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What can ancient erotic texts teach us about sensuality & sexuality?
Many narratives around women’s sensuality are rooted in religious-sin, purity or porn-that-distorts reality. But what could we learn about a woman’s right to pleasure from ancient erotic texts, texts such as the Kama Sutra?
“If a woman’s pleasure reaches its height, the universe will be in balance”
Seema Anand on the Kama Sutra
On the podcast today we’re joined by mythologist Seema Anand who has been studying women’s story of pleasure & sexuality through the Kama Sutra for the past 23 years.
Join us for this conversation exploring:
- Seema’s search for stories about a woman’s right to her own pleasure & how it lead her to the Kama Sutra
- Ancient erotic texts & what they have to teach us about pleasure
- What the Kama Sutra is (it’s not a book of positions) and why jewelry & pleasure are central to it’s erotic teachings
- What’s missing for modern women – how our emotional & intellectual vocabulary around pleasure is letting us down
Resources From Today’s Podcast
- Seema’s book, The Arts of Seduction
- Find Seema’s work here
- Feminine Embodiment Coaching – an emotional embodiment & vulnerability-based professional training for coaches
- Primal Feminine Flow – Embodied At Home Movement Practice
- School of Embodied Arts
- Leave a podcast review on iTunes here
- Thought or reflection to share? Leave a comment on Instagram here
Transcript
(This transcript is generated by AI so might not be perfect)
Jenna Ward (00:00):
Hello and a very warm welcome to our conversation today around a woman’s right to pleasure. I’m Jedda Ward and I’m joined today by mythologist author, sexual health educator and study of ancient erotic texts. Seema Anand, Seema joins us today for an incredibly rich and decadent conversation of her quest for stories that centers a woman’s right to her own pleasure and how that quest actually led her to the Karma Sutra and to studying this ancient text over the last 23 years. We are going to learn during this interview a lot about the Karma Sutra, and it’s not at all what you think. It’s got very little, in fact nothing to do almost with positions and a lot more to do with the adornment of beauty and sensual alive in the quest for women’s pleasure. SEMA also speaks with us about pleasure in the modern context. We speak about some of the big challenges that modern women face as it relates to our pleasure and embracing our full sensual aliveness. And as you can expect, this conversation includes topics and words that relate quite explicitly to sex and sexuality. So if you have little ears or sensitive souls around, perhaps a set of headphones may be recommended. I really hope that you enjoy this rich conversation as we get to know Seema Anand.
(01:57):
Wonderful. So extending such a warm welcome to our conference and to our conversation today. And I would love to introduce you to those who are joining us for this conversation by hearing a little bit more about how you got involved in the very unique and valuable and erotic work that you do in the world.
Seema Anand (02:21):
So it all started with me working on stories. I basically have always worked on stories, particularly women’s stories, because I believe stories are the most powerful tool of influence. The stories that we tell, they define our identity, and a lot of times women’s stories, you have stories that define a good woman or a bad woman or a loose woman. You hear them all the time. So you have stories like the man gets drunk, he beats up his wife, but she’s so good. She’s so good. She never ever says anything to her. She never dishonors him outside. So we’ve now created this platform where a good woman is the one who stays silent. And so we create stories. We then establish identity through those stories, and anybody who steps out of that is then sort of the bad person. So I’ve always been very, very fascinated by the stories that we tell.
(03:22):
And gradually I started to realize that we never tell stories of a woman’s right to her own body. We never tell stories of a woman’s right to her own pleasure, her pleasure, and her body’s always somebody else’s property. She always needs permission to feel like a woman or to feel sexual. Now you are married, now your husband will bring you into this. You know what I mean? So I actually went off to try and find the stories that we had silenced. I figured that there must have at some point been stories that talked about a woman’s right to her own body. I figured that we wrote the ka sutra. There must be something more over there. And like everybody else in India, I knew nothing about the Karo and I started to study it. It’s a lost text, and basically that’s where I went in.
(04:14):
I thought I’ll write a paper on it and then I’ll move forward. But that was 23 years ago because when I started to study it, there’s just so much that unfolds every single day. Everything that I read leads me onto something else. And so yeah, I got stuck in that. And you know what? There’s a whole universe of understanding over there. So yeah, one lifetime is not going
to be enough. I’m going to have to come back in my next life and just pick up from here hopefully. But yeah, that’s how I got into it.
