 I just arrived not long ago, so pardon me if you already spoke about this, but this last conversation just got me really emotional because I was born and raised in India, and then you know it took me leaving this culture to feel empowered to embrace my exploration with sexuality in a way that now I can come back and stand strong when it is challenged and when you know I still notice there's quite a bit of like women have a specific role that is assumed that it is not to be sexual and I'm curious what you know on your journey and your teachings what are you noticing has shifted in the last 10, 15 years maybe in India in a way that can be a route for women to feel empowered to also show up for their sexuality in a way that you know is removed from shaming and also kind of heal our ancestors in a way with that with our exploration of it. Well the Tasneem is your name right? So it's very interesting you know India is not India, India is a collection of many many many different societies so we can't at all speak about an India and I'll tell you what I mean quite so I grew up in Bombay for example and I thought that was India and that entire morality that middle-class morality that governs a city like Bombay with its imported Victorian morality and its imported American morality and its imported European principles of humanism had created a little India in Bombay which had nothing to do with the India that is otherwise around when we grew up and and and even today how it goes there's a lot of that very rigid morality about how women should be sexually how they should not desire how they should and so on also projected in the films that come out of Mumbai and which are actually shown in many parts of the world but then if you just drive out of Mumbai for an hour and a half even or two hours you land up in a village where the women have been for centuries very free in their in their expression of sexuality and not at all dumped on by all that shame and being ashamed and all of that stuff which you encounter in the cities of this country so the sexuality of the women in rural Bihar is a much freer sexuality than the sexuality of the women in New York City so we have many indias that we're talking about here and in the in the history of this subcontinent we've had a very open discussion about sexuality with the with the Kamasutra with the Anangaranga with all these treatises on sex and sexuality and very interestingly in rural India youngsters have systems by which they are taught sexuality one of my students comes from a village in Maharashtra and he told me that in his village the older women have sex with the younger boys shortly before they get married and show them how to have sex would you even imagine that in Bombay or in Delhi in Calcutta or in Madras it's happening all over the country and there's a huge freedom actually which we don't know about because it is not trumpet it it's like with everything in a culture which is as ancient as this one and where human beings have learned to live with each other in groups and quite successfully there are many layers of what is revealed in and within a group of people so there's a lot of freedom going on it's simply not spoken about and I can give you many many examples of that kind of freedom in rural India so we're talking actually about our inheritance from the west from Victorian England from the 50s onward America from Europe for the last few hundred years it's an inheritance we are dealing with rather than what is actually inherent to this subcontinent in the area of sexuality so the morals and all of that subjugation and suppression of women has arisen more out of that than out of anything else and also as a response to the Islamic invasions of India certainly and you if I hear your name you're Islamic in origin so you would have had to face perhaps more of that oppression than let's say a Hindu woman in the same area where you grew up you know so you have that one extra layer or more than one extra layer of Burqa to deal with you know what I mean which is not something very pleasant of course one has to boil all this down to one's own experience we are in a satsang here so we are seekers of the truth and the truth is an individual experience it's not a question of how society looks at it rather how do you look at it how are you going to now live your truth and the way to live your truth is to first be aware of its presence within however subtle your Islamic inheritance is it still has not ingrained you with the idea of a divine within if you want to deal with your sexuality and if you want to actually live it in a way which is which is which feels solid and right for you then you would have to discover love within and how do you discover love within by finding it by by piercing through that that wall of guilt and shame and fear and anger and all of those things that have been inbuilt into your programming and inherited through your religious background as well and you go into surrender into surrender into ask the soul the soul I want to find you I want to find you go go go and at one point you start to actually experience the living presence within as something to surrender to and that thing impulses you in all the moments of your life from moment to moment how to live and deal with what is happening around you because that sexuality is what of course in a case of someone like you who has had to suffer that much in that area it is something that is defining to be able to live it in a truth state you know what I mean so that is where you're going to have to go look and go find but because of the inheritance it is challenging it's fullness and it's here and it's divine I feel like I feel it and I have explored I'm a country teacher now I feel like I've explored it to that point of feeling the divine within and there's still so many layers now that I'm back here there's like so much fear and so much uh courting with the elders because they're such an integral part of our culture it's like two separate parts of me there and I think on this journey I'm here to integrate you will integrate everything if you live in the truth because the truth is so powerful that nothing which is false can stand before it so if you have elders in the family if you are really tuned in and very very clear and very coherent and solid then you are able to stand up before them in humility with compassion and yet with clarity and they will not mess even if they are strictly Islamic because the truth is felt by everyone you know even religion feels the truth so be fearless bend down go inward that is where your answers are and that is where your strength also arises and stand in front of them quiet surrendered inward and don't try to defend anything you don't have to defend the truth it's quite capable of defending itself