Reboot Your Sex Life through Tantra with Lawrence Lanoff

In this Episode

• [01:52]Lawrence starts things off by sharing his story, revealing how his early experiences have shaped his life and path.
• [05:01]When did Lawrence start practicing tantra with other people, as in tantric sex?
• [07:24]Lawrence discusses what tantra is, and how you can use it to take normal sex to a whole new level.
• [10:21]Stephan talks about his interview with Jaiya on this podcast, relating some points he learned from her to what Lawrence has been saying.
• [12:27]What’s the framework that underpins tantra, and why does that framework work so well for so many people?
• [16:33]The reason Lawrence feels so strongly about this is that after traveling the world teaching, he has discovered that people always have questions about tantra, no matter where in the world he is.
• [18:38]Lawrence’s experience is that most people are unable to articulate their fantasies to their partner, or to share them openly. He then discusses why so much of our sexual exploration in our culture is related to porn.
• [21:04]Lawrence’s views on porn aren’t black and white, he explains, and in certain situations it can be a good choice. Stephan then talks about the ways in which porn can be problematic.
• [26:12]We hear about what it means to be turned on and existing in that state without just rushing for the ejaculation. A natural consequence of this, Lawrence explains, is foreplay.
• [28:42]Stephan talks about the fact that pornography is two-dimensional and performance-based, not reality.
• [31:20]Lawrence compares tantra to a college class that you actually get to have fun studying.
• [31:55]One of the exercises Lawrence recommends is taking the time to slow down and create safe space with your partner.
• [35:29]For a lot of people, Lawrence explains, the issue is accepting that pleasure is okay.
• [36:25]Lawrence talks about multiple orgasms for men.
• [39:56]The first step is understanding what is possible in terms of expanding pleasure and your runway.
• [43:15]Stephan points out that this isn’t about being hedonistic, but rather that it’s sacred. He recommends listeners check out his conversation with Dr. Pat Allen.
• [45:34]Lawrence talks about how the chakras relate to tantric sex. They’re a metaphor for understanding or thinking about energy, he explains.
• [51:33]Lawrence discusses connecting sexual energy all the way from the root to the brain and the crown.
• [53:00]Stephan talks about an exercise that he did, similar to the energy work Lawrence has been talking about.
• [54:34]What are Lawrence’s thoughts on squirting? It’s not about the physical act, he explains, so much as what goes into allowing that to happen.
• [57:50]How can people reach Lawrence?

Jump to Links and Resources

Transcript

‏‏Are you ready to take your sex life to a whole new level? I think you are. It’s been a long time since we’ve had a sex episode, in fact, it was episode number one with Jaiya. Which is an incredible episode, it’s mind-blowing, you must listen to it. This episode, I think you’re going to find it really enjoyable as well. It’s going to open your eyes on a few different things like tantric sex and pleasure waves, multiple orgasms for men, all sorts of cool stuff. Our guest today to walk us through all this is Lawrence Lanoff. He’s a bestselling author and an award-winning filmmaker who’s directed and produced 11 feature films. He’s also a featured expert in Neil Strauss’s New York Times Bestseller, The Truth, which is an amazing book. And of course, Lawrence is a sex expert, which is why he’s talking about sex in this episode. Enjoy! Lawrence, it’s great to have you on the show.

‏‏Thank you. It’s great to be here, great to be here.

‏‏Let’s talk about sex and how did you go down this path. I know you’ve shared this with me personally before, how you got started at a young age but I think this would be a really great place to start for our listeners, for them to know your story.

‏‏I had the good fortune of growing up on the streets of New York City back in the day. I was exposed to a lot of things, especially in the ‘70s and ‘80s, was just filled with ideas and people who had lots and lots and lots of different thoughts about how life should be. That was from everything, from vegetarianism to meditation. I learned so many things early. I was meditating when I was six years old. I had started that path of starting questions about life and existence and purpose and meaning. Of course, during that time, that was the place and that was the time. Very, very optimistic, filled with possibility and potential. I had the good fortune of meeting a Tantra Master when I was 12 years old. What was the most important about that, it wasn’t that I even knew what sex was or sex energy was or even what an orgasm was? But what was important was understanding the idea that there was this infinite supply of energy, that there was this incredible force, and you can harness that force to transform, to create, to vision what is possible, and that in a way, harnessing your sexual energy is like the fire that’s under the pot on the stove and that fire is sex energy. I had the good fortune meeting this master who was like, “Hey, let me tell you about this.” I remember actually going to my encyclopedia and saying, “What is an orgasm?”

‏‏You basically got trained or you became an apprentice to a Tantra Master at 12 years old?

‏‏I got trained by a Tantra Master, yup. Again, more concepts, this wasn’t, obviously, but it was more like conceptual frameworks, belief system, ways to think about sex and sex energy. It’s a lot at 12. Trust me, it was a lot.

