Strippers and Sages

 Transformational facilitator Gaia Ma pioneered the Tantric Way Process, a world renowned personal and spiritual development practice that helps to shatter programmed patterns of the body mind. A former stripper and exotic dancer, she is the co-founder of InanItah, an earth-based community on the island of Ometepe in Nicaragua, where she teaches permaculture and tantra. When she’s not busy teaching techniques of ecstasy and liveness, catalyzing growth, or steering her community towards a more regenerative lifestyle, Gaia is running the Ometepe Development Fund, a nonprofit organization that supports programs for food security, economic development, and land preservation.

As both a stripper and a sage, Gaia offers profound insights about how our connection to the earth informs our sexuality. She talks about getting in contact with our animal nature and becoming attuned to our authentic sexual selves, and discusses techniques that build sexual energy. She also shares a really hot sex story involving BDSM and skydiving - so do listen to the end!  

Filmmakers Ian MacKenzie and John Wolfstone discuss their upcoming documentary Love School, which is about the Tamera Institute, a communal research village founded on and dedicated to systems change in love and sexuality as a foundation for planetary healing. Together, Ian and John produce new paradigm films and events through their media collaborative, Re/Culture Media.

Ian MacKenzie’s work has appeared in The New York Times, National Geographic TV, CBC Documentary, The Globe and Mail, Adbusters, and film festivals around the world. He is the director of the shorts Lost Nation Road (2019), featuring Stephen Jenkinson; Reactor (2013); Sacred Economics (2012), featuring Charles Eisenstein; and The Revolution Is Love (2011). He co-directed Amplify Her (2018), about the rise of the feminine in electronic music and co-produced the feature film Occupy Love (2013). He is also the host of the podcast The Mythic Masculine.

John Wolfstone is a filmmaker, ritualist, wilderness rites-of-passage guide, emergence facilitator and sacred clown focused on the work of cultural redemption. He has wielded these tools in service of restorative justice, ancestral healing and peace building in conflict zones from rural Guatemalan villages, to Middle Eastern refugee camps and inner cities in the U.S. John has studied intensively the 8 Shields Cultural Regeneration model, been a scholar at the Orphan Wisdom School, and trained with the Weaving Earth Relational Education.

Award winning adult film director, author, and activist Nenna Joiner is the Owner of Feelmore Adult in Downtown Oakland. Nenna has won two Feminist Porn Awards for the films Hella Brown: real sex in the city and Tight Places: a drop of color, which have screened in countless cities across the globe. Nenna’s first book, Never Let the Odds Stop You, was published in 2015. 9 years of owning Feelmore has challenged Nenna - just your normal socioeconomic troublemaker - to become a community advocate and small business champion.  In 2016, Nenna ran a successful campaign to become a Democratic National Convention (DNC) Delegate and is currently a member of the DNC LGBT Caucus. 

In this episode, recorded in the field at Nenna's adult toy store Feelmore Gallery, we talk about representation and distribution in the adult film industry and how pornography helped Nenna discover herself.   

My guest today is a social worker, educator, consultant, and former sex store employee. Her background is in sexual health education, gender-based violence response and organizational responses to trauma. In her current practice, she works with individuals, groups and organizations who want to heal from harm.  In this rich conversation, We talk about the politics of intimacy, the practice of pleasure, and how sexual freedom is a central to Democracy.

Nikesha is an interdisciplinary artist whose work investigates the inter-relationality and resilience of the black and queer body in relationship to power, vulnerability, the sacred, and the ancestral. In this episode, Nikesha talks about Daoist sexology, becoming sensitive to the invisible world through Qigong, decolonizing creativity, coming of age in Portland’s queer rave scene, opening up with her transgender partner, and the relationships between desire and destiny, art and sexuality, ritual and the creative process.

To learn more about Nikesha and her incredible body of work, visit www.nikeshabreeze.com

For show notes and episode reflections, visit www.strippersandsages.com

A podcast about sex - and so much more. Weekly discussions with brilliant guests about everything from eroticism to politics, mysticism to pornography. Subscribe now! Full episodes will soon be released. Visit www.strippersandsages.com to learn more!