The Value of Ecstasy in Challenging Times

Living ecstatically isn’t about bypassing the challenges of life and hiding behind a veneer of bliss. The art of the ecstatic experience comes from creating space for everything in life to hold the possibility for ecstasy.

Today’s post will be our first Spotlight on Wellcelium Faculty, celebrating teacher, author, and Modern Erotic Ecstatic, Barbara Carrellas. If you’ve never heard her name before, you have just arrived in a serendipitous moment of discovery.

Barbara Carrellas is on a mission to tell the world that ecstasy is born of accessible, universal life-force energy, and to invite each person to fully engage with this energy:

“Because the same life-force energy that flows through us also flows through every living thing on the planet, we are in an ongoing erotic relationship with all of life all the time. How much of it we see, feel, or appreciate is dependent upon how much of this energy we have learned to recognize, accept, and allow,” (Carrellas, 2012).

What is ecstasy?

“Ecstasy is a universal human experience. It is not limited to those who are sufficiently spiritual, excessively sexual, or brilliantly artistic. Ecstasy happens to everyone, sooner or later, in one way or another” Barbara explains in her book, Ecstasy Is Necessary: a Practical Guide (2012).

The path of ecstatic and erotic evolution is the same.

Barbara meets us in the revelatory moment where we connect with our desire for Something More. Ecstasy is not something reserved for tantric masters, and it does not require previous experience. It does, however, require practice. There is a map, a pathway to everyday ecstatic living. She has broken it down into accessible steps, and wants to reveal to us how expansive our lives can be when we invite ecstasy into every-day present-moment living. Beyond the genitals, beyond sex, and beyond our conceptualization of orgasm.

Barbara has described tantra as a spirituality that invites us to use all forms of physical life as a path to the divine. She believes that tantra is about energetic connection, and the act of allowing life-force erotic sexual energy to move through us. When we hone in on the energetic aspect of sex, it’s much bigger than just the genitals. Committed conscious breathing, prolonged eye gazing, and creating heart connections can slow us down and expand an experience by intensifying each juicy moment.

Why is ecstasy necessary?

“One of the great paradoxes of life is how the most challenging of times can be exactly the right time to learn how to create transformative, ecstatic experiences,” Barbara reflects.

She explains, “I discovered through Tantra—and other sex-positive practices both spiritual and physical—that when I was able to fully embrace my grief and my anger, I was also able to fully experience my passion and joy. I was able to find my purpose during the crisis—both personal and planetary—and live it out with energy, focus and fullness, creating healing experiences for myself and others.”

You might have moments when ecstasy comes to you, but the more you put yourself in ecstasy’s way, the more likely you are to experience it on a regular basis. Joy is a practice, and ecstasy is a practice. When you deliberately practice pleasure in times of turmoil, you are making a radical choice of departure from the culturally-imposed idea that “suffering is necessary”. Pleasure, ecstasy, and authentic expression are each antidotes to suffering.

​Pleasure Guilt

Have you ever felt wrong feeling good when others feel bad? Practicing pleasure can be accompanied by guilt and grief, even feelings of disloyalty. You might hear a conditioned resistance within yourself, a feeling that in order to be loyal to your people, family of origin, you have to suffer alongside them. Experiencing all the emotions that arise through your pleasure practice can help you discover areas of emotional experience in need of healing, and opportunities to rewrite your personal narratives to be more in alignment with who you really are.

Invitation to Pleasure Guilt Reflection Practice

1. The first step toward working with pleasure guilt is to acknowledge that it’s a real thing that everyone experiences at one point or another in life.
2. Next, approach the pleasure guilt with curiosity by asking what it takes care of. All defenses have a very special role: to keep you safe. It is your job to work gently with them to discover what wound or unmet need they are guarding, and to remain curious by exploring and asking more questions while suspending judgement.Pleasure guilt can often be related to your experience of connection and belonging, and your fear that if you don’t suffer with the group, the group will abandon or reject you.
3. Lastly, ask yourself: Are there other ways to strengthen our sense of connection and belonging that don’t require our suffering, our denial of pleasure?

