**Video Title:** Healing from Sexual Trauma: How Tantra Can Help | Tantra for Gay Men Podcast EP 15

 

Watch the full episode here: – https://linktr.ee/tantra4gaymen

 

Welcome to Episode 15 of the Tantra for Gay Men Podcast, hosted by Jason and Ingo Tantra. In this powerful and deeply personal episode, we tackle a serious yet vital topic: the impact of sexual abuse on one’s sex life and how Tantra can play a transformative role in the healing process.

 

Jason shares his own experiences with sexual abuse and how it profoundly affected his journey into adulthood, his relationships, and his connection to his own sexuality. Together, Jason and Ingo discuss the challenges survivors often face, such as feelings of shame, secrecy, and disconnection from their bodies. They also explore how Tantra offers a unique, body-centered approach to healing, helping survivors rebuild trust, rediscover intimacy, and reconnect with their authentic sexual energy.

 

This episode is a must-listen for anyone seeking insight into how trauma can impact one’s life and how holistic practices like Tantra can offer a path to healing and empowerment.

 

**Key Topics Discussed:**

– The effects of sexual abuse on personal development and sexual intimacy

– The role of Tantra in healing trauma and reclaiming sexual energy

– Personal stories of transformation and recovery

– The importance of community, trust, and spiritual practices in the healing journey

 

**Upcoming Retreat:**

Join us for the “Healing and Surrender” Tantra Retreat, from November 30th to December 6th, 2024, in the sacred landscape of Glastonbury, UK. This retreat is designed to guide you through profound healing processes using Tantra, with a special focus on cathartic release and empowerment. Learn more at [TantraForGayMen.com](http://TantraForGayMen.com).

 

**Connect with Us:**

💬 Share your thoughts in the comments below – we value your voice and experiences.  

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Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Tantra for Gay Men podcast hosted by Jason and Ingo Tantra. Here we’re exploring spirituality and personal growth through the practice of Tantra, the body, energy and sex. Hello there and welcome to episode 15 of the Tantra for Gay Men podcast.

Today Ingo and I look at the slightly more serious topic of how sexual abuse can affect your sex life. And I talk about today, it’s kind of quite a deep serious topic today. I talk about that personally and also how Tantra helped me in this journey.

Yeah and I’m really sharing all of this in service to you in that this might be helpful to you. So I hope yeah this is helpful to you and I want to say enjoy but it’s not an enjoyable thing. But I hope this is a useful podcast for you.

Take care now. Thank you. Bye bye.

Hello Ingo. Hello Jason. Here we are at episode 15.

Okay and yeah today we’re dealing with actually quite a serious topic. Yes and a more serious topic. So I think a lot of the topics we’ve done before are very discussional about Tantra and today is kind of a representation of people that come to see us or people’s backgrounds and histories that they bring to Tantra.

You know looking for answers, looking for healing. So today’s question is how does the damage of sexual abuse get in the way of a happy sex life? People who come to us to work with us we have realized you know over the years that no one comes to Tantra without a specific reason. Yes.

And more often than not this reason is to heal from something and very often that is you know we talked about sexual indoctrination on other episodes but sometimes it’s sexual abuse. That’s the first thing and the second thing is that I guess you and me have witnessed that incredible transformation in people where they completely change their relationship to those experiences and that’s I guess why we are talking about this topic today. Well I think one of the reasons I wanted to talk about the topic today was because I wanted to communicate that actually Tantra can be supportive in terms of one coming to terms with things that have happened and two that Tantra can be helpful along the journey of healing.

I think Tantra can play a part in that. Yeah. Shall we dive right in? Well I wanted to just before we dive right in I wanted to I guess just talk personally.

So for me I don’t really like labels of classing myself as a survivor of sexual abuse but what I would say is that the sexual abuse and mental abuse that I experienced suffered in my childhood and I think also the bereavement of a parent in my childhood is the reason why I teach Tantra today. I think you know I’ve been a output you know what I’m doing today is an output of what I’ve experienced and my own healing journey and I remember sex in my 20s was excruciatingly difficult. Actually even my first sexual experiences I think I feel like I was a little bit of a late bloomer and so I didn’t really have sex with men until I was 19 and I think also the other thing I would say is that the way the world is now is completely different to the way the world was in 19 in the 1990s and I feel like I have to say that because people feel very much more adulted at a much younger age than I remember growing up.

