Anshu Bahanda: This is Anshu Bahanda on Wellness Curated. Thanks for joining me on this podcast. My mission is to empower you with health and wellness so that you can then go and empower others. Hi Seema, welcome to our chat.
Seema Anand: Thank you.
AB: So, we’ll start with— what is wellness to you?
SA: Anshu, to me, I think wellness is something that comes from the inside. It’s a feeling that comes from within. Because if you feel well on the inside, it shows on the outside. Put it this way, we talk about all sorts of different things that make us well, make us feel happy. And so, for me, wellness is really that feeling of happiness or that feeling of feeling good. And that is what then leads every other part of the brain to tell your body that you’re feeling good. And that’s where wellness begins.
AB: That’s amazing. Okay, and tell me now, let’s take the Kama Sutra. People have a particular perception of it, which I know from talking to you quite a lot, that it’s not what the general perception is. Can you tell us a little bit about it? I know you can talk for days and days and days on the Kama Sutra, but just briefly, what is it, and what makes it so special?
SA: Okay, it’s a very simple thing, actually. The Kama Sutra, most people think, is a book about positions, because it’s a treatise. It was written as a treatise, which means that it’s written in a particular set of grammar and with a particular set of metaphors. And when you do not understand what those things mean, and the only word you understand is positions, then that’s what you’re focused on. The positions are the tiniest part. I mean, it is such a tiny part of it, and it actually also has a very relevant position. The positions have a very relevant position in the Kama Sutra. They’re there for a reason. They’re not for acrobatics. But the Kama Sutra itself is a book about social conduct. It’s written in seven sections. It’s quite a long book. Section two is what focuses on the arts of love. And the text, interestingly, was written for men, because this is a time— it’s written in 300 something AD, when women were not taught how to read or write. So, the book is originally written for men, to teach men how to pleasure a woman or to teach men how to treat a woman.
AB: That’s amazing. In 300 AD, they were thinking about pleasuring a woman.
SA: Absolutely. And they believed that if a woman got that pleasure, that pleasure was the path to heaven. I know you’ve heard me tell this story, and I absolutely love it.
AB: I love this story of yours.
SA: The fact that every king, whoever came to the throne, most people think there is Kama Sutra, there isn’t. There are several thousands. Because every king who came to the throne would have a text of the Kama Sutra commissioned because they believed that if a couple, if two people were engaged, if they shared a truly mutually pleasurable intimacy, then that relationship would be stable. And if the relationship was stable, society would be stable. And if society was stable, the kingdom would be stable.
AB: Wow!
SA: And I just think that it’s unbelievable. I mean when you think about it, isn’t that true though? Isn’t there somewhere where you can actually… so I always say that we do this for national security. Really, we have these talks for the sake of understanding national security. But you know, it was seen as the path to heaven. It was seen as what would balance the universe. And pleasure, I should also add over here, is a word that we have adopted over time. It’s an English word. It’s not an original Sanskrit word. And it also comes with a lot of baggage.
AB: Right.
SA: But pleasure back then didn’t quite mean what it does now. Pleasure meant an awakening of the senses. So, where your nerve endings were, everything comes awake inside you as opposed to the lethargy that senses seem to drop into. We live a sort of habitual life. We fall into a kind of monotony and the senses get dulled. And with dull senses, your nerve endings are not awake. Everything that your body is supposed to be doing on the inside is not being done. And so, pleasure was what raised your metabolism. It got you going. Like I said, for me, it is the basis of our living lives.
AB: Seema, your next book can be Pleasure for Weight loss: To get the metabolism going… I think that’s incredible.
SA: Well, it’s a fact. When all your senses wake up, everything functions better, that’s the energy. Most people think of energy as the kundalini. And then you have to meditate and you get it up and you use it to meditate and go onto a higher plane. The energy courses through your body. It has to bring everything alive. And the very first thing that it goes past, are your sexual organs. It is going to energize them.
AB: Right. Now tell me, can intimacy lead to wellness or how can intimacy lead to wellness? And on the other hand, if someone didn’t have intimacy in their life, how do they get to wellness?
SA: So, let’s point out a couple of things. Interestingly, the idea of celibacy. Again, back when we talk about tantra and we talk about pleasure, etc., we talk about it from the terms of Sanskrit. Celibacy doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re not having sex. It’s about what is being aroused inside you and it’s about where you are focusing your energies and how you focus your energies. So that’s one thing. Secondly… this is the basics, let me just sort of say this bit first and then we come to how it impacts us today. Secondly, did you know Anshu, that there was this entire thought process that you could use certain sexual positions to heal chronic illnesses?
