Cristian Graca is a man of the world.  He has lived in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and Canada and has found that home is where the soul is.  Cristian is passionate about the journey of his soul’s growth and has dedicated his life to calling others to theirs.  He has trained extensively in numerous psychological modalities and somatic practices and is a Tantra teacher (or practioner), process trainer, body worker and coach.

Vyana Bergen lives and breathes the principles of Tantra every day and is passionate about transformation on all levels for the individual, the community and the earth.  She is an experienced Tantric practitioner, an ordained UCC minister, a process trainer and an experienced therapist.  She has a private practice in individual and couples counseling and spiritual development.

With over 25 years of combined experience, Cristian and Vyana have dedicated their lives to sharing and teaching the healing power of pleasure.  In both their individual and joint coaching practice and their workshops, they support men and women in awakening to the possibilities of their lives through the exploration of spirituality and sexuality.

After I hung up with Time Warner and the deed was done, I stared longingly at my blank television screen.   How will I watch the new season of Mad Men?   I’ve got to keep up with Don Draper.  The guy drinks scotch at 8am in the morning for Goddess’ sake!  And all those fabulous 1960’s clothes…   Then it dawned on me.  Mad Men was once just a simple thought that emerged in creator Matthew Weiner’s head.  That in fact, everything on television is the result of someone’s imagination and by spending hours a week watching their creativity on the screen, I was actually numbing my own.

At that moment a new desire was freed up from inside me.  A desire to have the dreamings of my imagination out in the world.   Perhaps it was time to produce that exercise video illustrating how to lose 5 pounds a week by having sex and eating chocolate?  Or maybe a new reality show titled “Real Polyamorous Housewives of NYC”?  OK, not really my style – but what about a workshop on how to expand your capacity for adoration and intimacy?  Or that book I’ve been meaning to write about how the death of my child led me on a path to love more than I could ever imagine.  Now I was getting excited.

Rather then watch Ina Garten prepare yet another perfectly roasted chicken on the Food Network, I could journal, self-pleasure, take long baths or start to read one of the 17 books I ordered from Amazon this month.  And I decided to take the $1,200 a year I’m saving on lousy programming and gift my sweet twin Godchildren a weekly gym class their single Mom can’t afford right now.  Seems that giving up bad television is already opening the door to more desires being fulfilled.

Now that the click of my remote produces nothing but white fuzz, I’ve taped a note on my television screen to remind me of my hearts deep desire to set my imagination free.

What delicious ideas live in your imagination?

250 West 49th St., 2nd floor

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Description:

This course is complete! Thank you to all of you who participated in creating sacred community in NYC!  Stay tuned for our next event coming soon.

THIS COURSE IS OPEN TO MEN, WOMEN, COUPLES & SINGLES.

This unique series was created to provide both men and women with an opportunity to practice and expand our capacity to experience, receive, and honor the divine that is alive in each of us.  Each week we will expand our connection to each other and ourselves as we explore the nature and practice of conscious intimacy.  Each session will open with an hour-long dive into the teachings of the mystic path of sacred sexuality. We will be covering issues of self- acceptance, pleasure and pain, relationships between the sexes and, the historical experience of human sexuality.

Each session will close with a God/Goddess puja, a special worship ceremony honoring the divine Shiva/Shakti within us all.  This aspect of the series will support you in delving deeper into the practices and techniques used by tantrikas to heighten their awareness and redirect their attention inwards.

This powerful 4-part series is directed toward curious seekers wanting to explore their own perceptions and better understand why we do what we do, and thus empower themselves to make more conscious choices in relationship.

Led by ordained Hindu priest, teacher and theologian Ran Baron, Intimacy & Sensuality Coach, Joanne Porzio, and Certified Tantra Educator, and kirtan wallah Adam Bauer, the Art of Adoration is designed to build connection in community and to provide a safe place to explore and expand our capacity to experience and nurture deep intimacy.

We hope you will join us for this extraordinary exploration of presence, love and intimacy as part of our daily lives.

Session #1: The Practice of Eastern Tantra
September 13^th - $75*

Session #2: How & Why We Limit Ourselves
September 27^th - $75*

Session #3: How Much Love can I Contain and Share?
October 11^th - $75*

Session #4: Tantra Practices for Daily Living
October 25^th - $75*

Pre-registration is recommended.

Register

After spending the past decade as a student of sacred sexuality, intimacy and love, Joanne practices her dedication to awakening the divine that lives in each of us through her private coaching practice.

Joanne is also currently writing her first work of non-fiction titled “Playdate, A big lesson I learned from a little girl” which shares the simple wisdom of children, inspired by her late niece, Isabel, who succumbed to cancer at the age of six.

An engaging speaker and practitioner, Adam is one of only several dozen men certified as a CTE with Western Tantra pioneer Charles Muir’s Source School of Tantra Yoga. Adam’s authentic, grounded, reverently irreverent approach to the path of healing and self-embodiment is a welcome breath of fresh air in the sometimes stuffy world of personal growth and spiritual practices.

Caroline is a celebrated author, teacher and practitioner of Tantra Yoga whose books and teachings have impacted over 25,000 students – men, women, singles and couples who appreciate the depth, integrity and warmth she brings to this sensitive and ancient subject.

Caroline founded the Divine Feminine Awakened Masculine Institute and her memoir “Queen of Hearts: the Life of a Sexual Pioneer” is scheduled for release in October of 2011.

I recently worked with a twenty-four year old student/client who was the vision of erotic innocence. She admitted to not having had sex yet, worried that she was missing out and should perhaps just do it anyway, like so many of her friends.  But something told her to wait until she knew what she was doing, until she knew more about her own body.  I praised her for following her intuition in the face of a lot of peer pressure to lose her virginity and “hook-up”.

