Roxanna Minonna - Dancing the Divine

Roxanna Minonna (Roxy) is a Tantric Goddess, temple dancer and facilitator of a powerful way of initiation for women through dance called Dancing the Divine. On a retreat I attended with Roxy, she opened the floor to questions about sex and relationships and here’s what she had to say.

What is Tantric Sex?
First up Tantra is an attitude. It’s not about penises in vaginas. That’s part of it. But it’s about taking our sexual energy – our lowest vibration, base primal energy – and transmuting it to our highest frequency (for spiritual awakening and raising consciousness). It’s about bringing the masculine and feminine together to meet in harmony. That’s what making love is. 

What is the role of the feminine in the Tantric Tradition?
As women we are the keepers of the lore. The lore of nature. We set the tone of our communities. We women are the glue, the ghee in the dahl, we are what keeps it together. 

Women have come to the planet to give birth, but not just to other humans. Everything that you see happening right now on our planet, woman has birthed. Consciously or unconsciously, we’ve allowed it to manifest through our collective womb. So our role is to be totally conscious of what it is that we wish to give birth to. Feminine energy is the receptive counterpart that represents love. The masculine counterpart is the initiating energy that represents consciousness. So for us women as representatives of the feminine energy, our work as it stands right now is to make our way back to holding the feminine energy on the planet. In order for us to come back to the feminine polarity we have to be able to FEEL.

And this is the woman’s role on the planet. We are able to take negative energy and transmute it into love. That is our alchemy. Men are feeling much more crippled than women (ask them and they’ll tell you). Masculine energy responds directly to the feminine. So when we as women break down the bullshit, men will be free to respond to that. So we’ve got to sort it out amongst ourselves. We’ve got to recognise we are all just drops in the ocean, but it is our responsibility to look after our drop. So when we women get it sorted men will have something different to respond to. Until we take responsibility for our role, we can’t blame them for what we are feeling.

How does female energy work?
The way of the woman is being willing to feel everything. We are lucky in that we can generate energy from everywhere. Women build our water element from being in nature, from singing and dancing, yoga and meditation, from being in the company of other women and from sex. But when we overuse the head through too much discussion, intellectual work and mental stuff, we are draining our positive pole. One of the easiest ways for women to drain their energy is by gossiping. The great irony of course is that women are so exhausted, but if we all understood that we are just energy sitting in a sea of energy that is readily available to us we’d have more energy than we know what to do with. 

How does the energetics of lovemaking work?
If you think about it like two batteries with a positive and a negative charge, a woman’s positive pole is the breasts (they stick out) and heart, and her negative pole is the vagina. For a man it’s the other way around, his positive pole is the penis and his negative pole is the heart (his heart is like his vagina). So during the act of lovemaking, the goal is to balance the negative and positive poles so that a woman can take the positive energy in her heart to feel in her sexual centre and likewise, a man’s sexual energy in his penis opens his heart. During lovemaking, the energy exchange that happens when she’s in her positive pole (breasts) and he’s in his (penis) creates a cycle of the energy that can be cultivated to awaken the Kundalini energy and bring the energy through the heart to the crown of the head for spiritual awakening. 

How do we become orgasmic?
You don’t become orgasmic. You are born orgasmic. It is the essence of who you are and the nature of everything on this planet. If you look at the trees right now, they are making love to the sky. Your breath is sex. Everything is sex. So for a woman to say ‘I want to become orgasmic’ it is a process of undoing where she has tied herself up. It’s the refraining from everything we DO that allows the orgasmic-ness to be there. You can go into spontaneous orgasm without another person to be seen for miles. Just breathing can take you into orgasm. But it’s about learning to feel again. It’s about being able to stop the doing so that you can feel the subtle energies of the body. 

The other part is about bringing awareness to what it is that prevents us from being in our feminine energy (conditioning, beliefs, experiences), because the womb holds onto everything. So often in a sexual encounter a woman might be going into it with an agenda of trying to be loved, feel beautiful, get attention, or get a car. So start to become aware of any of your agendas in approaching lovemaking, and any of your hang-ups where you might have been wounded in the past, where you felt exploited, shut down, where it might have felt too full on. Notice how you create coping mechanisms and sexual personalities, identities and patterns.

How do we support men in becoming better lovers?
If you are grounded in your feminine energy you are able to guide a man without telling him what to do). Your energy will guide him. The moment you are telling him what to do you are in your masculine energy. There are ways you can communicate with him by sharing what your intuition picks up without coming down on him and making him wrong. As you come to understand your energy you can begin to move with your energy in a way that is transparent for the man to follow. 

One of the biggest services you can do for you man is to stop trying to be his mother. You can still nurture a man without mothering him by understanding the distinction between mothering a man (telling him what to do) and serving him from a place of devotion to the god in him. 

What affects do alcohol and drugs have on our sexual energy?
Substances like alcohol and drugs take you out of your body and that’s that. You might think it’s making you feel more connected to yourself, more open, and allowing your heart to open but it doesn’t. Over time using drugs and alcohol to relax you will only serve to drive the tension deeper inside you. Through conscious lovemaking you can release that core tension, so why would you want to put it all back in through substance abuse? Cannabis is especially emasculating for men and as women we need to be aware of what energy we are taking into ourselves (literally) through lovemaking. 

Women can be such bitches to each other, so how do we learn to trust each other?
It’s not about being ‘nice’ to each other. It’s about getting real. And the more we get real with ourselves, the more than transpires to our relating with each other. The deep mistrust we have for the feminine is a deep distrust that we have developed from abandoning ourselves. When we are totally clear in ourselves nobody can hurt us. It’s also about starting to look at the demands and expectations we place on other women. I don’t expect a whole lot from women. I know in myself how gnarly, competitive, jealous, manipulating I can be. But if I can see that in me and still have love and compassion for myself, I can see how that comes up for other women and stop the misunderstanding between us. 

What about competition between women?
Competition is not the way of the woman. It’s a man thing and in their world it’s healthy because it’s the way they improved themselves. Men would get together to see who could shoot the fastest so we knew who could get the food for the family. So competition is about who is the strongest and how can we share these skills for the survival of us all? The moment women go into competing with each other it’s a very scary day because the feminine energy is like the glue of the society. So if there is some frequency floating in that energy about needing to be a princess or have the biggest car, you’ve got the beginnings of something that needs to be addressed in that community. A mature woman knows there is an infinite supply of abundance and knows that competition is futile.  How can you compare one woman’s beauty to another? You can’t say one is more beautiful than another. It is like looking at pebbles. They are all exquisite. They are just all different. So what are you competing over? It’s just little girl stuff.

For information about Roxy’s workshops and upcoming dates visit Dancing the Divine.
To read my interview with Roxy about her story, click here© Kris McIntyre 2009.