Cult, Tantra and True Desire with Yossef Sagi

In this Episode

• [02:24]Yossef Sagi reflects on his 25-year involvement with a cult-like environment and the identity loss and healing process he experienced.
• [08:42]Yossef shares his experiences with breaking rules and exploring other spiritual paths, which helped him gain the integrity he needed to leave.
• [18:26]Yossef explains how kink helped him understand and express different parts of his personality and sexuality.
• [20:02]Yossef emphasizes the need for a holistic approach to personal development, integrating mind, body, and spirit.
• [33:49] Yossef discusses the importance of communication, attunement, and consent in creating a safe and consensual kink environment.
• [35:52]Yossef shares his personal experiences with sex magic and how it has helped him achieve his goals.
• [43:12]Yossef advises following the heart, listening to subtle desires, and taking action on them.
• [44:43]Yossef explains how surrender helps in dealing with painful emotions and creating a sense of trust and safety.

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About Today’s Show

Hi, Yossef. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here.

It’s such a pleasure to be here with you, Orion.

Before we begin, can you share one beautiful childhood memory with me?

That’s a good one. I think for me, every time that I got to, when I was a kid, and I got to jump in a big, just container of water, it could have been the ocean, it could be in a pool, it could be a lake, it didn’t matter. Like for me, my best memories were always just immersed in the water, and that’s something I take with me today and I just came back from Mexico, and I was with some friends there, and we were all in the ocean, and I was looking at the sun and reflecting off the surface of the water and my friends around me. It’s like being in the water has always been an incredible memory for me.

It’s amazing. Something really interesting about your childhood is that you were very involved with Kabbalah. Maybe you can share a bit about that. What was it like to be in this world, and how did it? And then we’ll take it from there, because there’s so much to unpack.

When I was eight years old, growing up in Toronto, my parents got divorced. By the time I was 10 years old, my mother, who was always like a spiritual seeker, found herself at the Kabbalah Centre. One of her friends had already started going there, and she was fascinated by it. She took us, along with my sister at the time, to the Kabbalah Centre. That was something I was very much immersed in from the age of 10, and they didn’t have classes for kids at the time. 

Sometimes I would sit in, I remember being 12, I think and sitting in on adult classes, learning I think astrology and learning all kinds of different things, Kabbalistic astrology and all kinds of different things and how much it fascinated me as a child to learn these like deep esoteric things that I was always curious about, but didn’t had the answers for. That’s what I grew up in. That’s basically the environment that I grew up in from a very young age.

You became a kind of prodigy, studied a lot, and became a teacher at an early age. What do you think it gave you, and what do you think it took away from you, to the extent that you took a completely different direction in your life?

Absolutely, that’s an excellent question because as I look back at those times and in retrospect I can identify that I was in a cult for 25 years and my relationship to it changes because when you first find out and you recognize that you’re in that kind of environment it feels like a betrayal and then there’s an identity loss and then there’s a healing that comes from it and in the healing process there’s also an understanding that everything is in black and white around everything. 

There’s like a mix. Even if the leaders’ intentions weren’t in the right place, there’s still a lot I took away from it. I would say that, at a very young age, when I was, I don’t know how to use the word, but I was an old soul. I was very deep, very emotional, very curious, and it met me with a lot of information that helped me see myself, and it also provided an environment where I could flourish because that depth, the mysticism, the personal development, these are things that I take with me to this day. 

I was able to flourish, grow, and hone my skills as a teacher and facilitator in that environment, and it gave me a lot. The other side of what it gave me is all the what-not-to-dos. What not to do when you’re in a place of power. How not to abuse your power. How not to take advantage of people by seeing them do the opposite of that. I can actually be at a point now where, instead of just saying, it was bad, or it was good, or it was a mix, I’m saying, “Well, these are all the lessons I learned from that phase in my life.”

Because right now, with what you do, you are definitely in positions of power where people look at you in the most vulnerable, intimate situation and one slip, and you can just completely devastate someone’s soul. It is a great power, great responsibility. 

Just like Spider-Man.  That’s a lot of Spider-Man. I’m teasing.

Just like Spider-Man. I learned everything from Spider-Man. Everything I know. How do you find out that you’re in a cult? Because when you’re a fish inside a fishbowl, you can’t see that. Like this is your world. What made you step out, or how are you capable of stepping out and seeing the signs that this is not how everybody else managed their lives, and that this is actually a cult?

