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The Heart & Soul of Sex

March 6th, 2008
RASA SPA & Women’s History Month
The Heart & Soul of Sex

RASA SPA talks with sex therapist, author, and speaker, Dr. Gina Ogden

by Anne Marie Cummings

Dr. Gina Ogden is a pioneer in sexuality and spirituality whose visionary work has changed the lives of women all over the country.  She has had a distinguished career as a marriage and family therapist, sex therapist, teacher, researcher, and author.  She has written seven books, including The Return of Desire: A Guide to Rediscovering Your Sexual Passion, Women Who Love Sex and The Heart and Soul of Sex.  She also conducted the first nationwide survey on integrating sexuality and spirituality (called ISIS) to challenge the performance-oriented norms established by Kinsey and other sex researchers.  In addition, she has been a featured guest on numerous radio and television programs including Oprah and NPR’s On Point. 
What made you decide that you wanted to do a sex survey with women called the ISIS (Integrating Sexuality in Spirituality) connection?
Well let me start out by saying that I needed an acronym for Integrating Sexuality and Spirituality, and Isis is the Egyptian goddess known as the initiator into the sexual mysteries.  A surprising number of people don’t know about her, but for me it’s like calling in the holy name.  Using the acronym ISIS for my sex survey informs it in a way that’s historical because Isis goes back three thousand years to when sexuality was part of religious worship.  And it brings in the whole mythic context that underlies so many women’s stories.  When I was on the road with my book, Women Who Love Sex, audiences pointed out that a lot of the women in the book were talking about sex, but they were also talking about spirituality, and this is when it occurred to me to do a project on sexuality and spirituality.  It was like going on an archeological dig, there were all these layers.  I found out that people were writing about sex and spirit, but they were mostly men.  I also found out that no one had done a survey.  There were seven hundred fifty sex surveys, and they all asked the same questions, “How many orgasms do you come to?”  “How many times do you have intercourse each week?”  These questions were defining not how women are, but how men are.  These sex surveys never asked questions such as, “How does sex feel?” or “Is there anything other than intercourse that turns you on?”  I began to understand that sex surveys were shortchanging both men and women by asking the wrong questions.  So I created my own sex survey which took me two years to develop, and before I knew it, one thing led to another.  I ended up with almost four thousand respondents, in addition to almost fifteen hundred letters about how respondents felt sex and spirit connected.   This was when I realized that I had very precious material.
Spirituality is different from religion – can you explain, in your opinion, what spirituality is and how religion can interfere with a woman’s spiritual connection?  
Religion sometimes interferes with sex, and sometimes it can help.  Religion and spirituality are both about our connection with something beyond our selves.  Religion is when that connection becomes ritualized with traditions, it’s basically a cultural phenomenon.  Spirituality is a personal, direct connection.  There’s a lot of literature that states that religion will kill sexuality, but  some letters from ISIS respondents, say it has been their deep faith that has kept them in their relationships.  Religion is not always a detriment.  The detriment comes with the “Good girls don’t…” and “Thou shalt not…” mentalities and moralities.   
The principal of your ISIS survey is that the sexual experience is part of our everyday lives, not apart from them.  How can the sexual experience be a part of our work, our cooking at home, and being with our families?  
Think mindfulness.  When you are mindful and connected, cooking a lovely soup, or making breakfast for your children, if it’s done with love,  it’s sensual.  It’s not sexual, but it’s sensuous in the sense that you are connecting with people you love through food, or washing the dishes, or holding your child’s hand.  Here’s what doesn’t work: If you’re furiously trying to do the dishes and your husband comes up to you and says, “Okay honey, let’s get it on,” then there’s no appreciation of where you are.  But if your husband would pitch in and wash the dishes with you, then that may be connecting.  Where sex is separated from life is when you get into the male and female dynamics of, “Why doesn’t my wife ever want to have sex with me?” 