Before I lay her back on the massage table, I invited her into my arms as we rocked and held one another. Hands placed consciously on the back of one anothers’ chakras at sacrum and heart, we eye gazed, breathing deeply until the nervous eye fluttering subsided and she relaxed. I then suggested we lower our eyes, place our foreheads together softly, and exchange wisdom of a feminine nature.  Sounds of AH toned along with our exhales, as a soft breeze caressed our bodies.

The session was a calling to the Priestess within me. I asked if she would like to have a deeper understanding of her inner sanctum, her cave of warmth, her garden of delights… her Yoni… her Sacred Space. I gave her the option of using the sacred name. I explained the meaning of Yoni as Sacred Space from the most ancient of all languages, Sanskrit. She loved that.

I took great joy in holding her lovely, flawless young fingers, and using a vanilla-scented oil, I showed her on her own hand how I have learned to caress my own body, building energy in all of the chakras from the heart down. With intention and permission, I touched her with the same strokes while holding a clear boundary of integrity. I was not hired to arouse her, but to teach her, staying in the connection of mentor rather than lover. For that connection is what can help one learn to experience orgasmic pleasure to the heavens and beyond. Safety is the cocoon that must hold this mentoring in order for it to fully become integrated.

As a pioneer of this cutting-edge work of spiritual sexual education, I have the privilege of mentoring men and women into their own integrated sexuality. As the ripples spread, and more and more people are learning how to fully access and express their life force with integrity and respect, we are creating a new world. I invite you to explore our offerings-weekend workshops and weeklong trainings, as they continue to expand world-wide, and experience for yourself the magic of the weaving of the divine feminine and awakened masculine energies.

Fortunately, countervailing forces also entered the equation and helped me navigate what could easily have turned into a dead end road. One of the strongest positive forces was found in my discovery of a small, tightly knit community of souls living across the river in Cambridge, practicing therapeutic massage and a host of other healing disciplines and mind/heart-opening practices.

This group ran the gamut: Harvard students and homeless street-dwellers, kids from wealthy and well-known families and unreconstructed Vietnam vets, activists and therapists, meditators and medicine men, business consultants and fellow struggling high schoolers like myself. It was quite the throng, but all seemed guided there by a common passion for lessons of self-discovery, personal growth, a desire to heal and, on the best of days, for being a conscious agent for facilitating and serving the healing of others.

One of the main practices was hands-on massage work—not the naked, oils, tables and new-age music version, but a social, sit around the living room while a couple folks sat in chairs being worked on by their friends approach. The deal was simple: everyone learns how to breathe and receive, and everyone learns how to offer and give, too. It was my first serious experience of healing touch, the combination and integration of physical and spiritual healing through the vehicle of bodily sensations. I later attended massage school to get my official certification, but nothing I learned at school came close to rivaling the amazing education in healing I learned for free in that funky little apartment above a jazz and reggae club in 1980s Cambridge.

Through my association with that community, and the guidance of the man that functioned as its somewhat reluctant center, I awoke to an entire universe of possibilities. I found myself evolving from a skeptical, life-is-bleak-and-I-want-out adolescent into someone with my own tactile, experiential certainty that, while life in Ronald Reagan’s America was most certainly weird beyond words, underlying all the social peculiarities and pathologies of my time was an even deeper truth: that Someone was home in the universe, and whatever that ineffable energy was, it cared about me. Somehow, all the crazy darkness of both my own life and the “real” world around me seemed to be held and contained within a larger unfolding process of evolution, all of it held in a sort of mystic embrace of universal love that words fail to do justice to.

It was in that context that I first encountered a revolutionary idea: that despite my age, stage and culture, I could be at choice in how to express my own sexual energy. I didn’t need to play the loveless adolescent male American game of seek and conquer that I had absorbed from the relatively un-evolved society I grew up in. I began to learn more about the age-old traditions of various cultures, where a path existed for those who wished to delve into a life of inner learning, rather than householder life. Against the odds, I decided that summer of liberation to renounce the material world as I knew it, to live the brahmacharya’s life, and delve deep into the world of the spirit instead…

Next episode: My life as a monk…

While I was on my book tour for Shameless, and I spent the weekend with a couple who has been in relationship for 17 years. We are sitting in the living room chatting about summer plans when my host Al, comes out with how he is looking forward to taking a motorcycle trip with his honey across the country. “I know the trip will be long, but I am going to have the pleasure of my beloved’s pelvis pressed against me for hours.” Ladies and Gentlemen that simple sentence made me swoon!

And this went on all day – on and off in small and subtle ways. This couple erotized each other and let each other know this as casually as I have been known to pick on my husband.

I started to think about the last time my husband walked in the door and I said something like “Look at the hot man that just walked in my door! Santa came early this year!”

As I tell my coaching clients – words are foreplay. I think that we all forget that. How we talk to each other during the day can affect how the rest of our sex lives go. What if our partners looked up from their newspapers while we are walking by to take out the garbage – and say something like “Look at the ass on that tomato – I want to give it a bite!”. What would that do to us? Personally, hearing my sweetie say something like that to me would make me feel sexy and desirable.

Talking hot to each other is an art and it can be learned – and I think we should start to make it a habit. Talking hot is not saying to each other that you want to do a particular act to them – it is more subtle. It is gentler and smokier. When done right it should make the fire begin to burn just a little bit in your loins or bring color to your face.

It’s a tip for the new monogamy. How we are able to keep our sexuality alive – our relationships burning. It can really start with words. It can start with telling each other in small ways throughout the day that we think each other is hot and sexy. Make it a practice. Decide that today – and every day, at least two times a day – that you will use words to communicate the hotness of your relationship or marriage. See what changes it will bring.