Episode 7 - The Erotic Awakening of Venus & Mars with Geralyn Gendreau human potential expert and lifestyle coach
Transcript
Transcript
The Erotic Awakening of Venus & Mars with Geralyn Gendreau
Woman: This program is intended for mature audiences only.
[Music]
FRANCESCA GENTILLE: Welcome to “Sex: Tantra & Kama Sutra”. I’m your host Francesca Gentille, bringing you the soul of sex. And in today’s show we have Geralyn Gendreau, marriage and family therapist and author of “When I Became God’s Lover”.
GERALYN GENDREAU: “Sexuality, like everything, is a blank slate that we project our unconscious beliefs and expectations onto. It’s imagination that allows us to create out of nothing but our intentional focus and passion a future that wouldn’t otherwise be available. And I remember one guy telling me that if he gets to feel like a woman’s hero, that is the greatest reward in his world.”
FRANCESCA GENTILLE: Welcome Geralyn.
GERALYN GENDREAU: Hi Francesca, it’s great to be here.
FRANCESCA GENTILLE: That concept of ‘when I became God’s lover’, that is so tantalizing! How did you get that? When did you become God’s lover? How did that work?
GERALYN GENDREAU: Well it’s the title of a poem from a book of short stories and essays on sacred erotics that I wrote in the late 90’s when I was going through a kind of transition in my life. And it’s always been amusing for me to see myself on the bill as an ecstatic poet, because quite honestly I mostly write bad poetry, and “God’s Lover” is an exception, a favorite that I’m often invited to recite because it has this kind of mind- and body-bending effect. I’m best known really for reciting other people’s poetry, Rumi and Hafiz as well as Mirabai and Lala, a Kashmiri Woman from the 14th century whose miracles are really the stuff of legend. What’s important to say about being God’s lover and what I’ve invited listeners to consider and investigate the whole idea of being a lover to the beloved, the beloved meaning that infinite, ecstatic field of all possibility and energy that’s really what we are, and always have been at the core. When I think of “God’s Lover” it’s a kind of erotic ‘Declaration of Independence’ that helped me break out of my Catholic girl’s mindset, where I was God’s bad little girl-child, you know the whole Eve mythos, the mythic structures we’ve all been marinated in, this idea of woman as sinful and evil, like she’s the one that Adam’s afraid of and has to dominate, otherwise she’s going to take him over and somehow lead him out of the light, instead of into it. And sacred sex is really the place where pleasure bonds, which from my perspective are a woman’s responsibility to form and protect with all of the seriousness she can muster, lead us directly into higher states of being, a more elegant experience of existence and day-to-day life, both in relationship to others who are beloved and to everyone that we meet.
FRANCESCA GENTILLE: So in becoming God’s lover, there was this beautiful shifting from the bad girl of sex to the driving woman of sexuality.
GERALYN GENDREAU: Yes, yes. I mean, sexuality, I think of it as a natural resource, one that’s largely been wasted and left untapped because of the sex-negative mindset promoted by traditional frames of reference that see sexuality as base, or worse, even evil, and you know this is what we took on in our anthology The Marriage of Sex And Spirit
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because sexuality, like everything, is a blank slate that we project our unconscious beliefs and expectations onto, and in a culture that teaches a deep respect for sexuality, such as they had in ancient India, where the Kama Sutra comes from, the energies of love are harnessed for the good of society, so there’s a positive context for sexuality. And to my way of thinking, relationships and sexuality have the potential to carry individuals and society to a higher level of functioning. That’s why the book’s subtitle was chosen, because it points up the possibility. And I so love what Teilhard de Chardin said, “Once we’ve mastered the winds, the waves, and tides, and gravity, we will harness the energy of love for God. Then, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.”
FRANCESCA GENTILLE: So there’s a power in sexuality, a fire in sexuality, that is… like you said it’s a resource that can be used to bring higher levels, to bring us into… What did you mean by ‘higher levels’?
GERALYN GENDREAU: Within “Marriage of Sex and Spirit”, which we had so much fun with; Francesca was the associate editor on that book, and we talked about sexuality and spirituality and the convergence of the two as the place that lifts relationships into the heart space where conscious evolution occurs. But in thinking about being on your show I watched one of my favorite movies, called “Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love”, fabulous film.
FRANCESCA GENTILLE: It’s so yummy.