It’s very difficult because, when you’re in it, different cults treat it differently. Some will actually prevent you from leaving a compound. That’s not how this was. But this organization was very discouraging about creating relationships of any type outside of the cult because it’s like, these people aren’t as highly conscious, and they’re going to pull you down. It was sort of this light manipulation around, you have everything you need here. 

Even when I dated, I only dated people there. The majority of my friends were from inside the cult and everything. Even my family was in there at the time. There were a few stages of leaving, basically. I joined when I was 10 with my mom. When I was 25, my mom had some type of awakening around it, and she decided to leave with my stepfather and now four younger siblings that I had. 

They all left at once when I was 25. By that point, my mom was in Los Angeles, I was living in Miami, I was teaching at the Kabbalah Center, I was also teaching at their children’s program, which was sort of like an offshoot that they were doing, and I felt very empowered in my work. My mom’s realization started like planting seeds in my head, but it wasn’t obvious.

But how do you realize that? Like, what do you see? What’s happening that you’re like, wait a minute, this isn’t because the teacher cheated? As you said, the teaching is amazing. The wisdom is amazing. It’s its ancient self-development. There is so much to it. I think everybody should like to learn this. But how did you see both the light and the darkness, where you’re like, actually programmed from a very young age to think that this is it? This is the world. This is it, or better than anybody else, and you shouldn’t leave because it’s not going to be good for you.

One of the things my mother told me, even though I wasn’t ready to leave yet, was just to be open to questions and ask God to show me the truth. It took me another 10 years after she left, but I was open to that question and started noticing a lot of things. I started noticing the discrepancy between what people preached and how they behaved. I noticed that people would try to cover up others’ behavior and explain it in spiritual terms, using all kinds of techniques to justify it. 

I also noticed many contradictions in the teachings. I also noticed that, and I think this is one of the biggest things: people, when they first came in the first year or two, saw huge changes in their lives. After it’s a plateau, people wouldn’t actually become happier or more successful. They would just live in the same patterns over and over. It’s like, “Here, let us give you some gifts as you come in. But now we use that to trap you inside.” I noticed those things. 

By the time I moved back from Miami to Los Angeles, I was closer to the headquarters, and I could see how things were being made in the kitchen. I was like, “Oh, this is actually quite bad.” I already knew it wasn’t good for a few years, but I wasn’t ready to leave because it was all I knew, and all my friends were there. I felt maybe I could help fix it from the inside. When I started making recommendations for fixing it from the inside, I faced significant resistance. 

When a person stops being challenged by others, they develop, even against their own will, the fallacy that they are perfect and can’t make mistakes, and they become incapable of taking in criticism because they’re not given enough of it.

It was either some resistance, like, “Who are you?” Or some people, some of the teachers there, who were like, you’re right, but there’s nothing we can do about it, so let’s just fit in. A lot of interesting things like that. The final few things that helped me leave were actually breaking some rules and experiencing things outside. Even before I left the Kabbalah Center, I got into the world of Tantra and began learning different pathways and types of spiritualities, and I recognized that there’s not just one source. That’s why I want you to learn other things, because then you’ll recognize there are other paths. I broke those rules first, went secretly, and studied other things. 

I recognized there were other ways to do the work I wanted to do, which helped me leave. In the end, what I needed was to walk the talk. It wasn’t enough. Like I felt so out of integrity, even though I tried to do everything in integrity while I was there, while I was teaching, while I was leading, while the things that I was doing, being a part of their system felt out of integrity for me because if like someone came in and they connected to me, but then they went on and got to take an advantage of somewhere else in that organization, I didn’t want to be a part of that anymore. 

Then the advantage was money, like trying to extort money from people. 

Mostly, mostly money. There were a few cases of teachers who had some sexual indiscretions as well. That wasn’t as prevalent, but it happened even among the higher-ups. But it was mostly taking advantage of people’s money, time, and energy. 

I’ve been studying with a lot of people. I’ve been traveling a lot, studying a lot, and sometimes when you get close to the top in many organizations, even like the best in the world, people who are like, ‘they are the best.’ When you come closer, you see corruption and things you don’t want to see, and it hurts. I learned to separate the guru from the method. Because in any organization, there will be some corruption, and people are people.  Some people are better than others at taking advantage of people or not. 

You’ve got to separate the guru from the method and just take what is good for you, and then be like sovereign, think for yourself, “Is this the right place for me?” Because the answers are in your heart, if you just stop for a second and are willing to look at your inner truth, you’ll see whether this is like you’ll see the red flags. It takes courage, awareness, and some maturity, especially for someone who grew up there; it’s like turning your back on your family. That’s super hard. To everything you knew since you were a child, to everything that you identify with. That’s so much courage.