AB: Oh my God, that is amazing!
SA: So, imagine if you have a bottle and you fill it with water. In whichever way you turn the bottle, the water will flow in that direction. So, the idea is that when you perform a particular sexual position, the energy is aroused— it flows in a particular way. And it was just the way that position was performed, sort of how much time it took, how many thrusts, etc., there was a whole science behind it. But yes, you can actually cure chronic conditions, everything from low hemoglobin to gastric wind. There’s a whole bunch of things from this, and even till now, there aren’t that many left in India, but there still are in places like Tibet and in China, you have practitioners you can go to. So if you’re a woman, you can actually go to a practitioner who’s a man. And if you’re a man, you can go to a practitioner as a woman, and you actually can have the sexual therapy.
AB: Oh my god. That’s incredible. It’s amazing that there is… I guess it’s a lot like maybe acupuncture. It is about the energy and what direction they remove the blockages from the meridians.
SA: Yes, absolutely. And the most difficult one to get past is your second chakra from the bottom. So, it’s known as the swadhisthana chakra, which basically translated means— the dwelling of the self. So that’s the core of your being. That’s where your life force is based. And if you want to try and find it, for anybody who’s not aware, it’s like a four-finger width just below your belly button, So, if you trace the finger around to the back, so you’ll know where it is in the front, at the back it is the one that gets blocked the most. It’s the most difficult to get your energy past the swadhisthana chakra. And so a lot of our medications, our breathing exercises, the sexual therapy, et cetera, is all focused on clearing that particular gateway, that chakra, but talking in terms of a more generic sort of thing. So most people will say to you that if you actually Google I think it’s Google MD, I think that’s the medical base on the Internet, and they will tell you that sex is extremely good for you physically. It can help you to destress, it improves your memory, etc. Another idea behind it is, like I said, it’s about raising certain shaktis, raising certain energies inside you, and those energies power your nerve endings, and that’s what leads to better health. If you do not have a partner, I don’t want you to worry. There is a way, of course, of raising these energies either way. To me, pleasure is distinct from sex. The two things are not necessarily together. They’re not mutually exclusive, and they’re not terribly tied together as well. Pleasure comes in many, many forms.
AB: Many ways. Okay, lovely. And tell me Seema, I’m sure you’ve been hearing this a lot, but relevant to where we are today. People have been in lockdown. They’ve been in small, confined spaces. They’re working. They’re seeing the same person. They’re trying to homeschool kids. Kids are getting on their nerves. Spouses are getting on each other’s nerves. What would you advise people like that? I have so many people. It’s Valentine’s Day, what are you doing? And they’d say, what do you mean, what are we doing? We’ve been doing the same thing for the last year. And I’m like, oops okay.
SA: So, the thing that I have been advising through this is that, like I said, pleasure, intimacy, there’s so much more to it than merely sex. For pleasure, I would suggest that time spent by yourself, if you can get some, is extremely important because, as they always say, that you appreciate the sunlight because you know that there is darkness. You appreciate the togetherness because you know you can be away. So, to get more out of a shared intimacy, please consciously spend time away from each other. Make more of holding hands. Sit in front of the television or even not in front of the TV, and actually just very gently hold hands. You wouldn’t believe how much comfort and just that little warm feeling that you get from just being able to do that. It’s unbelievable. Don’t even hold hands fully. If you don’t want to, just link your forefingers. You’ll be amazed at the difference it makes. Just try it and sit quietly just doing that. Don’t just think, okay? I’ve done that. This is a formula, E + C2, something will lead to this. If it doesn’t, give it a little bit of time. The Kamashastra always says that the thing that truly melts away stress between two people is to either share a funny story, a naughty story, or gossip. So, in this case, I am saying to you that for your health, do please share some gossip with your partner. It’s like when you play cards. If you gamble, somehow time disappears. You don’t think of anything else. That’s what happens when you share a little bit of gossip, time disappears. You drop all your inhibitions, all your stress, and for a little while, it just brings you closer together. Just try it. Lord Shiva’s very first point was to tickle each other. And if you can make each other laugh, it dissolves the stress between you. So, I think those are little tiny tips that might be really useful.
AB: So also now, when books like the Kama Sutra were written, the average lifespan was about 40, 50 years or so. Today it’s believed that every generation is living ten years longer. And our generation may live to be 100. The next generation will probably live to be 110. So what do you think will happen with single partners, with monogamy, with marriage?
