In this episode:

In this episode of The Fearless Females Podcast your host Tegan Mathews interviews Martina Hughes who shares:

• Her transformation from a chartered accountant to a tantric teacher
• How she overcame the lowest point in her life
• The power connecting with the energy within
• Her passion for helping others to connect with their inner power house

Tegan’s Take Aways from talking with Martina Hughes:

1. No matter what happens in the outside world and no matter what happens externally I am never alone because I will always have me.
2. The gifts I have that are most valuable in my life, are those that are on the inside of me.
3. Knowing that there is something inside of each of us that trust that life will bring us the lessons we need and no matter how painful it is, we can find a way through.
4. Being fearless is about recognising that often when fear shows up, it’s a signal that something is important, it’s a signal that change is coming and it’s a signal that extra fuel is needed. Connect and listen to it instead of shying away from it.
5. Truly believe that you do have the capacity to make a difference in the world and follow where that fire takes you.

About Martina Hughes

Martina’s vision is to create a world where people express themselves in an embodied and authentic way. She created Tantric Blossoming, the largest Tantric Community in Australia, 11 years ago, offering private sessions, workshops, retreats and training. Since then she has supported thousands of men and women to feel their hearts and open to sensations of aliveness throughout the body. Martina’s wish for humanity is for each man and woman to know themselves as a powerhouse of love and sexual energy.

Martina leads people through practices that support transformation of relationship dynamics, so that men and women can create the fulfilling and empowering experiences they desire with each other. This includes integration of healthy masculine and healthy feminine qualities, so that people can find their inner balance, with the result of greater harmony in their relationships.

Contact Martina Hughes

www.tantricblossoming.com

Tantric Blossoming

A Gift for Listeners From Martina Hughes

Download your copy of the Sensuality Toolkit that explores what sensuality is, what sexuality is, and the benefits of being open in one’s orgasmic energy. It includes practices that you can do daily and then how to integrate the experience of sensuality into every-day life in your own solo experience but also how to bring more sensuality into your connection with a partner.

By entering your name & email address we agree we won’t share your details with anyone! You may receive the occasional emails from Martina Hughes and Tantric Blossoming. You can unsubscribe at any time.

Show Notes: 035: Your Tantra Powerhouse – Martina Hughes

Martina Hughes’ Fearless Story

I was a chartered accountant for many years and quite unhappily so. People’s first question of me is how I made the transition from chartered accountant to Tantra teacher because it’s not exactly a linear path from one to the other. I was very unhappy in my life as a chartered accountant and very much looking for success and gratification on the outside. I was feeling quite disillusioned with that.

Discovering that the satisfaction wasn’t in the next holiday or buying the new car, a new wardrobe or a promotion. Feeling quite disillusioned with the world I went through a variety of different personal development and healing experiences ranging from re-birthing and shiatsu through to energetic healing and a variety of other modalities.

But the thing that really brought me home to myself in a new way was going to a Tantra Retreat. With that retreat I experienced my feminine energy from the inside out for the first time. It was like I had found what I had been looking for on the outside, I found it inside of myself.

There was so much aliveness, vibrancy and bliss and I was so in touch with the fire of this orgasmic energy from within. So, it revolutionised my life in ways that I could never have expected.

The very next year I started my new life as a Tantra teacher and very much enjoyed the new path offering Tantric workshops, Tantric sessions and then leading into offering Tantric retreats and training programs.

Along that journey there were different periods of time of feeling like I had arrived and finally the life I had been looking for was here. Then I had another crisis hit around three years ago and there was another significant awakening and this time it was an awakening via crisis, my whole life fell apart.

I had just completed running a significant twelve-month training program and as that was completing I had a miscarriage. There were illnesses and breakdowns in my family, the relationship that I felt like was my ‘forever relationship’, fell apart.

So, after these experiences I went into a severe personal collapse and then of course, business started struggling as well. Plus, there were varying other conflicts in my life too. It was like my own personal and professional tsunami. Feeling everything crumbling and falling apart in front of my eyes. It was a new kind of rock bottom. I felt much lower than I’d ever felt before and my life felt very meaningless and empty.

How did you turn it around?

I found that each day I needed to focus just on my immediate needs. Each day asking myself, “What do I need today?”, “What does self-care look like today?” and “What does self-love look like today?”. “How do I support myself in the midst of all this chaos, in the midst of all this turmoil?”. “How do I learn to listen to my heart and to keep on trusting myself and find a way forward?”

During that time there was lots of rituals and lots of time for meditating and listening to myself. There were lots of walks and having alone time and journaling. Seeking out inspiration from mentors and teachers that I trust so that in the midst of feeling myself having been quite crushed, I could then experience myself blossom and open again.

