Kute: What does it mean to you to be an “authentic” man?

Charles: For me, it means to become balanced, and easy in both my Yin and Yang energy. To be able to be both strong and gentle at the same time. To own my feelings fully but not let them run me. To live the truth as I understand it, to the best of my ability. I believe that every one of us as young boys is balanced in our Yin and Yang.

Kute: Are you saying that we are born this way?

Charles: I think we come in with the feeling and the mental sides pretty much in balance but we are quickly conditioned that boys shouldn’t feel, or shouldn’t cry. So we get out of balance and it ultimately prevents us from feeling deeply, emotionally loved because you can’t numb one side of the emotional system without affecting the other side of it. I think the last ritual for a man of coming, into his manhood, is to be able to reacquire his ability to feel deeply.

Kute: How would a man go about reacquiring his ability to feel deeply?

Charles: The first step is to recognize that feelings aren’t bad, and to know that feelings won’t kill you, but suppressing them will. The second thing is to take a look at the activities that we participate in as men, which are mostly Yang, and competitive. Take a look to see if you do anything Yin for yourself. My biggest recommendation is, for a man to meditate, because it brings the left and right hemisphere into balance, which brings the Yin and Yang energy into balance. So as a first step some sort of meditation or yoga practice gives one a way to nurture oneself.

Kute: I am beginning to open up to Tantra, which you have been teaching for many years now. Could you share a bit about what Tantra is and how it is different from sex?

Charles: Every animal species knows how to have sex, but sexual love is different from just sex. Sexual love addresses the entire person, physically, mentally, emotionally, energetically, and even spiritually. It is an art form in which we are not born naturally good at. In ancient India it was studied as the most sacred of the 64 arts that every cultured person should learn. Never in the West have we looked at sex in that way. “How can I be the best that I can be at sex for both my woman and myself? Can I take it to new levels that poets spend their whole lives trying to describe? Will I go beyond pleasure into intense and ecstatic pleasure that truly fulfills me and leaves me feeling, deeply, emotionally loved.” We are really talking about 21st century lovers.

Kute: What is a 21st century lover?

Charles: Quite unknowingly, most of us sit on top of a mountain of conditioning, which pretty much stems from our great-grand parents conditioning, Victorian in nature. Even though we are thirty-five years or so from the sexual revolution, there is still a lot of fear, guilt and shame. Even as we grow older and we don’t let that fear, guilt or shame run us, the conditioning is still there. It holds us back from exploring all of the beauty, the energy, the passion, and the union that God made that sacrament to be. It was God that created sex, and men and women have screwed it up. 21st century lovers have to learn the art form of sexual love and through that, end the battle of the sexes. This way we can live in harmony with our women, we can understand and value the differences between men and women, and live in happy union.

Kute: What are some of the fundamental things that you feel men need to know about relating and being with women, that we are not traditionally taught in school, or our culture?

Charles: If you take a look, our parents are our original guru’s in relationship and sex, which will screw up anyone! Firstly, are not born naturally good at relating. Secondly, communication is an art form and talking to a woman is very different from communicating with a woman.

Kute: What’s the difference?

Charles: A woman can switch back and forth between her left and right brain and tell her man her feelings. Whereas a man, unless he trains himself other wise, is stuck in his left-brain. He will hear a woman’s feelings and rather than address them which is what she needs, he will take her words logically and either defend his position, prove to her she shouldn’t feel that way, or that historically what she said is incorrect. “ I didn’t say that. I said this.” It leaves the woman feeling unheard and the man frustrated because now he feels that his woman is crazy, and not logical. We could eliminate 95% of disconnects with women if we could understand that when she uses the word “I feel,” that is a big red flag, and we have to simply be there for her feelings, rather than become Johnny Cochran the lawyer, or try to make her feelings get better.

Kute: I often find myself trying to fix women, which does not work too well! You are saying, just being there, for my woman and listen without doing anything?

Charles: Yes, while giving her a sense that you have heard her. The best way to do that is simply to listen and repeat what she says. Equally important is to have some compassion, and empathy.

Kute: Sometimes, in the heat of the moment I feel so disconnected from any sense of compassion because my woman really does not seem to be making any sense at all! And then when her emotions begin coming at me, it feels like an attack, I get triggered, my defense mechanisms come up, and I shut down. I just want to get away in those moments.