SA: So, I have to say, Anshu, that this is a question that I get asked every single time, no matter what.
AB: The younger generation asks us this all the time. So, I’m sure you’ve had it [asked] so many times.
SA: So, I personally think that monogamy is, again, about understanding what you mean by monogamy. But if we’re talking in traditional terms, then it’s about sort of dumping your partner and moving onto another one because the chemistry is gone. Now, the Kama Sutra says that the best sex… So let’s go one step at a time. The best sex is with somebody that you’ve been with for a very long time because the chemistry is gone, which means that you will take it much slower. You have to put a lot more effort into it. And when you do that, the whole arousal takes a different turn. And great sex can be of many different types. Please remember your sex, your orgasm, your sexual experience, is not a race to the finish. Imagine it’s like a train journey, and you can get off at almost any station that you want. You’ve got a day pass. You can get off anywhere you want. Treat it as that. So, you need to be able to understand that there’s so much more that goes into pleasure. Just the touching of the skin, that’s part of intimacy. Kissing, just being together. The whole idea of being with somebody who you are comfortable with has a lot of benefits when it comes to a sexual relationship. And if we say that there is so much pleasure in sex, then frankly, you see somebody and you’ve got this great big arousal, this burst of ejaculation, and you’re done, then you haven’t experienced any of those pleasures. So, in order to do that, you actually need to be with somebody that you’ve been with for a long time. But my point is that monogamy is a social construct, but we live within this society, and hence it is something that you need to think about if you want to live within society. There are certain rules that you live by. A lot of people feel, oh, well, monogamy is an outdated concept. A lot of people use this as an excuse. Anything that you want to do for the long term, you’re going to have to work at it. And it does take a lot of working at, it does take a lot of work. But it’s like you said, we live to be maybe, I don’t know, 80 years old. You want to be healthy, right, for that entire time, which means that you’re going to work on your physical health. You’re going to exercise. You cannot say, I exercised when I was 22 years old and that should last me till I’m 80 years old. You can’t do that.
AB: You can’t say that, absolutely.
SA: So, it’s the same thing for your sexual relationship. And I’ll tell you one other thing. Whatever you might think is there on the other side of the fence, trust me, everything comes to exactly the same point ultimately. So, don’t be so quick to sort of jump over the fence and go elsewhere. Work at it. It’s truly, in the long run, worth working at.
AB: Lovely. Thank you.
SA: And if you can actually, I remember this line from a Elizabeth Taylor movie years ago. I think it was called Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. It said, if a marriage is on the rocks, the rocks are generally in the bed. Now, whether this is absolutely true or not, I don’t know, but why not work towards it? And it’s hard, it’s not easy to do. Go with that. Understand it.
AB: Lovely. And when you were starting the Kama Sutra and when you wrote your book— Art of Seduction, what were some of the more unusual and interesting things that you discovered?
SA: So, I’ll tell you what I did discover, and this is when I decided to write the book. It’s when I discovered that the idea of intimacy was considered so beautiful. It wasn’t just that, oh, this was a really open society and they believed that sex was a good thing. No, it was because they believed that it was an art form. If it was going to last you all your life. You also had to be a virtue at it. You treat it like an art form. It was beautiful, it was elegant, it was subtle. And so even your positions, you learnt them. Each position is indicated by a piece of jewelry. So, you never say, oh, she climbs on top, you say, she puts on her jingling girdle or whatever. But you learnt to execute each position by wearing a piece of jewelry and understanding how that piece of jewelry should move on you.
AB: Oh, amazing.
SA: That’s when I thought, this has to go further. I mean, till then, of course, we talked about perfumes and the whole idea of perfume on your body. Like I said, you don’t need a partner for this. Your skin is like an erogenous zone altogether. And just loving yourself by rubbing yourself with perfume, with different types of oils, is just so good for you. It’s self-love. It makes you feel amazing. But I loved this idea— it was so complex and fabulous; that if you have a nine string necklace of pearls, you would wear it and understand how those pearls need to move to be able to perform the sitting position.
AB: Right. Wow!
SA: I’m not going to tell you anymore because that’s for another time.
AB: Okay. Wow. That’s amazing. My God, that sounds magical, actually.
SA: I know.
AB: It was just so elegantly good. It was handled so beautifully through jewelry. That’s amazing.
