How To Have Great Sex Well Into Your 60s With Tantra | The Mindvalley Podcast | Ep #48

I don't know how anybody can have a healthy 40 year sex life without practicing tantra. Layla Martin.

Leyla Martin is the creator of the Vida Method, a tantric approach to sex, love and relationships.

She spent over 10,000 hours teaching thousands of people how to get back into their bodies and experience epic sex and legendary love.

What is tantra?

It was this idea that the feminine expression is sacred. It actually celebrates anything as a potential divine matter.

Oh, wow.

So the way that you eat, the way that you make love, the way that you move your body, all of this can be an expression of the divine.

I feel like this is my next step in my healing journey.

I grew up very Catholic and I was terrified of my own body. And what happens is when you actually heal physiologically, your energy actually starts to flow in this really beautiful way. And when you enter partnership from that kind of openness, there's a whole new world available.

Wow. How can we start with some simple, basic steps to understanding contra?

So there's three that I think are really great for a starter practice. The first is.

Oh, what does that do?

Oh my God, it's so good. It's literally.

About to start. Interviewing the tantra specialist, Leila Martin. I'm very, very excited, guys, about this one because I'm gonna ask all of my unanswered questions that I'd never had the courage to ask. And it was making me feel shameful and making me feel like I'm gonna be judged, but I'm gonna go for it.

Ask me anything.

All right, well, first of all, when Vishen told me that I'm going to interview you, I started reading about you. And this is an area that I myself and I'm very uncomfortable about, about myself. I haven't explored it much for myself other than, you know, what the little knowledge that we have Growing up as a Middle Eastern girl in Iran, you know, it's not like that. I was very educated about US human sexuality. There's a lot of shame around it. There's a lot of self judgment about it. So anyway, so I'm thinking that I'm definitely not going to talk about sex with you because, you know, if I say that word, then people will see on social media and they will judge me and I'll judge myself and my mother will judge me and my dead father's, you know, my dead father is gonna shake in his grave. So it was like all those thoughts, I'm being honest. So I'm like, okay, instead of the word sex, I'm going to say sacred Union.

Okay.

Then I'm like. Then I wrote to Vision, and I'm like, I don't think I ever did need to ask those questions. And that made me go down a deep, dark rabbit hole for. By my. For my own personal reasons, because it made me realize how much shame I have around this subject. So just want to let you know that the last two days, I've been really like, your work by itself made me understand that I have to do some healing work. Yes.

Thank you for bringing that. I. Most people feel just a huge amount of shame, even disgust, this strange terror that they feel, but they can't even articulate why when it comes to talking about sexual, it is the predominant experience of people on this planet right now. So thank you for bringing that forward, because I know how many people feel that and also have the sense of, like, yeah, why is it so hard? Like, why is it so hard to discuss something that is such a beautiful part of our lives?

Like, for me, I started thinking to myself, what is the core of this fear around sex?

Yeah.

And I understood that my biggest fear is that my. I can be used for my body.

Yeah.

And somebody can use my body without respecting my emotions, and that'll be the end of my life. That's just so scary that I, you know, that it doesn't even allow me to think about sexuality because sexuality becomes about my worth.

Yeah.

So if I were to have a sexual interaction with someone, I got to make sure they love me, they don't abandon me, they'll be with me, they're committed to me, blah, blah, blah. And then that by itself is like. It doesn't allow you to fully understand. Okay, what do I want?

Yeah.

Out of, you know, sexual interactions with another human being. I know that you've devoted for your whole adult life, at least, to learning about tantra and what it really is. But think of me, at least me. I'm a dummy. What is tantra?