Jenna Ward (04:46):
That’s so interesting, and I love that you were sparked by this quest of where are the stories that are telling about a woman’s right to her body, a woman’s right to her pleasure because I come from a very different culture. I’m based in Australia, and these stories are definitely missing in my culture. There are not a lot of ancient texts around them at all, but I know that just from how I was raised and the common narrative around women’s pleasure, these stories were woefully lacking and in large part are still not common. They’re not common stories that are told. So I’m curious, as you were coming to the work of the Kama Sutra and exploring stories through this platform and maybe through others, what is it that you discovered around women’s pleasure and how has that become such a big body of work for you?
Seema Anand (05:52):
So my first understanding of the Kam Sutra was like for most people that it’s book about positions. When you start to read it, you discover a couple of things. One is it’s not a book about positions. The positions are the tiniest chapter in the book, the ka suru is made up of seven sections. The ka suru was written in about 300 and something 80, which we’ll talk about a little bit later because fascinatingly enough, it is written at about almost the exact same time, 325 80 when the first ecumenical council of the Catholic church is set up. And the Catholic church starts by teaching that the body is bad, it is sinful. Pleasure is the road to hell. And across the oceans on the banks of the river Ganges, there is WIA sitting there apparently and writing the Kasu. They’re talking about how pleasure is the path to heaven.
(06:47):
And it just fascinates you because we were talking a while ago about how the narrative is missing so desperately we’ve kind of grown up in this twilight zone between this is so bad for you and this is so good for you, and we’re stuck somewhere in between. We have no idea whether it’s this way or that. But yes, to go back to when I start to first explore the council, the first thing I realized was it was a book written for men. So it is not written for women because women in 300 and something 80 were not taught how to read or write. So the book was not written for women. It’s written for very wealthy men who have the money and the leisure to live their best lives. And so the K Sutra explains how you should live your best life. It tells you so the K sutra is divided into seven sections.
(07:42):
It tells you the first section tells you how a man of wealth should build his house, how he should decorate it, how many hours he should spend on his toilet, on his bathing, on his massages, how many hours he should speak to his parrots and minor birds and so on. So it’s a whole sort of section based on how to get there. Location, location, location where you build your house. The second section talks about pleasure, which is the only section frankly that interests me. The third section says how a man should go about looking for the perfect wife. The fourth section is on how to marry the perfect wife. The fifth section is on how to seduce another man’s wife because that’s a political thing this point. Yeah, I mean, seduction is not just about, Ooh, I like you. It’s about whether her husband is really powerful, hence should I seduce this woman because then I can get to the husband and his power through her.
(08:41):
The sixth section is on the rules surrounding, because this is also a time when Cortis Ann Array was legal and there was a ministry for it, and the rules around it was so intense. I mean, they were so copious that most of them, it’s like rules for anything really. People couldn’t understand then. So it just said that the cortisone said, could you please put in a chapter of the explaining what the rules are? So the sixth section deals with that, and the seventh section I think was added a bit later. It’s on lotions and potions. It’s one of those useless bits of thing, which it says makes the eye of new with the saliva of a frog, that kind of stuff. So it absolutely has no bearing on reality. The only interesting chapter for me or section for me, as I said, is section two, which is a section on pleasure.
(09:36):
And what I find interesting about this section is that whereas the rest of the book is written for men, this section is addressed to both men and women. And I was actually doing a reel on this because in the introduction of the K Sutra, the author of the K Sutra says that people say to me, how silly because the ksu incidentally, again, for most people who don’t know, this is written as a treaties. So it’s a technical book. It’s a formal scientific text. It’s very much like describing the process of osmosis, for instance. That’s how you would lay down the information. The KRA is not a book that you can pick up and read with one hand while you pleasure yourself with the other. It’s not one of those books. It is a very serious text, which has absolutely no stories. It has no anecdotes, it has no emotions involved.