GERALYN GENDREAU: Yes, and in that movie, the gorgeous servant girl whose name is Maya, she’s in the midst of a storm brewed up by her love nature, and she runs to her teacher, Rasa Davi, and she says the very words centuries ago that I often hear the hopeless romantic side of women, when they come into some of our women’s circles, she says (she’s just had a split with her lover and she says), “But Rasa Davi, I want to give myself to him.” And it’s one of my very favorite lines in the film because Rasa Davi responds, and she says to Maya, “Passion remains the spirit behind acceptance. Nothing will ever change that. It’s how we use our passion that’s of essence. Now we must listen to what the Kama Sutra teaches: The true union between man and woman can take us beyond this animal lust into total trust and merging with the other. Each becomes both. Imagine such bliss!” That’s my favorite line in that movie.
FRANCESCA GENTILLE: That is, that’s tremendous. I’m so glad that you quoted that.
GERALYN GENDREAU: Yes!
FRANCESCA GENTILLE: That is a delicious line from that movie, and how does that work, Geralyn, in your life? How do you experience that focusing of intention?
GERALYN GENDREAU: Yes, well it’s interesting because I think that there’s a very specific clue in that command, “Imagine such bliss.” Imagination, it turns out, is really the key in the lock to our higher potential in relationship, as well as in every area of life, because it’s imagination that allows us to create out of nothing but our intentional focus and passion a future that wouldn’t otherwise be available. And you know one of my favorite teachers and authors over the years has been David Deida, who speaks of the three different stages of relationship, and I like to add a fourth stage. My model’s a little different from David’s. I speak about the four levels of relationship and how they correspond to four distinct structures in the brain, and just in capacities that every one of us possess, this kind of stage-wise progression of consciousness that goes from unconscious to subconscious to conscious to superconscious, and the way these correspond to our brain structure.
The unconscious is the reptile brain, that very oldest structure in the brain that governs your digestion and all the thing that happen completely unconsciously without you even thinking about it; it’s in the medulla oblongata, the hindmost part of the brain, there at the top of the spinal cord.
And then the subconscious, which is the second-oldest part of the brain, the mammalian structure that we have in common with dogs; that’s why you and your dog have an emotional bond. That’s common to all mammals and it’s where a lot of the memories of childhood, the amygdala, this is where the subconscious patterning that really governs a lot of people’s relationships, and where a lot of what we call dysfunctional patterning comes from is this part of the brain.
And then there’s the conscious brain, where we become conscious of what we’re doing and engage in conscious evolution is in the neo-cortex, this is the third of the triune brain structures, where rational thinking and reasoning, and our creative capacity and imagination begins. It’s the part of the brain where we have awareness of time and the future.
But there’s also now, there’s recognized a fourth structure in the brain, the most newly developed part of the human brain is the frontal lobes. I love the other name that they’re given sometimes, ‘angel lobes’. And I think of this as the site of… for me I think of it as the site of my superhero self. So when I look at relationships through this lens, what I see is that we establish our relationships on different levels of meaning. The biological mandate in our DNA, the reptile mind, to reproduce is common to every organism that has a reptile mind; it’s this urge to procreate.
At the second level, a lot of relationships are founded on the limbic, on the mammalian. Playfully speaking, we’re all ‘pack animals’; we live in a social interactive field where we’re innately social by nature. We need each other. The pleasure and reward centers in the brain are deeply linked to our personality, the way we express our sexuality is who we think we are, in a lot of ways.
And then from the higher mind, this is where you start talking about commitment and overcoming some of the lower urges, where we get into conscious relationships and through commitment, which involves a certain amount of self-discipline, structures, marriage, thinks like ‘NVC’, non-violent communication, where people learn patterns of relating that allow them to rise above the urges and emotional patterns of the lower brain.
And then the fourth level, for my taste and what I am most aspiring to now, is to raise the bar even on this thing called ‘commitment’, which always sounded a bit like a prison sentence to me, and to actually pioneer the territory where relationship is based on devotion. And this elicits the possibility, and invites the possibility of relating to the divine aspect of another. And this goes back to becoming God’s lover. Really I always think of myself as being in a relationship with a man’s highest self, with his actualized divine self, and when I relate to him in that way it’s a whole different field of possibility that emerges for a relationship.
FRANCESCA GENTILLE: You know, Geralyn, I’d love to talk more about how do we relate to our partner in that devotional way? In that highest way that brings forth the highest in them, after we have a break and a word with our sponsors.
