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An interview with David Deida
by Charley Cropley David Deida must have the biggest balls in contemporary spirituality." So writes Vijay Rana in the Watkins Review. Deida teaches and embodies a fully sexual spirituality that integrates our lowest sensual lusts and fears with our highest yearning for the divine. He demonstrates and invites a level of personal mastery that seems almost unattainable, yet compelling, necessary and practical. He is intensely alive, outrageously funny and unwaveringly devoted to his purpose: fully embodying love. Deida exemplifies what it is to be a fearless, fully human lover. When you engage Deida personally, you are taking a risk. He has but one commitment, and that is to open you to love no matter what. Ken Wilber, Marianne Williamson, and a host of other "spiritual" celebrities acclaim Deida to be one of the most insightful and provocative spiritual teachers of our time. He continues to revolutionize the way that men and women grow spiritually and sexually. His teaching and writing on a radically practical spirituality have been hailed as among the most original and authentic contributions to personal and spiritual growth currently available. In his inspiring and challenging workshops Deida offers a unique and effective program of transformative practices that fully addresses spiritual awakening in mind, body, and heart. He is a founding associate of Integral Institute and has taught and conducted research at five different universities and colleges. He is the author of hundreds of essays, audiotapes, books, videotapes and articles. Boulder Weekly: Let me get right to it. Many people’s experience of being with you is they find it frightening. David Deida: (Laughter) Why? BW: Obviously because they are afraid you are going to ask them to face their fears, which you do, both in your workshops as well as by giving them incredibly creative assignments. DD: Sometimes that’s necessary, especially if you have to get right to it in a 10-minute moment where someone asks a question and you want to point something out. But another aspect of my work is the healing aspect that comes from the celebration part of it, too. So not only do we consider our fears and what is beyond our fears and relaxing into that love, but we celebrate that love. We celebrate the depth of divine truth and love. BW: I don’t think anyone would deny that your celebration of love is open, free and intense. DD: In that celebration everyone can also feel where we hold back from celebrating. I mean authentic celebration, the celebration of life of offering your heart through your whole body and mind as a celebration. BW: So you’re suggesting that in addition to considering one’s relationship, i.e., pondering our difficulties and what causes them and what we can do to improve, that it is equally important that we practice the art of celebrating our love. DD: Exactly. What would happen for every hour that a person spent fully investigated in the consideration of love–specifically "how do you give love, how do you withhold it, the mechanics"–you spent equal time celebrating love, the love that you would be otherwise waiting for from others so you could open? Imagine you just took it on like you took on a yoga practice, for one hour, no matter what your partner does, you are going to practice love in the most sensitive but creative way with her. What if you practiced that kind of celebration in all of your relationships? BW: Can you talk about the masculine way of giving and receiving love? DD: Sure. As a man grows spiritually, both his intimate relationship and his career become less and less for personal gain or pleasure and more an expression of love. The masculine penetrates his woman sexually, as well as the world through his work both as expressions of his love. BW: Interesting. You’re saying that entering your woman and entering fully into the world can be viewed as forms of intercourse, one sexual and the otherworldly. DD: Yes. Doubt and uncertainty cause men to "go limp," or they hold back out of fear. In order to penetrate the chaos and closure of the world and his woman with his love a man must develop sensitivity, spontaneity and a deep connection to truth. BW: You can’t fool her. She wants to know that your love is real. DD: Right. They know when you are just dicking around. If you sheepishly penetrate them to gratify your own needs, your woman and the world will feel your lack of dedication. If you are tentative, unclear, doubting then you find that they distract you, suck your energy and draw you into endless complications. BW: How is the feminine expression of sexuality and spirituality different? DD: Whereas for the masculine his purpose in life is dominant, for the feminine, nothing is more important than love. Sex is one place where you discover just how open are your body and heart. BW: Meaning that as a woman actually makes love, if she closes her body and heart to some degree, she is closing down the flow of divine love? DD: Yes. It is easy to practice surrendering as love in the ways you find comfortable. But you should practice flowing with the energy of love that you most resist. If you are comfortable giving tender motherly love but resistant to humping your man like a drunken slut, then you have more to learn in the art of transmitting love and light. BW: This is truly embodying love, not just feeling the emotions or thinking or talking about it. You are saying that spiritual growth for a woman means, among other things, growing in your capacity to flow energy and love through your body. DD: Yes, you learn to flow with every possible energy, savage and pristine, motherly and witch-like, bitchy and saintly. To love this big, you must be willing to feel every possible emotion… whether you like it or not. BW: Describe the three stages of masculine-feminine relationships. DD: First, my use of "masculine and feminine" refers not to gender but to sexual "essence." So these principles apply equally to gay, lesbian and all types of intimate relationships. Stage one we could describe as the stereotype macho jerk and submissive housewife. Each is selfishly seeking their own pleasure and fulfillment with little regard for the other, and disagreements are dealt with through force and manipulation. BW: The pain and conflict of stage one move couples to learn how to communicate better–developing listening skills, setting barriers, keeping your word, etc. DD: All of which are valuable and necessary. Also as women grow into second stage, they tend to become more decisive and self-directed, and men tend to become more sensitive, learn to feel their feelings, explore music, dance, nature. Women enjoy their independence and careers. Men enjoy their capacity to let go and allow things to be without effort. Women become more purposeful and success oriented. Men become more radiant and sensually alive. BW: So in stage two men and women become more independent by men developing their feminine side and women their masculine. They also become more alike. DD: Exactly. There is not the dramatic attraction and repulsion there was in stage one. Often this may lead to sexual neutralization and spiritual stagnation. Women can become hardened, and men can lose their edge. Stage two spiritually oriented people often become stiffened women and spineless men–very efficient and quite safe, but their sexual and spiritual passion screams for satisfaction. BW: You are describing many of the relationships in Boulder. DD: Correct. One big missing piece in stage two is that occasionally women want to be ravished by a dangerously loving man of strength and integrity. And men want to be invited into pleasure by a sultry slut with a deep and open heart. BW: These longings are our very nature and must be fulfilled. DD: Of course. If you suppress the darker, more wicked textures of love, then your sexuality becomes tepid. And the same is true spiritually: Unless you can really "do it" with the Divine, your spiritual heart begins to starve. BW: Say more. DD: Without knowing the ever-present edge of death, a man can become a sexual and spiritual wimp. The sensitive, stage-two man must now grow to risk everything for the sake of love. He realizes that he must discover and live his deepest purpose in life or die a mediocre fizzle. He can no longer tolerate bullshit, his own or his lady’s. BW: And women? DD: A woman’s heart desires passionate communion more deeply than the competent independence of stage two. If she is honest she’ll admit constant self-protection and self-sufficiency is stressful, boring and unfulfilling. She must allow and actively invite deep, forceful, blissful penetrations–spiritually and sexually. Welcome to stage three. BW: What are you most passionate about now David? DD: I am most passionate about bringing people together in circumstances that permit further growth in a free spirit of consideration and practice. I am hosting an ongoing global consideration and celebration that I am calling The Symposium. It involves bringing friends and teachers and people who have practiced the sacred arts together and gathering with people for the purposes of celebration and consideration. Not just a verbal consideration but a whole bodily celebration, a ceremony that takes place through movement, through ecstatic dance, through silence, through meditation, feasting, eating, every avenue, every possible aspect of life. The Symposium is an ongoing global consideration that people can participate in, step out of the daily cycle of life and enter into a sacred space, a sacred occasion, a celebration of profundity whereby they pass through all the limits on love and spiritual practice. It gives people that opportunity to really do it, to enter into a place where they themselves are transformed, not only by the light that they bring down but by the light of everyone else. If we can’t enter into the light together, we can never do it alone. The Symposium is a sacred space beyond time and place where human beings gather together. It’s THE great consideration, in praise of divine love. That’s The Symposium. A place to be intoxicated by the profundities and mysteries of spiritual and human life. Truly. BW: It’s contagious! DD: It’s absolutely contagious. We live in a troubled time. The fear factor is so great that the most ordinary processes–how to breathe, how to walk–these things have to be relearned because of the fear factor. It’s so dominant everywhere. But no man has any resistance to love and truth once he’s really tasted it. But he has to get a feeling for the sacred way of life. We all, men and women, have to come to a greater understanding in which we see that love and wisdom really are our primary obligations in this life. Providing a culture of forums in which such an opportunity for celebration and consideration exists is what The Symposium is about. Realizing that culture is what you do every day, then how do those of us living in this unique era of human history transform life into sacred culture? The Symposium gatherings are about how to do just that. How to make sacred culture out of ordinary life. How can we help one another do this? BW: That’s beautiful. Life itself is sacred, and everything in it lived rightly works together and is absolutely necessary. DD: Yes. Restoring the sacred, the mystery to human existence, is the focus of the Symposium gatherings I am hosting. Think of everything that is now known by the collective of humanity and ask yourself how much more loving has it made anybody? If mere knowledge or more experience were the cure to what ails us then we’d have all been enlightened a long time ago. BW: Yes–nuclear power, television, it all gets subsumed to our greed and our fear. DD: No one is any more loving, and