(10:36):
So it doesn’t tell you how you will feel. It provides the vocabulary, which then inspired the next 2000 years of our classical Sanskrit literature of the epic romances. It provides the vocabulary and the practice, and that’s why it is so important. But this
vocabulary is written in metaphor. So if you don’t know what it’s talking about, you don’t know what it’s talking about. The easiest chapter was the chapter on positions because everybody understands what positions mean. And so they just decided to go with that because it was simpler. But actually the rest of it that people don’t understand is far more exciting. It is so much more erotic than you can even begin to imagine because it gives you actual ideas and tips and thoughts of where you started over here, because when you can start to think of it as pleasure and as exciting, that’s when it then filters down to the rest of your body.
Jenna Ward (11:48):
I love hearing you speak about this, and I love the passion with which you speak about it. There’s so many pieces that I want to tease apart here. But let’s start with the last one that you were speaking about as you are reading through this beautiful vocabulary, interpreting through metaphor, the practice as it’s speaking to women and men’s pleasure both, and I assume women’s pleasure for the sake of a woman’s pleasure, not necessarily for the
Seema Anand (12:20):
Sake of a woman’s pleasure. Jenna Ward (12:21):
Yeah, which is the key delineating piece. Seema Anand (12:25):
Yes, it is the pleasure of the woman because it is the pleasure of a woman as opposed to, because she’s supposed to be with her partner. She’s supposed to pleasure her partner. So as I said, the metaphors are there and it’s just, it’s fabulous. So for instance, there’s this beautiful piece of information that says that when you went to make love to your lover, you got dressed up for it, you ornamented yourself. It wasn’t a case of, okay, we’re going to have sex. Let me wash my makeup off, put on my old night. You turn the light off. It was about saying, this is going to be special. So you got yourself in the mood, you dressed for it, and there are all these things that it says, because with each thing that you do, it raises your excitement, like when you dress for a party that you really want to go to and gets you more excited.
(13:23):
But it’s just this amazing sort of, it’s the journey that it takes you on. So there’s this wonderful text that talks about the ornamenting. So the very first thing is you put your coal on and you stretch it to the corner of your eyes because again, with the idea of beauty at that point was that it was how you made your eyes dance. So that’s the other great thing. The idea of beauty and the idea of being erotic was not about sitting still with lots of makeup on and just sort of sitting there quietly because that’s what makes a woman desirable. No, it was about what all she did. It was about her being active, her being a participant. So she gets herself dressed for the whole thing, but the very last thing that she puts on is a little lotus bud behind her ear.
(14:12):
And the moment she puts that on, her heart sinks just a little bit. And I discovered March later that the idea was that in ancient India, they believe that between 3:00 AM and 6:00 AM you do not make love. That’s the time Dawn is about to come upon you. You have to get yourself up bed dressed, say your prayers, and start your day. And so if you are inside and the curtains are closed, you don’t know that the sun has come up, but they say that a lotus bud will flower when the sun comes up when dawn hits the sky. So this was a little alarm clock that came up. And in all our literature, you actually have the woman sort of covering this up because she doesn’t want her lover to know that the lotus is flowered and it’s time for her to leave. She wants to continue.
(15:03):
And I just love the fact that we don’t just have the art for it. We don’t just have the stories for it. Music was also written, so if you were listening to a piece of music, when you listen to a particular type of harmony, you knew that this was the story behind it. I mean, isn’t that just so gorgeous? You know what? It gives me goosebumps each time. I love it. But sorry, you were going to say something. No, I love listening to you. Please continue. So the point where I decided that the book that I wrote had to be written just to explain these metaphors, because we don’t know these metaphors, hence we don’t know this. So the lotus behind the ear could just be, yeah, fine. It’s got a lotus behind the, yeah, it’s a bit of ornamentation. But there was a reason for everything. The first time that I thought, okay, I have to actually write, is when I discovered that each position was indicated through a piece of jewelry, and not because we were being prudish, and we don’t want to talk about the position because women were taught how to perform that position to their best pleasure through how jewelry moved on their body.
