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Tantrapodden

Women supporting men to step into their power

Charlotte Fogel in conversation with Anna on Tantrapodden.

About the conversation

Polarity, tantra, leadership, spirituality and the healing spiral.

Charlotte talks about why so many men do not believe they are welcome, and what happens when they are seen by women who stand in their own power.

The conversation moves between the temple room and the boardroom.

Tantrapodden, 52 minutes, in Swedish. Published with permission.

Men are not that hard to support.

What happens to a river with no riverbed?

Our closest relationships are up in our faces every day. And we can't hide.

We're careless with sexuality and intimacy. Maybe we don't see it for the goldmine it is.

Good men who have done the work on themselves and stand in their power are needed more than ever.

If you think you're enlightened, spend a week with your mother-in-law in a small cabin.

The full conversation in text

Tantra as the starting point

00:01 Anna: Hello Charlotte.

Charlotte: Hello Anna.

Anna: Welcome to Tantrapodden.

Charlotte: Thank you. It feels good to be here with you. I have a sense this is going to be an interesting thing to explore together.

00:21 Anna: It does, yes. You have been popping up in my awareness. We have never spoken, we have never met, not as far as I know anyway. It has come to me from a few different directions, and what came was the context of women's work, and of inviting men to be held by women. The people who have talked about it are people I respect a great deal and trust deeply. So along that road I felt that if I am going to invite Charlotte into a conversation, then let's see where it leads and what wants to come of it.

01:01 Anna: You are sitting in Tantrapodden. What do you make of sitting in Tantrapodden in particular? What is tantra to you?

Charlotte: Well, it is lovely. I do not know that I define myself publicly as a tantrika, but tantra is of course a very important ground and base in me as a person and in what I do. It feels good. I think the tantric approach to life is fundamental and important.

01:40 Anna: How would you define the tantric approach? What is it for you?

Charlotte: For me there is a very strong element of full presence. Of presence. And of following a flow that has no particular direction or goal, whatever we are doing in life, whatever the situation. Whether we are at work, or making love with our beloved, or talking on a tantra podcast. Bringing yourself home to the present moment, over and over. To put it briefly.

02:33 Anna: What would you say your path has been, given that you do not call yourself a tantrika? What kind of road have you walked?

Charlotte: I have walked a very long road, despite being terribly young. It has been fairly winding and also fairly broad. It has moved between many different fields. Ever since I was more or less a teenager, almost a child, I have been fascinated by people's inner lives and my own inner life. That has been my most basic drive, that I want to learn and expand as much as I possibly can as a human being during my life. It has taken me on a great many outer and inner journeys, between very different spheres. That breadth is what I carry with me, and it is the breadth I keep trying to weave together in everything I do.

Two worlds that are really one

04:03 Anna: Can you give an example of that breadth?

Charlotte: I tend to talk about my two worlds, which of course are really one world, but which many times in my life have felt like two quite separate ones.

One is that I have worked a lot out in the business world, with leadership development and executive development and organisational development. Worked with teams and employees, with managers and that sort of thing. Which has felt wonderful and very important, because leaders, as we know, affect a great many people, and affect society to a very high degree.

That has been one track. Then I have the other world, which has been more about the deeply intimate sphere. That is, spiritual and soul expansion. I have been very much in relationship work, relationship development. Personal development as a whole. There can be many different threads in that. Everything from working with shamanic principles to modern psychology, those kinds of foundations. Worked a fair amount with NLP and plant medicine ceremonies, and various therapies and healing and energy work.

They can look like quite different worlds, but I am myself in both of them, and I try to hold that balance in myself.

05:58 Anna: What is it you are weaving together?

Charlotte: The way I see it, we need what I tend to call divine business. Or if we are going to talk masculine and feminine, yin and yang. Out in the business world we really do need, more than ever, to bring in the soul, the existential, the deeper, the meaningful perspectives. Just as we should not separate our personal spirituality and soul and depth from our outer life. From how we are at work, or at the supermarket, or with our friends. I find it very separated. But it is needed. We also need structure and direction in our soul lives, to hold what we want to express or give to the world.