So I remember at the age of 14 and 15 still going out to play or out with my friends and we would roam fields, build dens, ponds with water. You were still children at that age. Yeah and we weren’t expected to adult up to like the age of 16 and I experienced sexual abuse from the age of 9 all the way through to probably the age of 14 and 15 and it was weird because I was just going to say I didn’t know it was sexual abuse.

Well it’s weird because I think I blocked a lot of stuff out and I’ve blanked off a lot of stuff that’s why I hesitate but it wasn’t until the age of 16 that I decided to tell my parents actually this person was sexually abusing me for these number of years and thankfully I had really supportive parents to help me I guess just express what had happened and to make it okay that I didn’t have to hold this secret any longer and that you know that was a part of me I didn’t need to hide and the utter confusion between the sexual abuse I experienced and being gay and those two were also very messed up and also the other thing I want to say here is the information that was available just was non-existent like the internet didn’t exist then the internet didn’t exist for another five years later so topics about sexual abuse topics about sexuality they just didn’t exist they just they just were inaccessible you know the only place I remember at that age getting information of any kind was going to a library you know library and books and you know there weren’t books on those topics so it just kind of was undealt with and unknown and kind of un-whatever and you know my mother I’m grateful for so many things about my mother she she really supported me to start to talk and to check through and to ask questions about what had happened and you know where it had happened and I think there was also for her a huge amount of disbelief but her love her support at the age of 16 really enabled me not to fall off a cliff literally and then at the age of 18 I was able to come back round to the world and say actually I’m gay and I didn’t feel safe to have a real and I used the word safe I didn’t feel safe to have a sexual my first sexual incidents were horrendous but I didn’t feel safe to have to have sex until I was 19 and I would say that from the age of 19 all the way through to maybe my mid-30s early mid-30s my sex was deeply impacted by the sexual abuse that I experienced and it would show up in different ways but ways that I wasn’t conscious that I was being affected so the biggest thing for me was just an absolute freeze state in my body like a real frozen state and it would be nigh on impossible for me to let people physically interact or physically touch me without me feeling frozen and and rigid and utterly stuck I remember that going on I also remember kind of the art of cruising so again in this in this time you know Grindr didn’t exist the way that men found men to have sex with was they used to be personal columns in the back of gay like magazines like the what you call them the gay classified ads that would be one way that you would meet people the other way would be down the pub in the gay bars and the other way was cruising and gay saunas and I remember that cruising used to feel secret and hush hush because it was illegal and would happen in places where police would be actually you know looking for people having sex to arrest them prosecute them and send them to jail so there was that living with danger and living with a big secret and I think that also spoke to a unresolved part of me in the sexual abuse is that it became like habitualized and normalized that it was a secret that it was something that wasn’t spoken about and that um and and so I think cruising because that was also secretive in nature kind of just normalized the secretive nature and I think you know one of my biggest um one of my biggest learnings or gifts of my marriage to you like I trust you implicitly and go I really trust you implicitly and to be able to remove that veil of secrecy and be utterly honest with you and I’ve never been met with anything other than love anything other than yes that’s okay my darling it’s okay to want that to have that to explore that and you have you know every opportunity given me everything that has helped me work through that need for secrecy like I’ve never had any secrets from you I’ve always been utterly honest and even where times where my toes will curl that I’ve got to tell you something that’s never ever been met with anything other than love so I think there was also then like this this part of secrecy around sex and cruising and I just didn’t know how to have sex um I really because again the other thing that I missed in sexual abuse was um you know like how most teenagers experiment with typically members of the opposite sex and they kind of find a way to well I never had that you know I didn’t one I was a really regressed introverted shut down teenager that I just remember just feeling like I was in survival mode from the age of nine to the age of 16 I just remember feeling utterly in survival mode I’ve got really um big blank patches where I just don’t remember stuff and I remember feeling highly uncomfortable in my own skin highly uncomfortable as to who I was and that went through into my 20s like I look at when I first came out at the age of 19 18 19 from that age to the age of 22 23 I was really uncomfortable I was uncomfortable in how I dressed uncomfortable in how I looked just uncomfortable with me and I had some really great friends at that time that without their support I’m not sure I would have ended up where I did because I had some really supportive friends I used to belong to a youth group in Bristol um and that was just a life ring an absolute life ring because I could meet other men I say men other members my age some of which are you know our friends today yes yes that’s why yes um and you know that was a real backbone and support that carried me through um and yes I said my sex so before you I had one other long-term 10-year relationship and then