‏‏I can’t even imagine.

‏‏Let me tell you that there were positives and negatives to both. The positives were here is this person who is explaining to me just how to live in my passion and my fire, but then I was also telling young friends of mine, teaching them what I was learning and just sending them into sheer panic and terror because they’re like, “What? Do I have to control this energy? What?” It was both beautiful and also probably a little bit early, but hey.

‏‏Yeah. A little bit maybe. When did you start actually practicing with a partner or partners this tantric stuff? In your teenage years, I’m guessing.

‏‏Yeah, absolutely. In fact, my first sexual experience was actually great because I was moving slowly and I was using my breath and my sound. It was like I hear some of the horror stories of women who lost their virginity to men who were not trained, and it sounds like, in some cases, for a lot of women it was pretty traumatizing. But for my girlfriend at the time, it was just life-changing for her. It was like taking her to an experience, it was filled with abundance, just an abundance of pleasure and freedom and spaciousness. I think that that’s why coming back to why is this important and why are we talking about this, we’re talking about this because it gets to what it is to be alive.

‏‏It is at the very basic level. It’s why we are alive. If we didn’t have this sexual drive, we wouldn’t procreate and we wouldn’t be here and our children wouldn’t be here and our children’s children wouldn’t be here, and so forth and so on.

‏‏Exactly. When we’re talking about it, it seems like oh yeah, that seems in a way obvious but it is crazy for how many people that is not obvious to. They think that there is something wrong with them because they have desire or they want to explore things or try things or experience things and yet this is the very drive of life.‏‏

Yup. There is dissociation, there’s shame, all this junk that people associate with sex. It doesn’t belong. It’s this beautiful thing, this gift that was given to us by the creator and we’ve turned it into something ugly, something to hide, and to be ashamed of. Very strange.

‏‏It is a strange thing but we have done stranger things as humans.

‏‏Let’s talk about how do you take normal, mediocre, humdrum sex to a whole other level? What does this tantra thing mean for somebody who’s not familiar with the term and why should they care?

‏‏I’m going to define tantra as a little bit different. Probably if you picked up a textbook or something like that because I am interested in how do you live. If we were to stand back a little bit, what I would say is we have an opportunity in this day and age to really create the life we want. For a lot of people, that can be a scary thing. In fact, I just finished a tantric energetic workshop in Mexico City, and one of the questions I asked in that course is, “What do you want?” But not in the sense of I want a car or a house. But in the sense of like what is the quality of life you want to live. What do you want to do? Where do you want to do that? And who do you want to do that with? I feel like that really is the tantric question. When you consider what the framework of tantra is, it’s like the ability to say yes to the things you want in your life and the capacity to say no to the things you don’t want. That balance between things we want to experience and share and things we are a no to is the sweet spot that I feel is what tantra is. The ability to say yes to expand into pleasure and freedom and joy and bliss.

‏‏There’s an expression, I forget who says it but it’s gotten a lot of traction. Something like this, it’s got to be a hell yes. If it’s just a yes, then it’s a no. It’s either a hell yes or a hell no.

‏‏Right.

‏‏If you live life like that, you’re going to live it much more fully.

‏‏That’s right. If you do step into a hell yes, we can’t really step into that if we don’t know what we want. Part of tantra is there is like an inner tantra, the relationship I have with my own sex and desire and pleasure, and my sense of freedom and spaciousness in my being. And then there is the other tantra that I share with the world and partners who also feel open to the idea that pleasure can be more than a couple scratching an itch. What happens if you begin to orient your life and your relationship towards sharing and connecting and expanding your capacity to feel good?

‏‏When I interviewed Jaiya, that was the first episode ever of this podcast. Amazing one as well, that was two years ago now. We talked about different blueprints. There is energetic, there’s kink, and sexual, and sensual, and shapeshifter, that was another one. These different blueprints and there’s one that you resonate with the most, or the one that you fall back on and if your partner is a different blueprint, that could be a mismatch. Let’s say I’m sexual and my wife is sensual and I’m not doing the stuff that she really enjoys, that’s sensual, the long caressing strokes and just the different sensory types of touches, feathers and whatever, and I’m just straight to it, that’s what I want but that’s not what she wants and vice versa. She’s coming at me with one blueprint that’s hers and not really meeting me at my level, with my blueprint, then again that’s a mismatch. We have to give in a way that we want to receive but not in the way that we want to receive it and the way that we know is going to be received the best by the partner. The more pressure we deliver to our partner, the more we’ll probably end up getting ourselves but it can’t be the same type of pleasure that we enjoy, it’s got to be the pleasure that they enjoy.

‏‏Yeah. That is a framework for sure. It can be a very powerful framework.

