Waking Up To Deeper Sensuality with Henika Patel

Henika Patel  0:00  

And so that really became the first question. This is before social media, where there’s a plethora of information now on sexuality and teachers that you can find quite easily. And so I typed into Google, how to heal a numb pelvis, how to heal a numb vagina. And I mean, what I got back was mostly Top 10 Karma Sutra positions. And you know, the major magazines that are out there that speak about that stuff, and I knew somehow that it was deeper than that.

 

Christine Mason  0:35  

Hello, everybody. It’s Christine Marie Mason, your host for the rose woman podcast on love and liberation. Every week, we bring you something that might open the body, mind, spirit a little bit more help you see, from the heart, have more pleasure and joy, maybe even an open mind to something new. We’re in the middle of a series on spirituality and sexuality, couple of episodes on Tantra, last week with the amazing classical scholar, Hareesh Wallace, and this week with Henika Patel, a beautiful tantrika out of the UK, who’s just written a book called sensual. More on that in a little bit. And the next week, God Sex and the brain, with Dr Andrew Newberg, who is a neurotheologian. I thought I might start today with a poem by E Cummings. I like my body when it is with your I like my body when it is with your body. It is so quite new a thing, muscles better and nerves more. I like your body. I like what it does. I like its hows. I like to feel the spine of your body and its bones and the trembling, firm smoothness and which I will again and again and again kiss. I like kissing this and that of you. I like slowly stroking the shocking fuzz of your electric fur. And what is it comes over parting flesh and eyes, big love crumbs and possibly, I like the thrill of under me. You so quite new. Your eyes big love crumbs. I mean, we’ve all had these experiences of intense sensual engagement, a moment of peak vitality, vida, full essence of life. My guest today is Henika Patel. She has just written a book called sensual and her invitation is to come onto a journey of expansion, to find your unapologetic, unashamed, fully expressed sensual spirit. She blends Eastern philosophy, what we’ve been calling Tantra on the show and Western psychology with practices, rituals and stories from her own life. And she makes it clear that sensuality is about more than just pleasure. It’s really tapping into your innate power. And she says that to be sensual is to know yourself so intimately that you can move through life with confidence and clarity, deeply connected to the fire within the book is sensual. Connect deeply, express freely, and love intimately. And we cover Latin here, like how we learn to feel, and also how the Goddess Kali in Indian philosophy and the Rolling Stones logo are related. But we start by talking about what it’s like to be a woman of Indian origin and descent, sort of reclaiming her ancestral lineage and then bringing that into a very successful contemporary modern life in Britain. In addition to being an author, she is also the founder of the School of central arts and a clinical psychotherapist. She now combines Tantra and yoga with Western therapeutic guidelines to create spaces for people to do just what she says in the book, connect, express and love. She’s also a thought leader on the topic of cultural appropriation of tantra and yoga, and she translates that sort of resistance into cultural appreciation, because if you appreciate where it comes from, it’s even richer and deeper, as you will hear in this opening dialog on her upbringing and the goddess Colleen,

 

Henika Patel  4:12  

so first generation British Indian woman. So my parents moved to the UK, and then I was born here, and my father was a monk, and then has professional training as an artist as well. So has quite a unique kind of artistry, slash spiritual mind. And he grew up in a town in Gujarat, which is in the western part of India, called bhadran. And the eminent figure, kind of, each town has its own, you could say goddess or God figure that represents it, kind of like a patron saint. I guess you could equate that to and the patron saint or the eminent goddess in my father’s town was goddess Gali, that’s the figurehead of the tantric practices. So I grew up. With a lot of Goddess worship, you could say connection to the festivals that celebrate the Divine Feminine growing up, but kind of growing up in the west with this quite inquiring. Why do we do this kind of mind and not always finding the answers? Because these are traditions more of doing, rather than questioning or asking. I wasn’t that convinced or connected to the practices as I began to grow up and started to study more, and I went down a law path completely choosing kind of the mark, the path of the mind and training that until I got to my kind of early 20s, and I was really seeking some some answers about life and death and healing, and that really led me back into my ancestral path, where I started to connect a lot of the dots from the traditions that I grew up seeing and some of the answers that I was starting to find in my own healing Journey.

 

Christine Mason  6:00  

Can you say a little bit about Gali for the audience? Yeah, absolutely.