Charles: Those are the typical response patterns, but then we have ended communication. It becomes a matter of, if she is having a feeling and it’s historically incorrect, or she is discharging her feelings at you, which is a terrible thing to have to go through, do we have to give up our peace and let her win? Or can we just say “Oh, she is in her feelings I don’t have to loose it, this is my beloved how can I be here for her?” If we can pay attention to the “red flag” and do that a few times, we get conditioned and then we are not in our old pattern. We can enter into a new pattern, of “Oh my beloved is stuck again, she has been locked out of her wonderful logical mind that I love and her wonderful loving self isn’t there and she is being Kali. She is expressing the bitch, and if I can look at her being the bitch and remember that this is still my beloved, the one who loved my pants of last night, how do I want to respond?”

Now if it’s a business arrangement with another guy, we have techniques and we know how to negotiate and do all that stuff but with women, we tend to be stuck in the old patterns, the mom/dad patterns. So there is this little bit of conditioning, and it’s a great strength for the man to not be thrown off any more.

Kute: That is a very empowering place to be.

Charles: Indeed. Also, I think it is important to know what a woman’s needs are, especially around sex. How to approach her, how to build up the energy gently, how to follow her energy sometimes, and how to move that energy into realms that, once the woman’s energy is awakened, they are far more sexual than we are. Their capacity for love, orgasm and pleasure is much greater than ours.

Kute: In our culture it is portrayed as the opposite, that men tend to be the more sexual ones.

Charles: This is true initially because when the man awakens sexually, at fourteen or so, the chakra explodes into consciousness and awakening and we are quite obsessed and possessed by it. One tantra writing says “A man has two heads but only enough blood to run one of them at a time.”

Women as they mature, become more orgasmic and more sexual, unless they have been shut down or emotionally scarred. So men need to learn techniques of sexual healing, as well as being a sexual lover. There are skills that can bring about sexual wholeness, which we have taught some 20,000 people personally, in this art form, and we see this as true.

If a woman learns the skills young, her orgasmic potential as she ages is awesome. However, a woman usually has to obtain this ability, if not with clitoral orgasm, then with vaginal orgasms. There are two different types and a hundred varieties of each. There are octaves upon octaves of higher orgasms, more powerful, more dramatic, more beautiful, more transformative, and more transcendent, than most men could ever imagine.

Another important thing for a man to learn is that they can learn to separate orgasm from ejaculation. Orgasm is the movement of their sexual energy, which is quite pleasurable, whereas ejaculation is the movement of that energy down and out, and the man usually ends up tired. When a man is young he is not so tired, he can get it up again because the chakra is so fresh, the battery hasn’t been discharging for 20, 30, or 40 years. But as a man gets older it is important for him to learn how to separate orgasm and ejaculation. He doesn’t need to ejaculate or orgasm every time he makes love. This is the creative energy that can be used in every part of your life and it is sometimes great to end lovemaking full. If nothing else, that allows you to make love again in an hour if you want to, but it also helps you in writing the next book chapter!

Kute: Yes, it is life giving creative energy. It is a huge shift to separate ejaculation from orgasm. Exactly how do I do this?

Charles: Biologically, when orgasm begins to happen, it’s much like an ocean wave. It builds to a peak and then very quickly breaks, approximately 5 seconds. That is not a lot of ecstatic pleasure. If you take a look at the average male married two years, he makes love 2.34 times a week statistically, multiply that by 5 seconds in 52 weeks, you get about 600 seconds per year…

Kute: Is that all?!?

Charles: Ten minutes of ecstasy a year! As a man versed in this art form, he can experience that every time he makes love and more. In those 5 seconds here is what usually happens. After approximately 2-2.5 seconds of orgasm the man reaches “the point of ejaculatory inevitability” and those pumping contractions starts to happen, and the sperm is lost. More importantly the energetic analogous of the sperm is lost and the man’s life force/creative energy drops. Now the battery needs to recharge and that process gets slower and slower as you age.

As a young man, there is no warning period. It is like “Oh God I’m going to come and I wish took I my pants off!” As you get a little older and you start getting that feeling “Oh, I could come soon.” and you do whatever you can to fulfill that women in that time, or you just go unconscious, or go into overdrive and you have your orgasm, and your ejaculation. It is that point of “I’m going to come soon” where the most energy and pleasure can be experienced, tapped and assimilated into one body. That period can be dramatically expansive. “ I’m going to come soon, I’m going to float in this energy and I’m so erect. I feel so much energy, and maybe I’ll just pause from my thrusting and do some techniques of breathing with my woman, moving energy, transferring energy back and forth, and moving it up instead of just letting it dribble out.” Men become squirters. We get close to coming, we squirt it out, and then we are finished.