(16:21):
The very first one that I came across was that if a woman was going to be on top, which as you know in every other culture in the ancient world, was not a permitted position. A woman was not supposed to be on top. The kasu says you could be on top, but you only move your hips when you are on top, you do not move the rest of your body. Okay, we’ll get to it. Let me
into that. Distill this information. Yes, please. Now, the idea was that for this position, you wore a jingling girdle around your waist, around your upper waist, and you made sure with lots of little bells, you made sure that the bells did not make a sound.
(17:10):
Now, for most people, there’s this sort of confusion about how you would even do that, because what porn has taught us and what our lack of understanding has taught us is that if a woman is on top, she’s bouncing up and down. That gives absolutely no pleasure to the woman because it misses all her important spots. It misses the clitoris, it misses the gpo, it misses everything. Basically, she’s jumping up and down. So the idea was to get yourself into such a position where you’re kind of leaning forward, where your face is pretty much almost parallel with your partner’s face on top because you grind.
And when you grind in that position, that’s where you actually get to the clitoris. But again, it’s not an easy one to do. So women would wear long earrings. If you were on top, you wore long earrings because these earrings were supposed to swing in an arc across your cheek. Now again, when I get most women to try this, they will do this with their head because they’re trying to make sure they’re doing this with their head. It’s about slowing yourself down, thinking in your head where your head would be. I mean, actually figuring this out in your mind, how your body would be positioned, where your head and your body will be for that arc to happen.
(18:40):
Now, I just think go back to the idea that you are teaching a woman about her own pleasure through beautifying it to this extent where you put her in the most exquisite jewelry, and then you say, now move this jewelry around your body and see what it does for you. Tell me that’s not the most beautiful thing you’ve ever heard.
Jenna Ward (19:08):
It’s much more beautiful than the sex education most young women, individuals, humans are receiving these days, worlds away from worlds away. How most young people are exposed to the concept of sex, intimacy, porn, often very graphic and quite disembodied. This to me is like beauty adornment subtlety. Take me back.
Seema Anand (19:44):
Take me back. Absolutely. And it’s about the main thing for me is that it instills in your head that it’s a thing of beauty, it’s a thing of pleasure, it’s a desirable thing, as opposed to using all the terminology that we have today as opposed to making it coarse and disgusting and all the other words that we have for it. And you know what? I know that there’s a lot of people out there who talk about sacred sexuality. There’s a lot of people out there who are trying to change the narrative. They’re trying to change the vocabulary to bring it back to this. But I just feel that nothing that they can say even comes close to what this text is telling us already. Why are we reinventing the wheel? We need to go back. You know what? So every position had its own piece of jewelry.
(20:43):
Like I said, what’s interesting is that the kru refers to the shuddering of the orgasm or just the orgasm as the pu, which means the jewel case. Now, once you know that every position has a piece of jewelry, you automatically make that connection that every woman’s orgasm is different every day. Her orgasm is different. And if that is the jewel case, it means literally that every day you pick a different jewel, you pick a different piece of jewelry, pick a different jewel, your orgasm, your pleasure becomes a jewel. It becomes a gemstone. But you have the different pieces of jewelry. I mean, it’s a case of making the links. Do you know what I mean?
Jenna Ward (21:26):
Absolutely.
Seema Anand (21:27):
We lost the link. Jenna Ward (21:29):
Absolutely. So it seems that in rediscovering this beautiful ancient text, this erotic text that speaks to women’s pleasure and maybe does not necessarily have the literal anecdotes, but really is speaking to the heart of beautiful pleasure filled women’s adornment. Seems like you found exactly what it was that you were looking for. And yet, I’m curious. So at this time, around 300 ad where the Catholic church is really labeling anything based in the body or a woman’s body pleasure, a woman’s source of power or pleasure as something really sinful, as something really dirty, as something to be controlled and tamed here on another continent, we have a very different narrative happening. And yet what? Correct me, but what I hear from both of these timelines is that there’s a degree in these particular areas, this may not have been true for the entire country. There’s a degree of men’s power being primary. So a degree of, if you will, patriarchy in the context in the times, if this book is written for wealthy men, this is how you get your wife. I’m getting the idea that to a degree, although this is centering women’s pleasure, women are in some way a commodity. Their labor, their bodies, their reproduction are in some
way a commodity. Is that a fair assumption to make? Can we generalize in those terms? I’d just like to hear your thoughts on that.