 

Henika Patel  6:03  

So Gali, or makali, is the figurehead, you could say, of the tantric tradition. Her appearance is a dark goddess, so not your average goddess. She often evokes these sensations or appearances of fear, because she has blood dripping from her mouth and she has skulls around her neck. And so she isn’t necessarily this Goddess that is kind of love and light. She’s more love and darkness, but the love is definitely there. Her name comes from the Sanskrit girl, meaning this kind of dance of time and destruction. And she really is this Goddess that invites us into dancing with with transition, with releasing the parts of us which are ready to die within and embracing in that the path or the space for for newness as well. So yeah, she’s this really powerful goddess to connect to us, and often one of the first goddesses that will find us, I think, when we’re when we’re on our on our tantric journey. And one of the facts that I love most about goddess Gali is, most people will know the Rolling Stones, right? And the logo of the Rolling Stones is one of the most famous logos. You know, the tongue coming out of the mouth with with red lips. And that was actually inspired by Goddess Kali, who is seen with tongue lulling out of her mouth and and I love that, because I see that logo all the time, and I think, Oh, there she is.

 

Christine Mason  7:51  

Yeah, that’s right, the sort of like the tongue sticking out and bearing her teeth. Yeah. I also, I also love that there are many aspects and flavors of Kali, like padra, Kali, the goddess of compassionate destruction, and that even within this idea of clearing the space, there are nuances, yeah,

 

Henika Patel  8:09  

any or most mothers, there’ll be different aspects to to the mother. There’ll be a nurturing side that that loves, hopefully, and they’ll also be the side that is firm and needs to look out in a way that is quite awakening, like, don’t do that, you’ll get hurt, you know? And there are these different faces of the Goddess, and that’s something that I love, when I learn more and more about this philosophy that actually helps us to embrace the many different faces we have within ourselves as well at the same

 

Christine Mason  8:43  

so you’re reconnecting with this tradition, and you call it Tantra. And are you, when you say Tantra, are you referring it to classical Tantra or to more the Neo sexual Tantra? How does it land? For you?

 

Henika Patel  8:54  

For me, it lands first as the classical Tantra, because that’s those are the first kind of connections that I I made back to what I saw growing up, though I didn’t know it was called Tantra. Then it’s like you practice the rituals. But it wasn’t necessarily called that until later on in life, when i i added up the dots. But as my own kind of inquiry and my own journey to awakening. What was manifesting as numbness was in my body which really sparked my own journey into this this path is as that was unfolding, I was coming into contact with some of the more Neo tantric practices, which I feel that Tantra as this technology, which, which it sometimes translated to as this technology for for the world in which it is is in, in that moment, I’ve really started to move from this idea of, this is Tantra, and that isn’t Tantra. More towards this openness, towards this is where the technology of Tantra is being used in this current time period, in the aspect of sexuality. Quality, and that’s where we are with Tantra today, aren’t we? We’re in this, this realm where the first kind of connotation of Tantra is often with the sexual, and I believe that’s where, yeah, that’s where the technology is being used at the moment. Yeah, there’s

 

Christine Mason  10:13  

something just in connecting the word numbness to like, how do you feel again and when for you personally, and from what you see with all of the clients and the people that you work with, why? Why do we go numb? Why do people go numb? What is what’s happening there? Yeah,

 

Henika Patel  10:28  

when I follow the journey of sensation, which is the journey that I was working towards, from a place of numbness, I realized that there were perhaps a lot of sensations coming to knock at the door of my body over a number of years. And over those number of years I, as I mentioned, I followed the path of law. So it’s very much in my mind, rather than my body. I had a lot of grief in my body that I wasn’t quite ready to to look at. And the thing with numbness is that the sensations will come. They knock at the door, they’ll knock at the door, the knock at the door, maybe they’ll knock really loud in a burst of pain, but if we keep ignoring the signs and the sensations that are being delivered to us, the best way that the body will know to maximize its survival, physically or emotionally, would be to turn that sensation off because it’s tried to arrive, whether that is through the manifestation of an emotion or a physical sensation or an illness, and if being overridden on a number of occasions, numbness will often be what its last resort will be, and that’s the journey back to pleasure too. So sometimes when we’re working with areas within the body, within the Yoni, within the emotional psyche, one of the first sensations that we might encounter as we turn the body or the mind or the emotion or sensuality, the sexuality back online, can sometimes be pain, the feeling of all the things that went numb, and then we might move into something that’s a bit more neutral, the feeling of Just feeling the body feeling the emotion, without the pain attachment, and then maybe, from that place of neutrality, pleasure, might be able to to get through and so seeing, yeah, numbness is this journey. And I think one of the biggest turning points for me and in this journey was realizing that numbness is also a sensation, and and being able to give it that name, rather than it being this kind of abyss that that you can be very easily lost into. There’s such

