Barbara Carrellas is a sex positivist and a pleasure activist. She started working in the sex industry at the age of 35, and after stints as a prostitute, dancer and nude model, Barbara found an even higher calling in what she calls conscious sexuality. Living in New York City, she needed to find a way to stay connected to the spiritual world and has done so by maintaining her own mystical perspective. Carrellas spoke to us about the spiritual side of sex including alternative types of orgasm and her own version of Urban Tantra.

Is sex a religious or spiritual practice?

Sex is completely my spiritual practice. Religions are things that have laws and rules and groups of people that need to meet at certain times of the year. A spiritual practice, you don’t have to go out and do “it” — it does you.

At the moment of great sexual release you experience loss of ego, loss of boundaries, and a connection to all that is. That’s also what happens in a great spiritual experience. So sex is simply the easiest, most fun way to find God as you define God.

Why do we want to connect sexuality with spirituality?

We all crave ecstasy, because ecstasy is a sense of connection with all that is. We crave ecstasy because when we get that connection, we know that we are unlimited beings. We see the totality of possibilities in any situation.

How do you open yourself up to these experiences?

Through orgasm. Orgasm is often looked upon as a physical thing. You build up some energy, you get to a peak, you release some energy and there’s a reasonably rapid cool down. That I call the Mount St. Helen orgasm. And it’s not just men who have them, women do too. I think it’s a very narrow view of orgasm; even though books and magazine articles are written on how to make that kind of orgasm better, I think the way to make orgasm better is to expand our definition of what orgasm is.

So what is your definition of orgasm?

Orgasm is a release of energy rushing through the mental, spiritual, emotional body and connecting us to spirit. Have you ever really, really, really laughed so hard that the laughter starts laughing you? You can’t stop and you think you’re not going to be able to breathe? And when you stop, your whole body’s tingling? I call that a gigglegasm. Those are orgasms to me, and when I work with people who think they haven’t had an orgasm, we go back to when they were 2, 3 or 4, to remember gigglegasms, crygasms, blissgasms and angergasms. Once your mind changes and the totality of erotic possibilities is really your playing ground, you find pleasure in unexpected places.

So, orgasm is more than just a genital thing?

Of course. When people understand that they’ve already had an orgasmic experience, the totality of possibility opens up in their mind that they could have another one, just a different kind. You’ve already had an orgasm, now you’d like to have one in your clit. That’s a very different issue than I’ve never had an orgasm.

You were the general manager of a Broadway show and now you manage a Broadway Theater. When did sex educator become your “other” role?

In the mid 80’s, I joined the NY Healing Circle, a support group for people with AIDS and those who care. I was losing a lot of my gay, male friends from the theater, and there, I met annie/”>http://www.anniesprinkle.org”>Annie Sprinkle who was losing a lot of friends in porn. We were both looking for the same thing; there has to be more to sex than this, we have to find it, it’s a life or death matter. So together we explored these different forms of conscious sexuality, and later genders.

Why did you decide to try sex work?

I started doing professional, commercial sex work when I was around 35, so I already had a whole career. I was not doing this because I was desperate, I was very conscious of what I was doing, when, where and why. I did it because it was fun. I did it because I met a lot of really nice people. I did it because I loved the money, and I loved learning about the sexual energy around the money. I loved making people feel good. I don’t do sex work in the traditional sense anymore.

Now you practice Urban Tantra? What’s that?

Urban Tantra is my term for the way I practice conscious sexuality and conscious eroticism in my daily life. It’s about learning, step by step, to be conscious in the present moment, to stay and appreciate sensation in the present moment. To stay in your body.

So it’s more of a life choice than a “let’s hop into bed and try this once” sort of thing?

It’s about training yourself to live more erotically. It’s not just about how to do it in bed, although that’s certainly part of what my Urban Tantra is; sex is a good way to get to know your body, to drop into your body. Sex is a good way to know that you’re more than a body, but it also involves taking that knowledge and applying it to the rest of your life.

As a city dweller, I know that it’s not so easy to teach other city dwellers how to drop into their bodies. That has to be a challenge…

When we live in intense urban environments, we build up energetic, protective shells. We build up invisible, but very powerful and strong, emotional thick armor. So when we get home, and we want to connect with our partner at the end of a day, we have all this armor built up. In one of my workshops, I asked the couples to touch each other tantrically with a feather, and it made them anxious, the touch was too light. And then I’d hand them a soft paddle or cat o’ nine tails, (you could always do it with a loofah sponge if those toys are too off-putting to you), and I’d tell them to start waking up their partner’s body, getting through the armor. Some people who live in urban environments need a harder touch than “tantra” generally suggests. The touch can be very light or very hard in Urban Tantra. People who do serious SM are doing it very tantrically.

SM? I hadn’t thought about that…

They are breathing. They are watching their partner’s bodies. They are as conscious as you can get. I’ve seen a lot of exquisitely tantric SM.

Tantra or conscious sexuality focuses on touch and breathing. Don’t you think we are a society that has a hard time replacing our words with actions?

Yes, I think we do overly rely on words. Urban Tantra reduces speaking to conscious speaking. Chit Chat can minimize your ability to feel the sensual experience. If communicating is reduced to intentional feedback like higher and to the right please, and we mutually agree not to talk, that we keep our speaking intentional. That’s a trick to make you more conscious. It’s not hard, not complicated, it doesn’t take long to learn, it takes a little practice.

What’s the difference between practicing alone or with partners?

You are the one partner you will have for the rest of your life. Your sexual relationship with yourself is everything. From there you can share it with anyone you want, but knowing your body makes you a healthy eroticism magnet. When you are clear, and juiced, and that in love with yourself, you’re going to go out and attract the best, most wonderful, people, who feel that way about themselves as well. And isn’t that what we want? That’s like the whole point.

Now, a group sexual experience creates a lot more energy, even if I’m only focusing my energy on one person in the group, we are all in a room and we are all creating the energy. Tantra rituals are often like that, or play parties. It doesn’t matter what the ritual is, but there’s a whole other kind of sexual energy available in groups.

Conscious sexuality and tantric sexual practices both focus on breath. How does breathing enhance an erotic experience?

The fastest way to become in sync with how someone else is feeling, or to line up energetically with them, is to match your breathe with theirs. If you’re visiting a patient in the hospital, the first thing you usually ask them is “how are you feeling?” If you were to sit down at the side of the bed and actually match your breathe with theirs, you would know exactly how they were really feeling, not what they were telling you.

When you breathe together with a partner, you enter the same headspace, the same emotional space. You create your own emotional meeting place, you discover this person on a whole other level.

You have so much passion about conscious sexuality…

I went into Eastern forms of sexuality for one reason other than curiosity; I was looking for a way for my gay, male friends to have the same kind of mind-blowing sex that they had before the HIV scare. I was on this quest to find a way to show people to have mind-blowing sex so transcendental, that a piece of latex wouldn’t matter.

So you became spiritual because of AIDS?

I was looking for a new kind of spirituality since I ditched Catholicism as a teenager. I learned to make sex essentially a physical prayer, and this helped me deal with my grief. I really did find spirituality at the bottom of a long, black pit of grief through sex. In the mid-80’s, yes, AIDS, sex and spirit did slam together for me, and I mean that in the nicest possible slamming way.

What is the one thing you want people to learn from you?

That every aspect of your life can be erotic and every aspect of your life can be spiritual.