Tantra. So it's important to make a distinction between what's called classical Tantra and Neo Tantra. So most people, when they think of tantra, they think of what is called, like, the new form of this. This spiritual practice, essentially. And it has roots in classical tantra. So classical Tantra has roots that go back thousands of years, but it was most developed in India and then spread throughout asia starting around 500 AD and it peaked around 1000-1500 AD and what was so special about it as a religious tradition, because it is a religion, is that, number one, it was very oriented towards Goddess consciousness. So it was this idea that the feminine expression is sacred and holy and deserving of reverence and worship as much so as male religious principle. So that in and of itself is profoundly healing. And it's one of the only religious major world religions that celebrated sexuality as a divine act. It actually celebrates anything as a potential divine act. So the way that you eat can be a divine act. The way that you make love, the way that you are with your spouse, the way that you pray at an altar, the way that you move your body, all of this can be an expression of the divine. And the reason that tantra as a spiritual practice and as a religious tradition taught that was that if everything is one, that's the core Tantric teaching, then your body is an expression of divine consciousness, meaning your body is just as holy as a temple. So in Judeo religious traditions, right, I grew up very Catholic. God exists in a church, God exists in prayer. God exists when you're, you know, celibate and not being of the world. And this is the only way to access God. Tantra was this amazing religious tradition, is an amazing religious tradition that said God is absolutely everywhere. It is also in the temple, it is also in a celibacy practice, it is also in meditation, and it is in orgasm, it's in the beauty of dancing. And so most people misunderstand that tantra was about sex only. But it became known for that because it was one of the only spiritual traditions that said sex can be holy. And I believe so many of us who were raised in these very sex negative traditions, it's been so healing for us to hear that that's an option, that sex isn't inherently anti spiritual, it's not inherently anti God. And I think most of us inherently, if you think about it, oh God, right When you're experiencing sexual pleasure, there's this inherent knowing that it can be a spiritual connection experience. And in fact, when they look at scans of people meditating and scans of people having an orgasmic experience and brain scans of in psychedelic experiences, they look very similar in all these different parts of the brain start to light up. And people who have started to study what the brain looks like on orgasm, some of the experts are saying it looks more like a spiritual experience than what they might have expected. So this classical tantra is a teaching and a path of doing hatha yoga, pranayama, chakra activation, working with kundalini energy, doing deep spiritual practices in order to become enlightened. Neotantra was developed in the last century and one of the predominant teachers of that was actually Osho, an Indian teacher. And it spread all throughout the world because he had this revolutionary idea, which is that if you sit and meditate and try and do too many transcendental practices, when you've got all these issues and you're like terrified of sex and you're afraid of your own heart and you haven't healed things with your mom and your dad, then when you sit and meditate, you're just going to compound the stress inside of you and your spiritual practices actually going to look like a lot of repression rather than aliveness. One of the hearts of tantra, both classical and neo, is that to be spiritual is to come fully alive. And so part of his teaching and part of what's spread throughout the world as this new tantric practice is that we can embrace our bodies, we can activate our energy, and we can specifically heal our sexuality. So many of us as you're talking about, like I grew up very Catholic and I was terrified of my own body. I was terrified and ashamed of my own vulva, like, let alone right, my asshole, like, right. It's like we, we grow up so scared of these parts of us. And so the Neo Tantric tradition is like, why, like why not go there and heal these places where we're ashamed and we're afraid? And what happens is when you actually heal physiologically in your body, this tension, you not only have way better sexual experiences because you're no longer all like tense and ashamed and disconnected, but your energy actually starts to flow in this really beautiful way. It starts to move from your sexual center up to your heart and then to your third eye. And what happens is when you make love that way and when you enter partnership from that kind of openness, there's a whole new world available, both in lovemaking, yes, that's way deeper, more potent, way more expansive, even spiritual. But also the types of relationships we can form because our hearts become so much more open, our orgasms are so much more expansive. So when people think of tantra, they tend to think of a sexual licentiousness like being really slutty, right? And I totally celebrate anyone's path. And I want to say for those of us who want to be in long term partnership, I don't know how anybody can have a healthy 40 year sex life without practicing tantra and the neotentric practices. Because it opens you in this way, it sensitizes you. It's the only path that I know that could make a 50 year marriage sexually interesting. Because when you practice sexual skills from this neodontric tradition, they open up the aperture of what's possible sexually and give you this opportunity to grow together over a lifetime.

Oh, wow. And can a single woman do tantra by herself?

Yes. So actually in the Taoist tradition. So Taoism is a tradition that comes from China and it's very related to the tantric tradition, but they're both very wise traditions and I've studied in both of them. So in the Taoist tradition, there's actually a recommendation that you do what's called solo cultivation. Your own practice first. Because if you think about it, sex is sort of like playing doubles in tennis, right? Like you're actually, you're like you're, you're interacting with another human in something that's physiologically kind of advanced. And so if you take these practices, right. So in a neo tantric practice, you're going to learn things like how to do breathwork sexually, you're going to learn things like new ways to pleasure yourself. You're also going to learn how to heal, how to release the shame, how to release the fear. You can use techniques like sounding or how to have an orgasm in different chakras, which can be really, really powerful. If you try and do that with a partner and you've never ever practiced before, it would be like never practicing tennis solo and trying to practice with a partner, like it would feel overwhelming. And a lot of people feel very overwhelmed by the neotentric practices sexually. So it's actually far more effective to train on your own because if you think about it, you're in your own bedroom. It's still scary. It's still scary to go into self pleasure to teach yourself how to breathe, to learn even breast massage techniques. And when you do that, and hopefully your partner does it too, then when you meet and you start doing the practices together, it's going to be so much more effective.

So you have to do tantra alone in order to do a good job as a couple?

Yes, yes, yes. Or even when you're single. What most people don't realize is our energy is magnetic, right? Like anybody here studying mindvalley knows that we attract part of what we're putting out. So many of us have deeply imprinted experiences and messaging around sexuality that actually either shuts us down or limits our experience of a person of the opposite sex or someone that we want to be in romantic partnership with regardless of gender. So if I got really imprinted, right? My father was sexually abusive growing up and I grew up Catholic. So I got all this messaging that sex is dangerous, men are dangerous. And on top of that, like God is kind of dangerous and might send you to hell if you do anything wrong or if you're a sexual being. So when I was a teenager, I couldn't even walk into Victoria's Secret. Like that's how deep my shame body went. And when I first started doing sacred sexual practices, I actually threw up over the side of the bed because I had so much trauma and so much fear inside of my body that needed to be released for me to do these experiences. But what was amazing is as I replaced this imprinting around the masculine, like, it's scary, it's dangerous, I started to attract a different kind of man into my life. The more that I felt like my sexuality is beautiful, the more I became a match for men who felt that way that weren't just objectifying me or weren't just trying to have another notch on their ego belt. And so when we do this sexual work, even as single women or single men, what happens is that we actually re imprint our energy field and that can either change who we attract or it can literally transform our long term relationships from the inside out.