Seema Anand (23:20):
No, no, we absolutely can. So as I said, the rest of the book doesn’t interest me at all. It is patriarchal. People think that because the K sutra was written at this point, and there was this attitude around sexuality, that it was a very open society. It was equally patriarchal and equal. So it’s pretty much, let’s say parallels today. You have the people who are trying to maintain the control, and then you have the people who are trying to fight for change. And I personally think that section two, which is on pleasure, like I said, was written to try and change that narrative. It’s that little tiny bit. I don’t believe it was written by the hand of a man at all. I think that it was written by a woman, by women, because at no point does the council mention the act of sex.
(24:09):
It talks about positions. It talks about technically what you would do with different limbs. It doesn’t talk about sex, it doesn’t talk about trusting. It talks about pleasure unendingly. It talks about how before you have sex, what are the sort of conversations and stories you should exchange so that you can arouse your partner to her full excitement after sex, after you finished with your whatever you are doing, what are the stories you should be telling her to make her feel good about what she has done so that you can bring her back into the right sort of mindset? Because how you finish will define how quickly she comes back to your bed the next time. So I think that this particular section was a little bit of a rebellion. I think that not a rebellion in the way that we see today, but definitely this effort to change the narrative of women.
(25:18):
I think that patriarchy is paramount. There are definitely kings in position at this point. There’s definitely, it is pretty much the way that you see society as you see it today. But what’s interesting is, again, something most people don’t realize, there’s not just the one comes through through, there is several thousand versions of it because every king who came to the throne over centuries would commission a version of the ka sutra for their kingdom. And each of this, whenever one of these books are written, it already starts with a story. And the story is always about, so I mean, one of my favorite stories, for instance, is that there is a king sitting in his court surrounded by all his ministers, and suddenly this woman runs in and she’s stock naked, and the ministers are horrified. They try and cover up and she says, no, I refuse to wear any clothes because in all of these years, whenever I’ve been with a man, I have made sure that he’s fully pleasured.
(26:20):
But no man has ever taken the trouble to fully pleasure me. And I’ve just decided that till somebody does, I’m not getting creed. As one does. Now, the ministers in the court are petrified and Hispanic because they think if this becomes a fashion, what if all our wives dig to the streets naked? What’ll happen then? And so the king is like, can somebody save my kingdom? Can somebody please? Because you can see that nobody’s interested in looking after the kingdom right now. And he says, can anybody please understand how to pleasure a woman properly? What should be done? And there’s complete silence. And then finally one man comes forward and he says, okay, leave it to me. And they bring her back. After some time, she comes back and she’s fully clothed. And the king says to the man, he says, please, for God’s sakes, write me a book because I never want my kingdom to be in this kind of jeopardy again.
(27:16):
Write me a book on how a woman should be pleasured now. So almost all of the books begin with the story of women’s pleasure. They begin with the idea that if a woman’s pleasure reaches its height, the universe is going to be in balance. That was the idea. Over time, all of these stories have been distorted. So I read a version of this story that has been rewritten in the 16 hundreds or the 17 hundreds, which is absolutely wilde, where the man takes her away and he subdues her. So he ties her up and he puts her through this whole 50 shades of gray stuff. And then finally he says, now you have to admit that you got the best orgasm from me treating you like this. So he brings her back subdued as opposed to empowered. And I think that happened over time. So these stories have got changed gradually.
(28:23):
And that’s why I was saying that stories are just so powerful because you don’t need to shift the story fully. You don’t need to go from here to here. You can shift the teensiest little word, one little sentence, and you can change the meaning and the essence of the whole story. So yes, you are absolutely right. It is a patriarchal society. And Stein, again, the author of the Kria does at one point in one of the translations, which is I think, sorry, not a translation but commentary, which was written in the 11th century. The introduction says that, but for centuries, men are used to thinking of this as their pleasure. Why should they suddenly take? Because it comes says that you could be trying to pleasure a woman for several hours. If it takes several hours, that’s what you need to do. Why on earth would any man who’s not used to having to do that, why would he do that?