 

Christine Mason  12:27  

a beautiful moment. I was just feeling what it would be like to notice, and if you’re listening, you can even take a moment, if you’re not driving, to pause and notice what sensations might be knocking at your door and that they’re always knocking. I might be focused on looking at you and listening to you, but then there’s an entire world of perception that I’ve just blocked out for the moment. And it’s available, if I just take a deep breath and pause. It’s a beautiful invitation. I’m curious about this move, that the first move from numbness to feeling to sensation is pain, and I kind of feel into it, and it’s got a quality of tingling like a sponge that’s getting soaked. So it’s uncomfortable, but it’s not quite the wounding pain of hitting an old trauma. So so maybe there’s some flavors within that move from numbness to sensual that we could look at?

 

Henika Patel  13:23  

Yeah, absolutely. And I don’t think it’s necessarily a linear process. For example, some people may move straight from numbness into neutrality. Some people may move from numbness into pain that feels emotional. For some others, it may be a new manifestation in the body that becomes more present, you know, when working with the Yoni as well, for example, in in bodywork, which is an area that we can hold so many knots and tangles. Or, you know, as we say, In the yogic practices as grantees, when we’re unlocking those knots and tangles within the Yoni was in the base of the body, where, not only if you’re seated, you’re also kind of holding all of your weight there, but also, as it is, this basin of the body, almost this bowl, or this collector of the sediments of our physical and emotional experiences, there can be so much held there. We don’t necessarily have had to have had a sexual trauma in order for to be held within this frame or this bowl within the body. And this bowl is this, this space of elimination of toxins. You know, you don’t have to have studied this for a number of years to know that this is, this is the way that the body releases. And I really believe that it’s just that sexuality is just has so much shame around it, rather than being acknowledged as this, this other way that we can eliminate or transmute or release the physical, emotional, energetic sediments that we have in in the pelvic body. Well, I hope that we’re on the pathway to making that more accessible.

 

Christine Mason  15:04  

It’s a beautiful vision to really have all the sediments and all the clean out. And so here we’ve got this CO mingling of elimination and sexuality and reproduction, separate from sex for pleasure, all sort of living in the same space. And gut like gut instinct, gut response and intuition, the gut brain. Do you parse those things, like those different kinds of memory when you’re thinking about healing, like you have a bunch of children all of a sudden, the experience of caring, of being a womb carrier, of carrying a child in your body, the scarring and the pain and all of the stuff that comes with that, and also the joy that’s all living in there, right? So as you move into feeling, do you find that a lot of the women that you’re working with go through all of that?

 

Henika Patel  15:49  

Well, it’s really, it’s such an such an individual journey, but the thing with the first and the second chakra that is, that’s when we start to begin our polarity, our journey of polarity, right? So we start in, in that root, that root which is the space of elimination, and then the second polarity, in swadhisthana, the seat of creation or creativity, you find the first kind of two polarities, the first way that the body expresses in this manifestation of two. So yes, we have both Death release happening at the one end of the body, but then in the same seat, just centimeters nearby, we have the seat of absolute potential and creation, enough potential or space to even give life. And then, of course, on top of that, the digestive process, which I

 

Speaker 1  16:43  

mean literally, it’s the Trinity. It’s like Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva, they’re

 

Christine Mason  16:48  

like, right there in your pelvic base, yeah, creation, destruction and nourishment. That’s crazy, preservation. That’s actually a really sweet and very subtle, uh, conversation, and I gotta talk about that polarity there. I would love, I would love to hear a little bit more about that, like you’re pulling that apart. It’s very, very subtle, beautiful. So polarities in general. Let’s go there in Tantra. And by the way, I apologize in advance for not saying Chakra The way you say it. And Tantra, it’s so beautiful. It’s so it’s so not. You know, California, English and my first chakra, my first chakra does this? You know, satistana, so beautiful. So these polarities of masculine, feminine, receptivity and agency, the polarities creation and digestion. What role does polarity play in the overall philosophy, and you know, in your approach to sexuality as well. Firstly,

 

Henika Patel  17:44  

I don’t even think when I’m switching between the languages, because I’ve grown up switching between maternal Language and English, so I’m constantly kind of switching in the languages in my brain. So sometimes you’ll say things,

 

Christine Mason  17:57  

it’s utterly charming, and we will talk about this cultural co optation piece. And you know, even when you say, I’m sorry, Kali, you say Kali and it sounds like a G, and I’m like, Oh, that’s so accurate. It feels so different in the body to hear it that way too. Just acknowledging. So before I get too far off on the language piece, let’s keep on the polarities.