SA: And I personally think that the Kamashastra of ancient India was written by women because the Kama Sutra really does focus on the pleasure of women. So, it doesn’t say, okay, now, fine, you’ve had half an hour of this or 1 hour of this, now move on, come on. It doesn’t. It actually says it could take days. It says that when you first get married, you don’t expect to have sex with your wife if she’s a virgin. If you don’t know her on the first day, you should either wait three days, six days, or nine days, depending on how shy she is bringing her to that point. Because it says that if you actually force yourself on her on day one, you may just put her off sex for the rest of your life, and you’re the one who loses out.
AB: Yeah. Wow.
SA: How fabulous is that?
AB: Amazing. And there’s something you said to me which really stuck with me, was how this was about attaining almost equality for women in 300 AD. Amazing, isn’t it?
SA: It is. So it wasn’t about social equality because you couldn’t go that far, so you had to start somewhere. So, it says, make them equal… A woman is equal in the bedroom. She has an equal right to pleasure, which is something that we still don’t believe, and that she has an equal right to consent. And it says that if you cannot even give her that status and respect in the bedroom, which is the most private of the spaces, how can you expect that she will have that outside? It’s the first book that actually talks about equality, and it’s a very brave book, I just want to say. Because till then it had been believed that as a woman, you did not have an independent source of pleasure, because you see a man’s hard on, you see a man ejaculate. You cannot see a woman’s pleasure rising. There’s no physical manifestation of it. So, they believe that a woman’s pleasure depended on the pleasure of a man. That’s where it came from. So, this is the first book that says that, no, a woman has an independent source of pleasure and it has got nothing to do with a man.
AB: Right. Lovely. So the mission here, as you know, is to empower humanity. That’s my mission with health and wellness. With that in mind, before we open up to questions from people, what advice would you give people?
SA: So, a lot of people, a lot of women, particularly, believe that pleasure is taboo.
AB: Taboo?
SA: Yeah. It’s not permitted. Over the centuries, one has come to believe that pleasure is not a woman’s privilege, it’s a man’s privilege. So, pleasure is very much a taboo thing, and women will not even think of their own pleasure. Most women have no idea what they’re capable of with pleasure. And a lot of them also believe when they go into a sexual relationship, or this is what they’ve been led to believe, that it’s their partner’s role to bring them pleasure. Your pleasure is your responsibility. You have to open up those channels in your brain which say that you deserve pleasure. You have the right to it. You have to start to explore what gives you pleasure before you can tell somebody else. And your partner, if you’ve got one, is there to be part of your pleasure. They will take part in it, but they’re not responsible for your pleasure. You are responsible for your own pleasure.
AB: Interesting. That goes to what we tell everybody. You’re responsible for everything in your life. Take responsibility. Lovely. That’s lovely Seema. In some religions is lust, stroke, pleasure not a vice?
SA: I don’t know whether I would attach it to a religion because I don’t think that. You know this whole idea of a woman’s right to pleasure, it’s been banned in pretty much any culture, in any society, across the world. I can’t think of very many places, except for one tiny place in China, where it’s very much about a woman’s pleasure, but otherwise everywhere it is a male privilege and it has been banned for women. And so, I don’t think that— how you need to approach this today, that you should be worrying about what an ancient religion might have said. I would like you to think about this. Don’t think about it as lust. That’s another thing that we really, again, in ancient India, we have this amazing idea that everything is to do with love. So, whether you hate somebody or you’re indifferent, or whether you’re lusting or whether you’re loving or you’re feeling, everything comes out of that one spring, that one fountain. It’s all to do with karma. It’s all love. It’s just different aspects of love. And no emotion is ever unchangeable. So, what’s love today can change to hate. What’s hate today can change to love, and so on. The mind is a very fluid, unbalanced kind of place. And you cannot trust the mind to kind of help you to walk the path. Let’s be real. The mind has to be brought into balance all the time. And the mind is pretty fickle. It changes all the time. So, I think that it’s important to understand that pleasure is a particular part of your inner being. It’s part of your core. It’s a shakti, it’s an energy. And that idea, in some religions, some things are taboo. I’m not going to tell you what other people in other religions might feel. I just feel that this is something that should come from within you. Treat it as energy.
AB: Lovely. That’s very well put, treat it as energy. And I mean, I can talk about Hinduism, right? Because shakti is such an important part of Hinduism. You say it’s got to do with shakti, right?
SA: Yeah, it is. It’s a shakti. We have 52 shakti’s in our body, basically. And what we tend to do, what we say is that— at any point when you’re going through a particular situation, you arouse the necessary shakti that will get you over that hiccup. But to get to those shakti points, you have to first have your metabolism going. You have to be awake inside you.
