This week I'm joined by the one and only Ty Shaw. We dive deep into our connections with the Orishas and Ty talks us through some of her sexual empowerment work and how they all connect. Her work covers old traditions and new traditions, and her dedication to her practise is inspiring. This is one not to be missed!
Connect with Ty through her website. 
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Andrew
 
transcription 
ANDREW: Welcome to another installment of The Hermit's Lamp podcast. I am hanging out today with Ty Shaw, who is a fascinating human being. She practices a bunch of different traditions, and brings a lot of, you know, experience in a lot of different ways through life and spirituality to the conversation today. So, for folks who don't know who you are, Ty, why don't you introduce yourself? What -- Who are you and what are you about? TY: Oh, my god. Ooh child. Well, I am Ty Shaw, like you just said, and what am I about? I'm a Iyalorisa, palera Mambo, and a lot of other things, oh iyanifa, that's the most recent one! Always forget to list that one! ANDREW: Right. TY: And basically, what I have been doing is working with people within the tradition. I was obviously with my spiritual house, and the various, you know, people that I service in my communities, but my sort of day job now is in the space of sacred sexuality coaching, intimacy coaching, and really bringing, particularly, well, people in general, but women in particular, in alignment with sort of their spirituality and their sexuality, and kind of bridging that gap, and working in a space where people understand that when you talk about sacred sexuality that you don't have to look to India or to China or to Japan or to these other places, that we do have concepts of sacred sexuality from an African context ...ANDREW: Mmmhmm.TY: If you're willing to actually look at what we're doing and examine what we're doing. ANDREW: All right. Well, why don't you enlighten us on that? Because I know, you know, being a babalocha, right, you know? That sex, at least sex in general is very, we keep that inside of the Orisha tradition, you know, not inside of the tradition, but outside of the relationships and the connections there, you know, and people are often like, very slow to even get into conversations like that, because there is such an emphasis on having proper relationships and where those lines are ...TY: Right.ANDREW: So, where does that come from in what your experiences are for you? TY: Well, that's exactly why I do this work. Because our traditions are very conservative in how they look at sex ...ANDREW: Yeah.TY: Which to me, is not only counterproductive but contradictory, because everything we do mimics a sexual act on some level. If we want to take, say the babalawo for example, when the oluwo is pounding ikin, the oluwo is mimicking copulation, such that ikin, or odu, can give birth. When we go into the igbodú and we want to birth a new priest in the process of a kariocha, we are using the leads, singing the songs, doing the invocations ...ANDREW: Sure.TY: To get certain elements to give birth. You know, if we're sitting on the mat and we're divining with the odun and odí falls, or some iteration of oché, or something out of ogunda falls, we're going to be talking some sexual shit. [laughs] You know what I'm saying? ANDREW: I do!TY: Can you talk -- we deal with deities who cover these specific things. And, we deal with energy. We're priests. We understand that, just from a basic scientific perspective, that energy is neither created nor destroyed. It's how it's directed. So that means there is no difference between spiritual energy and sexual energy. And the fact that we vibrate on a different level as priests because we activ