 

Henika Patel  18:19  

One of my teachers. I was in a Tantra sacred dance teaching, which is a training, which is one of my first trainings into, kind of diving a little bit deeper into, first the awakening of my own body, and then rediscovering some of she was more in the kind of Osho lineage, and she was sharing with us the idea that was in the body, there are the positive poles and the negative poles within the chakra system, positive and negative, not in a good or a bad way, which which Tantra also touches on. Because within this idea of good or bad, it it really dissolves that, and it asks us to dissolve what we think is good or bad, and to just see reality as it is, ie, to cast aside judgment and to one thing, and then there is the opposite of that thing. There is no union. There is there is separation. So it’s asking us to dissolve that separation and come into union. And where I find this fascinating. Now, when it comes into sexuality and relationships, is within our own body. If we look at, I mean, we have many, many chakras within the body, but if we look at the major seven, which most people are more familiar with, within these seven chakras, you have the negative poles. So you could say, these are the Shiva poles and or the Shakti poles, or you have the and then you have the positive poles, which could be the Shakti poles, or the Shiva poles, depends on how you see it. But say, for example, even if you look at the manifestation of of the body for a woman’s. Body, or a body with breast and a Yoni, the heart space, being the positive pole, having this physical, outwards manifestation, the intuitive center being this positive pole, having this deeper connection to to our intuitive sense, visioning, dreaming, and also having swadhisthana as the positive pole within the female body, or the body with the Yoni as, again, the center, which can expand right. And then having the opposite in a man’s body, or a person with a lingam penis, where the positive pole is, in the lingam. This, this physical outside of the body, the power center in manipuraz is known as is their positive pole, and also the throat center as well. And the teacher, when she was explaining this to me, was sharing how, why are so many spiritual teachers? Men, why are so many chefs? Men? Is it just that the physical manifestation of the teaching is expressed through the positive pole, or is it, I mean, that could be its own debate in itself, but when we start to draw this now together within relationships and within sexuality, we start to see that we may unconsciously start to choose partners where we are, we are fitted in a way that we may have less balanced. You could say pole or chakra, in one sense, where they have a stronger chakra, and vice versa and that fit, maybe you could call it attachment, or you could call it chemistry. Could often be at the point of our energetic system that may be why, why we become a good couple fit because we are able to support each other on that subtle energetic level. The

 

Christine Mason  22:01  

feeling is also not just between, like, as you’re speaking, not just between, say, a negative and a positive. At the shocker level, a vertical, like vertical between a man and me. Or it’s also this rotation, this in and out within your own body, if you can’t see me. So I’m drawing a little oscillating line that if my voice is out, then perhaps my heart might be in. And you know, sort of this vibrational flow within the self. It’s so overlaid with culture, right? Like if a is a woman allowed to speak, is she allowed to act in the world? I think that unfortunately, the conversation of those poles being located that way inside of a masculine or feminine body has all of these potential corrupting factors as far as power access, literal voice in the world. So I notice I get a little nervous thinking about that being true.

 

Henika Patel  22:54  

Yeah, I agree with that. And I think that’s where this untangling of feminine being, Shakti and being Shiva really needs to happen. And usually when I when I’m teaching Shiva and Shakti polarities, it will be that we each have Shiva and Shakti polarities within, within the body. And it’s not ascertained necessarily to the physical body, but rather the spiritual body. And I love the you know, where there’s that God figure, where Shivan Shakti, are joined ardhaneshvara, and in the visualization of it, it’s literally a half female and a half male deity, which represents the third gender, which has long been a celebrated gender within Indian culture, to the point where it is given a divine status, or at least it was given a divine status. It’s had to go kind of underground through through historical developments which were not so accepting the third gender, but it’s still very much an eminent population within India, and often, when there are auspicious things that happen, like a baby or a marriage or something like that, the hijras will turn up to give their blessings. And I enjoy that this path has that openness for us, exploring what Shiva means, what Shakti means within our own bodies.

