Barbara Carrellas: Sacred Sex for the Twenty-First Century

Barbara Carrellas is an author, sex educator, and theater artist. Her most recent books are Urban Tantra: Sacred Sex for the Twenty-First Century and Luxurious Loving: Tantric Inspirations for Passion and Pleasure. She conducts Urban Tantra workshops throughout New York City and is the co-founder of Erotic Awakening, a groundbreaking series of workshops which toured the United States and Australia. Believe me, her list of amazing accomplishments goes on and on.
Barbara is currently directing her partner Kate Bornstein in Kate’s new solo show, “Kate Bornstein is a Queer and Pleasant Danger.� They also frequently perform and tour their sex positive, gender-bending lecture/performance piece, “Too Tall Blondes Do Sex, Death & Gender.� Barbara is also the Dean of Femmenergy at Miss Vera’s Finishing School For Boys Who Want To Be Girls, a crossdressing academy.
I corresponded with Barbara over email on her new book Urban Tantra. Here’s Barbara…

For those who have never heard of Tantra, or zone out whenever they hear something that sounds remotely New Agey, what is Tantra?
Tantra is a spiritual path that considers all aspects of life (including sex) to be potential paths to enlightenment—or if you prefer—paths that can lead you to a connection with the divine or give you a direct experience of the divine. Tantric sex is a way of practicing sex that facilitates and welcomes that spiritual experience.
Tantra is not a religion. Believe me, if it was I wouldn’t be doing it. You do not have to join any group, take any vow or say any special words to practice Tantra. You do not have to swear allegiance to anyone, and nothing bad will happen to you if you do it “wrong� or differently from other people who practice it. I love Tantra because it is such an effective spiritual practice. The spirituality does me; I don’t have to do it.
Some people think they won’t like Tantric sex because they think that there is no fucking—that it is only about breathing and eye gazing. Actually, nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, you can fuck as much and as long as you want to. If you are a man, you can even learn to have multiple orgasms without ejaculating, which means you can fuck a lot longer. But in Tantra, sex is a lot more than fucking. Sexual energy exists well beyond your genitals. Tantric sex is a full-body/full-spirit experience, so people who practice Tantra are less genitally focused. When your entire body is pulsing and vibrating with pleasure you’re more likely to talk about the atoms in your body dancing to the rhythm of the universe than you are to describe the experience as a great fuck.
Other people are turned off by the idea of Tantra and Tantric sex because of its image in America as couples therapy for white, middle-aged, middle-class, apolitical, woo-woo, New Age, sarong-wearing workshop junkies. In fact, Tantra is practiced in a wide variety of styles by a wide variety of people, including some of my friends who are young, leather-clad, gender-fucked anarchists who are into BDSM. Tantra embraces all genders, sexual styes and sexual preferences. It is primarily concerned with inner mystical experiences, not relationships and wardrobe.
Tantra was once a supremely revolutionary practice. Tantra in India in its early days probably looked something like the social revolution in America in the 1960s: experimentation with sex and drugs, group ecstatic rituals with music, dancing and sex, loving whomever you chose regardless of race or background, and questioning the moral, ethical, and philosophical precepts of the day. In the twentieth century, Tantra was reintroduced in the West by a few brave sex, gender, spiritual, and political radicals who ventured to India in search of an active spirituality that would embrace and empower everyone in all aspects of life, including the sexual and political. The practice of Tantra today can once again be revolutionary in the face of the current cultural rise of fundamentalist sex and gender politics.
You mention in Urban Tantra’s prelude that you came to Tantra because of the AIDS crisis. Can you talk more about this, and how Tantra has served as both a sexual and spiritual awakening for you?
I came to Tantra out of sheer desperation. By the late 1980s I had lost dozens of friends and colleagues to AIDS. I went to a support group called the New York Healing Circle, which had been founded on the love-yourself-heal-your-life principles of the metaphysical pioneer Louise Hay, the first person to declare that AIDS was not a death sentence. There I met Annie Sprinkle, a well-known porn star who had lost as many friends in the sex industry as I had in my Broadway theatre community. We were both looking for a way to cope with our grief and to find some spiritual solace and guidance. We also knew that our friends who had lived at the edge of the sexual revolution were not going to settle for safe, latex sex for long. It was just not going to meet the needs of a community who’d had years of mind blowing sex enhanced by all manners of brain and body stimulating drugs. We were determined to find some way for them (and us) to have safe sex that would be as intense and amazing as it had been in the bars, the discos, the dungeons and the swingers’ clubs. We found that answer when we began to explore the ancient Eastern sexual practices of the Tantric and Taoist traditions.
I had two experiences in those early days that planted my feet firmly on the Tantric path. Both were versions of what I now call breath-and-energy orgasms. I learned a breath and visualization techniques called the Firebreath Orgasm from my first Tantra teacher, Jwala. It’s quite simple. You lie down and use your breath and your mind to “breathe� circles of energy up your body. The first time I tried it I thought I’d taken LSD! Energy was shooting out the tips of my fingers. I was laughing and undulating and seeing visions. I was having a full body orgasm with absolutely no genital stimulation!
Amazing as that was, it was shortly followed by another technique that was as incredible. My dear friend Joseph Kramer, a visionary erotic pioneer, used to throw what I called Joe’s breathe-and-dance-and-run-and-play-until-you-come parties. (He called them Tantric Group Rebirths.) As my title, implies, a group of some 40 to 60 gay men plus Annie and me would breathe and eye gaze and dance and run and build up as much energy as we possibly could in 45 minutes. Then we would lie down, hold our breath and tense every muscle in our body. When we let go, anything could happen. Sometimes I would feel like I was bodiless, astrally traveling for a private meeting with the goddess. Sometimes I had visions of my dead friends that were so real I could touch them. Sometimes I cried or screamed or giggled so hard I hurt.
The long term of effects of these repeated transcendental orgasmic experiences was completely life-altering. The way I looked at everything in my life changed. There was no turning back—and why would I want to?