GERALYN GENDREAU: Great.
[break]
FRANCESCA GENTILLE: Welcome back to “Sex: Tantra & Kama Sutra”, bringing you the soul of sex. Today we have with us Geralyn, author and award-winning editor of the, co-author actually, of both Healing the Heart of the World
We were just talking about devotional relationships and how to relate to our partner in a way that really brings out the highest and best and new possibilities in the relationship. Geralyn, would you tell us a little bit more about that?
GERALYN GENDREAU: You know it’s really a whole course of study that a person can take up, either on their own, by reading and studying these things, the Devotional Intimacy Mystery School, which is kind of the umbrella for the men’s and women’s groups that I offer, focus on this very intentionally, and it’s really the place where relationships… where you surrender being the center of attention in your relationship, and allow a relationship to become about service and about healing, so that we learn to love in the service of healing one another, and to allow the relationship between two people to be a gift to the world. And in that sense, we begin to devote ourselves to the realization of the Self, ‘self’ with a capital ‘S’, and you know the Kama Sutra comes out of ancient India, where yoga and the practice of yoga is really the science of self-realization. And that’s part of the, again the subtitle of the book, “Conscious Evolution” is really about that, about becoming something different than before, because human nature is a constant impulse to evolve. So when I talk about relationships based on devotion, rather than commitment, which is this kind of this strange thing that has different connotations in different worlds, what I see often out there, and what I aspire to myself are the exquisite relationships that are all about a shared mission. This involves a level of ego identification, and annihilation that I think many many people are actually hungry for. The transcendence of the small ego self is something that is our soul’s cry for a larger life. And I actually met, and have been invited to work with, one couple recently; they’re the founders of Urth.TV, which is an Internet portal dedicated to sacred commerce. It’s kind of one part YouTube, one part MySpace, and one part eBay. And in a sense, the relational world that these two people inhabit is almost like a parallel universe, the world where Venus and Mars can’t even find each other. And one of my pet projects is a book and stage show I’ve proposed and been developing, to reverse this whole metaphor of men and women living on different planets, because I believe that we really do co-habitate on one globe, and what we’re looking for is a field of deep honor that I invite people to explore and it’s the first precept, really of the devotional intimacy school, is to honor thy lover. So we take the ‘honor thy mother and father’ to a new level, and that’s ‘honor thy lover’, and this practice of devotional intimacy.
FRANCESCA GENTILLE: You know, let me ask you a little about that because we hear so much about co-dependency, and especially with women, but sometimes with men, where people say, “Oh what do you want, dear?” Or “What can I do for you, dear?” And it builds up resentment because they’re not ever thinking about what their own true needs are, or what their limits are, and they’re in a sense over-giving. Now you’re not talking about that; you’re not talking about over-giving or abdicating the self. What do you mean by ‘honoring’? What does that look like to ‘honor’ the lover?
GERALYN GENDREAU: You have to start with honoring yourself, and again this is where the myth of Eve comes in and where our perceptions of ourselves have been so colored by this old paradigm that’s really kind of melting as we speak, as women come into a deeper relationship with their true self, where you can’t be ‘self’ by giving yourself away in a relationship, because when you find the divinity at your own core, you have a rock-solid foundation to stand on in relationship with others. So the stage that you’re talking about, people who are really struggling at that level, have a few stages to go through before they can get to the place where they can be in service to their relationship. The kind of co-dependency you’re talking about is a breakdown of the traditional level of consciousness, and there are two or three levels beyond that, that we… Now if we talk about the ‘integral model’ and the work of Ken Wilber, which is a whole nother show we might want to do sometime, but there are stages of development, and I’m talking about a fairly advanced stage, where a person really has an intact sense of self, and where those old co-dependent behaviors have pretty much become obsolete, although I still find myself sometimes giving myself away in ways that really aren’t appropriate to my deeper needs. So what I can say about it is that there’s a quality… You know there’s a beautiful body of work that Allison Armstrong launched about five years ago. I think it’s called “Celebrating Men, Satisfying Women”.
FRANCESCA GENTILLE: Yes!
GERALYN GENDREAU: It’s a beautiful workshop series, and one of the things that Allison offers in that first weekend, and she really sets it up as a kind of initiation, and an invitation to women to take on the commitment. And she puts it in a negative frame, which I don’t like, which is why I prefer to talk about generating a field of deep honor. But the challenge she offers women, and it’s a really beautiful one because it’s so important to our times, the challenge she offers is to give up the right to criticize your man.