I like how you write that turning to the wisdom of the body is how we can begin to make an ISIS connection – that when we feel good about ourselves, our bodies tend to be healthy, open, and flowing, and so do our thoughts and emotions. 
Not only that, we can literally change our hormone levels with how good we feel. 
Access to the ISIS path is by listening to our hearts, acknowledging the intelligence of our bodies, caring for ourselves, appreciating our partners and opening our minds to adventures. 
Yes, absolutely!
When an individual is on a spiritual path, you write that the standards for sexual fulfillment don’t depend on how you perform. 
It’s about the connection.  Sex is universally defined as performance, and what I’m saying is, step back, broaden the definition, and performance may be part of the definition, but it doesn’t have to be.
I love how you write that for those in a long-term partnership, we may find that what connects sex even more poignantly with spirit is commitment, intimacy, and sometimes day-to-day ordinariness.  I find it interesting that day-to-day ordinariness is a part of that.
Many years ago, and in one of the first projects I did, I interviewed a colleague, and she was describing this sexual scene that she was having with her husband.  She said it was the ordinariness that made their everyday life intimate.  She said that the kids had gone out to play soccer and that was a time when it was the norm for them to be together.   She described that she loved that she and her husband didn’t have to say to one another, “Okay, on February 14th we’re going to plan a hot getaway to an expensive spa so we can have time together.”   For her, and for many, it’s the sense of incorporating the ordinary into sexual intimacy.
Why is it difficult for this culture to think of sex in a meaningful way?  And do you think it is just this culture?
Let me start with this culture, and before I go on, yes, I do think it happens in other cultures.  But for this culture, and particularly this century, we have gotten very, very far from nature, and the natural world.  Kids are plugged into cell phones, our feet never have to hit the ground, and many of us live in cities where we don’t see the sky.  Sexuality, spirituality, and nature are connected because of the rhythms of the earth, and how our bio-rhythms connect to the planet.  As a culture we are, however, disconnected.  Our culture was founded on religion, Puritanism, which was very much anti-pleasure, maybe not so much anti-sexual, but anti-pleasure where men did one thing and women did another.  And as Catholicism came into the picture, sin and redemption added yet another layer.  Then of course there’s medicine - with an emphasis on prescribing pharmaceuticals  for a quick fix.  And then there’s language and how it’s used in this culture to describe sex.  Our language makes sex jokes, it puts down women, and makes unreal claims about products that are needed to enhance performance as we get older.  And right wing politics pushes the idea that abortion is a bad thing, and tries to make it against the law.  The short answer is that we get so many mixed messages, and  it’s not okay in this culture for women to love sex.  There are women over the last couple of generation who have finally won the right to say “NO” to sex they don’t want, yet we don’t have the right to say “YES” to pleasure because women get called dirty names. 
How can sex touch our souls, even transform our lives if one partner is viewing sex as a performance and the other is seeking the ISIS connection?
This is what brings couples to see me as a therapist.  Many women have said to me, “Isn’t there something more than sex every Friday night at eleven p.m.?”  If an open woman is with a guy who is locked into a physical/mental place, there’s hope for them if they are both willing to explore all the quadrants of the ISIS wheel (the physical, spiritual, emotional and mental elements).  If not, they’ll be like two planets whirling in their own orbits. 
It may just be my imagination, but hasn’t love between partners always been a powerful catalyst for sex that is meaningful and satisfying?  I mean, even if this hasn’t been the case for some, don’t they know it deep down? 
Yes, but the problem is the way sex is defined – “Women only want sex so they can get love, and men agree to love so they can get sex.”  It’s the old stereotype, but there’s a lot of truth to it.  If you look past the stereotype, true sexual ecstasy and erotic pleasure are embedded in the relationship.  Listening to each other, sweet talk, it’s embedded in the relationship as much as, “Do you know how to stimulate my clitoris or penis?” But listening to each other and sweet talk are left out of the usual definitions of sex. 
