Orgasm, Kegels, Sex Positions: Upping The Ante Of Possibilities with Suzie Heumann and Francesca Gentille (This is the written transcript of an audio interview conversation from March 2009)

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Francesca Gentille: Welcome to Sex, Tantra & Kama Sutra, bringing you the soul of sex. I’m your host, Francesca Gentille, and with me today is Suzie Heumann. Suzie is amazing, multi-talented, one of the forefronts of the Tantra movement in our country, with her site, Tantra.com, and she’s also an author who has written several books, and her latest book is called The Rules of Love: The 64 Arts of the Kama Sutra. She’s a speaker and a filmmaker, and I’m delighted to have her with us today.

Suzie Heumann: Hi, Francesca, it’s great to be here.

Francesca Gentille: You know, Suzie, this is your second time, and I couldn’t wait to have you back, because you always have such good, precise information, and the Kama Sutra is one of those areas that, for the average person, feels like an advanced mystery. What is that? So, what does Kama Sutra mean, and why should we be interested?

Suzie Heumann: Well, I think Kama Sutra is a much better known term than Tantra, of course, and they’re completely and radically different things. The Kama Sutra was a love manual that was based on sex as part of the sciences in many of the eastern Asian cultures - Arabian, Japan, China, India - and so sex was considered one of the sciences. They looked at what the rules of love were: courting, relationship, and sex, and though the Kama Sutra is quite a large book, sex is only one of eight chapters, and it’s a small chapter. The Kama Sutra doesn’t go into a lot, because sutra means an “aphorism” or “short phrase,” and it was structured that way so that it could be used as a teaching manual for young couples, or young men and women. An older person, a sister, a nurse, or someone in the family of a predominately higher caste, might instruct a younger person in the ways of love, and they got loose interpretations. There is a two, three or four-line stanza about, say, a position, or a love bite, or a love touch, or some other aspect of making love, that then acted as a guideline for the teacher to take and expound upon. So it’s a great structure because it leaves it to the teacher to explain to the person about the particular sutra or technique. So it’s a good manual but it is not Tantra, Tantra is much more in-depth, much more spirit, body-associated, but I would say that Kama Sutra practices fit within Tantric practices.

Francesca Gentille: So what I hear you saying is that the Kama Sutra is a ‘how to’, kind of the basics, almost, of like how to run the car, it’s the basics of how to work with the body, the positions. There’s 64 arts of love, which I want to get to and then Tantra is, well, to be an amazing race car driver, to be somebody who’s just an artist at anything, and who brings spirit to it - that’s a whole other level. This is more about the basics, and Tantra is the more expanded, enhanced spirit.

Suzie Heumann:: Yes, that’s correct. When people think of the Kama Sutra these days the idea of positions is mostly what comes to mind, so it’s the Kama Sutra positions, sex positions, that is the hot topic around the Kama Sutra.

Francesca Gentille: Well, before we get to that hot topic, I’m just so curious about “64 arts of love.” What are some of those 64?

Suzie Heumann: Well, it’s actually a misnomer in a way. Everybody thinks that there are 64 positions in the Kama Sutra but there are really only 23 - if you stretch it, 24. The 64 arts have to do with magical numbers of eight times eight. So there are eight sets of arts, and eight parts to each of those sets. So there are things like scratching, there’s eight types of scratching and ways to leave nail love-signals on your lover, and there’s eight ways to bite, and there’s eight, well, there’s three different sets of eights for positions, which makes up the 24, and there’s eight ways of kissing, and so there are these sets of eights that add up to 64. Most people when they write about “64 arts” are writing about positions, or at least that’s the sort of common nomenclature, so for this book, The Rules of Love, because the editor wanted 64 positions, I said, okay, well, I’ll give you the 24 from the Kama Sutra, and then I’ll take more from the Anaga Ranga, and from the Ishimpo, which was the Japanese version written much later, and from the Arabian Perfumed Garden. I took positions from those to round out the 64. I speak about the different arts in the beginning chapters of the book. People have their own ideas about what the Kama Sutra is.

Francesca Gentille: But we’re setting them straight, we’re here to set them straight.

Suzie Heumann: Yes, that’s right.

Francesca Gentille: And is it true that some of the arts of love were also thought to be conversation, and music or dance?