(29:23):
And so VA makes it aspirational. He says, well, if you can bring a woman fully to pleasure, your business will do better. And then he explains how the business would get better. And then it says, if you can bring a woman fully to pleasure, you’d become a better warrior. And then he explains how that would happen. So it’s an interesting section. Like I said, most of it is lost. But if you go into all these little details, yes, there are lots of mistranslations, there’s lots of things in there that can sound quite misogynistic. When you read them, you’re like, excuse me. But the point is how you read it, because like I said, the story has changed so much over the years. But yes, as far as I’m concerned, they tried really hard to balance out the narrative,
Jenna Ward (30:19):
And I absolutely give them so much credit for that. As you were speaking and sharing with us so many of these beautiful stories, which I adore, I particularly love the one of someone take this woman and pleasure her for the good of the kingdom. Like yes, that’s brilliant. I had a moment in my mind of thinking about how sex is represented in, let’s just describe it as mainstream porn these days. So I’m not sure if everyone who’s listening to our conversation watches porn or not, and whatever your preference is around that is totally your own. But certainly the creative storytelling of our current industry is so far away from what you are describing. And as I’m sitting here just reflecting on this incredibly huge divide, I’m just really interested to hear your thoughts around what you feel most modern women in this time are lacking and are kind of denied or a searching for in the realm of pleasure and sensuality. Because as you describe it through the lens of these beautiful poetic adornments, I’m just inspired and excited and it just seems an extension of aliveness to engage in this kind of pleasure. And that’s not necessarily what’s happening in the mainstream. So I’m just really curious to hear your thoughts about what’s lacking for most modern women in the context that modern women to be in around pleasure. And six,
Seema Anand (32:12):
It’s the emotional and intellectual vocabulary. We have centuries of gray cell DNA, which has taught us that this is a bad thing. It is a sinful thing. We’ve been taught to believe it. No matter how much you love your body, no matter how much you love yourself, the vocabulary that we have and the thoughts and the ideas that have been passed down lead us in the direction of this is a bad thing. And so it isn’t just a case of a girl growing up and thinking, Ooh, I love my body. It’s a case of girl growing up first fighting the vocabulary that’s being given to her, fighting the stories and the narrative that she hears around her being strong enough to say, I will get past this. And then coming to where we want them to be. And I think Naomi Wolf said this, and I love this, where she says that when we talk about pleasure, we talk about genitalia, we talk about sexual organs from the ksu.
(33:18):
Everything is described in so much beauty. Imagine a girl just growing up, hearing herself described with so much beauty and so much elegance and so much reverence for her pleasure, how differently she would feel about herself. Think of how we grow up fighting the narrative that we have, fighting the social taboo to even use words around our leisure or use words that describe different parts of our body. When I was growing up, I mean, I’m 61 now, saying the word breast in public was not okay. You couldn’t say breast. You certainly couldn’t say vagina. You still can’t say penis because it’s like, no. So yeah, like I said, if I can get anybody listening to me to just visualize themselves with different pieces of jewelry on their body and understand how their body has to move with that, just imagine the lushness of wearing seven strings of pearls for your sitting position, and you just learned how to position your body so that you could move your pearls back and forth, that you would give your lover a brief glimpse of those beautiful breasts behind just literally, you would have the position taught to you by understanding how to wear nine strings or seven strings of luscious spurs.
(34:56):
I mean, it just puts you in a different space, doesn’t it? Jenna Ward (35:00):
It really presents it as a skill, sensuality pleasure as that relates to sex and orgasm. But to me, as you’re describing it, it seems like there is this skill. It is an art form. This is an important vocabulary of being a full spectrum human.
Seema Anand (35:22):
And I think the other thing is that because of the taboos and the stigma around pleasure, even how we masturbate generally is as quickly as possible because you don’t want to get caught. You may not have enough time or space to do it. Not everybody has the privilege of privacy. And so you’re doing this quickly. So in your head, that is exactly how you think about it and how you practice it then is how you’re going to bring it to play.
Jenna Ward (36:00):
It’s really fast food sex, isn’t it? Which kind of matches a lot of the predominant cultural values of our time, which are more productive, quick get it done. Time is money.