I can definitely relate to that. I quickly learned that pattern because, when it got into the Tantra world, it’s far from immune to corruption. There’s actually so much corruption in the Tantra world. 

Absolutely. You hear a lot of stories.

Learn yourself. Be in tune with yourself. Be in tune with all of your different parts. Not just your mind. Be in tune with your body, with your desires, with your heart, and listen to them, and they will guide you down the right path.

It’s awful. What happens in a lot of those organizations? I started going to other personal development-type organizations, and I saw they had one form or another. You’re right, there’s no organization that I have found that’s really immune to it because there’s always gonna be people who take advantage of the power that they’re given. Especially when it’s in personal development, and you start seeing someone as like, “Wow, this person has such high consciousness,” then you stop challenging them because they must know better than me. 

When a person stops being challenged by others, they develop, even against their own will, the fallacy that they are perfect and can’t make mistakes, and they become incapable of taking in criticism because they’re not given enough of it. They become incapable of actually taking it in, and it’s like the organization will create the monster.

I heard somewhere that when people reach a very high level of spirituality, with a lot of light, they’re also capable of the same amount of darkness. They are the most vulnerable to turn to the other side. The more righteous, connected, and elevated you become, the more vulnerable you are. Also, you’re attracting those forces that will try to drag you into their side. What do you think about that?

Seen it again and again and again, and it’s something that’s always in the back of my mind, and I think like as I left the organization, it’s been about eight years now, more or less. I remember that for many of those years since then, I’ve been very resistant to building anything because I’ve been terrified that whatever I create is gonna corrupt me. I’ve just seen it happen over and over and over again. 

How do you shield yourself from that? Because you’re around lots of beautiful people and very vulnerable states, and you guys are having lots of fun together, and you’re basically like the king of the room. How do you hold that boundary? How do you take care of yourself and others and shield yourself and make sure that you’re not going to get lost in having so much power? Because the more you grow, the more power you’ll have and the more intention and awareness you’ll have to have.

Definitely certain things that I try to do. First of all, I try not to be the king of the room. At my events, I almost always have other people presenting; I don’t want to be the only person in front. In fact, I want to do that less and less, and I have been doing it less. I’ll welcome everyone and bring everyone in, then I’ll bring in other professionals, and I would say 80 to 90% of the time, I make sure those people are women as well.

Not that women are immune to corruption. I’ve definitely seen that as well, but to a lesser degree for the most part. Having more women in the container also creates a counterbalance. I bring in different experts. When I hold workshops, I try and bring other people, other voices to come speak as well. I don’t want to be the only person people look to; I build a team around me, as that’s one of the things I try to do. Another thing is just constantly doing my own work, being self-aware, and creating a system and a group around me to hold me accountable. 

I have a wonderful partner whom I see as even more brilliant and aware than I am; she’s my accountability partner. I also have friends around me who are accountability partners, and I have a team as well. I don’t think any of us can be immune to corruption, but we can try to stay constantly aware of the small ways it tries to creep in and create systems to counteract it. I think the most important thing is to think, “It’ll never happen to me.” One of the things I try to do most is constantly think about, like, ‘how it might happen to me and be aware of it.’

What do you do in your workshops? How do you even discover tantra? Why tantra? How do you go from Kabbalah to Tantra?

How that happened to me was twice in my life. Once when I was 25, and I was still living in Miami, there was someone at the Kabbalah Center, and he was an astrologer, and he would give me unsolicited advice based on my astrological chart, and he kept telling me that I needed to study tantra, and he gave me my first Taoist book by Mantak Chia, The Multi-Orgasmic Man, which I would read in secret without anybody knowing. 

Wow, hoping that you won’t be struck by lightning.

I wasn’t worried about the lightning; I was worried about people. What people would think if they were okay with me studying something like that, and it’s like, “Oh, that’s bad, you shouldn’t be looking at that, you shouldn’t be.” I did that in sort of a secret way, and I started becoming very curious about Tantra, but it always kept it on the back burner. I think it took me about seven years, or maybe 33, or maybe I don’t remember. 

Another person at the Kabbalah Center in LA, who read Akashic records, told me, “You are tracked where you are now in terms of your personal growth. You are not reaching your capacity.” And she goes, “And I don’t understand exactly what this message I’m getting is, but it’s something to do with sex.” From the moment she said that, I was like, “I know what I need to do.” I immediately signed up for a tantric massage course. 