Suzie Heumann: Well, that’s the other 64 arts; the life arts. There are two sets, and in fact you’re absolutely right, and whereas some of those 64 arts from a thousand, two thousand years ago don’t apply anymore, you’d be surprised how many do. And they can range anywhere from the art of playing games, to the art of conversation, to the art of flower arranging, to the art of, you know, making up the bed chamber. Now we certainly would not call those kinds of things ‘arts’ any longer, but…oh, the art of playing music, maybe, the art of making perfumes. We buy our perfume, we don’t make our perfumes generally these days, if we’re wearing them at all. Yes, the 64 arts are another whole different set within the Kama Sutra that the cultivated person should examine and learn as many of these as possible to actually attain a good standing in the community and family and your group of friends. These ‘arts’ are help you to be entertaining, to be witty, to be all those things that a cultured and cultivated person might be.

Francesca Gentille: And, you know, I encourage people to be a cultivated person. Sometimes in our civilized world, we’ve become uncivilized…

Suzie Heumann: Yes.

Francesca Gentille: And there’s these beautiful arts - what about arranging the bedchamber? Often when I coach people I go to their homes, and they have a beautiful living room, a lovely kitchen, you get to the bedroom and you go, ah, oh my God, you know, it’s a mess, it’s, you know, the laundry’s piling over…

Suzie Heumann: Yes, well there’s…

Francesca Gentille: It’s not a boudoir.

Suzie Heumann: There are certain rules about that. A lot of feng shui people will say don’t put any pictures of the family in your bedroom, make up the room so that it’s convertible into different things, you know, appropriate for the love arts, appropriate for sleeping, appropriate for relaxation – those kinds of things. The bed should be in the right direction, the windows, flowers, etc. have specific places they should be placed. Feng shui is another whole hour-long conversation, possibly. But it’s true, we tend to ignore those areas, we tend to look at our bedrooms as sleeping and getting dressed and that’s it, but in fact they can be very erotic sanctuaries for us that are more safe havens and cuddly, love places.

Francesca Gentille: Enticing, evocative…

Suzie Heumann: Enticing hideaways, I think that’s true, and I think that’s one of the reasons why all of this love furniture has come out from Liberator Shapes and other places in the last few years. We are beginning to look at making lovemaking much more important, and much more a part of our lives, and seeing the benefits for health, wellbeing, mentally, physically, understanding our body better. When you speak of the 64 arts like singing and dancing and the playing of music and those kinds of arts like the art of the bedchamber, you think about a cultivated person. The thing about Tantra is that sex is just one of the many vehicles we use in our lives to advance ourselves so that we attain wisdom, so that we become a wise, practiced, exploratory person, because the only way you can gain wisdom is by exploring and understanding. So sex is one of those things that has a stigma attached to it, and the potential it has is directly coupled with this; it is one of those premier vehicles for understanding and knowing oneself.

Francesca Gentille: Absolutely, I love the way you talk about this, it’s so inviting. And I want to hear more about what you have to say about those 64 arts of the Kama Sutra, the positions, those hot topics that people are always interested in, thank you for gathering them from all over the world. Are we ready to talk about the positions themselves?

Suzie Heumann: Yes, I think so. I find sex positions to be fascinating, mostly because it’s one of the number one things that most of the people that visit our site or look in search engines are looking. People are looking for sex positions because they think that they are an easy place to add novelty and, you know, learn new things in their lovemaking. But the thing for me about sex positions is that I see them more in the category of how the yogis might, in terms of what an asana is, which is a position plus more, sort of. It’s more of almost a magical place that you can find your body in with subtle movements and subtle shifts. When you take that to partner sex and positions, knowing your body well, knowing your partner’s body, and knowing what the possibilities are around positions, and the subtle small movements within each of the categories, whatever positions you like best, any new positions you’re trying and experimenting with, is really the key to fantastic sex. Studying positions also leads to the discovery of more of who you are as a person and what your needs are, and how to show up for you own needs, how to advocate for yourself and expand even beyond them.