A Sensual Exercise

The following sensual exercise, excerpted from Barbara’s book, Ecstasy Is Necessary: a Practical Guide (2012), is designed to explore and expand your nonverbal ecstatic communication skills.

Partner Exercise: A Sensuous Buffet

In this exercise, you’ll feed your blindfolded partner morsels of a variety of foods. Your partner will nonverbally communicate their delight—or disgust—with each taste.

Each of you will begin by gathering as wide a variety of tastes as possible. Be sure to include sweet, sour, bitter, and salty tastes, as well as a variety of textures. Here are a few ideas: chocolate, fruit, mustard, whipped cream, salsa, a sparkling beverage, a salty snack, diluted lemon juice, sweet or sour pickles.

Giving partner: Blindfold your partner. (Or for extra fun, put them in bondage.) Just make sure that the only sense completely blocked out for the entire exercise is sight, now feed your partner. Go s-l-o-w-l-y. Run a tasty morsel over their lips and tongue but don’t let them bite it. Allow them to experience the aroma, texture, and temperature of the food, and only then let them have a small bite. Feed your partner with the intention of helping them appreciate every nuance of the food.

Receiving partner: Enter as totally as you can into the experience of the food and being fed. If you like the morsel you taste, ask for more by making “yum” sounds, by reaching for more with your tongue, or by licking your partner’s fingers. Express your displeasure by scrunching up your face, making “icklike” noises, or turning away.

After a certain number of tastes, or a certain amount of time, switch places.

This exercise can get ridiculously funny. It can also cause you to drop deliciously deeply into your body, your connection with each other, and into the flavors of the food.

How to Create Ecstatic Experiences in Challenging Times: An Urban Tantra Adventure with Barbara Carrellas

Whether you’re interested in a more orgasmic sexual life, in need of a little daily ecstasy, or you want bigger inspiration-gasms, emotion-gasms, spirit-gasms, or creation-gasms, this 4-week Urban Tantra Adventure offers you permission and possibilities to unearth and expand the ecstatic in your life by using your breath, plus other Urban Tantric building blocks of great sex, fulfilling relationships, and spiritual growth. Conscious breath ignites emotion, erotic pleasure and power, and connects us to spirit. It enhances sensitivity, sensation and intimacy.

This is about so much more than pleasure. It’s about learning to live from a place of passionate, erotic engagement with whatever life brings you.

Who is Barbara Carrellas?

Barbara Carrellas is an author, artist, innovator, instigator, and thought leader in the fields of sex, gender, and spirit. She is a sex/life coach, sex educator, workshop facilitator, university lecturer, motivation speaker and theater artist. Barbara is the founder of Urban Tantra®, an approach to conscious sexuality that adapts and blends a wide variety of sacred sexuality practices from Tantra to BDSM. She is the author of Urban Tantra: Sacred Sex for the Twenty-first Century—now in its second edition, Ecstasy is Necessary: A Practical Guide to Sex, Relationships and Oh So Much More, and Luxurious Loving. Her books, workshops, and lectures are an eclectic mix of sexual and spiritual practices designed to encourage readers and participants of all genders and sexual preferences to expand their capacity for both pleasure and spiritual fulfillment.

Barbara brings a holistic, metaphysical, practical, humorous, entertaining and gender-fluid approach to conscious sexuality and to all her work. She began her work in metaphysics and conscious sexuality during the AIDS crisis in the late 1980’s—a time when the connections between sex, spirit and healing were at their most strained. The more Barbara explored sex and consciousness, the more she saw the possibilities for healing and expanded consciousness in all forms of ecstatic practices.

References:
Carrellas, B. (2012). What is Ecstasy? In Ecstasy is necessary: a practical guide (pp. 1–21). essay, Hay House.

Carrellas, B. (2012). The Language of Ecstasy. In Ecstasy is necessary: a practical guide (pp. 203–204). essay, Hay House.