The turning point and the inner compass

07:17 Anna: You say it with emphasis, that we need this more than ever in the business world. What is that emphasis about?

Charlotte: We know by now that we are going through an enormous transformation. The whole world, on a cosmological, global and individual level. And at enormous speed too.

In the middle of that there are a great many people sitting in the gap, or the void, between the old and before we have landed in the new. There is quite a lot of confusion there. Many people feel bad without knowing why. It is also often called the dark night of the soul, and it can produce physical and mental symptoms, emotional and spiritual ones.

That, combined with the fact that we are still inside the old system, where things are to be steered and led and organised and produced. But it needs to be done in completely new ways. And it needs to be done from a completely different place in the person, and in the organisations, and in the leaders.

08:50 Charlotte: And that place is our deepest inner compass. Because if we are in contact with it, then it matters less how much is moving out there, or how fast it moves, or how we are supposed to organise ourselves. We can come home again and again.

That is what I feel I really want to convey and give to more people. Whether we are sitting in the boardroom or at a tantra retreat somewhere, we need to integrate the worlds now, precisely because we are going through such an extraordinary turning point in the world.

09:34 Anna: This in-between is painful. The fact that more and more of us are letting go of the old platform, and as you say we have not landed in the new one yet. It is painful, and we are squeezed and under pressure.

10:00 Anna: How are you relating right now? What is your way of relating to the world at the moment, to navigate in it?

Charlotte: I wrestle with it too, of course, sometimes. I think that more and more I am actually letting go of clear directions and plans and goals. Intentions are one thing, of course, having a kind of overall direction. But more and more, being very open and alert and humble before the organic flow, before whatever life brings me each day or each week.

And really using as much as I can of my intuition, my inner listening. Listening to who I am and why I am here, even more consistently and often, to navigate in a completely different way than I have before. I am fairly goal-oriented and have been very much so in my life. But creating that way simply does not work any more. Not at all, for me.

And that is a way of navigating too. Coming home and coming home and coming home, and deepening and deepening and deepening, both in the inner listening and the listening upward. Self-listening, or universal listening as we call it.

When science catches up

11:49 Charlotte: I do not know why this is coming to me now, but I have been listening a fair amount to Maria Strömme and her research. Do you know it?

Anna: I have heard of it, but please tell me a bit.

Charlotte: She talks about how we are all the same consciousness, and that we are receivers of that consciousness. We are not transmitters, we are receivers of it. She has done it in a very scientific way and does not come from any spiritual world at all, she comes from physics. And she is very masculine, if we are going to use that term, in how she arrives at this. Her view is that it is simply obvious: if we look at these and these parameters, then that is how it is, full stop.

She has received a great deal of attention out in the world, with people trying to find scientific proof of it.

12:55 Charlotte: Imagine that we need it all the time. Everyone really knows. What people have known for thousands of years, we are now getting scientific proof of, so that we can really believe it.

Anna: Yes, exactly. But I also think there is something in that. Because what we already know, we have stopped listening to. Or we have been schooled not to listen to it. And this change you are describing, happening now at such speed, so many parts suddenly moving at once. That is one piece of the puzzle, I think. That we then need this slightly absurd science.

Charlotte: Yes, but belief and knowledge are increasingly being woven together. Quantum physics, or quantum psychology, has had its breakthrough and can also prove scientifically the theses we have felt, as I say, for millennia. That everything is one. And that we are built of energy and can affect energy, and all these things.

So I think that is excellent, because heart and soul and mind all need to come along on the journey. We need ourselves as whole units. That is why I understand that the intellectual understanding has to be there for us to really believe.

Seven keys to spiritual intelligence

14:27 Charlotte: That was also what I had in mind when I wrote my book Sju nycklar till SQ, on soul intelligence. A fairly important foundation in the book is precisely to bring forward quantum physics and the research and quantum psychology as a kind of link to existential and spiritual understanding. So I think what Strömme is doing, among others, is very important.