And from this space, what I discovered was that no matter what happens in the outside world and no matter what happens externally I will always have me. The gifts I have that are most valuable in my life, are those that are on the inside of me.

These being, my ability to feel, my capacity for intuition, my capacity for nourishment and connection. I also discovered a quality of empathy and compassion that was far beyond anything I’d ever experienced before. I thought I was compassionate prior to all of that happening but there was a new quality of self-compassion that emerged.

This turned into a much stronger sense of compassion in all areas of life. Through all of this I discovered myself as my own unique gift of life. From that place I’ve been able to create new foundations and keep blossoming and opening to a greater capacity of myself and life and now bringing that all into sharing via my work.

What were the fears you faced during that time?

As everything was falling apart and certainly even in the months after everything falling apart was that this state of chaos was my new way of living. There was a fear that I would never recover. There was a fear that I wouldn’t have goodness and nourishment back in my life again. There was a fear that something within me had gone so wrong. That I was being abandoned by everyone and everything I’d known previously.

How did you work through those fears?

By really trusting in the parts of myself that I know to be true and doing things like daily journaling, meditation rituals, walking and self-care. With those self-care practices and pleasure practices of finding things to be grateful and joyful about each day.

I rebuilt my sense of self, from the inside out. In the process of doing that I discovered I would be ok even if there was nobody else there to support me, I knew how to support me, I knew how to create a life.

And by doing that there was a new quality of resilience that emerged. Not a resilience of toughness and that very Australian attitude that many of us have of, “I’ll be right”, “I’ll be ok” and “I can take care of myself”. Not that tough kind of resilience but the resilience that comes from within that truly knows the power of self.

I guess I’ve been through significant transformations a lot in my life and this one was the most painful and the most significant. But having had a variety of significant transformations there is something inside of me that trusts that life will bring me the lessons I need and that no matter how painful it is, I can find my way through those challenging times.

Most Memorable Moment

I would say very recently, actually in the last three months in particular. I just recently facilitated a five-day retreat in Byron with twenty-four people and it was the most incredible five-day experience I’ve ever facilitated. It’s a retreat I call ‘Walking on the Edge’.

The idea is, creating the opportunity for people to have personal breakthroughs and to walk over those edges of those places where there’s been fear and resistance in their life. Feeling myself facilitate in that space recently and feeling my feminine love and fierceness, compassion and devotion to transformation and humanity so awake, alive and on fire.

At the same time feeling my own masculine strength, direction and capacity to hold this structure really potent and alive. Knowing that all of those things, it’s me bringing this personal and professional transformation to a whole new level.

What are you passionate about today?

I’ve also just recently launched a twelve-month training program called Tantric Alchemy Trainings. Some people will journey with me for twelve months and some people will journey for two years. This is a training program I have offered in the past but with all of these transformations that have happened, for me the training has been completely revolutionised.

I have the most incredible group of twenty-one people who’ve registered for this training and a lot of them will go on to work with me for a two-year period so that they can become facilitators themselves.

So I feel really inspired and excited about all the new training materials I am preparing for them. The platform of which the training is being offered is I believe there are three necessary components for a flourishing life. Those three components are:

1. The activation of sexual energy in the body because that helps us to be in touch with our power, a deeper source of our life force. To know that what we’ve been looking for lives inside of us and the energy, the power, that life force, can be awakened through sexual energy practices.
2. The healing and release techniques for past wounding and past trauma. If that’s not addressed then that will cause people to trip up, to get stuck, to be unable to move forward in life.
3. The self-love and self-care practices. Without that foundation of self-love and self-care, people can get stuck in their wounding or they can get stuck in the destructive elements of a sexual energy.

So the self-love creates a healthy foundation of which people can grow into maturity and discernment and a healthy expression of sexual energy and also bring their wisdom to healing the parts that really need to be healed and to know which parts need to be healthily walked away from. When to apply boundaries and when to utilise one’s masculine energy, when to utilise one’s feminine energy.

This template for a flourishing life that includes these three components, I’m really excited about that.

Any advice on how someone can face their fears of talking about their sexual energy?

The first thing to do is to make the distinction between sexual energy and the act of sex because the act of sex is engaging in intercourse with a partner or self-pleasure/masturbation for yourself and, of course, they are beautiful things to enjoy.

Those acts will always be limited unless the sexual energy is available and has the ability to free flow through the body. So, when I speak about sexual energy is equivalent to life force energy and in different traditions some people refer to it as Kundalini or Prana or Chi.

Essentially it’s our vitality for life, it’s our capacity to feel, to animate, to be in touch with our power, to feel our love, to feel our presence, to be able to radiate energy and to be able to be receptive to energies. So, sexual energy is essential to living a healthy life.