Wow. So like in your personal experience, what I'm hearing is your trauma around sex and your shame around sex motivate you to learn about Tantra.

I think I both had this soul longing because I asked my parents to send me to Asia, to Tibet, Indian, Nepal when I was 14. And that was something inside of me that I still can't fully explain. And I went to Stanford when I was 17 and I started studying sexuality and sex education. Basically I wanted to completely change how we educate children and teenagers. And it was, I don't believe the impulse came from being abused, but what I will say is that being abused taught me that sex can be one of the most violent places on this planet. And when we're not sexually whole, it feels like a piece of our soul is missing. So it became very clear to me that when I was super traumatized, I wasn't fully alive, I wasn't having the deep experiences I wanted, and my relationships with men were a total mess. And so I had a deep desire to fix that and to heal that. The other part of having that abuse background was I started with so much self loathing, so much shame, so much inner hatred, so much fear. And it took years to move through that and I was able to say like, wow, okay, very few people have that deep of trauma. But no matter where you're starting from, you can absolutely have an expanded ecstatic orgasm. You can fall in love with your own pussy. You can learn to adore your body. And even for me, like, I started out so terrified of men and now I am in devotional worship of men and how magnificent they are. And I feel like it's this healing. Right. I want to teach men how to truly worship women, all of them. And I want women to know how to truly worship men.

Wow. So as you said, sex can be an awakening experience or can be a horrible trauma. Yeah, Right. And which gives sex a lot of power. But as, as we all know, there's always been this significance on sex and how we should not treat it as a casual thing. And you know, like in different religions they said you have to first be married and you have to, you know, it has to be legal and sorry, it has to be religiously allowed and all of that. What are your takes on using tantra with the wrong person? How can you know if someone's, how can you find the right tantra partner? Let's say you're not in a long term, you haven't found your soulmate or the love of your life, but you want to experience tantra with another person.

Yeah.

How do you pick that person? How do you know if the tantric partner you've picked is a safe person?

Yeah. So the interesting thing about the religious programming is that usually in it's stay monogamous or else you'll be punished. Right. Or stay monogamous because monogamy is more holy. What I love about the tantric teachings is you learn that your body is a temple. You learn that it is this holy space of beauty and magic and wonder. And I find that when people truly experience that, like know how amazing their body is and how it's almost like it's a gift for anybody to experience you sexually. Once you know that, it's hard to just like buck a stranger, you know, like it's hard to just be part of pickup culture because it's this deep, self honoring. Now I do think you can be self honoring and have multiple partners in a lifetime. It's just that you're selective exactly as you're saying of who can meet you. Right. So I think that depends on where we're at in our lives. But for instance, for me, like when I was single, I, I left an eight and a half year partnership and then I was single for about a year, I couldn't be with anyone who drank. Right. Like that level of consciousness wasn't going to work. For me, everybody who I was with had to have a meditation practice and some history of spirituality. So I think when you go deeper into these practices, that starts to be more important. And I think for those of us who don't have a deep tantric practice, the basics of am I being treated well? Am I in a reasonably emotionally safe place? Like, nobody's ever 100% emotionally safe. But this is not abusive. This is generally safe. I'm generally honored in my experiences. And here's another thing that I don't think we ask enough questions about. Does sex mean the same thing to me as it does to my partner? So if I'm looking for a life partner, I want to be matching with people who are looking for life partnership as well. Right. It doesn't mean that we have to know that we're the one before we sleep together. But I want to match with someone who is interested in sex being the same expression. And if someone is like, I want to have as many lovers as possible, they should be matched with someone who wants to have as many lovers as possible. We don't ask that question enough of what does sexual sex mean to you? Right? And what does this container of being sexual together mean? And how do we hold each other in it? Because there's a tremendous sensitivity in sharing your body with someone. And I don't think we talk about that enough without the shame, right? Because I do think that some people are designed to be sluttier, more sexually expressed in this lifetime. And surely you can do that if you're aligning with partners who are taking care of you and respecting you. And you can be like, you know what? This temple, like any temple, it is designed to be worshiped. It's designed to be treated in certain ways. It's designed to be honored. So I'm only going to allow partners who meet that criteria. And when I was single, I would wait three weeks to sleep with someone. And that was if I was going on regular dates, getting to know them really well, dropping in with them really well. And what I thought was really amazing about that is someone shows you who they are in three weeks, and you don't get all those crazy sex chemicals and you're not, like, then blindsided by limerence. You can actually be like, wow, who is this person? Before I'm like, drunk on orgasm hormones and actually decide whether they are worthy of your body. And I think that's a huge flip of who is worthy of the gift of my sexuality rather than, oh, I can't share my sexuality because I'll be like, shame.

Wow. And then so looking at sex as a spiritual practice, is sex a sacred transfer of energy? Do we get each other's energies and karmas and traumas when we have sex?

I don't know that we take each other's karmas and traumas on. We certainly take on energy. And just like if you spend a night with anyone, right, Whether you're having sex or not, you are impacted by their energy. You are surely impacted by making love to someone. So what I like to have people ask themselves is, is this an upward spiral of energy? Because some lovers, some partners will amplify you. Some partners you make love to and you can take on the world, right? Some partners, you know your beauty through your own eyes, more acutely because of how they see you. Making love to someone like that is going to amplify your energy. Making love to someone who is carrying stories of sex that are super negative or who is objectifying you without seeing your heart and your mind. Women actually love being objectified, most of them when it's integrated. So you want your partner to find you beautiful and hot if they also see the beauty of your heart, if they also see the beauty of your spirituality. Right. But we don't often like objectification because it was removed. It's like, oh, I think you're hot, but that's it, right? I don't see your brilliance, I don't see who you are.