15:09 Anna: What drove you to write this book?

Charlotte: That is very interesting, because some of the most important things in my life that have been born and come forward, I did not think them up. I have simply gone: right, a download, now I am going to do this. And there has been no questioning it.

That is why I started. It was simply a deep longing to express in black and white what I somehow felt I knew and had lived and experienced, in my work with people and in my own life. And that is how it turned out, a kind of fairly broad handbook, almost, or orienteering map, for deepening contact with your deepest essence, with life, and with the higher dimensions of life as well. This combination of 3D and 5D and yin and yang and everything we are talking about now. Getting that whole into concrete, practical, everyday tools.

16:32 Anna: Would you like to say something about those six paths, or keys?

Charlotte: Seven keys, yes, I can do that. I actually have the book here.

Anna: Ah!

Charlotte: I published it just as covid had broken out. The seven keys, that is SQ, or spiritual quotient, or soul intelligence, spiritual intelligence, is for me the intelligence we really need to integrate into society today. It is the intelligence that will carry us forward.

Because soul intelligence is what lies beyond what we think and what we feel. That is, IQ and EQ.

17:31 Charlotte: If IQ is what we think and EQ is what we feel, then SQ is what we are.

And I think that is also very important. For people with great influence as leaders, for example, or for all of us, to really integrate into our lives now. The deepest innermost compass we spoke about earlier.

17:54 Charlotte: I will read out the seven keys as headings, so it gets the right tone.

  1. The hero's journey, understanding your inner transformation process.
  2. Quantum awareness and universal wisdom.
  3. Soul communication and your higher self.
  4. Life purpose.
  5. Body wisdom. Our bodies are magnificent universes, where we hold most of the answers and most of the potential for healing.
  6. Conscious relationships. How we can use our relationships, and sexuality in fact, as very important paths to a deeper SQ.
  7. The art of manifesting. Once we have found the depth of ourselves, it should leave its mark on our outer lives too.

18:53 Anna: This feels like a book I am going to order the moment we hang up here.

Charlotte: Yes, how lovely. It is actually fairly comprehensive across a great many areas of one's life.

Relationships as the fastest path

19:05 Anna: But if we now consider that we are also sitting in Tantrapodden. Conscious relating and sexuality as a path up to, or towards the universe, or whatever we want to call it. What would you like to say about that?

Charlotte: I see relationships, and not least intimate love relationships, as the single most powerful source of awakening. If we use them consciously, which perhaps not many do.

Your partner, or close friends, or family, they are our greatest gurus. If you think you are enlightened, spend a week with your mother-in-law in a small cabin, and you will get a fair idea.

20:00 Charlotte: Our closest relationships we have up in our faces every day. And we cannot hide.

If we enter a relationship consciously, that is, with the intention that I really want to learn to grow from relating with you, and all my triggers and my wounds and all my magnificent light that comes forward in a love relationship or a friendship. Getting to explore that consciously, that is so powerful.

I mean, we can take courses and we can take trainings, but there we can hide things. We go home after the course. It does not work the same way if we are going to keep having a relationship. So that is the first thing I really want to say. There is nowhere else in my life where I have truly learned so much, and had such strong spiritual experiences, as in my love relationships and friendships. And barely even with my children. Perhaps the greatest teachers of all.

21:13 Charlotte: What was your question?

21:20 Anna: Using sexuality and intimacy to reach higher consciousness.

Charlotte: Sexuality and intimacy are the same thing there. Because what we have not worked through in our inner lives or our history shows up one way or another in our sexuality and intimacy. Our wounds and our fears, just as much as our longings and our light, come forward there in one form or another.

And the same applies there: if we can explore sexuality with someone, or several, where we are open to welcoming whatever comes up, embracing it and then perhaps looking at it, that is magic too. It is the same thing. There are few paths more powerful, I would say, because it is so deep in ourselves and so close to our absolute essence.