Urban Tantra discusses Tantra from the perspective of urban living and culture. What obstacles do you think urban dwellers have to face when trying to have a healthy sex and spiritual life?
Those of us who live in urban and suburban cultures have too much to do in too little time. We walk through more identities in one day than our ancestors walked through in a lifetime. For example, here are just some of the identities I juggled—often on daily basis—in the course of writing my last two books: author, Broadway theatre manager, sex educator, workshop facilitator, friend, daughter of two parents in their late 80s, gardener, herbalist, meditator, artist, and lover. I also went from caregiver to estate executrix when an old and dear friend of mine became seriously ill and died.
When we live like this, we quite naturally focus on our actions, not out feelings. We have so much to do there is no time to stop and ask, “How do I really feel about this?� Unfortunately, our feelings are our best barometer as to whether the actions we do and decisions we make are really right for us. We become human doings instead of human beings.
Sex becomes one more thing we do—when we have time! In writing a modern Tantra book for book for urban and suburban people in the 21st century, I had to address this issue of time. So, I came up with a way that Tantra can be learned and practiced in as little as 20 minutes a day. Now, this is not like instant Tantra—just add water and chug. It is more like sexual meditation. When people first learn to meditate, they are told, just give it 15 minutes day. Watch how your life begins to change. The same thing is true for Tantra. Just try it for 20 minutes a day and I promise you will begin to transform your sex and your life.

What do you think are the biggest obstacles most people face when trying Tantra for the first time?
The biggest obstacles are strongly held personal beliefs about lack and limitation. For example:
“This might work for other people but it won’t work for me.�
“I don’t have time.�
“I don’t have the right partner.�
“I don’t have any partner. “
“I don’t understand it.�
To practice Tantra you have to be willing to change your mind about how sex works. By changing your mind, I mean allowing your mind to expand so it can accept more and more possibilities. For example, having a breath orgasm is easy. It’s believing that one is possible that can be difficult.
It’s easy to avoid trying something new because you don’t understand how it works or how it could work. Many seemingly impossible things happen when we start raising sexual energy. Peoples’ faces appear to change. We see, hear, smell or feel things that may or may not “really� be there. We have sudden bursts of emotion or sensation that appear to have no cause or connection to the feeling preceding it or following it. Sometimes we see the divine. It’s so unlike our everyday reality, it’s like we’ve entered a parallel universe. It’s easy to be skeptical. Easy, but not smart. Nothing great has ever been achieved by affirming, “That’s ridiculous; it won’t work.� Lots of things are ridiculous and many of them work.