Which is why we feel happy but not safe.

Yes, exactly. So having that objectification with and I worship your heart and I see the spirit in you is so incredibly important. So when we make love with someone who is taking from our energy, then sex becomes a net negative. When you make love with someone and there's an upward spiral and there's devotion there, whether you're going to spend your lives together or not, then sex actually enhances our energy.

I think that transfer of energy is the reason why there's always been so much emphasize on sex in all holy and spiritual books as well. Like somebody was trying to say, when you have sex with someone, you guys get transfer energies. And in my opinion, well, I always think that our, the manifestation of our energy body is our physical body or our physical body is the manifestation of our energy body. So I think sexually transmitted diseases are in fact the manifestation of the energy we took on from another person which was lower than our own energy. And we ended up at, as you said, net zero or net minus. Okay, back to tantra. So finding a partner who is on, who wants to Utilize tantra as the same purpose is yours is key, so you feel safe with the person. I. I'm noticing that in recent, especially in recent years, where the consciousness has reached a new level, a lot of women like to explore their masculine side by becoming more independent, more empowered, stepping into their assertiveness. And more men like to. To explore their feminine side, which is their softer side. They're more intuitive, creative side, which is amazing. But due to all the cultural and societal shame around a man, you know, exploring his feminine energy, I feel like a lot of men are confused by what they truly desire, which is wholesomeness within and connecting with their feminine energy. And they get sexually confused and they think they are bisexual, when in fact, all they want is to explore their feminine side.

Well, I have a different experience. I feel like sexuality is an orientation. So you either love cock or you don't, right? You love pussy or you don't. And it's pretty clear, I think, like, I'm bisexual, and so I can tell that I have, like, a deep desire for women that is a powerful aspect and expression of my sexuality. And for me, it doesn't come from confusion. It comes from clarity. In fact, I was less sure that I was bisexual when I was very clouded by the confusion of Catholicism telling me that that was wrong and sinful. And once I healed a lot of that confusion, it became very clear to me how I was attracted to people and who I could be attracted to. And that was this really deep and beautiful impulse within me. What I do recognize in society right now is that in terms of our gender expression, people do feel extraordinarily lost. And this is talking about polarity. Polarity means there's a masculine essence, there's a feminine essence. And when we embody those, we create a kind of alchemical activation, regardless of the gender of the body that we're in. And I feel like what happened is people are just taking on more ideas of, like, oh, women should be like this. And as a woman, like, you can't win. It's like, you stay home with your kids, and you're provided for by your husband, and society's like, oh, poor you. You never realized your career power or your dharma, right? And you go out and you make it in the world, and you're making a whole bunch of money, and everyone's like, oh, you must be, like, lonely and sad, right? And you should have had children to feel happier as men. It's kind of the same thing. It's like you go out and you're like, this big, strong alpha. And everyone's like, why aren't you more compassionate? Why don't you feel more? Why don't you have more heart? You start working on your emotions. Everyone's like, oh, you're a crybaby. Like, we just. We shame each other so hard in society. When I tune into what a woman is and what a man is, it's like, wow. So there's this fragmentation that I feel like happened energetically, which is that we split our sexuality, our sexual center, our heart center, and our spiritual center from full alignment and power. So as women, what happened was like, you can be fully sexual, but you're going to be, like a whore or a mistress, and men are going to want you, but you don't get to do anything else. Or you can be in the heart. You can be a loving, devotional wife, but you know what? No one's going to want to have sex with you. Like, your husband's going to cheat on someone who actually has their sexual center open. And should you dare to be in, your spiritual power, will probably just kill you. So that really fragmented what it was to be a woman. Men who often think that they escaped this conditioning. My experience is that patriarchy has been just as toxic for men and that they may have gotten a better deal in terms of having social, political, and economic power, but they lied to themselves just as much to live in such an unjust, dehumanizing society. For men, it was like, oh, your sexuality is all about conquest. Your sexuality is about taking from someone. Like, you take someone's virginity, right? Your heart. Like, you're actually not supposed to be in your heart, right? Or if you are, then that makes you, like, soft and compassionate. But you're never gonna, like, take over the planet or, you know, build an empire. Your spirituality. Men also got very brainwashed spiritually. Like telling a man that he has to be celibate in order to be aligned with God, which they did. You know, in my religious tradition, that's also disconnecting a man. So what I feel about true polarity is that when men restore the connection between their sexuality, their heart, and their spirituality, and women restore the connection as well, we have this expression that feels like wholeness. And no one has to tell me how to be a woman anymore. I built an empire. I run two companies. I'm really good at building teams and making money and being super successful. I love having a big career in the world, and I'm tremendously submissive in bed. I love feeling this, like, devotional service to My man, I've chosen a man who, like, loves to work out, and he's super successful and he's really powerful, and, like, he doesn't take from anyone, and he worships my power. And sometimes Eros doesn't live in these really politically correct ways of relating.

Right?