I like that you mentioned that a thirty-four-year-old Nevada psychologist said that she realized that being molested, once she was able to clear the anger, shame, and hatred she carried, was considered a “gift.”  In her words, coming to terms with these forced her to love her body and soul for its life force, pleasure, creativity, and power.  But how did she arrive at the place of clearing the anger, shame, and hatred she was carrying around with her?  
In my thirty plus years as a sex therapist, this woman’s story rang very true to me.  Between one quarter and one third of women in this culture have experienced sexual abuse, and some women come to terms with it by releasing the rage, owning the fear, letting it go, and moving on in their lives.  They come to a space of feeling a real spiritual connection rather than staying in the space of being wounded.  Once they move from the dark into the light, they may realize it’s a gift. 
Why is it still not easy for some women to say yes to pleasure? 
One thing is that when a message like, “Good girls don’t…” gets transmitted through the culture, it’s transmitted at every level.  It’s not just an intellectual message, it’s a body message.  We’re taught to hide our breasts, cross our legs, if we show we’re sexual we get called sluts, whores, bimbos, and our parents, particularly our mothers, want to protect their daughters,  because this culture is dangerous for women. I remember when my daughter was twelve years old and not feeling well.  I was giving her a massage, and I looked at her and felt, if anyone tries to hurt this child, I will tear them limb from limb.  That kind of feeling can translate into the kind of sex-negative messages some mothers give their daughters. 
The ISIS Wheel of Sexual Experience is very interesting because you are making all paths (the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual) connected to the sexual experience.  At the center is what you call “Magic” or in other words, the mystery that connects all these things when a woman has reached a point where she is an ISIS woman – can you explain this further?
There are moments in our lives, not always sexual, where there’s this unbidden, magical shift, and I’m not referring to the wedding night that’s been planned since you were six years old, I’m talking about magical moments where people feel clear, where physical ailments fall away.  It’s when you are in alignment with the universe, body, heart, and spirit.  It’s when you are aligned with nature and there are sudden openings and shifts, and you are never the same afterwards.  It’s like a car accident – a negative example, but appropriate - you’re driving along, you hit ice, and then everything changes.  It’s instantaneous and you can’t take it back.  You can’t go backwards.  You can feel it when those moments occur.  My shamanic teacher talks about those moments; he calls them sacred lightning bolts of illumination.
Many women you’ve worked with express how the ISIS connection helps them heal, especially from grief. 
It goes along with a lot of what I’ve said before.  Let’s go back to the abused woman we spoke about earlier…let’s say she’s carrying a lot of grief, that it was her father who routinely exploited her; she never had a childhood and she’s stuck in emotional quicksand where every time she starts to reach out to a lover she taps into this great well of emotional pain so that she can’t have a relationship.  If she can open up to maybe the spiritual lesson, what she is supposed to learn from her past, how to deal with other people’s power, then she can tap into her body, and change whatever is stored there in terms of rage, grief, negative holding, and let go into some kind of fluidity.  
I love what you wrote about what you learned when you were working in the field of recovery, “You can’t heal what you can’t feel.”  And you write that sexual “flow” isn’t an option for some women, that for some, a response to negative sexual circumstances causes them to go numb even when presently they are faced with a loving partner.  What do those women do?
They’ll come to me as a therapist, or they’ll take yoga, maybe sit quietly at the back of the class.  Some of these women may not be ready to deal with their sexual problems.
You write that there are of course times when genital-orgasmic sex is out of the question: when someone has a yeast infection, if you don’t have a partner, when you’re opting for celibacy, when career or working two jobs is more important than physical sex.  However, you write that even so, our bodies cry out for pleasure.  What are some of the ways that women receive pleasure when they are without a partner or when their focus is on a new job? 
They go for a walk, look up at the sky, go for a swim, skinny dip, take a bath, read a good book, the list is endless.
One of the keys to opening our hearts is safety when having sex, and you aren’t necessarily referring to safety such as “safe sex,” although that is important, but here you are referring to emotional safety.  Where do we learn about emotional safety?  I think we learn about it from our partners and with all that we can say about sexual abuse, there are in fact a lot of people who have wonderful partnerships and have lucked out along the way.  In these relationships they have learned how to hold each other in loving intimacy, in loving comfort and trust. 