 

Christine Mason  24:21  

So you leave law, you start doing sensual dance. What is the process by which you move from being numb to your traditions and to writing this amazing and beautiful book on sensual existence,

 

Henika Patel  24:37  

I suppose, kind of coming from quite an analytical law background my one of the first defenses that came off as I started my own healing journey was to intellectualize everything, to start to read everything about it that I could, to try and find the text that it came from, which I recognize is what my own. Fences that was stopping me getting into my body right, trying to learn about the body through reading a book. It’s like trying to learn how to dance by reading a book. It’s just that’s not how you learn how to do that thing. But partly through that, perhaps I gained some trust in in what I was practicing, and bit by bit, I went further further down into the body. And I suppose when it came to writing the book, that became a very the fact that that was part of the process, the kind of early intellectualization of it actually became quite helpful in the writing of the book. But within, within my own process, dance, I suppose, was the first step in and it, it really taught me that that system of moving from this idea of performance to this idea of informants beautiful, and how that could be applied to sexuality, sensuality, to almost everything, actually, and that was such a huge piece for me. I’d always loved movement and dancing and things like that growing up, but it was always something that you learn step by step or do for others. And actually, this came a way of receptivity. This became a way of connecting to the Divine Messages within the body. And that really tailored itself from the days of the temple dancer, long Lost Temple dancer, and in ancient times, where people would go to the temples to receive messages from the dance and the dancer being this conduit for the divine to be channeled through. Temple dancers or temple keepers were often said to be married to one of the deities that they kept within the temple, and were these incredible Divine Manifestations of the messages that came through. And I love that our bodies are really these vassals for for this communication. And you could call that maybe intuition, right? And that works not only within temple dances, but within each of us. When we connect to those sensations within ourselves, that spark,

 

Christine Mason  27:17  

I know women, where you’re sitting with them in a circle, and then all of a sudden, they’ll get a message, and they’ll go, ah, you know, they’re the shutterers, the ones that are so tuned in that they actually feel information in their body. And you know, when I first saw that, I thought they were performing. I thought it wasn’t real. But now you can see like they’re just tuning forks, this idea of performance versus informants. I want to reiterate that don’t dwell there for a second. It kind of time when you’re saying you go to the books first. The knowledge itself is kind of a form of control over the chaos of the body, and that there’s a there’s a beautiful invitation to let the chaos be and then to see what’s on the other side of the discomfort that you’re making so lovely. And

 

Henika Patel  28:00  

that’s really the bottom up approach, isn’t it? That’s working from from the body upwards, and then letting the mind compute or not compute. It may be an entirely unconscious process that happens. That is why I think, when I was growing up and asking the questions, why are we doing these rituals? Why are we going to these Nine Nights of the divine feminine. Why are we dancing around for hours in this repetitive movement meditation? And it was just like, this is just what we do, the bottom up approach, for example, yogic practice, let’s say which is more familiar. They work in this way that through repetition, you start to feel the effects of of the practice, and you may cognitively, at some level, be like, Oh, I feel better in my shoulder, or I don’t feel stressed anymore. But the unconscious process of what the practice or the ritual is untangling may still be entirely unknown, and I think that’s why these systems, they don’t have so much talking. You have discourse with teachers, but there’s not so much of that. There’s more, like it’s more in the practice coming from the other angle, I love the top down approach as well. Like I’ve studied psychotherapy, and I I believe that there is space for both, especially in the worlds that we live in. And for me, that top down approach and the bottom approach. It lands in the heart space. You know, that’s that’s where both of those really have a space of belonging, I believe. Yeah, I’m just thinking to that example of the circle, and how often we’re called into spaces to not only receive the messages that we may be there to receive, but also to channel the messages that someone else may have been searching for, for weeks, months, years. And that’s beautiful to witness. There

 

Christine Mason  29:49  

was, I was taking an intellectual Tantra class maybe 1012, years ago, and there was one woman in there, and she undulated the entire time. And of course, you know, I’d been, you. Brought up to be like, you sit in class and you listen to the teacher, and you hold yourself quite still, and she’s going, Ah. And I was so annoyed. I was so utterly triggered by her. So what did I do? I called her and I said, Would you do a private session with me? I want what is happening for you, like, what’s like? Let’s sit let’s discuss it. And she goes, Oh, I’m just like, following the energy that’s moving in my spine in response to what he’s saying and what’s coming down through my crown. Why don’t you try it? And I mean, it was utterly she was just being herself, but in being herself was a beacon for everyone else who is struggling with this blockage. Really beautiful. So is this when you refer to these temple dancers, are you talking about Devadasis, or is that a different category of female temple servant? Yeah,

 

