Emma is one of our featured speakers for the True Spirituality Summit, which was held in July 2023, and which is still available for free. She is a yoga teacher, a medium, a tantra teacher and a sexologist. Emma was raised a Catholic, and nearly became a nun, but she felt the need to depart from that religious tradition, due to the wars and deaths that had been waged in its name. It broke her faith, but also clashed with her values.
She feels that yoga has replaced the sanctity of mass, so she feels no grief.
As a young person, she remembers having had a book about auras and energy, that she borrowed from the library, and did the instructions on her hand and saw the energy. It resonated so much. But because she did not have the space to discuss this with her family, she slammed the book shut and took it back to the library. She had to wait until her first born baby turned four months old for that to come back.
Emma studied anatomy because she wanted to be a doctor, then psychology. But she could not get work because she learnt was not applied knowledge. She managed a youth centre, which highlighted how much trauma some people have.
After her first baby, she trained in yoga because she did not want to work a nine to five. Then after her second child, she started coaching but also mediumship. Then in 2016, she started a dark night of the soul period and she came across the book Pussy, a Reclamation by Regina Thomashauer, and it was like a revelation. She realised that pleasure was the missing link in her work. She also realised how much shame she carried about enjoying sex with her husband, and she decided she wasn’t going to put up with it anymore. She embraced Burlesque and somehow tantra also made it into her world.
People have a very limited view of what tantra really is but I can’t blame them because if you do an internet search, all you are going to find is the sex aspect of it. But it’s a bit like if you were searching for a recipe on google and all it came up with was spaghetti bolognese. Tantra is 6,000 years old and in a way, it has suffered in similar ways to yoga when it was brought to the West. Tantra is the way of the heart through the body. Tantra can be practised alone, but also with our friends and our children, because there is a social aspect of tantra that is about connection and presence. Pleasure can be something purely hedonistic, or it can be mindful and intuitive. We have a bath for self-care, or we can take it to the enxt level and have a bath because it feels good, and it’s a mindful and intuitive action; it;s the cream on top: pleasure.
To bring pleasure into consensual sexual intercourse, women, in particular, have to bring self knowledge and have the courage to voice what they need and what they want. But that can come with guilt and feeling selfish. And intimacy can only happen if we have the courage to be vulnerable.
I also asked Emma if she experienced sexual intercourse as a spiritual experience and I will let you listen to the show to hear what she shared about this. You can find Emma on Instagram and Facebook. Her website is www.emma-mccann.com.
To listen to the episode, click here.