Hello everyone and welcome to the Sex, Love and SuperPowers podcast show. I am your host, Tatiana Berindei, and I am so deeply delighted and honored to have with us today, Ms Penny Slinger. We are going to be discussing sexuality, aging, and art, but let me tell you a little bit about her before we dive into our conversation. Penny Slinger, born 1947 in Britain, is an Artist and Author, now based in California. As a collage artist, she has worked in different mediums including photography, film and sculpture. Described as being in the genre of feminist surrealism, her work explores the nature of the self, the feminine and the erotic.
Penny published three books of photo collage, 50% The Visible Woman, An Exorcism and Mountain Ecstasy, as well as The Groundbreaking Sexual Secrets, The Alchemy of Ecstasy in 1979. She published the Secret Dakini Oracle in the late seventies and more recently completed the 64 Dakini Oracle, presenting divine feminine archetypes. She is currently working on a new art series, presenting herself as her own muse and confronting ageism. So please give a warm welcome to Ms Penny Slinger, I thank you so much for being with us here today.
Thank you for having me.
Yes, it’s a delight and an honor. So before we dive into our topic, will you please tell our listeners what your superpowers are?
What an interesting question. No one’s asked me that directly before. I would say across the board, I can give you a couple. One, on a more worldly level, I think I have the ability to turn a detriment into an asset. So that I can take examples of having a list from a young age and being scared of speaking publicly to being now in this position where I share my thoughts and wisdom where I can. And that’s one example of that and it’s shown up in many different ways.
And then another superpower, which I guess where I would say is my top superpower, is that I feel very blessed to have direct access to the divine, to the goddess, to whatever name one wants to give on that, which is greater and bigger than us, but which flows through us. So that blessing is something which I have never taken lightly or for granted, but I have definitely cultivated with many exercises to put my own limited ego out of the way and to let something else come through me and speak through me, which wants to be heard. So I guess you could say those two are top of the list, apart from the blessing of the gift of art.
Yeah. Well, I mean I would say the blessing of the gift of art is very closely related to that. The last superpower that you were talking about, right? I mean, really true art, that’s how the art flows through, right? It’s from that divine inspiration of the mind source.
Absolutely. But then over a lifetime of working with that one takes that gift and makes it into many things due to one’s own application to learn the different crafts and to find out how to manifest and to express those things. So luckily I’ve had gifts in both the reception and the ability to translate that into meaningful artistic language.
So, originally I reached out to you because of the book, The Sexual Secrets, The Alchemy of Ecstasy, which I think it’s celebrating its 50th anniversary. Is that true? I saw something.
Probably is. Right, it is.
Coming out with all color prints and everything. That book, I have to tell you, that book totally shaped my life in an incredibly powerful way. Like I was saying before we got on the recording, I don’t think I would have this show without that book. I definitely wouldn’t have a lot of the experiences that I’ve had in my life without that book. I was very blessed and fortunate to find that book when I was a teenager. So I was 16 when I first discovered Sexual Secrets. And you know, I was talking with my husband today, he shared an article with me about sort of the culture of boys in the U.S. Today and misogyny and all of that. And we were talking about where one goes to learn about sex when you’re a young inquisitive person, right.
And we have this really sort of toxic culture around that nowadays. There’s a lot of nuances, a lot of dynamics and, and a lot of people, not just young people, but a lot of people in general, I think they turn to pornography to learn about sex because it’s really like the only place that you can go to or one of the very few places that you can go to observe people in the sexual act and maybe learn a little bit of what to do with the body of the opposite sex. And while definitely, I went through some of that phase myself in my teenage years, your book gave me an alternative. It gave me something different to be able to study, to observe and to learn from that was not pornography. And for that, I’m forever indebted to you and yeah, I just want to say I publicly, I wanted to thank you for that.