Henika Patel  30:45  

Devadasis are an example of Temple servants, but there’s a generation before that as well. Oh, okay, the before colonization, for example, each family would have their own connection to a temple dancer who would be as much a part of the family as the priest, right? And this connection to the feminine and this connection to art forms as as a channel for for divine communication, as much as sacred texts are, and it’s written within the text that the arts are a way of of connecting to the divine. That’s why we have this beautiful Saraswati who’s embracing her Veena, her beautiful kind of guitar like instrument. And yeah, I just love that the arts can also be this way that we express and communicate. Because sometimes for for many of us, particularly in modern and very fast worlds that we live in, sitting down and meditating for an hour in stillness may not feel as accessible as getting some paints out or listening to a beautiful piece of music or whatever your form of or dancing, and I really like that. Actually, there are these different forms of meditation through the creative arts that can give us as much insight as well as you could say, traditional forms of sitting with a straight spine, it feels like it’s very relevant for for where we are today. Yeah.

 

Christine Mason  32:22  

And it also goes back to, you know, your father being a priest and an artist, a monk and an artist so lovely that you kind of bring that back into the story. So you begin to dance. And then are you doing other forms of art, also visual expressions, or anything like that.

 

Henika Patel  32:38  

I studied because, before I because I was working from the bottom up approach. I hadn’t actually, I had a lot of grief between the ages of 10 to 14, four members of my family died, like one year after another. So that’s what was in my body. But I had not yet computed that that’s that’s what was there. So I had started the bottom up approach, not yet found the words to realize or recognize that that is what was bubbling up under the surface. And so in my classic intellectualization where I went to study art therapy, because I thought, Oh, this is a non verbal way of of expression, and maybe seeing what’s under the surface, and how even the pictures that we’re interested in can sometimes have a deeper unconscious pull to why we might be interested in them. Maybe it’s the colors, maybe it’s the figures, maybe it’s the materials that are being used. I found that really, really fascinating, that again, music, art, dance, all of these forms could be ways of us channeling or sublimating, as we say in the tantric practice, that which is within our bodies that may not yet be conscious, and we learn to play and to draw much sooner than we learn to read or write or even speak. So it can be this, I think, fantastic, kind of middle piece between something that’s conscious and can be spoken about, for example, with the therapist, and something that’s unconscious or may have just come alive within the body and giving it this channel to kind of transmute out and through the body where it could find some deeper understanding beautiful.

 

Christine Mason  34:24  

I also never really thought of the art that you appreciate as being a pointer to what’s going on subconsciously. Like, art therapy is always presented as what you create, but like, Oh, I really want to stare at that painting for a while, and what’s that? What’s that leading me to? So I’m interested also, do you want to talk at all about grief and how these practices of feeling the body help us move through grief?

 

Henika Patel  34:48  

Yeah, absolutely. And I think it’s, it’s very much related, because it’s through, it’s through the grief that my journey into this really, really began and starting to understand that there are questions of. Out life, that my legal degree could not answer some of these deeper questions, that even through ticking the boxes of education and job and apartment and relationship, that there was actually still this deep unfulfillment or numbness that was occurring within the body, and that was, at that time, first manifesting within my sexual relationship, because I thought, Oh, this surely is one place that I meant to feel something nowhere else. I mean, maybe the office can be a bit boring sometimes, or, you know, I just moved to a new city, so maybe I haven’t found my people yet, but I was in a relationship, and I felt was in the four walls of this bedroom there is meant to be a spark, and so that really was my first indication that numbness was present within my body. And I realized then that that became a mirror. What was happening within those four walls actually became a mirror for just about every other aspect within my life and how we communicate, within our sexual relationships, our loving relationships, how we feel, how we present, how we unravel, is actually a mirror to how we may be doing that in other aspects. And so that really became the first question. This is before social media, where there’s a plethora of information now on sexuality and teachers that you can find quite easily. And so I typed into Google, how to heal a numb pelvis, how to heal a numb vagina. And I mean, what I got back was mostly Top 10 Kama Sutra positions. And, you know, the major magazines that are out there that speak about that stuff, and I knew somehow that it was deeper than that. That’s really where the journey to answering that question began, and that’s what I address within this book. How in this book sensual, can we connect more deeply? How can we express more freely, and how can we love more intimately? And the book presents itself in three sections. It explores, firstly, the natural sensuality that we are born with. And I look at the trifecta of the sister sciences of Tantra, Yoga and Ayurveda, as these sciences which are complementary and which support the system of sensuality when practiced with one another. In the second section, then we move into what are some of the key blocks that come up in the the realm of sensuality and through the many, many people that have come through the school of sensual arts. What are the first things that come up when we begin our sensual journey? And those are things usually one of the first things that comes up is shame and all the different messages and scripts that we take on on our journey to of life through the lens of sensuality. We look at trauma and how that affects our sensual spirit. We look at fear, the fear of what if I was to enjoy my life? What if I was to take more pleasure within this and then we look at stress, and we look at the body’s response to stress and how that really puts sensuality on the back burner. Because, I mean, if your body is thinking that it’s running from a lion, it’s primary motive is not going to be, how can I procreate? So it’s looking at that fine balance between stress and sensuality. And then the final section of the book is, is the central rebirth, and it’s about how we can really use our sensuality in the bedroom but also outside of it, how our sensual energy, our Shakti, is this power for deep manifestation, how our sexual energy is literally energy of Creation. So we look at that with relation to arts. We look at that with relation to manifestation. We look at that in relation to relationships as well, which I think is it’s at the end of the book, because it’s usually probably the first thing that people are expecting when they pick up a book about tantra. So I invite the readers to follow the line of these incredible sciences and practices, and there are practices within the book, as well as story and as well as philosophy and mythology, to make this a really rich practice that you can embark on. So, yeah, that’s sensual. I