‏‏How is tantric sex different? What’s the framework that underpins tantra and why does that framework work so well? That works for a whole bunch of different people who are doing it.

If I can teach somebody a guiding principle, that’s going to be a better way for them to have an experience.

‏‏I think because there’s an openness, and I think that’s really the quality. When it comes to these things, I find if I can teach somebody a guiding principle, that’s going to be a better way for them to have an experience. If I can say for example, whatever you want to experience, it’s okay. If I’m in a relationship with a consenting adult, whatever my partner wants to experience, we can talk about that. Again, this is my personal experience, is that sexuality is a very fluid thing that people’s ideas change, that thoughts change, that experiences change. As we change, our sexuality changes. No matter who you’re in a relationship with, who you’re married to, whatever’s happening, when the dopamine is flowing, which is in the beginning, it’s really, really different than when we move to that oxytocin connected relationship based thing. Just that one idea alone, there are so many people who are like, you know we just don’t have the spark. These are people who have coached over the years, and there is like, oh I love my partner but we just don’t have that same spark. Tantra is about recognizing that life and sexual energy is a lot more like clouds and it’s a living, breathing thing. You don’t walk outside and say, man, how come the clouds aren’t like they were yesterday? That’s why it’s so successful because you can meet your partner or partners wherever they are, you can have adult conversations with them about what your desires are, you can set boundaries and frameworks for experiencing that and then you can together go and explore that.

That’s a very powerful thing because we don’t learn that in school. You don’t know how to talk about sex in school. I was speaking with an adult female, an adult human in her 40s and she was still referring to her, in tantra we call it the yoni, but her vagina, she was still referring to that as down there. I thought it was so interesting that she wasn’t really able to speak openly. That creates a lot of problems for people if they can’t speak and be themselves and communicate about their desires. Why I think this is important, it’s because it’s a very non-judgmental framework for you learning to be more you as a sexual human, whatever that looks like. And then as you get more comfortable with that, then you can play with other people who also want to play with that with you. I feel like those are some of the foundations and what makes playing in these more tantric ways successful because we actually have a framework, we practice connecting and not speaking from, I wanted this and you didn’t give it to me but speaking from a place of love and kindness and compassion and sweetness and tenderness, and those things create connection and relationship which is ultimately what most people are looking for.

‏‏Yeah. They say that language shapes your reality, and I believe that. If you’re not even able to articulate your desires, even just your anatomy, you just call it down there like you were just saying, how can you possibly speak your fantasies?

‏‏Exactly. Here’s the interesting thing, this is why I feel so strongly about this. I’ve traveled the world, traveled the world teaching, I have met people from so many different cultures and backgrounds and lifestyles and religious beliefs and spiritual beliefs. At the end of the day, it does not matter where I’ve been, when people find out that I have a tantric practice, they have questions. It always surprises me that it didn’t matter where I was. Whether I was in a conservative Christian group or I was in a Buddhist temple or I was in a standard spiritual configuration or a sex cult of some kind, it didn’t matter what the environment was and it didn’t matter how progressive it seemed, people always have questions. Perhaps the biggest question they have is, “Am I normal? Is this normal? Am I normal?” That sort of uncertainty that people have, where they’re feeling like maybe I’m broken or there’s something wrong with me, which a lot of our culture sets up by speaking of language by the way we talk about sex and the way we think about sex, it creates this environment where people just spend a lot of time feeling really messed up. It’s kind of a sad thing because if you’re feeling messed up because of your desire, it’s very hard to ask for what it is that you want or would like to experience. That I feel is the disservice we do by not educating our population, our people, and our young people on how to have conversations that make us feel good.

‏‏Would you guess that most people are unable to articulate their fantasies or share their fantasies openly with their partner?

It is very seldom that somebody feels safe and confident and comfortable enough to share their deepest, most intimate desires.

‏‏That’s my experience. In all the sessions I have, it is very seldom that somebody feels safe and confident and comfortable enough to share their deepest, most intimate desires. That’s sad because it really limits our capacity for pleasure.

‏‏How does that play out? If somebody’s unable to share with their partner a certain kind of fantasy, let’s say it’s a BDSM fantasy or something, and perhaps the partner doesn’t know for their entire lifetime together that this person was into BDSM and it’s almost like they cut off an entire part of themselves not just to their partner but to themselves.

‏‏I think that’s exactly right. I think that’s one of the reasons why there’s so much of our sexual education and exploration happens around porn in this culture, because there really isn’t a safe space to talk about things. We are male-bodied humans. If a woman has a 10X problem in revealing her deepest desires because there are so many negative words for women who are openly or comfortable sexually, we don’t have those words for men. Just be like, oh he’s a dog or he’s a bad boy or he’s a player. But these aren’t like words that can ruin your life and your reputation, whereas women have words that can ruin their careers because they’re sexually expressed or expressing ways that perhaps culture doesn’t like or doesn’t agree with. There’s also that very strange paradox. Not only is it difficult already to talk about it, but then if somebody does talk about it they risk social, emotional, sometimes even intimate relationships charming on them, that’s a very scary thing for people. I think that’s probably as scary as anything.