Seema Anand (36:17):
And for most people, they’ll say, oh my God, this would take forever. Oh, who’s got the time for? And so on. But people will know if they have a hobby, how much time they would spend on their hobby. I’m not saying you have to do this every single
time. I’m just saying that if we could little by little start to change it in people’s minds, I think that’s where it’ll then filter down to the body. It’s the subconscious mind, then to the conscious mind and then to the body.
Jenna Ward (36:48):
Absolutely. So another big part of your work, there’s storytelling. There’s the reclamation of this beautiful erotic text and sharing that with the world today. I know there’s also a lot of myths and misconceptions that you address in your very prolific social media and really providing really great quality, very factual information as it relates to sex education. I see you do a lot of that work really well, often with a lot of humor. And I’ll include the links to your social media for people who might like to follow along as well. I’m curious to know, what do you feel is one of the most important, whether it’s pieces of education or shifts that kind of a regular modern woman can or should make if she’s really genuinely interested in deepening her pleasure, deepening her erotic embodiment, expanding her orgasms, what do you feel like just knowing the context of the world as it is, what do you feel like is some of the most important things, one of the most important things that modern women can,
Seema Anand (38:09):
Should do? (38:11):
Okay, so I always think that, okay, the best place to start and the safest, let’s say the least intimidating place to start the comes through. GaN says a lot about perfume, how you perfume different parts of your body because every part of your body reacts differently to a different fragrance. So each part of your body had to have a different fragrance on it. And I think that even if you start with the idea of one perfume, start with how it feels not, but get yourself some natural perfumes. And just for short, while every day massage one part of your body with a fragrance, just one part of your body with one fragrance, spend maybe five minutes doing it. Just the idea, just that motion of loving that part of your body. It’s incredible. It’s sort of leading you gradually to say, I love this body of mine. This body of mine deserves pleasure. Just feel it. Just feel. Do it sort of harder. Do it softer, whatever. Just get the sensations of touch on that part of your skin. That’s it. Just listening to you speak. Jenna Ward (39:40):
I just can feel it. It permeates me as you speak. Please continue Seema Anand (39:45):
Though. I was going to say that also the same time, allow yourself this particular, so start with this sense because it’s the easiest one, the least intimidating one. Spray a different perfume into your shoes so that when you take your feet out of your shoes, you get this whiff of perfume, spray a different one into your handbag so that when you open your handbag, now again in lovemaking, the idea was that when you perfumed yourself, perfuming was a very, very detailed art form. So literally even the way that the room was perfumed, every level of the room had a different fragrance. So if you were floor level, if you’re making love on the floor, it’s a different fragrance. Bed level is a different one. Kneeling height is a different one. Every part of your body is a different one. And the idea is that if you are in it for a longer stretch, somebody is making love to, you’re making love to somebody, whichever way after a while, no matter how excited you are by your partner, whether you’re kissing them all over their body, at some point it becomes routine. You start by kissing them here, then you go to their ears, then you go to their eyes, then you go to their cheek, then it’s their throat. It becomes a sort of path that you follow. And gradually with that, you start to zone out a little bit because by the time you get somewhere, you’re like, oh, I wonder if I made that phone call. Did I send that message off? So when you got to a different perfume, it brought you back to the present.
(41:24):
You encountered something different and you were like, oh, I’m here. And you waited. Sometimes you got used to that, but you waited to go from there to there. It’s just that idea of being there as opposed to sort of being there.
Jenna Ward (41:45):
And that makes such perfect sense to me. I mean, when I think about what it means to really inhabit your body, it’s about engaging your body through movement and breath and sound, but also using all of the senses that are available to you, your touch, your smell, your sight, and to let all of these really interface with the volume turned up as much as feels pleasurable with the world. So the idea of this adornment and this beauty and this multisensory experience as a way for us to keep our body anchored in the presence in that moment of pleasure, because I’ve been with my partner for many years, and I can attest to the habit making,
Seema Anand (42:38):
Sounding out
Jenna Ward (42:40):
The habit, making forms that happen. So using those senses almost as an anchor into the present, Seema Anand (42:49):
Yeah,
Jenna Ward (42:50):
Is magic.