 

Christine Mason  39:36  

love it. So there are a lot of classical Tantra books. There are a lot of the sort of Kama Sutra sexuality books, but it looks like this really takes you from an inside personal journey before it gets into engagement with others and also like, how else would you say it’s differentiated? Or, why did, why did you think this voice mean it to have its place?

 

Henika Patel  39:54  

When I was working together with my publisher, Hay House, we were really thinking about. The tone of this coming from an Indian author, and the tone of bringing in this deep kind of cultural awareness, or this deep cultural transmission, you could say, of generations of family that have practiced within this tradition, and allowing that to flower through and meet the way that Tantra is presenting within the modern world. So it really is this union of traditional Tantra. And you know, in the research and the textbooks, you can get really textbook versions of classical Tantra and inviting it to meet Tantra where it is today, within the neoclassical sense. So I really feel like it’s like my life, in many ways, this meeting point, or this bridge between the two cultures that offers both the classical but also the Neo, and the bridge between the cultural understanding of what it’s like to live in the western world whilst integrating these beautiful, ancient traditions

 

Christine Mason  41:03  

as well. And then you’re offering people live classes also in your school. Can you tell a little bit about your school? Yeah, absolutely.

 

Henika Patel  41:09  

So at the School of sensual arts, we share Tantra Yoga. So this is a weekly practice that we have in an online membership myself and another teacher, Manoj, we share our Shakti circles as well. These are all online and in London, and a new circle facilitator training that is is launching this year, which is very exciting. And we also work with couples as well. So we have tantric date nights, which can be taken from home, which are based on the ViGYAN bay of Tantra, which is one of the key classical texts of of the tantric lineage. And I work in groups, and also one to one ways as well, both online and in person, through bodywork and retreats and things like that too. So lots of different ways you can you can join us and really put this into practice. Yeah,

 

Christine Mason  42:04  

like you said before, it’s got to happen in the body. It’s not just intellectual exercise, the experience of doing it online. How does that differ from being in person with you? I,

 

Henika Patel  42:15  

myself, during the years of the pandemic, was not convinced that these body based practices was something that could be transmuted and transmissed in a in an online way. But here we are, four years later, with a beautiful community which shares philosophy through the week and allows, I suppose, within this space of cultivating your own practice, in your own home, in your own space, on your own mat. And there’s been something really quite powerful about that, in ways that have surprised me, in the way that the teachings are trans transmitted and in person, which has been a big intention of mine to move more back in person over the last two years, again, just having that community aspect. And it’s really a big part of the school of central arts, the meeting the other people who are curious about similar things, like hearted as well as like minded. And that’s really where that first aspect of shame coming up when we meet our central journey. That’s why the community aspect is so important, because community is where we dissolve the shame that we have picked up over the course of our lifetime. So whether that is in a room with other people who are speaking about sensuality or doing a practice, or whether that is in an online group where you are sharing that it has that quality, the

 