Francesca Gentille: You remind me, Suzie, of some clients that I worked with, who were having some sexual disconnection issues. He would go to touch her and she would shrug him away like it was icky, and when we slowed that down, she realized that she was actually in sensory overwhelm. When they realized how easily she was overwhelmed, they slowed down how they went into positions and how they moved, and she discovered—which was actually delicious—that she could have an orgasm through very, very miniscule movements.

Suzie Heumann: Yes.

Francesca Gentille: …right, just little itty bitty, instead of that thrust-thrust-thrust-thrust-thrust, you know, just almost like a little bit of rocking, or just infinitesimal movements, and that’s what I hear you pointing to, is that it’s not only the position, it’s how we consciously, slowly find where that sweet spot is in the position.

Suzie Heumann: Yes, exactly.

Francesca Gentille: The one that brings the most connection and eros.

Suzie Heumann: Yes, that’s right, and discovery about oneself and about what this connection is about is important. The Taoists have all kinds of mapping systems, the lingam has places for the lungs and the heart and the liver and all these endocrine systems, and then the interior of the yoni, or vaginal canal and exterior, has all those same demarcations, so when you’re matching these parts during lovemaking it becomes a deep science. When you’re matching those parts and connecting those parts in different ways we’re in the realm of the subtle, we can move into the subtle in which we can do deep discovery about ourselves. So I think one of the most important things you can do for yourself is strengthen your pelvic muscles. I’m sort of like the Kegel Queen. I just think there’s nothing you can do better for yourself than have strong pelvic muscles, and one of the things that does is it allows you to feel much more of the topography of, as a female, my yoni, as a male, his lingam. As females we’re told, science tells us, oh, there’s not that many nerve endings in the vagina. There’s some around your cervix, there’s some around your g-spot area…

Francesca Gentille: They’re lying! They’re lying!

Suzie Heumann: Well yes, yes, but when you have a highly developed set of pelvic muscles, i.e. doing your Kegels, you have a capacity, one, to feel your g-spot a lot better, and two, to know your own interior topography with your mind. You have this mind-body connection that allows you to increase exponentially your own pleasure, and so then once you know that kind of thing and you’re experimenting with sex positions, you can begin to feel those tiny little subtle areas. For instance, personally, my g-spot and my clitoral nerve bundle are slightly off to the left. Research says that most women, if you look at the yoni as a clock, it’s the right-hand area between the two and three o’clock area, which is the woman’s upper left-hand area, from her perspective - that’s where 80 percent of all women have their eight thousand nerve bundle endings. If you think about that, for me, it goes with my g-spot, too. It is just very slightly off center. Once I knew that, I began to be able to move into very subtle, different thrusting patterns where there’s some deep, some very shallow, some very, very subtle ways to move that just cause me to explode. When my partner also begins to feel that subtleness and to work in those realms so that we’re working in sync and in unison together you go into the sublime.

Francesca Gentille: What that reminds me of is that we always see positions where the people in pornography have sex where it’s just straight on.

Suzie Heumann: Yeah, pound-pound-pound-pound-pound.

Francesca Gentille: What I hear you talking about, and I also experience, is that sometimes a little to the left, you know, if my sweetheart’s like leaning a little to the left or leaning to the right, or often to have multiple orgasms, I find that it actually shifts. The sweet spot in my vulva shifts, so the first time, maybe, it’s in the center, but then if I want my second one, if he would lean just a little to the left, and then the third one, maybe he would lean a little to the right, and it’s almost like I’m orgasming from different spots in my vulva.

Suzie Heumann: Yes, I totally understand that, absolutely, absolutely, wow, yes!

Francesca Gentille: And then one of the things that I also love that I hear you pointing to with the Taoists is where they brought these positions into sexual healing, where if you have a cold, maybe it’s here, if you have, you know, lung issues, it’s there, and what I found—at first it was frightening—is when I would have pain in my vulva, I would have a tendency to say, well, we have to stop, or, we can’t put pressure on that. But my beloved is trained in these arts, and he says what we want to do is slow down but still put energy and attention, and in a sense pressure, like acupressure, into that spot.

Suzie Heumann: Yes.

Francesca Gentille: We’re releasing something that needs to be released.