before that I’d had other sexual encounters boyfriends and I just never felt comfortable in sex in my 20s I never felt comfortable it was always there was always bits that I felt like I felt I might even cry at this point I felt injured you know like a bird you know if it accidentally hits a building or a window it it breaks a wing and it’s kind of like limping and the wing is trying to fly and the wing is is is like damaged and dropping off that was how I felt inside going into sex because I felt disabled in some way and I felt like I couldn’t be present and I couldn’t meet the other person and that I just felt utterly inhibited I felt rigid I felt frozen I felt stuck I felt I just wanted to run and yet I wanted connection and intimacy more than anything and I just had no idea how to achieve that and then I had my first relationship before you and that was 10 years and I loved I never was in love with my partner I one of the reasons I was with that person was because that was the the god it’s gonna sound awful that was almost like the best I thought I could get because I thought that’s what it was I thought that’s it wasn’t until I met you when I utterly fell in love with you from the minute seeing you I didn’t really know what being in love was and I didn’t know you know yeah what being in love was and what being in real real collaborative relationship like I feel you and I have a completely collaborative relationship in so many different ways not just what we do in tantra but in in everything else that we are together and I’d never had that before and so my sex in that long-term relationship well I’d entered into an agreement of monogamy and there was one time in in that time that I didn’t have sex for two years and I can’t I used to have a wank and it wouldn’t even touch the utter hunger like you know you talk about like nails down a wall oh my god it was just excruciatingly painful not being met physically and to be honest the sex that we shared together wasn’t great it was it was really over quickly I think my partner at that time wasn’t comfortable being a gay man and I think you know if you look at Freud’s ideas about saying things attracting um I think that yeah you know we really attracted each other and sex was was not satisfying it was not great it was not you know I was utterly inhibited and you know I think my partner at the time wanted it to be over as quickly as possible so what I’m trying to say here is that the sexual abuse I experienced in my childhood really impacted me through my late teens early 20s all the way into my mid-30s until I met Tantra yes and I was I was going so what I really really here is how um how this abuse almost took away a whole developmental stage yes completely a whole developmental stage in which you would under like normal circumstances have learned how to be with your body yes what your needs are how you how it is possible to express these needs how it’s possible to get these needs met yeah and instead what I hear is that this was just like eclipsed by that freeze uh uncomfortable yeah uh inhibited basically you you missed a whole developmental stage almost yes what it must have felt like yes yeah you were just starting to to talk about this what would interest me what I hear is that you had spoken through with your mother she was absolutely supportive but you had not had until what 20s late 20s any uh context to a to really work through it yes like I don’t know psychotherapy or something and more importantly maybe even to embark on a path where you could actually almost do that developmental stage and discover what your real sexuality is is that correct well and that didn’t happen until I met tantra but yeah let me let me go back a little bit more so in my in from the age of 18 and and this is also quite normal and a normal phenomena it’s very normal for people that have experienced any kind of trauma in their life to develop spiritual gifts I don’t know if you know that so it’s really like very normal that you know um people that develop mediumship people that develop psychic abilities people that develop and and the reason being I’ve I perceive and again personal view is that when you’re experiencing trauma there’s something about disappearing there’s something about leaving what’s going on and being somewhere else anywhere else than in your body and I think that pushes people into developing psychic gifts probably as places for safety survival and I certainly know that of myself so whilst I’ve got that narrative going on at the same time I had then a spiritual narrative going on but just before I I mentioned that the reason for sharing all of this today really so personally is not because I’m I’m looking to achieve anything for myself in sharing that but as we’ll come on to in a bit what I really want to share is how tantra was pivotal in that healing process for me in my life it seems to be each time I’ve experienced something or I’ve learned something that I seem to you put that to use in service of others yeah so at the age of 18 um I with my mother and my sister actually that was at the age of about 14 15 we used to go to the spiritualist church in Melksham and the spiritualist church is a place for practicing mediums and all different forms of mediumship and also spiritual healing so I probably spent about four years in closed circles developing mediumship skills developing psychic skills and then at the age of 18 I then started training as a spiritual healer I was a an approved or qualified member of the national federation of spiritual healers and I did like a three four year accreditation process um so whilst that was going on on on one level and on the other level was my spiritual journey and the reason for sharing this with you is the day that I qualified as a spiritual healer I used to also go to psychic fairs and do readings for people and then I got to the day you’re qualified what happened I never had another client say that’s interesting I never had another it was like I feel like and again this is probably another podcast that life