So I know that I can be really powerful, successful, and respected as a woman and also be, like, so wild in the bedroom and actually, like, submit to his masculine power as an aspect of my sexuality and still be super powerful everywhere else in my life, including in the bedroom. Because to me, that submission is a source of power. It's a source of my joy. I found my way to that not by listening to anyone tell me what a woman was, but by doing the tantric practices to reconnect my energy and become whole again. I also think that there's just as women have woken up to spirituality and sexuality, men are starting to wake up. They're actually a little bit behind women. And there's this whole new way for men where they are warriors. They're probably protectors. They're designed to be protectors of what they love. They're designed to protect their partners, their children, their values. And they're designed for their sexuality to be a gift.

Right.

If you have a male partner and he's an amazing lover, that's a lifetime's gift. And we don't celebrate male sexuality as the gift. It truly is nearly enough right now. Men are scared and feel really ashamed. And I feel like we need to do the healing so that we can relate as men and women from a much healthier, more empowered place once again.

So tantra can help us activate the feminine and masculine energies within ourselves and become wholesome, right?

Absolutely. And also allow ourselves to be whatever we were made as in the divine consciousness. So some people don't fit neatly into the box of man or woman. They're gender non binary. Right. Or they're gender non conforming. And what's so beautiful about Tanjiro to me is it celebrates that expression as well. So it celebrates these archetypes of divine masculine and divine feminine, and then also celebrates the full spectrum of expression, no matter what it looks like.

Wow, that's amazing. When a woman wants to have sex with a guy and he's not initiating, we think that if we were to initiate and the guy says no, then that is rejection and we're not being a good girl. And even if he says yes, then he's gonna judge us and think, oh, this is not a person I want as the Mother of my future child, how should we deal with that? Do we for a woman, should we wait until we get to know the guy and the guy doesn't judge us? Or if we feel like we feel safe enough to have a sexual interaction with someone, should we just go for it?

One thing I want all women to do is to collect no's as a badge of honor. So for me, I was so insecure about men and so sure that I was like, so unwanted and so undesirable that, like a no from a man was the most terrifying experience for me. So I know what that feels like. To not want to be rejected, to feel like, oh my God, he's going to say no and then like, you know, what does that mean? It's like the most horrible feeling in my own body that, like, I'm supposed to be the sex object and he doesn't even want me. And so I literally trained myself to notice. First I did it in sales and then I did it and putting myself out there in the world where I was like, wait. To do anything meaningful in life, you have to get so many no's. Like every Instagram post I post, how many people thought it was dumb or unsubscribed or unfollowed or to fully dance the way that I want to dance. Some people are going to think it's amazing. Some people are going to think, ugh, like, she's too much, right? So I taught myself that collecting no's is the way to get what you want in this world. And I think too many women spend too much time hiding from the male no rather than focusing on, I am so worthy and so amazing and so sure of my beauty and so in love with myself that if a man says no, it does not change my fundamental sense of self worth. When I have that, then I can be in true love partnership. Because getting, finding, getting an early yes from a man is just the first little step on climbing the Mount Everest of what you call sacred union, right? That's my word for divine partnership. And if you want to be in deep, true, soul bearing love, that is one of the hardest things you'll ever do. It takes so much, much courage to be in that level of partnership. So early on when we're dating, getting used to going for what you want and taking no as an excellent sign that you're on the path to getting what you want. So important, right? If you want to get the career of your dreams, you go out there and you get told no a lot. The most successful People in the world have been told no the most, but we don't think of it that way when we're dating and looking for partners. Partners, what's so beautiful about a no means that I asserted who I am and what I want. Enough that I was able to weed out people who aren't a match. What I will say to women is men do pursue what they want. Men go for what they want. They don't play games. So if a man isn't pursuing you, if he's not all in, then he's not a fuck yes. And I want way fewer women standing for or staying in situationships or less than yes. Now you can have a partner who's scared. When I first got into partnership with my current partner, he had a lot of trauma from his previous experience and so he was very scared of partnership. But he was clear that he was a hell yes to me. And so I could navigate his fears and I could navigate his shutdown knowing that he actually chose me on a very deep level. So men are quite smart and quite perceptive and they know in like the first couple of seconds whether you are wife material or whether you are just for fun. And I think too many women spend time in just for fun category hoping they'll become wife material rather than getting to the no. Like, no, you're not my person. No, you're not my future wife. Right. And of course people need time to know, but they'll know whether they're even available to considering that with you pretty soon on. So I want to encourage women to develop that ability to be proud of getting a no so that you can sort through the people that actually aren't a good fit for you. Because life is short. So don't spend time with anyone who's anything less than a fuck yes to you.

I think for a lot of women, when they feel like a man doesn't want them as much, they go on. This competition of I'm going to make him want me totally. Where does that come from?

I think that comes from our hidden terror of love. Because when a man wants you, it's so scary. I actually haven't met a woman yet. I would love for some of your audience to write in and talk about their experience if it's different. When a man chooses you all the way and he wants to make love to you with his heart and his soul and his whole being and he is devoted to who you are, it brings up all of our terror, all of our relationship issues. And a lot of the time I see that women are terrified of love and we actually hide that terror and project it onto men. Everyone is playing that game, regardless of gender. And so what I see is that when women really own that true love is terrifying and being truly chosen is kind of scary, they actually stop choosing men who are playing hard to get, who aren't really that into them, and they stop hiding from the terror of being fully chosen. Because when you're fully chosen, you have to meet all those intimacy terrors and start developing a true, real, deep partnership. So it's very convenient to chase unavailable people if deep down inside you're terrified of real partnership. And most of us are.