Suzie Heumann: Yes, so let’s shift here, if we might. So you’re shifting the modality to work within what is showing up in the now and that’s exactly the kind of thing that I’m talking about. Our brains can change, science just in the last couple of years is finding that our brains are so plastic, we can learn with different areas of our brains, and intermesh better one or two or three areas of our brain, and learn to create our own chemical cocktails, if you will. This plasticity that allows our mind and body to work together can, if we get into the subtle parts, if we begin to use those modalities, can help us discover endless, endless possibilities for ourselves. That’s where healing, that’s where deep pleasure, that’s where long lovemaking can transform us. You know, of course, bringing the breath into that kind of healing modality is absolutely necessary, and that’s the kind of thing where, literally, this is what I think of as sex magic. For me, it’s the magic of the possibilities of knowing thyself, healing thyself, expanding thyself, and knowing that there really are no boundaries around that.

Francesca Gentille: Mmm, I want to talk more about that, about how we actually bring the breath to these positions, how we attune it to healing, and also maybe a bit more about—some of us know about Kegels, but some of us don’t. I’d love a little review about how to find the Kegel muscles, and maybe how often to use it in practice and also in sexuality itself

Francesca Gentille: Suzie, would you review, maybe real quickly for us, what a Kegel is, male and female, how to do it, a little…how often, things like that.

Suzie Heumann: Okay, well the Kegels are basically referring to exercises developed by a doctor in the ‘50s or something like that, that were meant for women pre-childbirth and after childbirth and also for incontinence. But what we know today is that the pelvic floor is built up of layer upon layer of musculature, almost slung in there like different hammocks back and forth at 90-degree angles of each other. We have all these muscles that have to hold up, they literally hold our insides in us - our guts, our stomach, our bladder, our uterus and everything, so we tend to ignore them, and when you begin to do your Kegels things change.

To identify your Kegels, sit on the toilet and pee, and then try to stop the flow of pee, that’s the basic idea of what’s happening there. When you get into them you begin to pull the muscles up and breathe in with it, and then as you let your breath out, you let the muscles go. I like to tell people to build up to 200 a day, and you can do them fairly rapidly once you’re good at them, it takes about seven or eight minutes. As an advanced step, and this goes for men and women, as an advanced step, do 10 or 20 more sustained type. These are, if you can imagine counting and pulling upwards, you’re starting to tighten your muscles, and tighten in a set of five, like you’re going up a ladder, like steps up a ladder. Then hold for a moment, maybe breathe in and breathe out once, and then let them down in five steps. It’s infinitely harder to let them out in five steps than it is to bring them up. You can then try 10 steps up and 10 steps down, because what this is doing is it’s showing you that you literally have isolated muscle bands, those bands of muscles in your pelvic floor, and you can control them very intimately.

When you’re good at your Kegels, and you’ve done maybe three or four months of them every day, every other day, you’re going to notice the difference. You can, for women, pre look into this by just slipping your finger inside of your yoni. Feel the muscle wall of your pelvic floor just inside your yoni. You can feel that it is probably quite thin. After three or four months of doing this many Kegels a day, or every other day, you will notice that your pelvic floor muscles, that wall just as you slip inside to the yoni, is extremely thick, up to maybe an inch thicker. It’s phenomenal. And this is the kind of area that obviously makes lovemaking hot.

Francesca Gentille: Yeah, it’s going to feel better for everybody.

Suzie Heumann: Well, obviously you can just imagine what your guy is going to think, but for you, too, because you can start manipulating those muscles. Sometimes I’ll do a pick-me-up where I’m sitting at my desk and I’ve been working, and I’m getting kind of tired, you know, it’s mid-afternoon, and it’s after lunch. I can just flutter my clit, so I’ll just do maybe 30 little flutters, just with the level at my clit, and I’ll do a little breathing with it, and go, whoa, okay, I’m awake and alive.

Francesca Gentille: You can do this while you’re listening to this interview!

Suzie Heumann:: Yeah, that’s right. But one of the more important things, I think—and this is for women—is the thicker your pelvic muscles, the stronger they are, the more access you’re going to have to your g-spot area, because what happens, if you can imagine, is that those muscles are getting thick in there, and the thickness has got to build up somewhere in your body. It actually helps to push down and out so you can manipulate your g-spot better. So your g-spot area is closer to the surface of the inside of the yoni because the muscles have pushed it further.

Francesca Gentille: What are we going to do for our guys?

