To all the participants of my workshops for the past many years and to everyone at a play party, ritual, or erotic retreat who has ever blown me away with their honesty, passion, wisdom, courage, and creativity, thank you. You inspired me and kept me on my path. This book is not only for you, but it’s also partially by you. Special Note of Thanks for the Revised Edition
Over the past ten years I have been further inspired, encouraged, and educated by my community of several hundred graduates of the Urban Tantra Professional Training Program. These training programs have been made possible by the fierce dedication of my local coordinators worldwide. My deepest thanks to Elise Bish, Hayley Caspers, Liana Gailand, Lola D. Houston, Amanda Gay Love, Donia Love, Rebecca Lowrie, Gina Machado, Tara Phillips, Carl Johan Rehbinder, Jennie Rehbinder, and Lorenzo Stiernquist. Equally huge thanks to the brilliant, committed, and loyal team members who gather each year in support of this training and this community.
Extra special love to my spirit child, Rowan Tinca Parkes, who drops everything, gets on a plane, and brings their magic to every wild and crazy endeavor I embark on.
Thanks once again to Ten Speed Press for their loyalty and commitment to this book and for yet another blissful publishing experience. My editor, Kate Bolen, and designer, Angelina Cheney, have been a joy to work with.
A very special thanks to the amazing artist YuDori (yudori.com), who stepped up to provide additional illustrations for this new edition, and to Cyndi Darnell for the images in The Atlas of Erotic Anatomy and Arousal, on which the illustrations were based. Thanks also to the BDSM Book Club of Lexington, Kentucky, for asking great questions and offering fresh insights into Tantra and BDSM.
And finally, to everyone who has read and recommended Urban Tantra, thank you. We are changing the world one breath at a time.
Foreword
When my friend Barbara Carrellas asked me to write the foreword to Urban Tantra, her second book, she said it was “because we walked so much of the path together.” This was true, at least up until Urban Tantra was first published in 2007. We had traveled thousands of miles, hand in hand (and hand elsewhere too), in search of the Holy Grail — great sex that was not only fun and satisfying, but also deeply healing, personally empowering, and spiritually enlightening. We followed our muses, and our clits, which guided us spectacularly well.
Our adventure began in New York City in the 1980s — before Sex in the City, before Disney took over the delightfully sleazy Times Square, before there were Tantric sex workshops in every major city. Barbara was a relatively mild-mannered and successful Broadway theatrical general manager, and I was a proud prostitute, porn star, fetish fantasy fulfillment professional, and blossoming sex educator.
The two of us had met during the “sex equals death” years of the mid-1980s, at a large support group called the New York Healing Circle, when AIDS was out of control, wreaking havoc and pain. We were losing many friends, far too young. The Healing Circle was a spiritually based support group. Barbara was a recovering Catholic who was very squeamish about religion. I had been raised atheist Unitarian and was struggling with my sudden interest in being in sacred space, learning spiritual healing and being holy. It took the deaths of several of our beloved close friends and lovers to put us on what was to become a life-changing spiritual path that fit us perfectly.
From the moment we met, Barbara and I hit it off. We had a brief sexual relationship, which morphed into a deep friendship. Barbara was already more sexually experienced and sex-positive than most folks. She taught me about my G-spot (thanks, B.). But she was also inexperienced in some ways. When I took her out and introduced her to the “sexual underground,” I thought she would just dip her tootsies into the waters and then go back to a more straight-and-narrow path. No way.
Instead, Barbara got on the fast track and proceeded to learn everything she could about all things sexual, gathering experience through excess. Together we went to orgies, BDSM clubs, Times Square peep show palaces, transsexual parties, and did masturbation workshops and rituals, and she tried it all with lots of people. Barbara even jumped in front of the cameras and appeared in two artsy sex films I directed, The Sluts and Goddesses Video Workshop and Annie Sprinkle’s Amazing World of Orgasm. She participated in Betty Dodson’s first sex education film, Selfloving, and then went into mainstream television in several HBO Real Sex segments. Barbara did it all with gusto, style, and integrity.
Relatively early on, we started taking Tantra workshops facilitated by the handful of Tantra teachers who were around back then. Originally, we were drawn to Tantra because of what we had read about the ancient Tantric paths, which seemed to embrace everything sexual — from love poems to extreme yogic fucking positions to far-out fetishes to stories of “sacred prostitutes,” month-long orgies in graveyards, and other wild things. But most of the workshops we took seemed a little bit silly and too woo-woo for our tarty tastes and New York City sensibilities. We didn’t really jive with the all-white, middle-aged, strictly heterosexual, couples-oriented New Age, Marin County style of Tantra. As the only queer, edgy, freaky, kinky folks there, we were judged for who we were and what interested us. “That’s not Tantra,” we were told. But the techniques we learned and the overall intentionality of Tantra resonated with us deeply. We secretly wondered if we’d been practicing Tantrikas in some past life.
Even relatively simple, ancient Tantric techniques like ecstasy breathing changed our lives forever. We had absolutely electrifying experiences with full-body energy orgasms, which felt like chakra enemas, shamanic journeys, and full-on religious experiences all rolled into one.
We were so enthusiastic about what we were experiencing that we naturally wanted to share it all with our friends and various communities. We began with our gay brothers with AIDS. When they loved and embraced our new ecstatic form of sacred safer sex, we were so encouraged, we hit the road and started facilitating sexuality workshops together, learning more through teaching. Our “Sacred Sex,” “Fun with Breath and Energy Orgasms,” “Erotic Massage,” and “Sluts and Goddesses” workshops were completely Tantric in spirit but quite different from traditional Tantric workshops. They included chanting, energy work, and meditation but also sometimes BDSM, gender play, tightly laced corsets, fetishes, whore/slut/witch archetypes, fabulous costumes, and more. Many of the wonderful people who came gave us enthusiastic, heartfelt, occasionally teary feedback about how they were liberated or how their lives were changed for the better forever because of something they learned or experienced. Many workshop participants inadvertently gave us some new key piece of information or new experience, deepening our own personal exploration, for which we were grateful. We taught what we wanted to learn, and learn we did!
Tantra provided a way for us to continue on our sexual journeys and get our spiritual and emotional needs met, while giving us ways to cope with all the disease and dying around us. Barbara and I felt like we were reclaiming and reinventing sex from our messed-up, sexually dysfunctional, judgmental, ignorant, puritanical American culture. It became our public service, our labor of love, our mission in life, to use sexuality to generate healing and transcendental, enriching sexual experiences for others and ourselves.