22:23 Charlotte: We are a bit careless with that, I think. We are a bit careless with sexuality and intimacy and relationships. Perhaps we do not quite see it for the goldmine it is.

22:35 Anna: What can that carelessness look like? What is it you see?

Charlotte: That we have McDonald's sex, so to speak. And there is nothing wrong with McDonald's sex, it can be wonderful. But that we also use sex for purposes that perhaps do not help us.

And that we perhaps move in and out of relating and mostly just reinforce our old ideas about ourselves and others. Or our old patterns, which instead just become deeper and deeper grooves, because we are not able to look at ourselves in it. For various reasons.

23:33 Anna: I am also thinking about taking on that challenge, if we are going to call it that. Which people do we have around us? Do we have people who help us look at that? Or do we have people who more or less defend us, saying no, no, you do not need to look at that, or it is not your fault. That we surround ourselves too, speaking of conscious relating in general.

Charlotte: Exactly. Very important.

Retreats for men, and Womb of Worship

24:14 Anna: I am very curious about these wonderful workshops I have heard that you hold and have started, with circles that invite men to be held. Tell me. Was that another one of these downloads, I need to do it?

Charlotte: Yes, it was. I thought: what, am I going to do this?

As I said, I have worked with very intimate therapies with both men and women for many years, and held women's circles and personal development courses for both men and women. But a few years ago I woke up one morning, and it had come to me that I am to support men now. Because I had been much more focused on supporting women and strengthening women.

So I asked a good friend of mine whether we should hold retreats for men. And she said: yes, we shall. And so we did. And it was absolutely wonderful.

24:23 Anna: Tell me a little about that before you move on. Holding retreats for men, as women. There were two of you women running it?

Charlotte: Yes. Two women who held retreats for groups of men over a period.

The reason we did it was that the main focus was for the masculine in the man to meet the feminine in us as women. And to get to do that in a safe environment, with women they have no relationship with and do not need to be anything particular in front of. Being met with love and directness and extreme clarity and reflection was something these men experienced as extraordinarily valuable.

We worked with everything from attachment theory, to how your experience of yourself as a man has been shaped along your timeline, to how you communicate, how you use your energy, how you stand steady in your masculine power. Sex, intimacy, getting answers to all those questions.

We had a women's panel with us during one stage of the retreat, where they could put these questions to a group of women. The kinds of questions they perhaps could not really ask otherwise. And to keep getting women's perspectives on what they wanted to know. And each other's perspectives, of course.

What came back as a very valuable thing was that we worked a lot with exercises where they got immediate feedback on their approach, their energy, how they came closer, how they communicated with us.

So it was very beautiful. It was a group of kings, magicians, warriors and lovers who walked out through that door. I am so full of admiration and humility before these men. It moves me deeply.

Anna: I feel it in my womb when you talk about it.

Charlotte: That is truly how it is. And also this format that was born then, in what we now call Womb of Worship. WOW it became, of course. Womb of Worship, which is really a fairly short format, a three and a half hour workshop, where we are a whole group of women inviting a group of men, as many men as women, to honour, hold, challenge and reflect the men in the deepest love and respect.

It has also been received so remarkably well by both men and women.

28:46 Charlotte: When I dropped this thought that we women, we are extraordinarily important. For our own sake of course, but also for men's expansion and healing right now.

The primal feminine force and the healing spiral

29:01 Charlotte: The primal feminine force can ignite so much in men. Instead of sitting around complaining and thinking men ought to be this or that, we can transform a great deal in ourselves, of our pain and our suffering, into love instead. And then things happen.

It has been absolutely wonderful. Just to see, to gather a group of women from all walks of life, all ages. To see a group of women gathering in their divine primal force, with a shared intention and a shared aim. It is so powerful. It is so powerful to walk into a room like that. I am getting a little moved again.

And I can see it in the men when they step into what we call the temple, where the women receive them. It is almost enough on its own. I see how the men are almost floored by the energy and the power in it.