‏‏They repress their desires and they turn to pornography and that poisons the relationship.

‏‏It can. There are multiple sides to these things. I’m not so black and white on these things personally because I’ve lived through a lot of different times, I’ve seen a lot of things in my lifetime and I think that I would rather somebody be exploring their fantasies privately in porn than taking out their frustration and rage by beating the kids and things like that that people really used to do. I have experienced that in my own life where as I was coming up, people were so afraid of their desires and they were so abusive as a result of that. There’s again, a paradox of complication and porn, you see that oh, I’m not as weird or strange as I thought I was or whatever the particular thing is that people are into. Because you see other people expressing that and exploring that, so on one hand we’re like, yay, yay, yay express yourself and on the other hand we’re like but don’t express yourself. That’s the paradox. I like the fact that there’s at least things out there so people are not feeling quite so isolated and alone and therefore tensed and freaked out and anxious and enraged by their desires. That’s an interesting thing and I could quote you different stats that are just hilarious. For example, ultra-conservative areas in America, some of the deepest searched or the richest searches can be for gay porn and yet on the surface, there’s all this hey, this is how it’s supposed to be but at least there’s a place for people to go and express or explore it so they don’t feel quite so isolated. It’s complicated.

‏‏Yeah. I get that. It makes sense that somebody who’s repressed can either use rage and violence as an outlet or they could use porn as an outlet. It seems preferable for me too that they would use porn.

‏‏Yeah, for sure.

‏‏However, if you as an individual are trying to elevate your consciousness and your sexuality and your relationship, turning to porn is going to be toxic.‏‏

For sure. Absolutely.

‏‏Right. Because you have this unrealistic expectation of what your partner is supposed to be and do, this performance you’re watching, which is not anything like real life. And also you don’t take the opportunity to store up your sexual energy, in what Napoleon Hill calls sexual transmutation in his fantastic book Think and Grow Rich, whole chapter dedicated to sexual transmutation and taking your sexual energy and storing it up and leveraging it for building your business or breaking through some sort of barrier in your life. Very, very powerful.

‏‏Super powerful.

‏‏If you don’t take that opportunity, store up your sexual energy, it’s also not healthy. As you get older you’re supposed to ejaculate less over time.

‏‏Right. What you’re describing is Taoist Tantra, it’s a very eastern approach, Mantak Chia’s work who could also be a fascinating interview for you. I’ve taught on the same stage with him at different times. His background, he really brought this idea of Taoism and Taoist Tantra which is all about ejaculation, control, and circulating sexual energy. That is actually what I learned first when I was 12, it was Taoist approach. It’s one thing when you get older, when you’re older you’re moving your energy in controlling your ejaculation and expanding your pleasure but at 12 and 13, when you’re just first learning, it’s like, “What?!”

‏‏I can’t even wrap my head around that.

‏‏You can’t. It’s just hilarious. My teacher taught me in such a black and white manner, I tend to just be a little bit more understanding of these things, if you will, like kids understanding that it can be complicated. And then my experience also, I’m not a spring chicken anymore. I will go through periods where I am completely containing my sexual energy, especially if I have a big project. That, as it turned out, was a natural consequence of the creative flow because sex energy is creative energy, it is creative life force energy. A natural consequence when you’re in the middle of a creative project which when I’m teaching, will be to just really internalize my sex energy and circulate it. That’s part of what I like to share with people, is just what it means to be tuned on and not going for the ejaculation, not just rubbing this thing friction-wise but really learning how to be in a state of turn on and ensure that with your partner or partners where you can just be yourself and you can just say, “Hey, I’m really turned on.” That’s where the natural consequence of that is foreplay. That is what foreplay is, it’s when you become less concerned about putting point A inside of slot B and you become more concerned with the entirety of the experience, what are my toes feeling?

Good five different layers of touch that you can do with a person but, this is really the destructive part of porn that I see in our culture, basically, porn tends to be an expression of dominance and force, and it misses all these flavors but that’s where our sex education happens. It’s hugely important that you and I have these conversations and share with your listeners both because I want your listeners, A: your desires are normal, it’s normal to want to try things. B: there are other ways to express sexual energy that don’t necessarily have to do with pumping and dominance and friction that you can touch differently, you can slow things down, that you can do other things. I think that’s the real disservice that porn does, as you said it, it portrays a certain thing that just doesn’t map to reality. I think that our job as adult humans is to start to create our own maps of reality where we begin to look at what are the things that I like, what I like to do, and what else is possible? And that curiosity is the essence of tantra. What is possible? What can I do with my pleasure, my energy, my connection? That’s where you start to get into ecstatic states of bliss, that to me begin to mirror the most ecstatic states of meditation I’ve ever experienced which is one of the reasons why I continued to explore sexual energy even though I had a very traditional background in spirituality for much of my early life.