It was like the deep end; it wasn’t like O-tantra 101 eye gazing; it was like jumping in the deep end, full body genital massage, the whole nine yards. I got there, and it was my first exposure to non-monogamy and my first exposure to energetic orgasms and my first exposure to semantics and a lot of different things that I didn’t understand yet at the time, and it blew everything wide open to me. That’s how I got into that world. I saw the shadow in that world very quickly as well. Instead of being a dedicated tantric, I just took what I thought made sense from it. A lot of the wisdom, like the ancient tantric wisdom, was very similar to Kabbalah for me. It’s just different vocabulary, but they’re saying the same thing. 

But it opened up the world for me of seeing personal transformation for me specifically, being the most powerful through the lens of sexuality and how I learned the most about myself through the exploration of my sexuality and it led from tantra to get into other practices around sexuality eventually into kink which became one of the strongest containers for me to learn about my sexuality and about myself as a person, about all the different parts that live inside of me. That sort of started me on that path.

That is so fascinating, and there is so much to unpack in everything you said. I don’t even know where to start. I have so many questions. What kind of transformation do you think happened to you? If you look at yourself, the guy from the teacher who taught strictly about Kabbalistic spirituality to who you are today, where is the transformation? What happened to you on a personal, emotional, and somatic level? How did it affect your relationship with your family?

Great question. I think one of the biggest transformations for me happened on the semantic level, because when I was at the Kabbalah Center, I was very masterful with my words and my understanding. Like, I learned to read Aramaic, and I was like, learning all these like ancient texts, and it was a very cerebral path for me. 

I can read Aramaic too. I haven’t done it in years.

I felt like I didn’t know it at the time, but there was a hypocrisy in what I was doing, because it was talking about light and energy and all those things. I never once felt energy in my body until that time I was on retreat. When I was actually on the receiving end of a bodywork at one point, I suddenly had this huge heart-opening, mind-opening, psychedelic experience, and I was like, “That’s God, that’s light, that’s energy.” I was like, “What have I been? I’ve been talking about this the whole time, and I never actually experienced it in almost 25 years.” The world of sexuality opened up a felt sense, an embodiment, and a somatic experiencing of things that I understood on a cerebral level. 

It brought me back to that same Akashic Records reader who told me I was at three-fifths of my capacity, but that two-fifths weren’t being explored. When I was at that tantric retreat, we learned about the five bodies, that there’s a spiritual, a mental, and emotional body, all of which I felt very masterful at, but then there’s the energetic and the physical body that I was like, not when Kabbalah’s like restriction, don’t eat, don’t sleep, don’t ejaculate, like all these like rules around like resisting the body. 

Tantra was like, “Oh no, use the body to explore spiritually and use your energy.” Those two worlds of the energetic and the body, I wasn’t touching that at all. The biggest transformation that I’ve had through Tantra and later through Kink, I think, in some ways on a deeper level, was an exploration, somatic and an energetic exploration that helped me be more holistic with everything that I teach.

Would you recommend everyone study Tantra?

What the physical reality and the physical body do is help us differentiate God’s experiences separately.

I don’t like to recommend particular pathways to anybody, but there’s something you said earlier that I really resonate with: learn yourself. Be in tune with yourself. Be in tune with all of your different parts. Not just your mind. Be in tune with your body, with your desires, with your heart, and listen to them, and they will guide you down the right path. Tantra is one way to explore, but you can do breath work, you can do meditation, you can do. There are all kinds of body work that can release these things. There are many ways to explore those worlds. Tantra might be right for some people. Some people don’t do it as much. Kink could be the way to explore it as well. 

A lot of the time, Tantra teachers look at kink, and they’re like, “Oh no, this is the bad part of sexuality.” They don’t admit it, but they shy from it. How did you go there? How did you go there from Tantra all of a sudden? What brought you there?

What I felt a lot in the world of Tantra was this shadow side, which is spiritual bypassing a lot of things.

Love and light all the time. Too much love and light.

I think all that stuff is great, and it’s necessary. I also don’t think it’s authentic to the true tantra. It’s all like, that’s Neel tantra, the authentic tantra, the ancient tantra, that it’s the esoteric side of Hinduism and actually has a lot of the shadow work inside of it. But the modern tantric practices really sort of like skate over that. 

What kind of shadow work do they have in the old Chantra?