Urban Tantra conquers many stereotypes about sexual orgasms and what leads one into experiencing an orgasm. For example, you state in the book that you’re convinced orgasms “happen� primarily in the brain versus in our genitals. Can you talk more about this, and braingasms?
Energetically speaking, the kinds of orgasms the majority of us experience on a regular basis are little more than genital sneezes in comparison to what is orgasmically possible. I like to talk about the Totality of Possibilities of Orgasm. In the Totality of Possibilities of Orgasm we can include experiences like the breath and energy orgasms I had with Joseph Kramer and Jwala. We can have gigglegasms, crygasms, angergasms, even quiet little blissgasms—an astounding range of emotiongasms that can exist together with, or separately from, genital orgasms.
In Urban Tantra I tell the story of how I began to really understand the role of the brain in orgasm. My friend Alison Partridge, a paraplegic sex therapist in Adelaide, Australia, has physical sensations only in her hands and arms, breasts (one has less feeling than the other), neck and head. Yet, when her clitoris is stimulated she can have an orgasm. Where does she feel her orgasm to be located? Well, sometimes she orgasms in her nipples, sometimes inside her head. She reports that there is a distinct difference between nipple orgasms and the ones inside her head, but that both are wonderful. She has even discovered that by changing positions during sex she can have multiple orgasms. Alison’s experience illuminates the presence of numerous previously undiscovered neural pathways by which orgasmic energy can travel through the body to the brain.
More recently, I have heard how quadriplegics with feeling only in their head and neck can have orgasmic experiences when a partner lovingly and erotically sucks their ear, or a one-inch-square latch of skin on their neck. After hearing so many stories about the infinite possibilities of human eroticism, it’s obvious to me that we have not even begun to scratch the surface of what is orgasmically possible.
Towards the end of the book you talk about channeling sexual healing and extra sexual energy to do good in the world. For example, you channeled orgasms to the people of South Africa when they were protesting and struggling against apartheid. Do you see orgasms as more than individual acts of sexual gratification but vehicles of communal positive energy?
Orgasms are not only vehicles of communal positive energy, they are powerful sexual prayers. Orgasmic prayers are especially effective because of the unique power of the erotic. Let’s face it, when you are erotically connected to something or someone, it occupies a much larger space in your awareness than something with which you have no erotic connection. So, every time I sent the people of South Africa an orgasm I was reminded of the healing that was needed there. I paid more attention to what was going on there; I sent money; I did whatever I could to support my sexual prayers.
We are now becoming able to prove with quantum physics what the ancient Tantric already knew: that we are all connected by a vast energetic web. We can send and receive energy through this web. As the entire universe is made up of energy, it’s seems pretty easy to understand how powerful energy—such as orgasmic energy—can have powerful effects.

What do you think is the state of self sexual health and exploration in the U.S.?
::sigh:: Woefully skewed. We do not even know what is erotically possible for us because we live in a society which practices and promotes such extreme sexual reductionism. What is sexual reductionism? Well, let’s just say it hit its defining moment the day Bill Clinton declared, “I did not have sex with that woman!� A blow job was not sex?! Good grief! Than what is sex? Apparently it’s only intercourse in the missionary position with the person you are and will always be married to. How pathetic.
This theme has continued over the past decade, as the abstinence and no-sex-outside-of-marriage movements have attempted to stifle not only sexual intercourse, but by association, all sexual activity and awareness. In this climate, it is hard to get people to think of sex as the erotic life force that permeates every cell of life and hold us all in an interconnected erotic web.
However, I have a lot of hope. I meet many people—mostly between the ages of 15 and 30—who are just not buying the party line. They know that sex and spirit and life are far more vast and wondrous than they have been told. They know there is more of everything—joy, prosperity, erotic bliss—out there and they want to find it—now! I wrote Urban Tantra for these sexual expansionists and for everyone who would like to become a sexual expansionist. I wanted to give people hope, encouragement and a road map to start them off on a personal journey that I hope will lead to a pleasure revolution.