Kute: How do I move that energy up?

Charles: When we are going to ejaculate, the energy comes from every chakra, down to the second chakra, because the energy thinks you are going to create life, a baby. It doesn’t know that you are jerking off into a dirty sock, for instance. It is the same energy going out. If you let that energy come down to the second chakra and you stay in that high arousal and take a little pause, the energy goes back to the chakras highly charged, in it’s speed and power and energizes them. That is a wonderful thing to do 3 or 4 times during lovemaking. Now lovemaking can become quite a relaxed, enjoyable, and non-pressured experience to share with the woman, that lasts as long as you have time for it. Statistics say that the average man goes somewhere between fifty and a hundred thrusts, and he is done.

Kute: And then it’s over?

Charles: Yes, it is over and maybe he gets a second erection, maybe not. He feels happy, and has a sense of relief and contentment, because we’ve have never met an orgasm we didn’t like. However, as a tantric man who learns the skill of ejaculatory choice, you have the choice when you get closer, things you can do to reverse the energy. You can bring it into your body, transfer some of it to the woman and absorb some of her energy, which is very nurturing to the male’s energy. The extended orgasm comes from learning to stay in that high state of arousal of “I could come soon.” That is a transformative experience. I’d rather have one transformative orgasm a week, making love everyday or twice a day if time permits and building up that energy. Then have one incredible, body fulfilling, full body orgasm, than have the little squirts that men experience as orgasm.

Kute: I have begun to feel a real sense of emptiness in terms of sex and ejaculation. Like “ That was nice and is that it? There must be more here?” I feel as though ejaculation is becoming less fulfilling.

Charles: Exactly. There is emptiness, and there is fullness. What would you rather have energetically? To be a tantra man, to conserve and build up that Yang energy, you get to use it in every aspect in your life and it’s a delight to use it sexually. I believe that every man can and preferably should be sexual, everyday of his life. The more he is, the more a vital man he will be, but only if he learns these concepts of energy.

Kute: You say that the tantric man is about conserving energy, circulating the energy, and choosing fullness rather emptiness. However, I often feel a compulsion to ejaculate. How can I let go of this, because ejaculation can feel really good too?

Charles: It is a little strange at first. Especially as a young man because you get the feeling of “Ahhh! I should have ejaculated, I’ve got blue balls now.” After you try it once or twice, you actually experience, “Wow, I like the way I feel now, I’m going to mow the lawn, and write the next chapter of my book. I have this energy that I don’t have after I ejaculate.” So you have a comparison, then you can evaluate it based on experience.

When I teach this to my men in my men’s course, or weekend seminars, with Caroline we break into men and women’s groups. Some of the men repeating the course, and are six months along usually say, “ I thought it would be impossible but once I tried it I realized I liked it much better”.

The wisdom of the ancients who made it an art form, knew that it was truly about evolving consciousness. If you practice this, you will observe an ever-ascending spiral of more emotional joy, spirit, energy, consciousness, harmony and closeness to your woman. When you don’t ejaculate, she is still the most important being in the whole world. Right up until you ejaculate, she is the most important being, but after you ejaculate it is like, the energetic connection that happens during love making short circuits, and all the chakras have to close down like circuit breakers and go on recharge. So the woman looses us emotionally and mentally, we are about as conscious as the average cranberry. Our energy goes down and our heart also closes down a little. For example, it is like the difference between writing on an old typewriter and writing on a super computer. Why would you use your old typewriter any more, when it is so much more efficient, fulfilling and you have so many more choices, this new way.

If a man, can start his day with sexual love and not ejaculate, he takes that energy, and that emotional connection, into his life. Things that usually upset him do not, because he is full of that energy. He also still feels connected to his woman in a way, that had he ejaculated, he would not be. Then he comes home and he is still connected. She magnetically feels that, and there might be some more lovemaking!

Kute: How would I cultivate this energy if I were single, and not in a relationship?

Charles: The way I ask men to train, is in “self love,” which is different than jerking off. The goal is different, because you are touching yourself not with any guilt, fear or shame, but in the way you would touch a woman, consciously, and to give pleasure. We mostly touch ourselves the way that makes us come. Which over the years is a terrible thing; because that is the only way then we can get off with women.