AB: Yeah, you have to think. And also, one of the questions that came in different forms was to be associated with self-pleasuring. Is it okay? Is it to be guilty about it? Is it permitted? Is it permitted for women? So, that came in different forms from different people.
SA: So, as medics will tell you, self-pleasure is a great thing. Psychiatrists will tell you self-pleasure is a great thing. I always say it’s up to you. Self-pleasure is something that comes in so many different forms. Whether you’re going out to buy a handbag; whether you’re spending 2 hours perfuming yourself just because it makes you feel really good, because each perfume has a different impact on different parts of your body; or whether you’re actually masturbating, whether you’re actually exploring your body and loving yourself. And I think that in any case, somebody actually asked me yesterday about what if your partner doesn’t want you to do that? Your body is your own. And I really think that at some stage we have to change the way that we think about sex and pleasure. Forget sex, actually. Let’s not talk about that. We have changed the way that we think about pleasure. Your body is your own. Your decision on how you feel pleasure should be your own. And certainly, the Kama Sutra has a lot that it says about self-pleasure. So everything from…. I have a whole chapter in my book, which is called Ungli Prayog or the Art of the Curved Finger.
AB: Oh, wow!
SA: Because it says that in Ayurveda, as you know, each finger has a different energy. So, there’s earth, wind, air, water, fire. Not in that order, of course. So, it says that when you pleasure yourself, or if your partner pleasures you, each finger or each combination of fingers will bring a different energy. It will bring a different sensation because it carries a different energy. So, if you put fire in front of water, it’ll become a different energy, if you put water in front of it, again [it becomes a different energy]. But also with each combination of fingers, it changes the shape of the finger that you’re using. So, if you’ve got three, it’ll change the way that it enters you, what part of you it touches, and so on. So, each one has its own pleasure points. And there’s a whole chapter on it. It does say, and I should put this out that it says, don’t use your forefinger on its own, because that just agitates. It doesn’t give pleasure. Just a little bit of information out there. But it talks about what we always say, how it’s the colonial influence that destroyed the idea of pleasure in India. I tell you what, the Kama Sutra and a lot of the Eastern societies have this idea of the silver balls. Two tiny, tiny little silver balls on a silk thread or a silk ribbon, which would be inserted inside you, one would have a little tiny drop of mercury, and the other one has just a little ghungroo, a little bell.
AB: Mercury? Wow!
SA: Inside…. sealed inside. Because when you walk around and you are doing your housework, the mercury would heat up and start to vibrate, and then it would hit against the other one, which would make a little tinkling sound. So, it gave you a little bit of a pleasurable sound as well as a little buzz to keep you going. And I think that’s such a great idea. Then, as you walk around doing your housework, you get this little bit of excitement going. And when the British East India Company came to India, there was a black market in these little silver balls because they wanted to take them back to England. And the natives in India started to provide them with normal fluid instead of mercury, because mercury is more expensive. So, there was a whole black market. And there are cases registered in India of people being taken to court because they’ve given something that didn’t happen. I think pleasure is something that has always excited people.
AB: Seema, I also got a few questions about tantra. And there were a couple, but it was sort of someone who wanted to know, what about pleasure and tantra? Someone else was asking, how is tantra different from normal….?
SA: Tantra is a philosophy. Now, most people think of this thing and they’re like, if we practice tantra, we can have tantric sex. There is no such thing as tantric sex. Let’s start with that. Tantra is a philosophy. And the ultimate aim of tantric philosophy is to achieve God, is to achieve Moksha, like in any other philosophy. But the difference is that we believe in tantra, that everything was created by divine hands, so everything is connected. There’s no such thing as good knowledge and bad knowledge. So, you learn everything, and they understand that this thing that we call kama or love or pleasure or shakti, whatever is inside us is an energy that has to be aroused and it has to be taken to the next level and the next level. And that’s when we actually talk about tantra. I started a while ago on my Instagram page, every Wednesday, doing a little video on Tantric meditation, which is literally just to explain how this is about understanding the mind, exploring what goes on through your head, understanding how to connect the mind to the body, etc. So, as I said, tantra is a much stronger philosophy than a lot of the others. And it doesn’t go for pretty stuff. It’s quite strong and it’s quite definitive in the fact that it wants you to go beyond this veil of illusion, beyond this sanitized idea of what is good and bad, because there is always a flip side to everything. There’s an underbelly to everything. And if you do not know what that underbelly is, you are never going to know what the other side is properly, you need to understand. It’s about holistic understanding.