How do you differentiate what you said earlier on that for tantric, for tantra, we should pick a tantric partner who has the same understanding as we do about monogamy. Yeah. What are your thoughts on monogamy and what are your thoughts on the fear around monogamy that a lot of women speaking on behalf of the women like me, we are scared of being cheated on.

Ah, okay.

Yes, yes.

So what's interesting, I just want to bust a few myths. So my friend who's a psychologist, Dr. Katmire, she says that the research shows that it's actually women who ask for open marriages over men. And science also shows that men are much happier in long term monogamous marriages than women are. So there's this myth that like monogamous marriage is designed for women and men are just caged. Men actually tend to thrive in that situation more than women do. So women have a deep sexual hunger for variety and for exploration. And sometimes we don't own enough. What I will say, like, I just finished teaching a six month tantric mastermind with my partner and we worked with, it was 20 couples who are so deeply in love, so devoted to each other, and the men, like, blew my mind, right? Just so in love with their wives. And so many of these couples had been together 15, 20. We had one couple that was together 25 years and they said at the end that that was the most in love they had ever been in 25 years from doing six months of tantric practice. So oftentimes, I think rightfully so, we can be scared of like, wow, if I do tantra, am I going to end up like, me and my partner are now sex fiends and he's going to cheat, Right. Or we put ourselves in these situations where maybe like other people aren't honoring a monogamous container. What I've seen is that if you study tantra with teachers and in communities where partnership is really honored, people fall way more deeply in love. Cheating, by most accounts. And I'm not an expert in cheating, but most of the people that I respect say, look, it doesn't just happen in a vacuum. Like, yes, there are serial cheaters, right? Like people who just by nature are serial cheaters. But the vast majority of people who end up cheating do love their spouse. They do love their long term partner. And they grow apart. They stop talking, they stop being intimate together, they stop having this dynamic kind of exchange where it would be unthinkable to even cheat on each other. That's the vast majority of cheaters. And so I really feel for people that don't have these deeper intimacy tools, that don't have a way to grow sexually, that grow apart because they're not, they don't know how to connect when things get scary. Nobody teaches us these things. So what I've seen actually is that tantra makes cheating way less likely for the vast majority of people because they fall more deeply in love, they become more connected, they become more committed. Now, if your partner or you are acting actually deeply wired to be polyamorous and you've been lying to yourself your entire life, could doing a sexual practice show you that truth? Sure. That's the thing about doing anything spiritual is you're going to find out the truth. Like when I became a little bit more open, I'm predominantly monogamous, but I'm also bisexual, so me and my partner don't explore separately. We would never do that. We don't have other partners. But like, we would, let's say, go to a play experience together and have adventures. Or I have like one of my best friends, Emily, she's also one of my lovers, so I can, like, I will make out with her in really beautiful ways. And so we have this like very, very light openness, but it's nothing like people would think. I call it California monogamy, because in our circles we are monogamous, right? Because we don't have other partners. We would never do anything without each other, that kind of thing. And what I have found in that constellation and in that level of devotion to each other is that we keep going deeper. And the more that we practice tantric sexuality, the more devoted we become, the more profound our sexual expression becomes. And when I started becoming a little bit more wild, becoming a little bit more expressed, I was terrified that my audience would judge me, that people would think, oh, if I do tantra, I'm going to automatically become this like, like sex crazed polyamorous person. And I had to have an honest conversation with my audience and say, look, if you do any real spiritual practice, and especially if you do tantra, it will show you the truth, the truth of who you are. And I think a lot of people are deeply monogamous. I think a lot of people would give anything to spend a lifetime of devotion with their chosen human. I think that's what most people want. I do think there are some people who would find that to be suffocating and they need to have multiple partners. And so what I have seen is that a true Tantric path that is truly oriented towards going inwards will show you what you truly are. That also to me reduces cheating. Because if your partner really wants to be with multiple partners and he's lying to himself, let's say, and trying to be in a partnership, and that's why he's cheating. Hopefully a true Tantric path would help him get real with himself so he stops hurting people because he's lying to himself.

Wow. So this goes back to we don't know our true selves because we are so conditioned by the culture and the society that we don't really know the career path we've chosen. The partner we've chosen, the family we've chosen is authentic to us. Or if we did it out of, of the cultural conditioning.

Yeah.

And sexuality is one of them. Yeah. Because maybe a lot of straight people, if they can dig deep into their authentic self, they would like to explore like both sides or totally vice versa. Maybe a lot of gay people are actually straight if, you know, we do. We just have to find ourselves beneath all the trauma, find our authentic self. And what I'm understanding is that tantra can be a way for you to find your authentic self, connect with your higher self.

That's the heart of it. It's a spiritual tradition that doesn't say you have to be like this in order to be worthy of God's love. It says, you are already divine love. That's what you are. And to express that with the most authenticity is to be honest with yourself and to live a life of truth.

And for our audience, how can we start with some simple basic steps to understanding and practicing Tantra?