FRANCESCA GENTILLE: Wow, that’s big!
GERALYN GENDREAU: It’s huge!
FRANCESCA GENTILLE: It’s so big!
GERALYN GENDREAU: The beauty of it is, the women that take it on and really embody it, and really become the possibility of being an unwavering support for their man, have a completely different quality of relationship. I know a woman who took that work at a crucial point when she was single, and really wanted to have a child, wanted to be married, and she took the work at a very important moment in her life, and I visited her just a few weeks ago, and she really has lived out that commitment. And the quality of their relationship is like it’s just the kind of thing that it feeds you, to be around, because there’s so much love and support in the atmosphere that they live in, as oppose to a lot of people I know, highly-evolved people that have been doing spiritual work and workshops and stuff… they’re still somehow addicted, and I use the term loosely; I use the term metaphorically, actually, because I think the word ‘addiction’ is overused in our current cultural milieu. But this tendency to ‘dig’ a guy, you know to criticize him, to nag at him, to focus on his faults, it colors so many people’s relationships and degrades so many people’s relationships. And one of the things that I wrote about in “The Marriage of Sex and Spirit” that was a fascinating little bit of scientific evidence when I learned it… I believe it was Jean Bolandwho first told me this when I interviewed her for an earlier anthology, that in women, the corpus colossum, which is a structure in the brain that lets the left and right hemispheres of the brain communicate is more sophisticated in a woman than it is in a man. So on the basis of that I charge women with the responsibility for their relationships, because we actually have a more sophisticated brain when it comes to relationship dynamics.
FRANCESCA GENTILLE: You know that’s so true, and also our emotions are mapped all the way across our brain, where for men the emotions are mapped in only one part f the brain. And it takes them a lot longer to access their feelings and speak from their feelings, and they’re not trying to ruin our day…
GERALYN GENDREAU: [laughs!]
FRANCESCA GENTILLE: …when we ask them what they feel and they can’t come up with it. You know, it takes them awhile to get there.
GERALYN GENDREAU: Yes, and on top of that, when we ask them, and so often a woman’s communication in the asking is in the form of an attack. And when a man feels attacked, there is probably no language he can find but silence, to manage that experience, that encounter. It literally shuts down his emotional center. So, a woman is in an angry rage, and she’s demanding to know what her man thinks. What she doesn’t realize is she’s not only backed him in a corner… she’s pushed him over a cliff! Because from where he is now, the threat that she is to his very self-esteem is so huge that he can’t even engage his language centers. His throat is in the noose, so to speak, and I use strong language because this is the Internet age, and we watch commercials that are so…
FRANCESCA GENTILLE: Well it’s such perfect language, and it engages us and makes it very real. And I want to talk more about how we get the men out of the noose and able to speak to us, and maybe you can give us an example or a good practice for that as women, or the men who are listening a way to let their women know how to support them, after we come back from our break and a word from our sponsors.
GERALYN GENDREAU: Great.
[break]
FRANCESCA GENTILLE: Welcome back to “Sex: Tantra & Kama Sutra”, bringing you the soul of sex with our fabulous guest, Geralyn Gendreau, author, marriage and family therapist, wonderful creator of the new Devotional Mystery School, and Geralyn was just telling us about how to get the noose off of the throat of men, how to really support them to speak to us and Geralyn, can you give us an example, if we’re women, about how to do that for a man, or for men, how to have women support us?