Seema Anand (42:53):
It is magic. And it’s incredible how easily done it is. And it’s also incredible how many people will fight it or prevaricate about doing it because it feels like a step too far, because it really feels like you’re letting go and allowing yourself into that world of sensuality, which is so forbidden and so scary that we almost don’t want to go there. We want to go there, but when it’s so close, you don’t want to go there. So yeah, it’s just crossing that threshold, do it gradually put, like I said, for the perfume menu or shoes first, but snail your handbag. Enjoy the feeling of what it does for you.
Jenna Ward (43:33):
Beautiful. My very final question for you is, as a woman who is walking and walked this path, who is awakened and aware to these practices in this way of approaching sensuality and pleasure, what impact for you personally, if you’re happy to share, does it have on your everyday life? So when this area, this domain around sensuality, sexuality, pleasure, when this is fully alive and turned on for you, what do you notice is the overflow into everything else? The more mundane, the more domestic, the more regular bits of life. I’m very curious.
Seema Anand (44:18):
So we refer to pleasure as a Shakti, as an energy. So we say that we have 52 intersections of energy in our body. And pleasure is, it’s not just about sex. Pleasure is, as we said, sensuality. It’s where all your senses come alive. It’s where the energy touches every part of your body. So it brings every part of your body to an awakening. You become alive. You step into that realm of just imagine. I mean, just imagine a place of being fully alive. Every part of you is awake. It is an incredible feeling. The first time that I actually realized, even the fact that my pleasure was because women are brought up to believe that it’s the man’s pleasure, the woman’s pleasure depends on the man’s pleasure. Women are brought up to think that, oh, what do you mean you need so much time to be aroused?
(45:28):
That’s just ridiculous. And so most women just fake it for a long time. And I think that the first thing that happened to me, because you grow up, you think, I’m going to be really good at my studies, I’m going to do really well at my work. I’m going to be brilliant at everything else. But there is that little nagging thing at the back of your mind which says, but you are lacking because as a woman, this part of you is just not right. It’s just there always at the back of your mind. And I think that the day that happened, there was a certain calm that settled into my soul, which said to me, you are okay the way that you feel.
You’re all right. There’s nothing wrong with you. And you know what? Just to be able to wake up in the morning and say, I’m okay.
(46:15):
There’s nothing wrong with me. It was like a burden falling off your shoulders. So yeah, I think that it is an awakening of your energy. You’re there. You are alive. What I will say however, is that we understand this idea of wanting to awaken the energy. What we don’t understand is that when energy is away, you have to have enough power to be able to control and channel that energy. Because if that energy is not something that you can control, it’ll control you. And I’m talking now on a larger sphere. I’m not just talking about in terms of sexual pleasure. I’m talking generally, when we talk about pleasure, we talk about all our senses coming away. We talk about raising our Shakti, our energy. But the first thing you need to do is you need to understand how to manage it and channel it. Because if you don’t, energy can be destructive. And for this, it’s literally, it’s all there in the mind. You have to say to yourself that this is something that you’re choosing to awaken. You’re choosing to bring into manifestation and define and decide what you’re going to do with it once it is awake.
Jenna Ward (47:40):
Barry sage, words to leave us with, thank you so much for your time today, for your expertise, your passion, all that you’ve evoked for me. Certainly, and I’m sure for everyone who’s joined us for this conversation. For those who would love to hear more of your storytelling, learn more about your work, where should they best go to find you?
Seema Anand (48:04):
So I have, of course, I have my Instagram channel, which is the name for each channel is the same. I’ve just started the TikTok channel, so that doesn’t have a lot of stuff on it, but it’s there. I have YouTube and Facebook as to most people. And of course there is also a podcast that we started, and it’s all literally under the same name. So, and storytelling, whatever is the platform that serves you best, that’s the place to go. And of course there is the book, which is really useful because for me, I found it useful. It’s called The Arts of Seduction as opposed to Robert Green’s, the Art of Seduction. It’s not the same thing. This is the arts of seduction, and it is basically a decoding of the metaphors of the Camp Sutras.
Jenna Ward (49:03):
Beautiful. I will include the links to all of these channels and resources for those who would love to learn more. Thank you so much for your time today. It has been a literal pleasure.
Seema Anand (49:17):
Thank you. Thank you so much.