Absolutely. So it starts with what I like to call a self pleasure practice. So this can even be as short as five minutes. So you set a timer, five minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes max. And you touch your body with the intention of self pleasuring, so, AKA masturbation. But you do it incorporating Some of these practices, so there's three that I think are really great for a starter practice. The first is to not just touch yourself the way you usually do. So usually masturbation, what I'll call self pleasure is very habitual. We still do it the way we did when we were young. We fantasize about the same thing over and over again. There's nothing wrong with that. But what it does is it actually wires our nervous system to only have orgasms and sexual pleasure for one particular kind of touch and one particular kind of fantasy. So if you start out, let's say you have a sexy playlist, we've got some of those, you can totally check them out on our website for people is if you like start by stroking your skin and bringing in awareness, like awareness of the pleasure on your body, awareness of what it feels like to touch yourself. You're starting to switch out of the habit and into presence. So this is bringing more meditation into your self pleasure experience. Now the next thing is to breathe more deeply and more fully than you normally would so you don't have to do like the full like Wim hof breathing of a. But it's nice to go. Why? Because most of us have subtly trained ourselves to be in our heads during sexual experiences. To actually be witnessing our pleasure or to be fantasizing or to be subtly controlling the experience. So what happens when you incorporate a deeper connected breath is that you'll actually melt out of your everyday state of control. You literally shift your nervous system so that you're feeling more, you have more interoception ability to actually feel your internal experience that will switch you out of this sort of automated sexual experience into one that's already more richer and more sensitive. Finally you can incorporate an energy practice. My favorite is that as you're turning yourself on, you actually inhale the pleasure up into your heart. Inhale the pleasure up into your heart. So instead of leaving the pleasure in your clitoris or in your cock, you inhale it up into your heart. This can eventually produce a heart orgasm where you're having an orgasm in your heart center as opposed to just your sexual center. But in the beginning what will happen is you'll start to feel a more full bodied experience of pleasure. And you'll also see this is just one tiny little step how just a few different changes to your self pleasure practice can completely shift how you experience sex even in just five minutes. So quick recap. You're going to touch yourself and become more present, almost make the sensations and the Pleasure, your meditation. Then as you start to self pleasure, you're going to do a deeper, fuller breath than you normally do. It's helpful if you breathe as though you could breathe into your pussy, your or your intersex genitals. And then finally, as you start to feel pleasure, you're going to use the power of your mind and breath to move your pleasure into your heart center, which will shift you from just feeling sexual pleasure in your sexual center into your heart center. And that alone has these huge shifts that you can feel inside your body. Body.

Do you first experience orgasm and then push up the energy? I was a little confused about that.

Yeah. So if you want to go for the full heart orgasm practice, what happens is as you're turning yourself on and feeling more and more pleasure, it's like as you feel the pleasure in your sexual center, you move into your heart. No, no, sorry. So as you're turning yourself on, so let's say you're just turning yourself on, you're not having an orgasm. So as you're turning yourself on, it's like almost like every pulsation of pleasure you feel, you breathe and move it with your mind into your heart. So it's like if turning yourself on is building like a pot of gold inside of your sexual center and orgasm is when that gold spills over, you take the gold and you keep putting it into your heart instead. So it's like instead of letting it fill up in your sexual center, you're like scooping it into your heart, into your heart, into your heart, into your heart. Then when you have an orgasm, the overflow happens from your heart instead of your sexual center.

So the energy release comes out of your heart chakra instead of the root chakra.

Yes.

Oh, what does that do?

Oh my God, it's so good. It's literally, it's. It's having an orgasm of the heart, which is so exquisite, it's like, it's like embodied pleasure. Prayer is the only way I can describe it. It's like it feels like there's a symphonic orchestra of angels pleasuring each other with feathers. And I'm in love with myself and the universe and my partner all at the same time. Or if I'm by myself, I'm just like madly in love with myself in the universe. It's like instead of just an orgasm that feels like sexual pleasure and release, it's an orgasm that feels like it's accessing the deepest poetry of your heart. It's so beautiful.

Wait, that's a heart orgasm.

Yes.

Wow. Okay, wait. I have more questions.

That's level one.

I got level one.

Okay.

What is sounding?

Yes. Okay. So most of us have learned to restrict the expression of sound. So I can actually do a little demo. So what happens? Like, let's say I'm going to breathe right now into my.

Is that okay? Sure.

Okay, great.

Yeah, it's yours. All right.