had had a certain predeterminedness to it and that I needed to learn about energy I needed to learn about healing energies I needed to learn about spiritual energetic realms and then what happened next is I then started to work on a telephone helpline this is how old I am there was a telephone helpline called male survivors of sexual abuse helpline and for about two three years I used to work on a phone line every Thursday listening to calls for men talking about situations of sexual abuse for the very first time because another fucked up layer of sexual abuse was feeling guilty about it as well yes is it this what we hear from many people who come to us it’s this um I feel guilty because I actually felt and I’m confused because there was a part of me that that liked that pleasure do you see what I mean or that the pleasure felt good I wouldn’t say liked I would say the pleasure felt good and and that in itself can be a head fuck exactly yeah so what I didn’t discover till years later was one of the reasons why I was doing this phone line was to try and ease the guilt that I felt for any pleasure that I felt during the sexual abuse and there’s kind of a fucked upness to it a real fucked up around Jason you were fucking nine or ten you know yeah and just as I said the fucked up nature of that what that then also led to was this as soon as I started working on the telephone helpline I felt vastly underskilled yes and that then led me into a five-year training as a counsellor at Bristol University because I wanted to be skilled in helping people I didn’t want to cause any harm and that then also led on to working in the prison in Bristol seeing inmates face to face I did that for a couple of years and then I also worked for a charity in Bristol working as a counsellor working with general members of the general public around stories or experiences of abuse what interests me in this process working with survivors of sexual abuse in the prison but also on the helpline and also trying going through your own training and I guess through your own therapy during that training right how did that change your relationship to let’s say the damage done through your sexual abuse I don’t think it did ah really yeah because well did it I don’t know maybe 50 50 but let me explain so the method we use in our tantra retreats called spiritual inquiry that we I created is heavily influenced I would say 60 percent influenced by different psychotherapeutic models but the stages of inquiry that we’ve developed is probably the first time they were never mapped out in psychotherapy I’ve mapped those out and these stages of inquiry is basically the stages of healing and stage one that we talk about is being able to tell the story yes so a lot of the the counselling I was doing in the prison and in the voluntary charity and on the phone line was around building a trusting relationship and so about building a trusting relationship and in that being able to tell the story of the abuse for the very often for the very first time that would take months every week week on week one hour for somebody to feel safe to actually start to communicate to build a relationship with that person would take months and that in itself was already a huge milestone and I think when we teach tantra and people talk about experiences because they’re typically you know what they’re sharing isn’t often as maybe traumatic as you know entrenched sexual abuse although that does happen but but normally when people arrive on our doorstep they’ve done some work around it and they can articulate these are people that have kept secrets for decades and they were utterly stuck and frozen and rigid and inhibited and just telling the story for the first time was a weight and then the second stage we developed was then starting to name feelings around that that in itself and this is why I you know I’m passionate about people doing talking therapies as part of a healing journey of sexual abuse because you need to be able to tell the story to a point where and you might have something to say about this in terms of a healing journey but we talk about layers and talk about layers of an onion and I’m looking at this statue next to us it’s got spirals so you know like the first time when you start to talk about a trauma you’re telling the story oh when this thing happened and then this person did this and then this happened and when people are talking about that they’re actually reliving that experience and then it’s like okay once they’re they feel like they’ve told the story as we know the next part on is well how do you start talking about the feelings associated with that and particularly if it’s trauma people are going to have very blank times where they’ve disappeared when the trauma was taking place and so there’s blank parts and then there’s a whole heap of very confused sometimes my own words very fucked up emotions a mess a real mess that feels yucky and sick and gray and pooey and sticky and to work through a feelings and then you know as we know the next stage on from that well that processing of feelings can take some people years you know years and I know for myself so in my training as a counselor I was in personal therapy for probably 10 years and I worked with different therapists at different times and I worked through a lot of the my childhood both in the bereavement of a parent sexual abuse and mental abuse and also family systems and structures because I wanted to understand why but up to this point, let me just say i’d still not dealt with me and my relationship with sex Is is this I was fascinated When when I was asking you this question Where at at which point and through what did you really start to um, To change your relationship to your sex to really work through that. Yes freeze and all of that and with and Did I hear right that you basically said with all that therapy that only did so much? Well all it I say all it did and let’s not make that insignificant. No, it doesn’t sound insignificant But but but because you said oh, no, it didn’t.