Anna: I heard about these workshops that men stood outside and wept. There was no room for them. The energy was so strong, and the longing to experience this was so strong.

30:40 Charlotte: I tend to say this, and it may sound a little provocative, but men are not that hard to support. My experience is that if a man is simply allowed to collapse, which may sound harsh, but to fall into a woman's seeing, her reverence, her love. When a woman is in contact with her heart and with the divine, if a man gets to be in that for even a short while, it is as if he simply rises up out of something. It does not take that much.

I think in general that we women have lost sight of how much influence and how much capacity we actually have to support and heal and help. Help sounds a bit off, men manage perfectly well on their own too, but you understand what I mean. There has been a very heavy focus on how to support women, which is also extraordinarily important.

31:49 Charlotte: It is as though I was given an image of a healing spiral. That is to say: most of it begins with the feminine in the woman igniting, lighting the spark for the healing in the man, so that he can make his journey, so that he can then hold and provide for the woman well, so that she can lead the way. That spiral is what I saw in front of me. And that is why we women, I believe, have largely lost our power in it, and our contribution.

32:37 Anna: When I came to women's circles twenty years ago, the woman who was my first teacher talked a lot about that. How the path to the divine often goes through the woman, from the man. And our power centre, the second chakra, and how that power centre can burden the man if we are not careful with it. So that it can lift the man instead of becoming overwhelming. And how we can support with it.

Anna: Truly so. Lift the man, but also lift ourselves into our deepest power.

Charlotte: Yes, exactly. That is really how it is.

33:24 Charlotte: Now I have had a group of women working together in these temples, where we meet in the sisterhood and practise different things. There I am extraordinarily clear and careful about training ourselves to hold this energy. Not going into the need for confirmation, or for getting something, or for being beautiful. There is nothing wrong with being beautiful, it is completely wonderful. But that is not the purpose here. Or with flirting. Because the men come into this room and it is a vulnerable state. It has to be a safe temple that is not about that. It is about love.

There can be deep, intense encounters. But we are not to be there because we need. We are to be there as channels, and then we need to be clean. So that is apropos this business of connecting with our primal force and our womb, and being thoroughly grounded in it.

Anna: I get shivers from the power in what you are creating. It is beautiful.

34:48 Anna: You also mentioned that you talk a lot about the man holding the woman as well. Would you like to say something about that, for anyone listening who perhaps has not heard much about that aspect?

The men who are needed, and the balance

35:03 Charlotte: Now that I have worked a lot with men, I find and experience that many men express that they do not believe they are welcome. That they think they constitute a threat. That they do not believe they are needed. Or they do not know how to contribute, they do not know how to channel their power. They are afraid of their own masculine primal force and do not know how to channel it. They cut away everything below the neck, essentially, which many women do too, but right now we are talking about men. And they are fairly confused and feel unneeded.

35:51 Charlotte: And in that we know that men, good men who have worked on themselves and who stand in their power, are needed more than ever. So that they can contribute what they are meant to contribute in society.

36:13 Charlotte: I know it can sound very stereotypical, and we are individuals and all of that. But if we are going to be clear and distinguish the masculine and the feminine: all people have both masculine and feminine in them, but women have a physiological constitution and a hormonal composition and a womb, which still means we tend to have a more generally feminine core. And men have a more masculine, penetrating core.

36:48 Charlotte: I usually have a final part in the Womb of Worship temple to symbolise that, where the women are in the middle, dancing and flowing and seeing one another, and the men stand holding each other's hands in a circle around the women, radiating energy from their hearts and from their groins, or their cocks, as I call it. I think cock is an extraordinarily positively charged and beautiful word. Their cock power connected with their heart power. That is the formula, I think. If you are only in the heart you do not really get the root power. If you are only in the root you do not get the empathy and the feeling. But the connection between them is powerful.