AB: Okay, lovely. And can you talk about the Mahavidyas, please?
SA: So, the Mahavidyas are these ten amazing goddesses who are all worshiped with tantric practices. So, they’re tantric goddesses. They have their hierarchies. So, the top-most one is Kali. The bottom one is Lakshmi, which is really interesting. Lakshmi is the one that you worship, the one that you leave behind as you go higher. So literally, Mahavidya means ultimate knowledge, and these are the goddesses of ultimate knowledge. They take you beyond this veil of illusion to ultimate truth, beyond. And they’re a fascinating bunch of goddesses because they all are very old. They’ve all existed for a very long time. But for some reason, in their own right, for some reason, these ten goddesses were brought together in 1000 AD and made into a group called the Mahavidyas. So, like, Lakshmi has a Mahavidya identity, and she has a Hindu identity. So as a Hindu goddess, she is the wife of Lord Vishnu. She’s always seen within the circle of his arms. She is the ultimate goddess that you aspire to, within the Hindu belief. As a Mahavidya, she is generally worshiped without Lord Vishnu. So, none of the Mahavidyas are worshiped with male consorts.
AB: Interesting.
SA: They’re independent of male consorts. So, it’s not because they’re trying to put men down or they’re just independent. It’s a gender-neutral universe that we’re going towards. It’s about shakti. So, yeah, it’s just literally, they’re a fascinating group. They’re very difficult to understand because if you look at them, their iconography always, generally, has them sitting on a couple who are making love on a cremation pyre, that’s how most of them are actually depicted. Tara is depicted like this often, and Tripura Sundari. So, you’ll have a cremation pyre, you have two people making love, or if they’re shown in positions of copulation— in positions of sexual intimacy, it’s always with the goddess on the top.
AB: Wow! Okay.
SA: So, that shows independence, because that was the position of control, of power. You have Chinnamasta who’s chopped off her own head, and she’s holding her head in her own hand, and there are three streams of blood coming out, and two streams are feeding the two women on either side of her, and one stream is feeding her own mouth. And people look at it, and it’s just difficult to understand why you would have something like this. But the thing is that tantra is also a very esoteric philosophy. It’s a very secret philosophy. So unless you become an adept, unless you become a saadhak, a practitioner, officially, you’re not allowed to be told what all these things mean.
AB: Oh, interesting.
SA: Yes. So, it’s difficult to understand, but my advice would be to go find a couple of well written books on the Mahavidyas, and read up about them. They’re a fascinating group, and even their origin story of when they first appeared is pretty amazing. It’s when Sati, Lord Shiva’s first wife, is told that she cannot go for her father’s, the big fire thing that he’s doing. And she’s so fed up by now, her father has said, you cannot come because Shiva got angry with Brahma, because Brahma behaved badly. Basically, what all the men are doing, they’re taking it out on her. And Lord Shiva, who by now has been ignoring her for a couple of years already, and now he’s saying, I don’t think you should go. So, it’s when she loses the plot, she says, how dare you all tell me. And these goddesses emanate from her in different directions. And this is her wrathful self that comes out one after the other. And the ten directions are covered. And they’re a fascinating group of people, of goddesses, even.
AB: And have you covered the Mahavidyas at all in your book?
SA: I don’t, no, absolutely not. Because they don’t appear in the Kama Sutra. The Kama Sutra has got nothing to do with Tantra. As I said, the Kama Sutra is a very different text, and we shouldn’t confuse the two. Pleasure appears in different places. The Kama Sutra was aiming at a different thing. So, they’re looking at social conduct. So, like, their first chapter is about how a man should find a spot to build his house, how he should build his house, how he should decorate his house and so on.
AB: Oh, wow. Okay.
SA: Yeah. And then it talks about some energies. For instance, did you know that the bed that you make love in, you do not actually sleep in that bed? Because the energy has changed.
AB: Yeah? Oh, wow! Amazing. Thank you so much, Seema. I think that was so educational.
SA: Amazing. I’m so glad.
AB: And your voice is unforgettable.
SA: Well, thank you. And I hope that this leads everybody to go and explore some form of pleasure. Because trust me, you feel good with it.
AB: Lovely. Thank you. Thank you. (Music plays and fades away). Thanks for joining us. Hope you enjoyed the Wellness Curated podcast. Please subscribe and tell your friends and family about it. And here’s to you leading your best life.