Yes. It didn’t at all what it enabled me to do was to Tell the story Okay to understand my feelings and that is the first time in my life That i’d really given myself the gift of the space to really understand how I felt and where I was In each of this all happening. Yes, and then as I said, the third stage was then about understanding the wider context You know your system that’s it and why people were reacting why the abuser was doing the abuse And all of these kinds of things But up to this point I had done nothing In terms of my body in terms of my sex in terms of anything to do with me other than my emotional body Yes This is this is the fascinating thing That that that I hear from you is that you did all of this work and I guess this is probably The type of work that people do when they go to a psychotherapist to yes through sexual abuse what you mentioned Understand what happened tell the story understand your your emotions understand the the you know, the systemic element and the dynamics in your life behind that And what I find fascinating and this this probably now goes into um The the the impact of tantra.

Yes your life and my is that you’re still saying, you know I did all these things yet there was a vast realm still That was untouched. Yes, and you just said Almost like relearning sex right the practical relationship to your body. Is it that well, so let me so again, um It wasn’t till I was nearing the completion of my psychotherapy training That I came across tantra I remember seeing it advertised a weekend in brighton.

Yeah. Yeah, and I went on that and then when I met you The following which was the next retreat after I think I went in the september october and then on the new years On the new year’s in germany. Yes, and that then led to two years of trade tantra training in germany in different retreats Um So when I met tantra It was two things.

It was fucking terrifying It was probably one of the most difficult things I have ever done in my life Because when I walked into the tantra room When I walked into the tantra room I thought everybody wanted to take something from me that I wasn’t ready to give And I went into the to the room and I judged everybody who was fit who wasn’t fit And I was scared. I was scared that I was entering into practices Where things would be stolen taken raped from me? And I lived with that fear And yet when I was able to get over those parts and let go into say a multi-orgasmic practice I had some of the most profound spiritual experiences of my life So for me it was the duality of Fucking trauma And just knowing how to navigate that And some of the most profound spiritual experiences of my life And let me just talk to the first one a second I Think the biggest thing I learned in tantra in my early days was about trust was about how to enter into a Intimate practice and I don’t necessarily mean sexual but it may have been but what I do mean is intimate practice and relearning That somebody didn’t want to take something from me and that tells me how much harm That i’d had in the sexual abuse Because if my default position is what are you wanting to take from me? And there would be a level of host hostility from me And this is in my mid 30s That kind of gives some clue as to the damage that had been done Given that that was my default position of what do you fucking want to take from me? and I remember feeling hugely hostile and I talk about what I call my fuck-off barrier So when I started tantra, I would have what I would call my fuck-off barrier, which was probably about three meters And if anybody came close into that I would fucking kill them. I would move into needing to defend my well In a tantra workshopping go where there’s, you know angels and spirits and and you know Plinky-plonky music and i’m there in a mode of hostility That I found really really painful I I remember, uh Do you treat and Some of these moments, um, I remember seeing you in that and what I wanted to say is that um You know in especially in a beginner’s group like like that group Everyone is there for a reason and everyone Comes there carrying so so much stuff and and they are carrying their projections and possibly other traumas sexual traumas and acting in ways that are You know not not quite they’re not quite aware of of everything that’s going on yet and I remember how tantra What I wanted to say what I what blew me away about tantra is is That it’s so ritualized Yes.