37:38 Charlotte: When the men stand in the circle and simply hold, the way the riverbed holds the river. The women, in their divine wisdom, get to flow and create. That is how I would like society to work more, that we truly had a balance of both structure, holding, providing direction, and the flowing, soft, empathic, life-giving creativity. The masculine has an extraordinarily important place there.

What happens to a river with no riverbed? And a riverbed with no river dries out and dies.

38:23 Anna: Yes, absolutely. I come from having been fairly feminist between twenty and twenty-five, closer to thirty, and thought equality and you, you, you. And very masculine in my energy. And it was my children's father who absolutely did not understand his place, because I could do everything myself.

For me it has truly been a deprogramming, of coming more and more into what I experience as my strength, my feminine core, and experiencing how well I can feel in that permission, and how this is how I am meant to navigate life. And thereby also being able to receive this masculine presence, this direction.

So I am completely with you that there is a certain simplicity, a certain freedom. Something very balanced, when it is allowed to arise.

39:20 Charlotte: I believe all people need contact with both their feminine and masculine, whether you are a man or a woman, because that is when we have the balance within us. But as you say, many women in our secularised society have stepped into their masculine more and lost contact with their feminine, and then we do not have balance.

I think that is very important, and I have really also practised softening and receiving and following and letting myself be led. That is when I have truly begun to feel, as you are getting at, what extraordinary power there is in it. In the receiving, from above, from outside and from within.

Leadership and an existential worldview

40:12 Anna: If we go back to the business world and leadership and organisations. How can we bring more of that into the boardrooms?

Charlotte: You mean the masculine and the feminine? Yes, it is interesting, because leadership research, where they have examined which leadership behaviours have proved to be the most successful, both in terms of organisational results and individuals' development, points to what is contained in so-called transformational leadership.

That is about personal care, for example. It is one of the most effective leadership behaviours. And we can simply look at ourselves: which managers have we truly trusted? It is the ones who care. I care about you, I care about how you are doing, I care about how things are going for you. Personal care.

It is also about involving employees. Communicating, involving, creating co-creators. Not running your own race or holding your own separate direction. It is also about being a role model.

That is perhaps the kind of thing we associate a little more with the feminine, whether we are men or women. But if we are talking energy, it is feminine. And that, together with the more transactional leadership, which is more about direction and goals and steering, becomes the ultimate leadership.

41:56 Charlotte: The problem is that we have been missing the transformational. We have been missing the feminine aspects of leadership for a very long time. But the research shows we need both. And that transactional leadership takes us a good way, while transformational leadership can take us any distance at all. And that is not an opinion, it is research that backs this up.

That is what I try to bring into everything I do out in business. Seeing this whole, and understanding that this is not only about us feeling good, which is excellent, but that when we feel good we deliver. And it shows in the numbers. It is a very simple equation that I think has been overlooked.

Probably because most people historically in leading positions have been men. And they have perhaps been closer to a different kind of leadership than the transformative. But now I am generalising. They may feel uncertain in many of the transformational leadership behaviours.

So that is what I try to do. Help managers and leaders go deep with themselves. Find their inner compass. Their existential worldview. Even that alone I think is extraordinarily important today.

43:29 Anna: But say something about that. Someone listening might think: what do you mean, existential worldview, when I am a manager? What difference does it make?

43:48 Charlotte: Then I am a manager out of who I am as a person. There is simply no avoiding it. My person and how I see the world and other people, my values, will run through which decisions I make, how I meet you as my employee, how I handle situations.

If I have not then asked myself who am I, what do I believe in, what is the meaning of things, what is the value in other people, do we have a soul and what is it, these existential questions, if I have no interest in that, then I have not really deepened my contact with myself. And with that it is also hard to deepen contact with others.

So whatever worldview or philosophy or religion or spiritual outlook we have, it does not matter, only that we have asked ourselves those questions and perhaps taken some position on them, and try to live a little from them. That way we will meet each other and situations differently. With greater clarity perhaps. And humanity, empathy, focus, presence.