our world is not growing any wiser because of it. Just take a look at the world as it is. Stand still long enough and relax the head, and you’ll notice that you are being lived, being breathed, being meditated. That’s the room of the Symposium. That’s the sacred center–coming into that place, staying in that room. That room is inherently full of light. In that room the knower is transformed into a lover. It’s not the knowers that we need it’s the true lovers of wisdom–men and women, who not only understand but whose lives are a living demonstration of love and wisdom. BW: Do you have plans for teaching in Boulder? DD: I’ll be teaching with the renowned Zen Master Genpo Roshi tomorrow, Feb. 6, at 7:30 p.m. at the Oxford Hotel in Denver. And I’ll be hosting The Symposium with a very special guest at Prasad Yoga Studio in Boulder on March 4 at 7:30 p.m. For information, call 1-866-234-0437, or go to www.deida.info. Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com
Sex and cookies
by Charley Cropley Sunday morning, Jim lays with Nanette immersed in the warm, gentle seductiveness of her feminine beauty. As her pleasure grows more intoxicating, his whole body and mind take on the pattern of his passion. His breath, face, skin, muscles all grow hot, full, yearning for release. He senses himself losing control to her beauty. There is barely any choice. In every dimension, he is being seduced by pleasure. For months they have worked together to rekindle the passion they knew in the years before children. Nanette has told him of how disconnected she feels during their lovemaking. She cannot feel his presence and love as she once did. He seems lost in a world of his own sensations and imagination, and she feels used and alone. She has given up on the ravishing, the tenderness, the intimacy for which she longs. It shows in the stiffness of her body and a coldness that pervades her words to him. Jim knows well that to collapse into climax this early is a statement of his indifference toward both Nanette and himself. It is not an expression of his love or power as a man. Becoming increasingly lost in the wave of sensation, Jim looks for Nanette’s eyes. They are closed. In his absence she has retreated inside. He brings his face close to hers and whispers, "Look at me." Her eyes open. "I need you… now." As he synchronizes his breath with hers, her eyes brighten. Jim’s breathing softens and his face and shoulders relax. Nanette’s body drinks the energy released intentionally from his body into hers. Somehow, miraculously, they have been claimed by a love deeper than pleasure’s seduction. They have ridden this storm of pleasure and survived. Smiles, kisses, caresses and laughter emerge as their journey continues on love’s ever-changing ocean. It’s 8 that evening. Nanette finished her dinner an hour ago, and she is in the kitchen alone. The gnawing will not stop. This yearning for pleasure, stimulation, release won’t leave her alone. The anticipation of the oozing sweetness of vanilla ice cream with warm, chewy oatmeal cookies makes her mouth water. Her will is weakening under pleasure’s sweet temptation. Her seduction is all but assured. She knows this dessert’s momentary pleasure also carries the flavor of betrayal–sweet in the moment, turning to lasting bitterness. Love calls her to do better. Since the birth of her son, Nanette has carried an extra 20 pounds, which displays itself unflatteringly no matter what clothes she chooses. She and Jim have discussed how much it would mean to each of them for her to reclaim her beauty. While she knows that he deeply loves her she can feel the difference in the way he looks at her and treats her. His passion and caring are definitely dimmer, and not only in the bedroom. As the clouds of failure darken and draw nearer, Nanette feels herself praying. "Help me…" She doesn’t want to pray. "Please guide me…" She wants pleasure and, as is pleasure’s way, she wants it now! "Strengthen me to do what I will not again regret." Nanette feels her breath soften, and she knows she is being released from years of compulsion. Tonight there will be no orgy of gluttony. Her deep desire to embody love, to be beauty, is, in this moment, so strong she could feast on nothing. She stops in the kitchen, plants her feet deeply into the wooden floor, opens her body and lets her breath flow from her pelvis to her head. I have won! Yes! I have won! Minutes later she makes a pot of tea, which she takes upstairs to share with Jim. She can’t wait to tell him of her victory. Sitting by candlelight they recount their stories of meeting love’s challenges, hers in the kitchen, his in the bedroom. Jim speaks softly, intently, "I wasn’t making love to you. I was just seeking my own selfish pleasure and about to give into having an orgasm. And something stopped me. I couldn’t go on. I think it was both of us, our love. But I won. We won. And I feel proud and strong and so much closer to you." Looking deeply into Jim’s eyes Nanette says, "Yeah, I felt the power of what you did. I had a similar experience in the kitchen tonight. I was gone, history–seconds away from another night of binging. And somehow I found myself praying. You know sweetheart, I did that for you, for us. I chose love over vanilla ice cream and oatmeal cookies." "You know," Jim says, "your energy from not giving into your weakness makes you incredibly attractive. I’m totally turned on by you, and it’s not because your body has changed a bit." Nanette responds, "Yes, I can feel how much more confident you are, too, from not giving into your weakness, and it’s incredibly sexy. Before you cared more about your own pleasure than me, just like I cared more about my ice cream. Now you’ve turned your attention much more on me when we’re making love, and it’s working. I’m more in love with you than I’ve ever been." Jim smiles warmly, sets his tea down on the table. He reaches across the sofa and slowly brushes Nanette’s chestnut hair back from her shoulder. He presses his lips close to her ear and whispers, "I know what it is you want and it ain’t cookies." Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com