Oh, well thank you for saying that. That is the best feedback I can have. In fact, when people over the years have come to me, especially young people who’d say to me, my first exposure to sexuality was through your book that my parents had the book in their library and I found it and I was able to read it. And this for me is like, why I did it, because you talk about people turn into pornography now in order to learn about sex. Well, when I was growing up, you could hardly even turn to that because there wasn’t the availability of pornography that there is today. There was very little available in the field of eroticism that you could find out anything about. So it was all like a kind of closely guarded secret. And then nice girls didn’t really have much to do with sex.
It was even shockingly as it may seem now, the kind of prevalent belief amongst women that women didn’t really enjoy sex and that there was something they just did to please their husbands, it was like a sacrifice they made. And as I started looking at all this and feeling my own burgeoning desires and body sensations and everything, I thought, this doesn’t seem right. I can’t believe that this would be how people approach this. And my early experiences of spirituality was through whatever systems that we had available really in the West, so Church of England, Catholicism, all those things. And I would get devastated at a young age to find that there was no way where my spiritual aspirations and my sexual intonations came together. They were on opposite sides of this fence of denial and shame and guilt and all of these things. And this felt always intuitively, so wrong to me.
And I thought, there has to be another way, there has to be something else. So when I discovered tantra, and first of all, through this exhibition of tantric art, which with on in London at the Haywood Gallery, in the early 70s. I walked into that and as a young feminist surrealist, I saw all these images that seem so familiar. And yet they were talking, not just the language of the subconscious, but the language of the super conscious. The superpowers in fact of the divine. And when I saw that there was a spiritual path which had a whole tradition which was acknowledged and recognized that was sex positive and included rather than excluded sexuality as it in fact included everything of who we are and what we think, what we feel, what we do with our lives. All of this being part of our sacred path. And it was one we’ve, tantra means to weave and to expand, so you could expand your whole sense of self and your whole way of living into including everything as part of your path.
And one that was not denial but embracing. And for me it was such a revelation and it was so exciting to find this and finally I had a real touchstone in life. And when I met who became my partner for 20 years, Nick Douglas, who was the most knowledgeable westerner I could find that that time in the field of tantra and who really knew it, not from book knowledge but from direct experience and studied languages and the tradition for many years, he was able to be this amazing reflection for me in the knowledge that he had of the field. So that when I could present and experience that I’d had, that was just very personal and in my own realm of experience. And yet it seemed there were no ways to reflect back anywhere in a traditional society. He has stunned me with a whole body of knowledge based on direct experience that could be a reflection for me in this very true way.
So when I found that, I just wanted to share it because I said this has meant so much to me. Think how much it can do for other people. Think of a culture that we have now, what we had then was something where really sacred sexuality wasn’t even a concept. It wasn’t something people even thought about or knew about generally in the Western world. And so that’s what spurred me to want to create Sexual Secrets so that this information could be shared and people could be given something that they could relate to from their own feelings and from what felt right and true without having to go through some other kind of filters which dumbed it all down and put it into some kind of box or other. Here was something that would be very living, very vital, a living tradition, which allowed you to be a full experience of all your senses and all your spirit in one package. And in fact, when, go ahead. Yes please.
Well, I was just going to say, I hate to cut you off but we do have to go to a quick break and I just want to say again thank you for following that divine guidance and that inspiration because like I said, this show wouldn’t exist. I think a lot of our… I mean that book was groundbreaking for the whole culture of bringing that sacred sexuality to the West.
Oh, thank you.
So we honor you and we acknowledge you and we are going to go to a quick break. Before we go, will you tell our listeners where they can go to find out more about you and the work that you’re doing now?
My site for my artwork is pennyslinger.com and then the other site which probably would be relevant is 64, with the numerals, 64dakinioracle.org where I have my 64 Dakini Oracle system where you can consult with the images of the divine feminine directly and get a reading for yourself.
Ooh, exciting. I want to check that out. So we are talking with Penny Slinger about sexuality, aging, and art. We’re going to have a lot more conversation when we get back, so stay tuned. This is a really special one you don’t want to miss.
To listen to the entire show click on the player above or go to the SuperPower Up! podcast on iTunes.
Music Credit: All instruments played by Amanda Turk. Engineered and produced by Tatiana Berindei and Daniel Plane reelcello.com
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