Well, mostly around the exploration of the self, and there’s a lot of understanding of who you really are. Even in the Bhagavad Gita. There’s, if you look at the story of Arjuna and his conversation with Krishna and Krishna’s challenging him, “Who do you think you are? You think you’re Arjuna, who are you really? You’re Atman, you are God.” There’s this thing inside of you, and he thinks, “I can’t fight in the war because I’m not supposed to be fighting.” 

He challenges him on thinking that that’s not part of reality as well. I think that the Bhagavad Gita is a wonderful work of shadow work. People tell it, tell that story, but then they go into the tantra, and it’s all like eye-gazing and love and seeing, seeing God, but God is multifaceted. You have the destroyer, you have the creator, you have Kali, who’s just like all of these things are different aspects.

If you just read the Psalms of Tehillim, you will find many references to God as an angry figure. Do you think God is everything? Well, God is everything, but does God really have emotions like we humans?

The question is, what do you think of as God?

That’s a big question. I don’t think I think God, I think I experience God, just like you did in a certain situation. I don’t think God is an idea, but it’s more of an experience. It’s just the way people talk about it in our limited language; we personify. Giving God a persona.

We think that we experience God only in our like highest orgasms and most spiritual states, but when you’re angry, that’s an experience of God as well. You can’t have a divine experience. All we have is a divine experience.

That’s really beautiful. I always just I loved what you said.

We’re just having it. We’re just having it in the frame of a physical body, and what the physical reality and the physical body do is help us differentiate the experiences of God separately, one by one. Whereas in the other reality, the spiritual reality, when we’re not in our bodies anymore, the soul reality, we just experience it all together as one big mush. It just becomes this like, “Wow, overwhelming feeling, and we think that’s God, that is God.” But when you take that, like imagine a white light, and you put it through the prism, then you can have each of the flavors on its own. That’s what this reality is. There is no experience that isn’t divine. But experiencing the entire divine together is reserved for outside the physical reality, and we can get glimpses of it here. We can get tastes of it, but we like to have it sustained. 

That’s okay. That’ll happen. That’s like after we die, we’re going back there. That’s my feeling anyway, so we can taste it in a deep meditation. You can have like glimpses of it in an orgasmic state, but that’s to sort of give us a reference of like, “Hey, that’s available to you there, but in this world, we gotta have each thing on its own.” Like, if you went to an ice cream store and you said, “Just mix up all the flavors for me,” and that’s the only flavor you get to eat all the time, that’s what they all get boring. This reality we gotta taste. You gotta give me one color at a time, give me one flavor at a time. Let me experience each of them individually. I think that’s what this reality is. 

When you draw your attention to what’s going on with you and become consciously aware of the situation, your relationship to it changes.

When you go through life, Sagi, when you experience God as anger, rage, you’re still like, “Okay, this is a part of the divine plan, divinity, a part of God.” How do you handle that? How do you find release? How do you tap into an elevated state in relation to hardship?

I think that the answer to all of that comes down to awareness. The idea that we’re experiencing divine states all the time, and that’s all we experience, I believe that’s true, but what we experience as suffering is the lack of awareness around the fact that we are experiencing a divine state. When you draw the fact, when you draw your attention to what’s going on to you, when you become consciously aware of the situation, it changes your relationship to it. 

You can be angry, but feel the power in it and the benefit. And that’s what parts work is. That’s what internal family systems, IFS, is about. It’s like looking at each part of you and seeing how it belongs to a part of the self, and they’re all valid. That’s why I like the because when you get into kink, and you do a scene, whether you’re the dominant or you’re the submissive, you’re playing a role, and that role is one facet of you, and you’re giving permission for that part of you to be expressed all the way. 

I can be a victim in this experience right now, and I’m allowed to be a victim for the next hour and a half and be fully expressed in it, or I’m allowed to be cruel, or I’m allowed to be caring, or I’m allowed to be a brat. Like I can be fully expressed in any one part of me, and that part gets to be very alive, and then I finish that, and I recognize that’s just one part of who I am. That doesn’t defy my entire identity. When I’m angry, so when I feel angry, but I’m not an angry person, I’m a person who sometimes experiences anger. I sometimes experience jealousy. I’m a person who sometimes experiences joy, but I don’t get identified with any one of those things. They’re all just parts of me.

What was your first kink experience, and how did it affect you?