So for example, you were saying a multi-orgasmic massage. Well The fact that it’s so ritualized for me It can actually contain all of these things because it’s ritualized now we do this and then we do that you can’t just Uh, you can’t just do whatever you want And this being so ritualized Creates a kind of safe space in which You can no matter which trauma you have you can actually Relearn almost Sexual activity as something that can be safe. Yes, and I found that Especially when I saw you in that context I found that incredibly powerful about tantra that We are not you know It’s it’s we are not just throwing ourselves into an orgy where everything is unhinged and everyone can just project their Whatever trauma and stuff and needs onto the group by by interacting but actually we are Entering a ritual where it’s very very very clear that we are acting from a place of Awareness and that it’s very prescribed And and and safe in that way.

Yes safe That that kind of what i’m saying is that the container that tantra offers. Yes for me Seeing you in that that I don’t know if that was your experience but um it seems to To open up a space where you can retrain yourself and actually have experiences in which sexual activity feels safe Well, it I must say it didn’t feel safe at the time. Yes.

Well when I say didn’t felt so it felt fucking terrifying Yes, because I felt confronted with Everything i’d not dealt with in the 10 20 years before And I felt confronted with myself and with my trauma in a way that i’ve never felt before but The space must have felt safe enough So what you’re saying must have felt so because otherwise I would have left Yes, but I didn’t be able to to face that right and we made you know We we both made some of our best friends at that time. Yeah. Yeah, totally the other big thing that I learned as well in that Time so not just that So you’re saying that the structure and the containment? Provided a level of safety.

Yes and that in itself was hugely helpful The other thing that was hugely helpful was the community. So we talked about in episode 14 about the camaraderie of a fellow Tantric tantric tantric as tantrics Um, not sure what the plural is Um, but there was something about these other men And I really had to do a lot of work on my own judgments of these men I used to like oh my god at that point. I used to put people in very rigid boxes And that was then how I was relate to them but then the way that I had been But I categorized them and then I find myself in a tantric practice with them That that didn’t match the box that I put them in and so there was a lot of head fuck around undoing the the Categorization and the categorization was another form of trying to feel safe and that I had control And I think that was the other biggest healing and learning that I did So I learned how to say no and I learned how to regulate I also learned how to be Intimate not always necessarily sexually but intimate ie cuddles to show affection to To men that I may not typically find attractive and to really work on Just being myself being feeling safe enough to actually not be myself but find out who I actually was And to feel my identity as me because i’d always been my spiritual path And the sexual part of me had felt deeply damaged and tantra enabled me To bring both of those together in alignment.

And as I said when it worked It was massively profound Um, I had some of the most amazing spiritual experiences of my life at the peak of my sexual energy And I was so motivated by those experiences That that then led to me us teaching over 19 years and i’m quite well aware that You know the shadow sides of teaching and what I mean by that is, you know when you facilitate a group It’s a very safe place to be And I appreciate that that I may be in some way still maintaining a level of safety because because we as Spaceholders choose not to interact sexually ever ever with ever students. It’s a no but What we have done and what I have done is continually worked on that in my private life. Yes um I’ve just you know, i’m just laughing because there’s something coming up for me soon that has that quality to it where I keep putting myself in spaces to Relearn who I really am Beyond the trauma and I think that is what you and I can provide to people in tantra ingo.

This is what we’ve done Many many times but I don’t think tantra is the whole journey You know as we talked about for me it was a blend of psychotherapy And then a blend of tantra. I think tantra can be massively helpful in the The embodiment healing that’s required And remind you Of who you really are as a spiritual being so basically What you are saying or what what your journey was Is shows that as you said Even 10 years of Therapy training. Yeah and going and being in therapy and being in therapy even those 10 years they had uh There were layers that they couldn’t touch for the very reason That there was no Call it training field or playground.

No physicality to Make experiences to learn directly from these experiences interacting sexually sensually intimately with people yeah, and that basically Yeah, I remember this is I remember you saying um after um our first Tantra retreat together. You said something like wow uh as someone who Has had to come to terms with sexual abuse this thing tantra Is actually the the the continuation almost of a psychotherapeutic journey that i’ve been through by other means into the more Experiential and to to learn from new experiences and to relearn these things well, and I think this is one thing let’s not underestimate what the gift That you and I have brought to the field of tantra because I feel that the tantra we experienced Certainly did not have the psychotherapeutic Support it had the experiential Yes playground. Yes, but I would say that the psychotherapeutic support not psychotherapeutic but the support in that context mainly happened through this Tightly knit group of tantric friends, but the the provider of that tantra That really was not it was not in a psychotherapeutic Held in the way that yes and me You know, well, let me get to that bit But the thing that was missing for me in that was people would have these profound experiences And then were essentially told to go away with that.