‏‏The idea of pornography being two dimensional and performance and not reality and also not rich and three dimensional I think is really an important concept for our listeners to grasp that you’re not going to learn from porn, for example, to disconnect or break apart orgasm from ejaculation.

‏‏Correct.

‏‏They are different and you can have one without the other.

‏‏Absolutely.

‏‏That’s powerful and you’ll not learn that from porn. Tantra and exchanging energy, I learned this amazing exercise from Jaiya that my wife and I use which is to breathe into each other’s mouth, just face each other and as I’m breathing in she’s breathing out and vice versa. It’s really hot.

‏‏ Yeah. It’s super hot, of course.

‏‏I can’t see that in porn, I don’t think.

‏‏There are small, little areas, I have some friends and actually have been trying to help people facilitate different things for a long time because I just feel really strongly about this. We need different flavors. Right, the mouth breathing is a beautiful thing because what you’re speaking about there is it’s the sharing of the energy that you can feel. If you do this with your partner for a while, when I say a while anywhere from a couple of minutes to you can do that for probably 15 or 20 minutes and it is sublime. I don’t know what else to say. It’s incredible, it’s like you’re breathing in your partner. That is hot. There are so many things like that that we learn, little experiences, ways to touch, ways to feel that are just incredible. I feel like that’s the beautiful thing about sexual art specifically, is that they are art forms, they really are. How you make love is unique to you and how you learn to use your canvass that is your body and how you learn to share that canvass and communicate about that canvass. It’s incredible, it is like your favorite class in college that you actually get to have fun studying. That’s what I feel like tantra and the sexual arts are, it’s like you get to have fun exploring you and your partner.

The mouth breathing is a beautiful thing because... it’s the sharing of the energy that you can feel. Click To Tweet

‏‏Yeah. Tell me a bit more about these explorations might look like. What are some of these exercises that you would do, tantric or otherwise, that would take the sexual experience to whole other level?

‏‏Here is one that I actually just demonstrated Sunday, and that is what happens when you slow down and you actually take time to create safe space with your partner. I have found that women will oftentimes say, they’ll come to me at different times they’ll say, hey I’m having a hard time with my orgasm or experiencing pleasure or have a hard time receiving. To a person, what that ends up coming down to is our own inability to know what our own pleasure is and our own inability to communicate about that pleasure and then our inability and our partner’s inability to create safe space so that we can explore those things. Probably the most important thing you can do is [00:36:39] and sexual and in your pleasure, is a, it’s a gift and it takes a lot of courage. If we can treat each other with the respect that that courage deserves, that’s where we begin to feel like, wow, this is deep and good and wonderful because that courage to feel and be in your pleasure.

Most people will never experience that in their lives, in their lives. Because it’s scary, it’s like you want me to be in my pleasure and my ecstatic and look you in the eye, this is a rare thing and it is also why we as a culture are so dependent on drugs and alcohol because it’s very, very challenging to look somebody in the eye and be seen in your desire and in your pleasure. That’s cross-cultural. The more we can learn that, the simplest exercise would be to just do a Yab Yum position, this is the most tantric cliché position. Which is where you sit on the lap of your partner which is a position where you could actually have the experience you’re talking about sharing breath, where you sit on the lap of you partner and you just look in each other’s eyes and just be quiet, just look and take each other in. That’s one exercise, I’ll give you a couple more but that’s a beautiful place to just start. And then here with this person on your lap and you’re close and there’s no distance and space, you start to have a conversation in that space where you’re breathing together and you’re in sync together, it’s really beautiful. Again, these are skills we have to learn because we’re not taught them, there’s no class in this. Our cultural model is you should know, you should just know.

‏‏Actually there is a class. You’re teaching some of them and there are others.

‏‏Of course, Jaiya’s teaching. There’s lots of educators Reid, Monique, these are people who are teaching but what I mean is like…

‏‏When you say Reid you’re talking about Reid Mihalko?

‏‏Reid Mihalko and Monique Darling, these are coworker friends. We’ve been in this field for a long, long time just spreading the ideas as well as the techniques. For a lot of people, it’s the idea, it’s the idea that pleasure is okay. Most people feel like, oh my God, if I just go for my pleasure, I’m just going to become a worthless citizen, and it’s really exactly the opposite and that’s what I think you are pointing to with Think and Grow Rich, which again, I read when I was 13. It was part of that study of sex energy, and I realized like no, here are the most successful people in the world talking about harnessing their sex energy. I feel like that is, in fact, the power, the real power of sex energy, is just all the infinite waves we can use it and explore it and use it to literally transform our lives and our relationships.