The first couple of kink experiences I had were being on the receiving end, so I’m more in the submissive role, and they were both impact play, which means that I was being either spanked or flogged or whipped. When you think about those things, you think that, well, that’s really painful. Most of our lives, we look to avoid pain. But in that experience, you’re choosing pain. What happens when you choose pain, because pain is inevitable, what happens when you choose pain is that it stops becoming suffering, and it can start becoming pleasurable. 

That’s what I learned from those experiences: that something that looked painful turned out to be extremely pleasurable. That doesn’t make sense. You come out of that, and you’re like, “Wow, is all pain like that? Is it all about my relationship to it? Is it possible that other painful things in my life can actually turn pleasurable instead of being suffering because I am surrendering to the experience instead of resisting the experience?” That changes everything. That’s what I noticed. When I have painful emotions and resist them, they persist. When I surrender to them, they pass. 

What happens when you choose pain is that it stops becoming suffering, and it can start becoming pleasurable.

How do you get into a place of surrender in your life or in the bedroom?

Think there are a lot of facets to it. Part of it is somatic. For me, a practice of surrender is connecting to my breath and taking deep, slow breaths. In my exhale, I’m not looking to push out anything. I’m just breathing beside the experience that’s happening. I’m not trying to get rid of my feeling in the exhale. I’m just breathing and noticing as things move through me at their own pace. Another thing is to unclench my muscles. When you’re tight, you resist. 

You just loosen the muscles. You notice your jaw; you loosen your jaw. You notice your hips, you loosen your hips, your neck. With loose muscles and a deep breath, I can almost always bring myself to a state of surrender. Surrender requires trust. That’s how I create that system inside of myself. When it’s done in tandem with someone else, with a dominant and a submissive, the dominant needs to create a sense of safety and trust for the submissive to melt into that experience. 

The same in the kink world, too, there are people who do it in a very beautiful way that actually can bring enlightenment, like true enlightenment. People get into like super high vibration spaces from what looks like a very painful experience. But there are also people who abuse their power. It’s like it’s the same in every freaking world, in every freaking thing.

You always have to go back to the self and do that. I love that breathing exercise you just shared, which is without forcing; you just get present, and when you get present, you get intentional, and then you’re able to surrender. But especially for women, they are more vulnerable as you know from, than men. A lot of us have been through some painful things. How do you help a female body surrender?

It starts with a recognition that this world is built on power dynamics. Can’t get unavoidable. There are people who are dominant, and there are people who are submissive, which means or subjugated. The reason I’m using subjugated in this sense instead of submissive is that the power dynamics that we live in this world are non-consensual. People with more money have more power than those with less. 

People from certain backgrounds have more power than people from other backgrounds. In some countries where you’re born, you’ll have more power than in others. In some countries where you’re born, you’ll have less power. All of these things exist. If you’re a man, you have more power than a woman in this world. There’s an acknowledgement of that. Like you can’t ignore that. The first way is to draw attention to the power dynamic that exists and acknowledge it. 

The power dynamics in this world are non-consensual. People with more money have more power than those with less.

If we can acknowledge what is, and we can both choose to step into a blank slate of, “Okay, we acknowledge the inherent power dynamics.” Now, which power dynamic do we want to choose? That can build trust. Trust usually happens by starting small and working your way up. Think about doing the trust fall. They do these exercises, the trust fall, where you fall back, and someone catches you. You start on the ground, and you put some mattresses down.

I just remember all the times I saw people doing that, and just like nobody’s there to hold them. It’s kind of funny.

That’s exactly it. If there’s nobody there to hold you, and that’s your experience in life, you’re not going to trust. You start small, you do a small trust fall, and you do a trust fall from a chair, and you work your way up. The same with the scene: start small. ‘What is our first scene going to be?’ Let’s do something very simple. Now, let’s not go too intense. Tie up some rope, do some light impact, maybe some just following commands, listening and attuning to each other’s voices. ‘Can you just trust me and follow me in small ways?’ Maybe just follow around, maybe just notice my voice like practicing the attunement.

Works first, and when there’s attunement, and that trust is built, you can go deeper and deeper and deeper, so I think that there is even in the Tantra world, like with Yoni massage, I’ve seen there’s some people that do it in a way that’s like break, we’ve got to break through and it’s like this like extreme thing and they have to have this big catharsis.

That is so stressful just thinking about it. Like you have to do that.

That’s right. It’s like the path of instead of taking a jackhammer to break the rock, it can just drip water on it and slowly dissolve it. 

I like that. Going back to water, you love water. 

I love water.