There was nowhere for that space of tantra to hold that And I worry now after 19 years Was that ethical? Because one of our ethics is around do no harm And I feel that if you’re providing something as as a modality of healing Then you need to pretty well make sure you take responsibility for what the practices you’ve offered Have evoked in people and this is why I developed this spiritual inquiry method because A key feature of the work that we offer we put you through put people through Intense practices that bring stuff up and we spend a amount of time good chunk of time processing and making sense so that that can be reintegrated and kind of Help that rest in people Why that’s useful for people With histories of sexual abuse is that you can learn a new thing or have a new experience And then you’ve got the space to work it through and integrate it rather than you know being left on your own Yes. Yeah, and and that’s basically um What we have been doing ever since yes Yes That’s a key feature, but I also don’t know that everybody that teaches tantra is offering that And I think that’s a beautiful thing in tantra that there are different people doing tantra differently It’s not a regulated practice, but I know for you and me um, it’s been massively but not even massively a The backbone of our work has been the psychotherapeutic holding for the the For what’s come up through people doing the tantric processes and we know ingo, you know over Decades of doing that that the the benefit how that’s really supported people Well, and that I need to disclose, you know that psychotherapeutic holding comes through you because you are the psychotherapist Yeah in the room. Yeah, and i’m i’m Incredibly grateful what I what I what I learned from you, but it’s um almost still now to this day is like when really hardcore, um Um Content content of of uh, sexual abuse comes up in a participant I I mainly give it to you because that is your domain as a psychotherapist Whereas my domain would be more in the in the spiritual realm and maybe you know Do you see what I mean? But I also feel in recent years people love both of our perspectives.

Absolutely They’re just they they they complement each other. But what I am saying is yeah that If you want to teach tantra and really invite these Topics really into the room, you know through people who have gone through that. Yeah, then It’s actually important for a psych for a specialized psychotherapist almost to be in the room and and you’ve got that I wonder if we’ve given enough time to this topic.

I feel like the time has whizzed by But I think what we’re also offering in in today is really an invitation Around, you know, if the way that you and I talk about tantra speaks to you dear listener Then we have an absolute invitation for you To come and join us for a very special Tantra retreat called healing and surrender healing being a lot of what we’re talking about today Um and surrender being another aspect of healing and also holding power going through a very very wide range of experiences, especially during that retreat experiences that Are very very hard to be had in in in so-called normal life and then see how how can I actually? relearn um relearn Many many things about sex. Yes And also about Doing more work in healing We also use in this retreat We explore how the arse anus is a portal into Cathartic release as part of a process of healing and the surrender part we’ve modernized it So when we explore surrender and holding power, it’s in a way that’s very pertinent to our community um You know very yeah pertinent to our community. So A very beautiful deep transformative retreat.

What is it? What’s the date single? um It starts on saturday the 30th of november 2024 Thank you and goes for seven days six nights until the friday the 6th of December 2024 And it happens in glastonbury. Well in I say the sacred landscape of glastonbury just in a very beautiful retreat center outside of glastonbury and If you’re in england, you know where that is in the southwest if you come in from europe or the us It’s quite easy to get there from london. Heathrow airport.

It is In go thank you that’s felt like quite a lot to talk about today that’s felt quite personal and emotional, but I really wanted us to share that and to I guess share my own personal journey incredibly of beautiful, you know what i’ve experienced and how tantra has helped In service to you dear listeners that this could show you a potential path Ingo, thank you for being here today and holding me in all of that. I love you. I love you, my darling We love you, too And yeah, we’ll see you on the next podcast.

Take care. Bye-bye So that’s the end of today’s podcast. Um, I hope that has been really useful to you It’s been quite a deep and moving podcast this time Um, if you’re interested to hear more about the retreat that we’re holding at the end of november early december You can get details of that at our website tantra for gay men dot com And we look forward to seeing you in the next episode episode 16 until then.

Take care. Lots of love to you. Bye You

 

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