‏‏Let’s get a very practical example for our male listeners. Let’s talk about multiple orgasms for men.

‏‏Okay, great. Obviously, everybody knows of the fabled myth of the female orgasm, I’m not saying it’s a myth but I’m just saying women can have multiple orgasms for a number of reasons but one of the reasons is because their refractory period is much shorter or can be much shorter depending on the type of orgasm. Whereas for men, when a men orgasms in a way that culture thinks about which there’s like a build, a build, a build, a peak and then an explosion and then an immediate come down, this is the standard story narrative when you go to the movies, it’s the same thing. We basically follow the sexual structure we just build in intensity, reach the climax, the ejaculation, and then the [00:41:47], the end. That is a lot of the formatting we’re in, but what we want to do, as men is we want to say, okay, first I will say why can’t we have multiple orgasms, what if we could? The first thing is just to consider what would happen if you could? As you made mention a little bit earlier, what if you could separate ejaculation from your orgasm? For our male listeners, I’ll give you some homework which is to self-pleasure and begin to make some distinctions between zero, I have no drive, I want to go to sleep and I’m one second away from ejaculating. For most men, if they have not been trained in some kind of sexual art, that build-up is very rapid, there is a lot of pent-up energy and desire and then there’s an experience and then there is ejaculation.

The average American has a complete sex experience in about 10 minutes.

The average American has a complete sex experience in about 10 minutes. What we want to do is just say, hey wait, can I extend this at all? Can I think about this differently? Can I find some distinctions? And mastery is about distinctions, mastery is about distinctions and sexual mastery is the same. It’s the refinement of the distinctions that you make regarding sex. Instead of being like oh my god I’m turned on, I need to ejaculate. You start, oh wow, I’m turned on, oh look at this, let me breathe, what if I expand this energy from my penis to my hips or to my legs or my torso, my chest, eventually expanding this sensation into your entire body. It’s really hard for me to communicate how incredible that is, but even as I’m sitting here my body is tingling a little bit because I’m remembering that I had an incredible, beautiful, multiple orgasmic full-body experience in front of the class just to demonstrate what that is and how it’s possible. Even thinking about it is like… The first thing we want to do, which we’re doing right is just setting the idea, what if that was possible? What if you could do that? What if it was just like understanding the idea that it’s even possible, that you can begin to separate your pleasure and expand the runway you have. Let’s say if 9 ½ is you’re over the cliff and you’re ejaculating, what does space look like between 9 and 7, what if I just really play in that intensity level over and over again, so I’ll get maybe to a 6 and then to an 8 1/2 or 9 and then back down. Then we begin to think of sexual energy as waves as opposed to a pathway to an ejaculation. I get it, that that’s one way to do and there is this other incredible thing. Then suddenly you could be with your partner who’s multi-orgasmic and you can just be right there with your partner just serving that orgasmic energy without ever peaking to the point where you’re at a 10. That delicious phase before 10 and somewhere still above 6-7, that intensity is just beautiful to just surf.

‏‏Yes, it is.

‏‏Exactly.

‏‏Yeah. Because it’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey.

‏‏Correct.

‏‏Jaiya taught this thing called pleasure waves and how you can take your woman through these pleasure waves, that’s amazing.

‏‏It’s amazing, it’s amazing. If you bond with somebody over a pleasure experience, it’s a beautiful thing, it’s a kind of a bond when you bond through pleasure that is unlike anything else. That experience is so deep and so profound when you guide somebody or flow somebody into the sexual flow and sexual pleasure and expanding that, it’s like this incredible connection. It’s rare and beautiful and filled with possibility and connection and depth. I really feel like if anything, the deeper we can go with our partners in surfing into pleasure and energy, the more connection, the more love, the more freedom, the more compassion. All of the things that I wanted on my spiritual path, I ultimately found in developing these beautiful techniques for connecting and deepening my relationships and my connections and my flow in life. With that, paradoxically, comes abundance and money and friends and intimacy and relationships and love. It all flows but it flows because for me, where it started was really cultivating my pleasure and my freedom and then sharing that with people that were open to sharing at the depth that I wanted to go. And that is the creative life.

‏‏I think it’s important for our listeners to understand that this is not about being hedonistic, that this isn’t just pleasure as your God. This is sacred, I love the way that Dr. Pat Allen when I interviewed her on the show, it’s an amazing episode, by the way, listeners. She refers to penetration as the God moment. Because you are playing God, you are creating life, potentially, right?