Suzie Heumann: Well, for the guys, it makes their connection with their lingam much, much better. It tends to help to stand the lingam up a bit more, which always, in frontal positions, aids g-spot connection in intercourse. And it allows them to have better control, the stronger their PC muscles, the better control they will have with ejaculation mastery, because they will know their body so well, they’ll know those muscle layers so well, that they can actually begin to relax the smooth muscle, which is the key. Science says we don’t have any control over our smooth muscle, but it’s not true, and that’s the key to many of, I think, our bodily functions - it even happens in advanced breath work people - but for a man, when he knows how to fully relax, because one of the things you’re doing with the Kegels is not only are you tightening, you are fully letting go at the end of each one, he can relax into the orgasm but not ejaculate. This is a very important step to fully let go, so as your muscles get stronger and more developed, the letting go has as much power almost as the tightening. For men, there are many advantages.

Francesca Gentille: I’m going to keep practicing my Kegels while we talk, and I want to talk about that breath - you’ve mentioned it a couple times now - that breath can be enhancing for our sexuality, could be healing for our partner. You know, when I just breathe day to day, I don’t necessarily think of it as sexually enhancing or healing my partner. So what is this special kind of breathing in sexuality that creates that difference.

Suzie Heumann: Well I think we don’t have enough time to go into breathing, because there are all kinds of different breath patterns and ways of breathing. It’s really important for people to learn to deep-breathe into their belly and make it a 24/7 practice in their daily lives. And in sexuality, deep-belly breathing allows us to open up our whole body cavity and actually receive the orgasms we already may be having, but receive them in such a way that we can move the energy throughout our whole body, which makes the orgasm much stronger and more present. This allows us to go into multiple orgasms and things like that.

But back to that section - what we were talking about in our beginning section, Francesca, and when you brought up your idea of the healing, maybe there’s a part inside your yoni that hurts a little bit and your partner says oh no, let’s just slow down and give it some energy? When we breathe into a place that is anxious, has some pain, we are putting our hyper-attention on it with the breath. By combining the attention and the acceptance breathing, the deep, full breath that just takes its self in and then comes out slowly from our body, we are releasing tension, we are accepting and releasing, and that kind of thing helps.

Your example was just the perfect place to put breath and attention in addition to movement with our partners and what we’re doing at any given moment with the breath and with sexual positions, that can, as a package, bring that healing to us. I mean, you know, there are many, many breaths, and there are many, many uses for those breaths, and that could be a whole great show. Connecting the breath, deep breathing and connecting the breath, and our intentions with positions, with the Kegels we’re doing, with the orgasms we’re experiencing, with the bliss states that we’re experiencing during long periods of sex or maybe with the child who’s crying in our arms, with the friend who is, who we’re laughing with at the moment - bringing these things to bear at the same time with our consciousness is what is enriching life and making us stay in the present moment with each other and with ourselves. And you know, it moves from the sexual to the everyday life, and that’s why sex is a vehicle, not a destination—although the traveling there is really fun!

Francesca Gentille: It’s really fun. And as we come to the completion of today’s show, let’s practice a little bit of that breathing that can be anywhere, we can practice it in our sexuality, we can practice it in our conversation, and one form of that, I’m hearing, is that just to focus on relaxing the jaw, relaxing the belly, and taking a little bit longer to breathe in… - what we’re saying, what we’re feeling - and I just want to take you in, girl. I just want to take in everything that you’re saying, and bring it into a more deeply felt place in the lives of our listening audience, into our own lives. There is a playground, there is an endless playground of discovery that you’re pointing to for all of us. And I want to thank you so much for joining us.

Suzie Heumann: I always enjoy talking with you, honey. It’s always a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me on the show.

Francesca Gentille: And if you want to get a hold of Suzie, she can be reached at www.tantra.com, yes, people can find you there?

Suzie Heumann: Yes, they can.

Francesca Gentille: And of course her book, her latest book, The Rules of Love: The 64 Arts of the Kama Sutra is available. If you want to find out more about Suzie, connect to her website, read the transcripts, see her beautiful picture, you can do that at www.personallifemedia.com. Thank you for listening to Sex: Tantra & Kama Sutra, bringing you the soul of sex.

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