GERALYN GENDREAU: I feel like the Venus/Mars analogy because we can listen to our own speaking as women, and begin to discern when we’re in the Mars aspect. It’s not just men that live on Mars; we have our own warlike tendencies, when we get honest and real about that we can start to take responsibility for how we speak. So I encourage women to do a practice that I call ‘phase shifting’, which is similar in many ways to what the Heart Map Institute calls, I think they call it, the ‘freeze-frame process’, where you literally stop yourself in your tracks and focus on your heart, and basically think happy thoughts. Or put yourself in a scene where you felt exalted and truly in and expressing your core self. Because that immediately shifts your biochemistry, and then ask your heart, “What is the right thing to do?” Act on it. So it’s really a personal discipline and one of the more sophisticated inner yoga practices, as opposed to outer yoga poses, inner yoga are our breath and awareness practices that one takes up as a discipline, and in that process you begin to really re-language yourself and reinvent yourself from your own voice box, by paying attention to the subtleties of which aspect you’re in, because the Mars aspect is so deeply grooved in our nervous system, anybody who grew up on soap operas like I did, with “All My Children”, we have all those patterns, all those ways of relating really deeply embedded. It’s in the movies; it’s on TV; it’s difficult to escape it, so it really requires some kind of intentional focus, and fierce self-discipline to unplug from that way of being and then plug into a more… Really, the rewards come immediately, because when you speak to your man wit respect, he can keep his brain engaged, and you’re much more likely… It’s the old saying, “You attract more flies with honey than with a swat”. It’s really about giving your message and your request in an envelope that he can open without getting a pie in the face. Okay, I’m mixing metaphors, but you get the idea.
FRANCESCA GENTILLE: I do, and I love that you said fierce discipline; then it really becomes a choice for women: Do we want a great beautiful relationship, or do we want to be right? Do we want to criticize someone, and if we want a great relationship it’s going to take discipline. It takes practice. That’s why they call it ‘spiritual practice’, because it takes practice. And how about for our men? What can our great guys out there who are listening to this do to help their partners to give some support?
GERALYN GENDREAU: Well I really encourage men to learn this kind of martial art of self-respect and self-understanding, and to structure some kind of understanding when they’re not in the heat of it, with their woman, that they can take space and reorient when they need to, and to begin to recognize those moments when they become incoherent and might say something they don’t really mean, because both have kind of tuned into a radio wave of criticism and rejection, and nobody wants to stay there. So one of the things men can do is take the lead on, through agreement, through an established agreement, to remove themselves from the situation and take cool out time, just like with little kids. We give them time-outs. So I really recommend to people in a relationship that once the fires have ignited, that they have an agreement about a time-out. And sometimes it takes me as little as 30 seconds to regroup, but I’ve been at this for a while. And one of the things that I really like to talk about and let women know is that most men, what they want more than anything is to feel like a hero. And I remember one guy telling me that if he gets to feel like a woman’s hero that is the greatest reward in his world, so when we can start to understand that men really love to please us, but they can’t when we’re in attack mode, because we basically cut them at the knees, and when we can really start to re-conceive the dynamics between us, with great compassion, understand that nobody’s too good at this yet, and we don’t have a lot of models out there, so we’re really kind of reinventing ourselves on so many levels that we have to have a lot of patience for each other. So what I suggest to men more than anything is to get with other men and to support their women’s consciousness by talking about their needs when it’s not in the heat of an argument. But creating a lovely date or a special encounter that invites that discussion when you’re not in the thick of it.
FRANCESCA GENTILLE: So what you’re saying is taking on… also that you need to take on some practices to share their thoughts and feelings when they’re not being attacked, when they’re not stressed, so that your building good groundwork for the women to feel connected and at ease ongoingly, and then if things start to get stressful they have their own practice, their own discipline, as it were, their own martial art to consciously choose to take a brief break, to breathe and to calm down. So really both people are actively working in the relationship to create beauty.
GERALYN GENDREAU: Yes. That’s why they call it ‘conscious evolution’.
FRANCESCA GENTILLE: [laughs] There you are! Geralyn, I just want to say what a delight it’s been to have you on the show. I look forward to, maybe in a future show to talk more about your Mystery School. That sounds very intriguing.
GERALYN GENDREAU: Yeah. It’s great to be on a verbal terrain after so many months in the written terrain with you, Francesca, and I just really want to acknowledge and appreciate you for all the work that you do in this area of sacred sex. You have such a magical passion.
FRANCESCA GENTILLE: Oh, I’m going to breathe that in…[laughs] Practice actually taking in the appreciation of others. Yeah in this case you, I also adore. We could go on for quite awhile, just adoring each other.
GERALYN GENDREAU: Mutual admiration society.
FRANCESCA GENTILLE: Mutual admiration society, and we will after we leave our wonderful listening audience, we’ll continue. And I just want to say to, apart from thank you so much, Geralyn, I want to say thank you to our listening audience, and if they want to get more information about Geralyn, a transcript of this show, be connected to blogs on this show, comment, and find out about more shows, they can get everything they need at www.PersonalLifeMedia.com, and that is two ‘L’s’ in the middle of PersonalLifeMedia.com.
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