‏‏Right.

‏‏Take it seriously. It’s fun and light and everything but it’s also deep. It’s like as deep as the ocean. When you can go to a higher level, a higher tier or elevate both you and your partner and ride that wave for a longer period of time instead of just staying at this low level of consciousness and low level of sex, bang it out until finally, you get close and then you come, you could’ve had something so much more profound by going up and down the roller coaster with her or him for a period of hours instead of just minutes.

‏‏Exactly. I will tell you, because a lot of people are like, what? Hours? What? Time, when you’re in that state of connection, it really melts, it’s the craziest thing. It may feel often times, tantric experience with my partner who I have been with 10 years, we will be in this beautiful cosmic deep lovemaking and will go on. It feels like five minutes, but maybe two hours has just passed. That’s a beautiful thing because you go so deep that time disappears.

‏‏Yup, amazing. Alright. Let’s move on to a couple more topics before we have to wrap up. Let’s talk about the chakras and how this concept of root chakra and the crown chakra, and everything between. How that relates to tantric sex and what we’ve been talking about in this episode?

Chakras forever make you free.

‏‏Right. The chakras, as one of my [00:51:32] would say, chakras forever make you free. They’re a metaphor for understanding or thinking about energy. When you were just now saying like hey, there are some other things you can do, we can transmute the energy, we can raise it. What we’re saying is the root chakra, which is often thought about as the place where we store fear and anxiety, the place where a lot of our more animal desires live, they live in the root and that has to do with security and how we feel in the world and safety, scarcity, and a lot of those things. A lot of people live at this base frequency and their sex reflects that. There’s a lot of jealousy and drama and oftentimes power struggles as you move a little bit higher into the first to second to third chakra where you’re in power dynamics but it’s a lot of power over others. We are trying to dominate and control those kinds of things. Those would be the lower chakras when you would consider the route, the sex chakra, and the dantian which is where a lot of the energy is built in Taoist practices and tai chi, you would call the hara the center.

Like I said, if I have to give them a flavor, there can be a lot of drama and a lot of ups and downs and power over. And then there’s something that happens. When you move into tai chi and dantian, the power center, you’re beginning to consolidate that power and move it out of just this need to pierce or ejaculate or take or power over someone or something. You begin to balance it. That first step happens in the power center. The move of tantra, the move of the sexual arts, the move of the sacred arts of sex is where you begin to take all of that power over and bring that into the heart and begin to integrate it. What happens when I take all my fears and all my desires, my darkest fantasies, just all the stuff that I’m afraid of and whatever’s going on, and I take that with love and compassion and kindness, what I teach about which is radical self-acceptance. I bring my awareness to that and I take all that energy and begin to integrate it into the heart.

The heart is really the first move of tantra, that’s really the first power move, that’s the first move where you begin to go like, oh, these things can start to flow together and connect. That’s why the metaphor of chakras, chakra is a wheel in Sanskrit, that these wheels of energy can actually in a sense rotate and begin to flow together. That flowing together gives people a sense of balance, alignment, and wholeness. That’s where the chakras come in, then you just continue up the flute. You go from the heart and then the next thing is the throat. Now I got all these desires and things and they are being tempered by heart hose, my heart’s capacity to feel and to empathize. The next step is the throat, the ability to communicate, what do I want. If it’s my deepest desires tempered by my heart allowed to express through my voice concluding boundaries, yes, no, maybe, as we said at the beginning of the show, hell yes. Hell yes, I want to try that or hell no, I don’t want that. Or maybe, which is also a really fun energy to explore. I love the energy of maybe because like I don’t know and I don’t know what I don’t know, so then there’s an openness.

We are using our voices to modulate that experience. Listeners imagine, take a journey with us where as I’m speaking about the chakras, we are going up the channels, and just do it, imagine it with us as we’re talking about this, we’ve come to the throat. Imagine from the root this central channel, this core meridian that’s moving up the center of your body, you’ve seen it, if you ever had acupuncture, you’ve seen the Chinese acupuncture drawings really go into these energy flows. There’s this central channel that connects all of your chakras. We’re moving up that core channel from the throat to the third eye. The third eye in the center of your forehead, that is what I call the inner eye, the transformational eye. That is where you’re not just trusting your eyes but you’re looking at your eyes but you’re also trusting your inside vision, your inner vision, your intuition.