So as I start breathing into my pussy, what's going to happen is my energy is going to activate. Most people have learned to repress their energy, and so what happens is if I don't let the energy move, which is going to move my body, and if I don't sound, it's going to lock the energy and put me back into my head. So this is one of the reasons why people have such a hard time unleashing sexually is because we're actually afraid of letting our bodies move. Our voices express and our energy activate. For thousands of years, we've actually been conditioned out of that. So if I start breathing into my body like this, so I started just letting my sound and my movement happen, I'm gonna first repress my movement and my sound and watch what happens. I have to stay in my head to do that. Most of us have trained our bodies to perform rather than open. So if sex is a performance and I want to control my body, I'm not going to let my body move and I'm not going to express sound. What's going to happen then is I'm going to stay in my head. For most women, what this feels like is, why don't I feel more like, why am I taking so long to orgasm? Like, why is this not touching me to the core? It's because we're subtly repressing our bodies. For men, it's like, oh, I just habitually fantasize about the same thing, or I feel disconnected from my partner, or I'm just doing this kind of sexual act. So what happens then if I start breathing and I let my body move? All right, so I'm gonna let my body move, but I'm not gonna sound. It opens, but not all the way sound. So when I'm sounding, what I'm doing is I'm sounding the experience that I'm having, the sensations that I'm having in my. As I breathe. Now, if you're watching, you're probably like, oh, maybe she's just faking an orgasmic sound. I'm telling you. And there's no way that you can absolutely verify this. All I'm doing is breathing into my and expressing what I can feel inside. And that is unleashing energy inside. And everybody gets to that point if they do enough practice. This is where you stop feeling disconnected in your sexuality or shut down and you start just feeling so full of pleasure and aliveness. Making love from this place with your partner is like, it's so beautiful. It heals so much of the alienation and loneliness. So I'll show what happens with the sound. So this, my whole system starts to open. Now usually we only let ourselves have that level of openness in our most amazing orgasms. Like most people think of when Harry met Sally. Right. And Sally is like, I'm having a fake orgasm. Right. But the reason that that orgasm looks so good to us is because that's what a really great orgasm is actually looks like. Now most of us wait for the moment when we have the most mind blowing orgasm to let ourselves get that free. If you train your body to be that free and that express, what happens is that most of your orgasms then become mind blowing orgasms. You're not waiting for the orgasm to give you that feeling of liberation and freedom. You're training your body to be that liberated and free. And that's what unlocks orgasm, is a much deeper experience, much more regular.

So we can experience regular incredible orgasms just by letting our bodies free?

Yes.

And by just by stopping to suppress ourselves?

Yes. Wow.

So suppression is what stopping us from experiencing ecstatic orgasms.

Yes. And here's the thing, I think most people think like if they were to unleash that it would be the end of their monogamous long term partnerships or that they couldn't be spiritual beings anymore. And to me it's the opposite. That level of orgasm allows us to touch the deep knowing of the divine. Viscerally it's the same as prayer. It's so powerful. And as I said earlier in the podcast, I literally don't know how a couple could have a satisfying deep sexual experience for 50 years without opening their bodies. It's like how could you be healthy if you never went to the gym? So sexually training yourself over a lifetime to me makes much deeper partnerships, much happier families and truly much more spiritually sovereign people. We've always thought it was the opposite, but to me it's like one of those cosmic jokes because it's such a lie.

Wow. So I really truly encourage the audience to watch your quest on mindvalley, which is basic tantra, I guess teaching tantra is it the Vita method.

So it is part of the Vita.

Method, which was my Vita method.

The Vita method is a vital and integrated tantric approach. So it's a tantric approach to sex, love, and relationships. I went to Stanford. I did pre med at Stanford in human biology. So I've mixed a lot of science, the most up to date research on what integrates trauma, what's good for the nervous system with these deeply mystical practices. So I've been practicing tantra for over 20 years now. And so combining these two understandings produces a sexual system that allows us to both heal our sexuality and our relational capacity, and to be able to restore our nervous system's ability to have the most extraordinary orgasms, the most expansive sex, and the deepest partnerships over our lifetime. So inside of the Mindvalley Quest, I taught one dimension of the Vita method, which is how to have an energy orgasm, which trains you in so many of these practices to be able to understand your sexuality in a much deeper way, to be able to heal, to be able to do the energy practices. So if you're curious about what I just taught, my Mindvalley Quest is basically a deep dive into that so you can completely rewire the experience of sexuality and partnership.

Wow. You know what? We are gifted by this body as a gift, the divine gift for us to enjoy the pleasures of this earth. And at the same time, it's her temple. It's the representation of the divine within her, capable of creating another life. And every woman should treat her body like she's a goddess and her body is her temple. And she has to be very conscious about what energy she likes to allow in her temple and what energy is truly aligned with the divinity within her, to amplify her divinity and not to dim her light. Thank you so much. This was very healing for me, personally. Very.

Yes.

I'm gonna explore deep and I want to talk to you and I really, really this. I feel like this is my next step in my healing journey, which I can imagine that it's gonna be the same for many women out there. I'm like, when I first started voicing my issues, I thought, it's just me.

Yeah.

And I've been surprised to see how many women think and feel the same way that I do. I thought I'm the only crazy one. Sounds like there are a lot of us in this world.

We all crazy.

Anyways, thank you very much.

Oh, thank you so much.

So I hope you enjoyed that episode of the Mindvalley podcast with Layla Martin. My name is Vishen Lakhiani. I'm the founder of Mindvalley and if you happen to be watching this episode and it's September 12, 2024, I want you to know that in just a few weeks, October 3rd to October 7th, in Ibiza, Mindvalley is putting on its luxury event, A Fest, and Layla is the key speaker. AFES explores the frontiers of human growth of consciousness and this A fest is no exception. We're looking at the intersection of sexuality, consciousness and manifesting. And if you enjoyed the topic of this podcast, you might want to to fly to ibiza to attend AFEST. All the information is on the website afest.com go check it out, read about it and decide if this is something for you. AFES is a luxury event. It's about 150 to 200 people. It takes place at the Six Senses in Ibita, one of the most astounding, most gorgeous hotels in the world. And it's for singles or couples. Now, the theme is a little bit unique and so I want to bring in one of our speakers, Emily Fletcher, to share with you what to expect. Listen to Emily. She's going to be one of our major speakers there, along with Layla Martin. And visit afest.com for more information.