#SPOTLIGHT ON RASHIDA KHANBEY
Rashida KhanBey is the creator of Woman Untamed, a safe space dedicated to helping women drop their inhibitions in bed, love and life.
Can you talk about the evolution from Sex Is A God Thing to Let Go and Let God?
SIAGT was truly the beginning of me pushing my own boundaries to talk about sexuality + spirituality in the same space, without apology or a need to hold back. I’ve been teaching around the subjects of eroticism and sensuality (primarily using erotic dance) for almost eight years now and I wanted to find a strong way to link the conversation back to our spiritual lives. Sex + Spirit go hand and hand and quite honestly one doesn’t have depth without the other. Not depth in the sense of ‘sex is so sacred it’s untouchable or only reserved for certain people or experiences. It’s more about taking the shackles off of the way we look at, talk about and have sex from a place of being spiritually grounded and nourished when we enter that personal and sacred sanctuary of our bedrooms with our chosen lover(s). It’s about having sex and living sensually in a way that heals our bodies, our hearts and relationships.
Over the last few years in teaching what I noticed is that I had a lot of women coming to me for help in ‘letting go’ in the bedroom. They wanted to feel more confident in their bodies, more willing to take big risks and just go there but something was holding them back. What I noticed is that the women would get to a certain point in the dancing where they hit a barrier and then suddenly the movement just fell back to the surface and non-orgasmic. When we paused to unpack the big obstacle present, almost always there was another sole issue lying underneath the surface that needed to be addressed before we go any further with the movement.
I knew that this obstacle being present was just another way of the Universe grabbing my attention so that I would do the work that I was sent here to do. I know that work now to be teaching women how to lead lives in the intersection between their spiritual + erotic self - calling us home to a place where we viscerally live life in the body vs. giving way to numbness.
Let Go and Let God comes into the picture at this same point many women face in my programs. It’s that point where you have to face the issue head on before you can get to that next level of breakthrough. The obstacle or barrier that they would hit in their movement was a reflection on the hidden pain, trauma, resentment,anger etc that they were refusing to acknowledge and release. So before we can go on having the toe curling sex and breathtaking love experiences that we desire in our lives, we have to surrender in order to experience that new level of pleasure and ecstasy with our beloved(s).
How has Woman Untamed influenced your artistic development and overall creative process?
Gosh, It’s my launchpad. Seriously. I never imagined that this was the way that I would come into my confidence and strength with acting and producing. I suppose I couldn’t teach other women how to drop their inhibitions and surrender if I wasn’t willing to do it myself (wink, wink).
After I graduated from the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Theatre program I didn’t really think I had a chance to be an actor. The very thing that I had trained for several years to doand all my confidence was shot. I thought I was too heavy, too dark, too this, too that. So since I had been teaching for a few years on a more low key level I figured I would move first into building a business after graduation.
It was in the process of developing the Woman Untamed method that I now teach at my retreats that I started stripping back my own layers of fear, stripping back the lies that other people had me believing about myself, stripping back the pain that I had experienced and truly erupting (sometimes gracefully and sometimes chaotically) back into my truth and my power.
What has been the most empowering part of working on a film that you are so emotionally and mentally connected to?
It was telling this story through this lens of walking through the valley of loss and grief. I have had a few points in my own life where I was so overwhelmed by grief that I could do nothing but lay on the floor for months. Depression had taken over me. I knew going into this story that I wasn’t interested in enabling this character staying stuck in her depression or staying stuck on the floor. I wanted to focus on that burst of time period right before you make the choice to get up off the floor, stop numbing, stop isolating and reconnect back to the truth of our lives. It all boils down to this one truth for me -- even in the moments of darkness when we feel most alone, there is an omnipresent force holding the light of our spirits at the other end of the valley. That force is waiting for us to summon the courage to keep taking steps forward. There’s nothing that we can do or not do to change that presence being with us. It is a changeless fact that we are kept and held by this Divine force that’s filled with a passionate and uninhibited love constantly rooting for us to win.