So I tell men that the best way to learn about this feeling of, “I’m going to come soon” is to pleasure themselves. When you reach that point of “I’m going to come soon” you can even go one second into it. Then you can use techniques to reverse the energy. There are places where you can press to short circuit the energy, and also breathing techniques you can do. Usually if you stop just as you are approaching it or even a second into it, you don’t reach ejaculatory inevitability. Once the energy is reversed you can begin to self-pleasure again, but the feeling of “I’m going to come soon” has backed up, you may not come again for 3, 4, maybe 5 minutes.

Kute: Coming from your Tantric perspective, what does “Success” mean to you today?

Charles: I come from a philosophical school of “Karma Yoga,” which means that everything I do, I make as an offering, to my God, and all reward and all failure goes to God/Goddess. It gets my ego out of it. That is from a philosophical standpoint.

I recognize that I am successful by being number one in my field and receiving worldwide recognition. That, by having a best-selling book and other products that do well on the market, like seminars, where every weekend or week we teach it, we watch our students transform. There is always a sense of the universe rewarding the energy that I put out and that is usually in the form of green energy. Being a 21st century yogi, you can’t have the attitude about money of “It is not important,” because it is. I think for most men success starts at the base chakra, financial security, and recognition of peers. For me, it is in knowing that I have done the best job that I can do, without attachment to success or failure, and that I maintain a sense of equanimity.

Kute: Based on your life experience, what are three key ideas, or principles that you would like to pass onto the next generation?

Charles: Study and master the art of love…as part of that, learn and practice some form of meditation and breathing exercises. The meditation and the breathing technique will help you in everything that you do. You can see it in professional sports; the golfer before he hits a putt, the basketball player before he shoots the foul shot, there is breath involved. These are things that we don’t usually study, in the West, and they are simple disciplines.

Caring for your body is very important. As young men we tend to take it for granted, because we have a certain amount of muscle tone, and are active, but our body will be like our parent’s body in 20 years, unless we take care of it. Personally, I do yoga, and now as a man half way through his sixth decade, I go to the gym two or three times a week. I do some weight training and aerobic training as well, not taking the body for granted, it’s the only body you have. It is the only body you are going to make love with for the rest of your life! A lot of people hit fifty and their love life declines. It is over, by the time most men are sixty. Now I’ve got students in their eighties that make love twice a day...they are truly living their golden years! They are my role models. They are retired, what else do they have to do?

Kute: Twice a day is that all! Where do you see relationships going in terms of the next 10, 15, 20 years? Also in terms of monogamy, alternative lifestyle and what you see unfolding in terms of men and women relating in the new millennium?

Charles: It is definitely two choices. Certainly the simplest one is monogamy, which causes less problems, less chaos and allows for certain bonding, that if you spread the energy too far, it just can’t happen. So we are advocates of the traditional monogamy lifestyle. Neither Caroline nor I live that and haven’t in 17 years of our relationship. We started our relationship when Caroline brought her best girlfriend along, saying, “We want to be with you. We want to learn, take care of you and help you bring tantra to the world.” So that is not the norm.

Open relationship as it went on in the 60’s and early 70’s, a lot of the authorities who wrote the books, ended up with divorces and in chaos and we had our share of that. There really are not a lot of maps for one to do alternative lifestyles. There are increasingly more people, playing with the concept of “If our energy, mine and my beloved, is truly bonded, and united, then sharing with another, from that space will not dilute or adulterate that energy. We can share that energy and bring that energy back to our relationship.” Now if both partners are willing to do that and have occasional adventures, with someone, which might look like, “Oh here is a friend whose heart was broken, let’s share our love with them.” Or “ Here is someone who is sexually shut down, let’s do some sexual healing on them.” This could be quite fulfilling and not get in the way of relationship. However, a free form, “ Let’s do whatever we want in the moment and let it not a problem”, it is rare that people can do that. It is certainly easier for men, because we are not so attached emotionally when we make love to a woman.

The key on monogamy versus polyamory - Sharing love with more than just one mate. Firstly, do you have a monogamous relationship that is strong? Have that before you start making the two into a three. It is hard enough to take the energy of love and merge with one other. The skills to have two lovers and try to create union are different and you need to study them and master them a little. Otherwise the dark side of multiple relating will come up and whatever issues you and your beloved have will hit you right in the face really quickly. Now that will make you grow quick, it can also end the relationship because it is hard to come back from feeling insecure, jealous, and full of rage. If that comes at you, it’s hard to come back from the wrath of Kali.