Sexual energy is so much more than the act of sex. When people understand this they can connect with sexual energy as fuel for life. The way I see it now days is most people are attempting to run their lives without having fuel in their vehicles.

So if you think of the body as the vehicle, and sexual energy as the fuel, most people are trying to push their vehicle through life using their head to push and struggle and trying to think and control their way through things. Rather than truly feeling and being inspired and animated from within.

And you don’t have to be an extrovert?

I would say that I have an equal amount of introverts and extroverts who are drawn to the work. Often it will be for different reasons, on the surface, but underlying, most men and most women in today’s society desire a deeper level of love and connection.

We live in a world that is missing real conversations about what love and connection is, what it feels like, how it is to truly embody sexual energy and loving presence, to bring compassion and care and respect and meaning to connection with each other.

I find that by coming to this work it drops a lot of the barriers because the other big divide that we’re up against right now is that women and men have different experiences. Women walk around saying, “Men don’t want real connection” and then men walk around going, “Women aren’t interested in the type of connection I want.”

But when people come into these spaces they have the opportunity to say, “Oh, actually the gender divide isn’t as big as we thought” and people get to see the truth that is men and women, introverts and extroverts, it doesn’t matter who people are, everyone equally desires real quality of love and connection.

The fact that there’s no real sex education in our society. The fact that there’s an absence of quality connections and quality information about how to transform connections means that people are pleasantly surprised when they come to this work.

What’s something in your future plan(s) that scares you a little bit?

I have a vision of touching millions of hearts around the world and for each man and each woman to know that they are their own powerhouse of love and sexual energy. When people truly get that that comes from the inside then they can live a much more empowered life.

So that’s the big picture vision for me. There’s some gaps in the, ‘How to achieve that’ so at the moment I know that every person whos life I touch they go and share this work and this inspiration with many others so there is very much an organic multiplying effect at the moment.

But I would say my fear is around not fully realising that vision of touching millions of hearts around the world. However, I say it’s a fear and yet underneath that there’s a deeper part of me that trusts it will be realised.

Five Fast Fun Fearless Facts about Martina Hughes

1. Who inspires you? Brene Brown is one of my favourite writers and speakers. I really love her work on vulnerability and that everything she does is so real and human and lots of love and authenticity in everything that she does.
2. Favourite thing to do each day? To stop, to pause and just put my hands on my body and breathe and feel my own energy from the inside.
3. What’s something that still scares you? Public speaking. It scares me and I totally love it at the same time. One of my desires is to be on big global stages and it also terrifies me and yet I totally love it.
4. Favourite technique/app/book? Just recently I read a book called Love Warrior by Glennon Doyle Melton and what I really loved about the way Glennon writes is that it’s very raw and it’s very much coming from a basis of being very connected to her feelings. Often when people write, they polish it up and make it tidy for the public and there was a quality of rawness and authenticity in her writing that really spoke to me and it’s similar to the way I like to communicate.
5. If you could wave a magic wand and fix one thing in the world right now, what would it be and why? I would empower people to trust themselves and to feel their love, their sexual energy and their power from the inside. When people connect with their power from within we have a much more liberated world. We have a world where there’s a whole lot more love, people are giving rather than taking and people are free to share and connect in new ways. It would just be so, so beautiful to see and feel that.

What does being fearless mean to you?

Being fearless to me is, it’s not denying fear, it’s recognising that often when fear is present in the body it’s a signal that something is important, it’s a signal that change is coming and it’s a signal that extra fuel is needed. So being fearless is being able to turn those feelings into fuel and a greater capacity for living and then being able to move that energy through the body, embody it, and move forward in whatever needs to happen.

Final Question for Martina

If you could turn back time what’s the one piece of advice you wish you could give your fourteen-year-old self?

Believe in yourself and really listen to the fire that burns inside and the desire to make a difference in the world. I feel as though that was alive in me from a very young age and at different times I doubted it and at different times I switched it off.

Truly believe that you do have the capacity to make a difference in the world and to follow where that fire takes her.

Where can people reach out to you? www.tantricblossoming.com

Facebook – Tantric Blossoming OR Martina Hughes

A Gift for Listeners From Martina Hughes

Download your copy of the Sensuality Toolkit that explores what sensuality is, what sexuality is, and the benefits of being open in one’s orgasmic energy. It includes practices that you can do daily and then how to integrate the experience of sensuality into every-day life in your own solo experience but also how to bring more sensuality into your connection with a partner.

By entering your name & email address we agree we won’t share your details with anyone! You may receive the occasional emails from Martina Hughes and Tantric Blossoming. You can unsubscribe at any time.