Christine Mason  43:42  

invitation to release things in community in a field of healing, is so powerful. I feel like that’s the whole future of mental health, actually. And health is not to hold it alone. I’m curious about the piece of the integration of the west and the east, when all of the yoga teachers first came to the West in the early, late 1800s early 1900s the next big wave in the 60s and 70s. You know, they were all saying it’s time for this to come west. And yet it seems to have gotten its tail picked up by capitalism and commercialization and then gotten whipped around such that the way so much of yoga and tantra is now presented is divorced from its original intent, even even its original intent. In coming west, you don’t even have to go back that far. And I wonder if you could speak a little bit to that both the merging and what you’d like to see happen next with these traditions as they’re brought forth in the West. This

 

Henika Patel  44:47  

is something I speak a lot about with my co teacher at the School of Social arts, because we created a cultural appreciation course for yoga as a response to the cultural appropriation that that is often happening and within that we have. This conversation where we we don’t think that people wake up in the morning and think I’m going to pillage the yogic practice today. I’m absolutely going to obliterate Tantra and divorce it from its original teachings. We didn’t think that was a logical connection. We just thought perhaps there isn’t enough information out there around what else is available within these paths. So while someone may come into the yogic practice, for example, for stretching, they may find something more as they start to delve further into their practice, if they are encountered with some more of the educational pieces, which a 200 hour training doesn’t usually have the time to cover, yeah, to cover. So we’re looking at a way of providing ongoing education for those who are interested in training in yoga and tantra, whether that is as a receiver, student or teacher, which we are both of anyway all along. My hope is that we can within both of these systems and Ayurveda as well, is just to create more fusion between the way that I suppose commercialization has has picked up and shared it, which is a fantastic thing the more practicing people of yoga and tantra Gray, but then actually allowing it to find its rhythm with some of the original teachings would be, would be a dream. Would be an absolute dream. And I think having conversations like this, where we can, we can share our different kind of aspects and ways into this path are really, really important. So thank you for creating these spaces and allowing that that meeting of East and West to happen.

 

Christine Mason  46:45  

Yeah, there’s some very interesting ways that cultural diffusion happens, like how things came west. I think Harish Wallace is on one episode, and he was talking about how Neo Tantra was created by one guy, Pierre Bernard, the great um, who came to the United States in like 1900 and was sort of a charlatan, and picked up just this one thread of tantric sexual practices and amplified that so that he could sleep with his students, you know, and that that sort of became the basis of a lot of what, what became Tantra in the West, and how both divinely appointed, because it was touching into The shame question of the embodiment that you spoke of, but also how strange that that is, the thread that got pulled because of one man’s creative will and impetus. So I think it’s beautiful that you and your co teacher have offered this richer array. And the book is beautiful. It’s really lovely. So happy for you. So how does life feel now?

 

Henika Patel  47:42  

Oh, wow. It is such a cave that I went into for a few years to birth this book, honestly. I mean, it is, it does feel like emerging. And, you know, recently, having, having gotten married, and all of this kind of news cycle that is appearing now is Yeah, is really nice. And yeah, I’m grateful for, for that cave, for that metaphorical cave that I went into, because so much of there was so much sitting within, with my own shadows within that cave, and kind of the remembering of why I came into these own these practices, was really a core driver for the person that I was writing to. If there was one person that I was writing to, it was myself in those darkest days, those days of numbness or disconnection or just knowing that there is something more to be had in relationships and life,

 

Christine Mason  48:39  

my friend David talks about it’s like pulling out the threads that are bound up inside of you, and you sit long enough with it until there’s there’s nothing that’s tight and and then you have freedom to invite creativity in the flow of love. It’s it’s a it’s a beautiful invitation. So if you’re sitting out there and you have a little hunch that you have grief or things that are trapped in your body, or that maybe the stories of the culture that prioritize the head aren’t everything that exists. Then I would invite you to check out hanukkah’s book and her work online. The book is called sensual. It’s out by Hay House, and she is an absolutely lovely, radiant creature, so go find her.

 

Henika Patel  49:19  

Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you for listening everyone.

 

Christine Mason  49:26  

Okay, thanks so much for joining me and for being interested in these questions of spirituality, sexuality, embodiment. They’re big on my agenda. Of course, you know that through Rosebud woman, you can visit rosewoman.com and find not only all of the back episodes of the podcast, but also 1000s of articles and letters that I’ve written and other experts have written on all aspects of being happy in a female body in particular, but a lot of stuff that’s also just on being happy in a human body. And you can visit radiantfarms dot. Us to learn more about our psychoactive gummies, which are interesting alternatives to pharmaceuticals for some of the common conditions of being in a body, like pain and inflammation and mood stuff. So check us out. Radiantfarms.us. Rosewoman.com, and thank you, as always, for being with me on the journey to greater love and liberation you.