So what we tell our students is that we advocate simplicity, because you can go to great depths. If your belief system allows for more love, indeed the techniques and the practices of more harmony and more love will assist that. It can be an extraordinary experience, when you share all chakras with someone; it is a much deeper communion and friendship. You can have friendship just based on, “ We have the same spiritual beliefs, the same intellect, we are good communicators, our hearts are open, and we have security needs that are fulfilled.” These are all chakras, but when you merge that second chakra all of them tend to bond and the potential to have great life long friendships, even if you are no longer making love with that person is phenomenal. I still make love to women who I was lovers with when I was 16. When I’m in NY, I can call her up and we get together. She comes to Hawaii, we get together, we spend five days together, and it is like the love is still all there.

Kute: How does your wife deal with this? That is a very free place to be. I am not sure that I could handle that!

Charles: Free is the right word. If we can be free from jealousy, and insecurity that is great freedom. Instead of brain chemicals of rage and jealousy that the brain releases based on our conditioning, it releases other neural-peptides and those are the emotions we feel. The brain can learn to release other neural peptides, “I’m happy my beloved is loving now, look they are coming and bringing that to me now.” That is a shift of not being owned by negative emotions, instead having a sense of joy, whatever the antithesis, the opposite of the standard of “This is how I should feel when my beloved loves anyone.” It is limited and perhaps unrealistic to say “I’m only going to love one person, for my whole life.”

It happens that most marriages end because of sexual difficulties or cheating. So we may need to look at the possibility of how to deal with that, if it does happen. Perhaps have some sort of plan. Maybe it won’t end the relationship and things can be worked out.

Kute: Do you ever get jealous? It is hard for me to imagine.

Charles: There have been three times in our marriage where suddenly Caroline was off and there was her energy with another person. At one time, she wanted six months to be with a guy and see where it could go.

Kute: And you felt no jealousy?

Charles: Not jealousy, but I had feelings, which I controlled. When I came to the house and saw his car there, and realized “ Oh my God he is not leaving, he is spending the night!” I can remember putting a couple of nails under his tire and then taking them away! I remember one time when she fell in love with her personal trainer and I humbled myself and worked out with this guy. If he was valuable to her, I wanted to know why and I wanted at least to be connected. So I’ve worked with my jealousy, which totally ran me when I was a young man. I once hit a cement wall, breaking my knuckles, out of rage. Then later in life being with uncontrollably jealous women, who ran her jealousy with me, like “ If you go to lunch with another woman that is cheating.” I realized that is ‘icky.’ Then finally I felt my own jealousy and realized “I don’t want to have this feeling anymore”. There is a choice, I can be at peace here, because love being limitless, it doesn’t take away.

Kute: Yes, I agree. Coming from a more traditional perspective myself, what amazes me is that; here you both are still together. The stuff that you have shared would break up so many relationships.

Charles: We took a relationship sabbatical two years ago. When you are married for a while, it is like your psychic umbilical cords get connected to each other. “We are a couple, my energy and your energy.” When you take a little time off, you get to own your own sense of who you are again. Then when you come back and you decide which of these bonds you want to continue and which of them were codependent and unhealthy, that you don’t want to do it that way any more. So it is all a learning experience. Treating each other as best friends and teaching together better then ever continues to thrill us.

I don’t recommend this path. Being teachers of this art form, it was necessary for us to be on the cutting edge, to continue to learn. Different people provide you with different energies, and different challenges.

Kute: How do you want to be remembered?

Charles: Pioneer of sexual love, great father, husband, teacher, lover, always did the best he could.

Kute: Beautiful. Are there any action steps that you could give, so that the reader could put into practice what you have been saying?

Charles: Firstly, I would suggest that they visit and have several sessions with a Dakini, a Certified Tantra Educator. That will take them to a new level. It will provide actual experience and if they are a couple to do that together. Secondly, seek out education, books, videos, and realize that as you go through life you will only become better at the art of conscious loving, if you study and practice.

Kute: Awesome. It was great spending time with you.

Charles: My pleasure.

You will find more about author, Kute Blackson and his work at www.kuteblackson.com