Some people talk about sex magic and manifesting through magic. I know that, in general, when I manifest things in my life, it’s through surrender, which is one of the things that is still challenging for me, even though I can teach people how to surrender. I really want to control this. How do you manifest through surrendering? Like, how do you manifest through sexuality?

I mean, sex magic is a Celtic practice, but there’s a very similar practice in tantra. That’s actually the whole tantric practice is all about how to harness your sexual energy in order to create things in your life.

That’s a better definition than sex magic. I like that. How do you do that?

When you apply consciousness to energy, it creates something from that consciousness. Because energy by itself is potential, it can go in any direction.

First, understand that sexual energy is creative energy. It takes sexual energy to create a new life. That’s how we literally create a new life is through sex. Understanding that, every new thing you want to create has both of these parts in tantra. They call it the masculine and the feminine. Feminine is energy, and masculine is consciousness. When you apply consciousness to energy, it creates something from that consciousness. Because energy by itself is potential, it can go in any direction. 

Consciousness is intention, and it directs it into one place. When you use the masculine intention in consciousness to direct the energy, it creates a very specific outcome. That’s the theory in Tantra. If you’re only putting your intention in just your mind in the upper three chakras, and you have only intention, there’s not a lot of energy there, it’s not going to be so powerful. Now, if you have just energy and you have no intention, your creation will be random and chaotic. But if you can work together the lower chakras and the upper chakras and direct them, then you can create things in your life. 

That’s why in Tantra, we harness sexual energy to create. We’re basically moving the energy from the root chakra, which is in the genitals, upwards through the navel, which is our will center, through our heart, so that we can color everything with unconditional love, and it gets expressed through the throat chakra outwards. That’s what sex magic is. That throat chakra is also influenced by the crown, which is the divine energy, and the third eye, which is our ability to see and our intuition, and to direct the energy as well. The chakras, from the bottom working upwards and the top working downwards, create our reality from a tantric perspective. 

Also, from the scientific perspective, there’s the famous two slit experiment, which was like, when they say that energy exists in a particle and they say energy exists in a wave, and the physicists are like, “Well, is it a particle or is it a wave?” What we learned from that experiment is that when there’s no observer, energy behaves as a wave, meaning it’s present everywhere along the wave at the same time. But when it’s observed, it collapses. The wave collapses to a particle that could be any point along the wave, but it depends on the observation of it. 

Listen to the subtle voices of your desires and learn to distinguish them from all the shoulds, have to, coulds, and the rules of the world around you to be in tune with what your heart really wants.

That’s sort of the way that I think it, that the wave is energy. The observer is the masculine. That’s the intention. By setting your intention on the potential energy, you collapse it to a certain point, and you create that particular reality along the wave, not sex magic in a way. Why sex magic? Because using your sexual energy is like a turbo boost to make all that happen in a more powerful way. You harness that energy creation.

How do you do it? Do you get to a point of almost orgasm, and then you put in tension?

There are many ways to do it. The way I’ve seen it practiced a lot is that you create an intention ahead of time, and some people do it by creating a sigil or image. You can even just keep a felt sense of it in your mind. I like to think of it like a slide. You have a slide, and when you project it, you can see the full image. You create the slide. You have a slide of this reality in your mind. That slide should not only contain the tangible aspects of what you want, but it should convey the feeling that you’re going to have when you get there. That’s even more important.

What’s the fault sense, what’s the embodiment of it? When that slide becomes very clear, then you introduce it into the sex magic, which is, ‘yes,’ you start with your sexual energy that’s in your genitals, but you start helping that move throughout your body, move it upward, upward, upward throughout your body. That’s where the tantric practice comes in, and looped breathing and all kinds of things you can do to move that energy upwards. When you get close to orgasm, you bring that slide back in, and you shine that light from your projector now, the sexual light from your projector, through that slide, and it then displays that across the universe. Now you’ve got this slide projected with a powerful light across the universe, and then it’s just about being patient for the universe to catch up to that slide.

Have you done it?

I’ve done it a few times, yes.

What did you get?

For me, I usually create my slides by asking myself a powerful question and noticing the answer that emerges. Two big questions that I’ve asked myself to change. One was right after I left the Kabbalah Center, and actually, it was even like a year after that. I was hustling to build my business, and everything felt like a lot of work. I had adrenal fatigue, crashed and everything, and I just started asking myself a question: ‘How can I live my life so that I always feel like I’m on vacation? What was the answer to that?’ 