The three of those things together become like this, that is the third eye. That’s when the third eye opens, when you can look at life with your eyes but also with an inner vision, with a part of you that’s inside and focused on what’s happening inside. I can take and connect my sexual energy all the way from the root, imagine it going all the way through that core channel and bringing that into your brain, which is what that expression of the third eye is your vision and your prefrontal cortex, your mind. And then the next step on the chakra trip is then to go up to the crown, the lotus flower which will be represented by the crown chakra where the lotus opens and is able both shine to the universe but also then absorb the light, the consciousness, the vibration of the universe. That channel can be like a two-way street or two-way communication where we’re both communicating up and down so we can bring that infinite consciousness, that God-consciousness in through us and down our spines so we can bring that God, that creative force into our sex and our sex center. This idea begins to take us into what it is to make love with and in concert with the universe. That is the idea of chakras.

‏‏Very nice. I remember when you were describing this whole thing, Reid Mihalko did a really cool exercise at one of Neil Strauss’s intensives. I don’t know if you were at that one.

‏‏I was.

‏‏Where he did the ball of rotating energy thing and you expand it to a size of a basketball and then down to a size of a golf ball and stuff, you could expand it outwards and other people could feel it. He’s very energetic and tuned in so he could feel other people doing this exercise and expanding that energy ball.

‏‏Right.

‏‏Pretty cool, pretty powerful exercise.

‏‏It is so powerful. Again, these are things and the purpose of our discussion today is really to just open people to what is possible. That as long as you know these things are possible, begins to just create a different quality of experience. That turns me on, that’s why I love to teach.

‏‏When you know something is possible, then you could start exploring and making that possibility into something real.

‏‏That’s correct.

‏‏One last thing that I’ll just briefly touch on with you, I’m curious what your thoughts are on squirting. Is that something that is available as part of a tantric practice or is that something that’s very different from that? How do you describe this process for people who are unfamiliar with it?

‏‏The thing is squirting is kind of funny because it’s become fetishized, we’ve gotten into the data of it. But in my experience, there’s a number of things that are really important about squirting and I have had several female students experience squirting for the first time and feel like as one said recently, she was like, “I finally feel like a woman.” It’s like a magic trick of release and the place that you have to go to in your body and in your mind to really let go to that level is so powerful. I think that’s the power of squirting, I don’t think it’s so much about the magic trick of all this liquid came out of me. But at the same time, especially in the vagina, there are deep liquids that flow out of deep recesses of the vagina and out of the cervix in when there’s tremendous turn on, there’s also the skin glands, there are all these areas where liquid can flow and those are very high viscosity and incredible sensation. And then there is the liquid that you could see if you were to look up women squirting and Google that and you’d see sprays. I think it’s just again recognizing what’s possible and all of it can be incorporated into tantra. If a woman can be open and have the experience of squirting, it’s such a powerful, beautiful experience for her in my experience, and for me, that’s very tantric as well. Just because it’s just fun and it’s like wow my body is capable of doing this, whatever that ‘this’ is. I think that it’s not so much like oh is it this, because there’s a lot of people debating these things and I think they’re irrelevant, they are missing the point which is did you have fun and what level of relaxation do you have to be at to let your body be that free. I think that’s where this gets really fun. Just creating more space and freedom for ourselves and our partners to play.

Create more space and freedom for yourself and your partner to play.

‏‏Essentially, it’s not about the physical act of squirting for the woman, it’s much as it’s the relaxation that’s required in order to get to that place.

‏‏Correct.

‏‏And the relaxation in different parts of her body that she’s probably ever relaxed.

‏‏That is correct. You got it 100%. That path is a path of pleasure.

‏‏And discovery.

‏‏Exactly.

‏‏Awesome. What a great way to end this episode.

‏‏Yes, I totally agree!

‏‏Alright. It was a real pleasure having you on the podcast, Lawrence. And if people wanted to take your workshop either individually or as a couple or work individually with you and get coaching and learn all the energetic practices that you’ve accumulated over your decades of exploration, how would they reach you?

‏‏The best way to reach me is lawrencelanoff.com. I’ve got all kinds of great, tons of free stuff, videos, things you can explore on YouTube, just tons of free stuff. If it’s something that you want to explore further, you can just reach out to me from the website or Facebook or any of those things. It’s lawrencelanoff.com. Happy to answer any questions or just help you continue to deepen and expand your path.

‏‏Awesome. Thank you, Lawrence, thank you, listeners. I hope you enjoyed this episode as much as I did. This is Stephan Spencer, you host, signing off. We’ll catch you on another episode of Get Yourself Optimized.

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About Lawrence Lanoff

Lawrence grew up on the gritty streets of New York City in the 1980s. It was a tumultuous time that provided Lawrence with some of his greatest spiritual insights. The City brings grounded practicality to all of Lawrence’s work.

Lawrence is a masterful teacher.  He applies this practical essence to his artistic and spiritual skills over a 30-year span, to an amazing array of disciplines, starting with a couple of dream jobs – the directing movies and a serial entrepreneur.

Lawrence has discovered that the way we understand movies is similar to the ways in which we understand dreams, symbols, and ultimately, ourselves.

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