Why is it that sexual relationships bring our deepest issues to the surface? 
Because they are core.  Sexuality, like spirituality, is a core energetic issue.  Also because sexuality and spirituality have been separated culturally.  Sex has been narrowly defined most often as forbidden fruit, except in the context of marriage. 
Just as there are un-nurturing women out there, there are also un-nurturing men.  In The Heart & Soul of Sex you mention that your guess is that a need for control is why some women marry un-nurturing men.  Why marry someone to control?  
Go back to the abused woman who now sees her abuse as a gift.  Imagine that she never moved from the victim position, the abused and controlled position, as she grew into adulthood.  When life is truly out of control, instead of surrendering to the world as an adult, some people draw in and confine themselves to that mental quadrant where they’re able to figure everything out, but they can never make a spontaneous decision.  It’s all about “Well if I do this instead of that, then this will happen,” and so on.  They run the perfect household.  They’re Nancy Reagan, or they’re Patricia Nixon.  I read that Patricia Nixon never went to bed without first taking off the dress she was wearing and examining it for flaws and cleaning it.  To her maybe her life is perfect, and God bless her, it’s the life she chose, but it’s a life of control and living up to all the messages.  It’s not always as negative as it appears, but if Patricia Nixon came into therapy with me I would want to work with her on her control issues.
In Women Who Love Sex you talk about your journey and how you came to be a sex researcher, therapist, author, and speaker.  Can you tell me what your first marriage was like and what your thoughts about sex were when you were in that marriage? 
I was a product of the fifties.  The kind of marriage I was in was with a man my age, and we were in love, but neither of us knew what we were doing.  Back then I didn’t know how to ask for what I wanted, and he thought wives were supposed to do what their husbands wanted.  It’s taken us many years to be able to get through the hurt and rage and come back to where we can be human beings on this planet again.
You mention that you have plunged deeply into the earth-honoring practice of Andean Shamanism.  At what point in your life did you do this?  
When I started to explore spirituality in relation to sex, it was one of those lightning bolts of illumination.  It was a moment where I realized now I’m supposed to learn about spirituality.  A healer friend invited me to a workshop, something called Mesa Work. When I experienced it, it was like “Wow! Where have you been all my life?”  My father’s family was Peruvian, and Shamanism was a way for me to connect to my family and connect to some longing in me to bond to nature, as well as spirit.  It took years of working in this tradition for me to realize that the sexual work I am doing is a spiritual practice, it’s a container for the many women who share their spiritual/sexual stories. 
In June of 2008, Gina’s new book, The Return of Desire: A Guide to Rediscovering Your Sexual Passion, will be out.  She will also be at the Kripalu Center this summer from August 15 – 18.  To learn more, please visit her website at www.ginaogden.com.
Suggestions for Your Journey on the Spiritual Path
Practice safety as erotic foreplay
Make time, set the stage, and follow your bliss
Speak your heart
Unleash your “wild woman”
Nurture each other, but don’t forget yourself
Open yourself to love
What Aspects of Relationship Deepen Sexual Satisfaction?
86% say love and acceptance
83% say being in love
81% say sharing deep feelings
80% say honesty
73% say laughing together
63% say caring for others
63% say letting go of control
61% say feeling safe
Describing the Indescribable (what it feels like to be in the center of the ISIS Wheel):Giver of Breath, Bringer of Peace, Embracer of Intimacy, Source of Serenity, Source of Joy, Source of Power, Being of Love, Face of Love, Lover of Lovers, Union of Everything, Creator of Inner Light, Giver of Vision, Fountain of Passion, Glimpse of Heaven, Enveloper of the Body, Gateway to the Spirit, Planter of Spiritual Seeds, Respite from Chaos, All that Is, The Great All – Love. 

   

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