This felt sense, this experience, I held onto that. It took a couple of years of holding onto that, and then suddenly, I was in a place where my life felt like a vacation. I noticed that I had a job as a contractor, training people, and I only had to work 6 days a month, 9 months out of the year, and I paid all my bills. Suddenly, I was like, “I’m living my life like I’m on vacation right now.” But then something didn’t feel right. 

Look for the next thing to do, the next place to grow, instead of pausing to feel gratitude and appreciation for how far I’ve come, what I’ve already created, and what I already have.

Like I was like, that doesn’t feel full for me. So the next question I asked myself is, “How do I live my life so I feel like my heart’s on fire, like I’m passionate about what I do?” It took about a year and a half of holding on to that, and I let go of that job, and that’s how I ended up where I am today, doing exactly what I want. I created something of my own, and not just a really good tool for someone else’s creation. Like now I’ve got my own thing. I hold that question with me and remain patient with the process.

You can’t have a tight grip on it, that’s the other thing. Like if you grip the soap too tightly, it slips out of your hand. You’ve got to hold your image and hold that vision, but you can’t be too attached to it, or you rob it of its potential. That’s why I don’t look at the specifics. You look at the general feeling you want to have and allow the universe to fill in the rest, because it knows better than you, because it sees more than you do. From your limited vision, step into a reality that’s bigger than what you want because you’re not capable of even holding that. That’s why you’ve got to be loose with it and let it stretch you out and catch you up to it.

I love it. A lot of people say this or better. I would like this, this, or better. Because we don’t know. Don’t know what we don’t know. There are so many timelines, so much potential along that wave. We cannot even fathom it. What are your three top tips to live a stellar life?

Three top tips for living a stellar life. Three of them. One of them will be to follow your heart. What that means is to listen to the subtle voices of your desires and learn to distinguish them from all the shoulds, have to, coulds, and the rules of the world around you. To be in tune with what your heart really wants. That’s by quieting the other voices. You can’t turn that volume up, unfortunately, but if you quiet all the other voices, then you can hear your heart better. The next step is to actually take action on it. You can’t just listen to it. When you take action on the voices that come from your heart and your soul, they start speaking louder, because over the years, we’ve told them to be quieter. That we can listen to the outside voices. Now we’re gonna do the opposite. You tell the outside voices to be quieter so we can listen to the inside voices, and we slowly build trust with them so they can speak to us more. That’s number one.

Number two is gratitude. This has been a recent lesson I actually struggle with a lot, especially gratitude towards myself and the things around me. As someone who does personal development, it’s been so easy to look for the next thing to do, the next place to grow, instead of pausing to feel gratitude and appreciation for how far I’ve come, what I’ve already created, and what I already have. I think that gratitude is really important, and that’s one thing that I’m personally working on right now, so that’s two. 

Accept everything—it doesn’t mean you cling to it; you don’t own it, but accept it as it comes and as it goes. Life is moving through us from the beginning to the end.

Three, I think it is the surrender-and-lack-of-resistance thing we talked about. That to me is the other side of the coin of radical self-love and self-acceptance. It’s acceptable; accept everything. Accept it doesn’t mean you cling to it; you don’t own it, but accept it as it comes and as it goes. Life is moving through us from the beginning to the end. We have a start point, there’s an end point, and it’s inevitable. We’re either going to fight it every step along the way, and it’s going to feel like suffering, or we’re going to accept and love it every step of the way, and then it becomes joyful.

Yes, absolutely. I love it. Where can people find you, attend your workshops, or contact you?

Absolutely. There are many ways to work with me. I work one-on-one. I do a lot of work with couples. It’s some of them, most of the work that I do helps to build polarity and teach them about kink and using those practices to both spice up their bedroom life, but also to change the way they show up in the world. I also do workshops and bigger events. Can find me if you want, as long as you spell my name right. I am the only Yossef Sagi in the world that I know of, spelled in this way. On Instagram, Yossef Sagi, yossefsagi.com. Those are the two best ways to find me.

Thank you, Yossef. That was so wonderful and fascinating. I just feel like we touched the tip of the iceberg. There is so much. I just really enjoyed our conversation. Thank you so much for being here, for finding your purpose, for sharing that with the world, and for taking action. Thank you so much.

Thank you, it’s been an absolute pleasure. I appreciate you, and I really love this time.

Thank you. And thank you, listeners. Remember to follow your heart and your desire by quieting the other voices. Take action on whatever you heard from that voice. Have gratitude for yourself and others here and now. Surrender with radical self-love and acceptance and have a stellar life. This is Orion. Till next time.