45:19 Anna: I am thinking about how many leaders ask for a new method, a new technique. Whereas from what I understand it is perhaps eighty per cent who need a new approach. That is somewhat what you are talking about. We may ask for it, because we do not even know what to ask for. We are told we need something.

45:45 Charlotte: Yes, that is how it is. People want quick fixes out in companies. And it should be tool-oriented and methodical, as you say. And that is excellent. But it is like handing a random person a toolbox and saying: repair the car. Or someone who is not a trained doctor, and giving them a scalpel.

That is roughly what I tend to think about leaders too. That they have very good toolboxes, but if they have not brought home their approach, or the feel for how and when to use the tool, it gets tricky anyway.

Opening the first door

46:23 Anna: We have a little while left. What else would you like to convey to someone listening who is a bit curious about their own development, who perhaps finds tantra interesting? How could they find a path, what could be a step to take?

46:50 Charlotte: What I find most important is simply to admit to yourself your longing for this, as you say. I want to expand, I want to find a deeper meaning in life, or I want to grow emotionally, and I am open to really finding those paths.

Then my experience is that life tends to deliver. Doors tend to open fairly automatically. And it does not matter enormously, in my experience, which door you open. Once I have opened that door and walk into that room, new doors will open. Everyone finds their path.

But reading a book, going to a workshop, connecting with people who have walked some distance along the road, finding yourself a coach or therapist. Then things will happen.

47:55 Anna: I am getting rather full of laughter now. Something like the picture of how it was for me when I opened the first door, or what I thought was the first door. If I had known...

Charlotte: How many rooms there were in there, how many doors.

Charlotte: Wow. Yes, exactly. That is what is so wonderful, that it is as if when I send out a longing that comes from deep in myself, life simply comes to me and shows me the way.

Charlotte: So you have to have a little courage too, to step in.

48:32 Anna: Yes, and I tend to say that too. I do not think there is anyone who has stepped into a tantra workshop, or any other kind, who has not felt afraid, nervous, a bit: all right, where have I ended up?

I thought myself: good grief, these people, they are very strange.

Charlotte: I remember when I went to Ängsbacka for my first tantra festival. My then husband and I stood there about to walk onto the grounds, and we just went: no, we are going home. This is never going to work. People are running around in there, they are naked, they are having sex all the time. This is never going to work. We were so afraid and nervous.

And then of course it became this enormous door-opener, both for us as individuals and for us as a couple.

49:26 Anna: My children put it so well when they came to Ängsbacka: there is not a single normal person here, mum. Then a day went by and they loved it!

Charlotte: That was interesting too, what we identified as normal.

49:53 Anna: Charlotte, I did not quite know why I was going to invite you to this. And this conversation has given me much more understanding of why our paths met like this, and why you were to be on Tantrapodden. It has been so much more rewarding than I perhaps expected, with the breadth you have.

Charlotte: I am glad to hear it. I also think it has been lovely to share these thoughts with you.

Anna: What I appreciate very much is this thing you said at the start. Two worlds, though it is the same world. It is people like you who inspire me a great deal, living in two worlds that are the same world.

50:42 Anna: And then I always ask every guest to contribute a song to Tantrapodden's playlist.

Charlotte: I thought about it on the way here, and now my mind has simply locked. I cannot think of a single song in the whole world.

Anna: You are absolutely welcome to come back to me. It can be a bit of a cliffhanger for the listeners.

Charlotte: I really do have to think about it.

Anna: Yes, do. That went very well. But thank you so much for this time.

Charlotte: Thank you Anna. Thank you so much for having me.

51:23 Anna: And one question I forgot. Where does the listener find you?

Charlotte: I have a few different forums, as I said. I have the one focused on company work, teams and so on. Then I have the more intimate work. And then I have the men's work. So perhaps we can contribute a few website addresses along with the episode. So I will not say them here, because nobody will remember them anyway.

Anna: No. That goes in the episode description. That will be perfect.

Charlotte: Exactly.

Anna: But thank you so much for this time.

Charlotte: Thank you.