up on Saturday. That’s something you could have a look at. I do one-on-one sessions a lot through Skype and through Zoom. You’re most welcome to approach me about that. We can talk about your goals. What it is you’d like to achieve through your practice of tantra, and the benefits you can receive from practicing, also, workshops and things. Of course, for the situation right now, it’s a little bit tricky but at some point, I have been invited to come over to teach them in the US and I’d love to. I’ll keep you in the loop about that. Yes, if you sign up to my mailing list, you’ll receive a free Dharana like the ones we did today, a centering technique, and it’s called A Dharana on Dating. It’s truly delicious, and you’ll have both the recording and the transcript available for you. I look forward to meeting you, and I hope you really, really found this a useful session today. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Grant, thank you so much. I think that you gave so much to people and so much that people don’t usually get, and I just love the spirituality of friendliness. It’s just really beautiful, and this tantra of friendliness and kind of the whole foundation of the way that you teach. Thank you so much for being here. We will see you again. Folks can reach out to Grant. I want to thank you, all, for being here. I encourage you to visit DeeperDatingPodcast.com, and you can get a transcript of this entire episode, and you can also find the whole video there, as well as on YouTube and lots of other places. Thank you, Grant. Thank you, everyone. We look forward to seeing you on the next episode of the Deeper Dating® Podcast. Thanks, Grant. Thank you. When you subscribe using the subscribe box on the Conscious Pathways home page, you will receive a dharana, a tantric visualization, which is exclusively available to you as a listener to Deeper Dating®. This dharana or visualization will help you connect with your inner intimate energy, your Inner Beloved. Known as Kundalini Shakti in many tantric traditions, this is your energy of transformation, growth, and fulfillment. Go to https://consciouspathways.net. On the home page, enter your email and then click the subscribe button. You will be taken to “A Dharana for Deeper Dating®” page. Enter the password: loveisnumber1 You will have access to download both the written Dharana and the audio recording of the Dharana. Enjoy!

Watch the episode here:

Important Links:

Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share!

Here’s How »

Join the Deeper Dating® Podcast Community today:

deeperdatingpodcast.com