Sexual healing
by Amy Brouillette It goes against what the modern woman is all about. Gender equality is, after all, what the women’s movement has been darning into both household and workplace since the 1970s. Yet for Shana Stanberry Parker, reclaiming her femininity back from feminist exile was the key to her sexual–and spiritual–enlightenment. In doing so, Parker jumped a cultural (and political) hurdle she admits runs counter to her own feminist wiring: She learned–gasp–to surrender herself completely to her man. "I know how it sounds," she says, smiling. "The concept of surrendering to a man makes most women these days squirm." Well-educated, self-assured and financially self-sufficient, Parker hardly seems the surrender-to-your-man type. Yet 10 years ago, after finding herself in a marriage devoid of sexual passion, the 56-year-old psychologist psychotherapist began a radical–if not wildly un-PC–journey of sexual reconditioning, which in the end, meant becoming exactly what women fear most: vulnerable to a man. "What I needed was to get in touch with my femininity," she explains. She studied the ancient and modern philosophies which bring together sexuality and spirituality–Tantric Buddhism, and Shivaic (Hindu) Tantrism–and became a student and then a teacher of the renowned work of tantric teacher Margot Anand and sexual spiritualist David Deida. She divorced, put her counseling practice on hold, and transferred her money from her savings to her checking account. What did money–or soon to be lack of it–have to do with finding sexual passion? According to Parker, her financial self-sufficiency was an obstacle to her finding intimate love with a man. "I realized that through money, I was insisting on being my own man." More than that, she says giving up her income–albeit temporarily–meant living moment to moment, and more importantly, it meant relinquishing her own self-imposed masculine role. While equating economic independence as a masculine act certainly raises eyebrows, Parker defends it as her own path, and not one she would recommend to all women. "For some women, the path to reclaiming her feminine side might mean giving up sex, if the act of sex was for her a purely aggressive, masculine endeavor. For others, it would mean giving up being angry or overly bossy." Realigning the sexual and spiritual balance between men and women is part of Deida’s sexual re-balancing philosophy, of which Parker is a devotee. "Both in my personal life and in my therapy practice with couples, I saw there was a pattern of women rejecting sexual intimacy in their relationships," she says. At the crux of that issue, Parker saw the widespread cultural suppression of women’s inherent feminine nature as the culprit. While the lack of women’s sexual satisfaction and passion had plagued her both personally and professionally for years, it was only through her relationship with her terminally ill daughter, Dove, that she was compelled to explore those answers more fully. Diagnosed at birth with a terminal degenerative genetic condition, Dove showed her the meaning of "total, unconditional nurturing and love." Following her daughter’s death in 1995, Parker says she was determined to find the kind of spiritual intimacy that comes with "fully opening your heart." She joined the increasingly popular western-style tantric sexuality movement. "While tantra is an ancient spiritual path to enlightenment, what was being taught in this country was the ABCs of good sexual relationships long overdue in this culture," she said. "What this philosophy gave me was the missing piece to sexual understanding: the feminine yearning to open through sexual intimacy." She attended hands-on sex workshops, read books, took seminars and teacher trainings. It was a far cry from her sexually conservative upbringing: Parker at one time practiced celibacy. In her 20s, she joined an ashram, where she became an ascetic, practicing sexual abstinence as a way to spiritual cleansing and enlightenment. "I was very much a product of the typically asexual household of the ’50s, where any discussion of sexual intimacy was avoided," she says. This, combined with her leanings toward Eastern traditions of celibacy, closed her to the idea of her own sexuality, a pattern that plagued her into her first marriage. Despite the lack of sexual passion in her marriage, "it was not as though I had been a prude," she says. Quite the opposite–she often rented erotic romantic movies in her husband’s absence. She longed for a deeper physical and spiritual connection to a man, eventually taking the brave step to go find it. "For some women, having a passionate sexual relationship is not important, but eventually I realized how important it was to me. I became honest with myself," she says. She admits her path was, indeed, radical, and even goes so far as to label herself altogether desperate. Fortunately, it paid off. Three weeks after she stopped working, she met her current husband at a workshop, in whom she found the sexual and spiritual fulfillment she sought. Whether a stroke of sheer luck or fate acting in the way believers say it should, Parker says she now enjoys what many women and wives have for too long denied themselves: passion, intimacy and true love. As for the 30-years of feminist progress that may have been negated in the process, rest assured gender equality remains alive and well in her life. A woman in the act of righting her relationships, both sexual and spiritual, is as feminist as it gets, she believes. She is now happily back at work. Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com
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