Conscious Relationships, Tantra And More: The New Relationship Paradigm with Lana Elco, Intimacy Expert

She is the world’s leading Intimacy Artist, Relationship Expert and the Creator of the Intimate Universe Brand. Leading women on their most intimate journeys for over a decade now, Lana Elco has redefined traditional relationship models and supported hundreds of women around the globe in creating loving and fulfilling relationships from a place of alignment and empowerment. Featured in Forbes, Entrepreneur, Authority Magazine and a true disruptor of the status quo when it comes to personal relationships, Lana joins me today in talking about relationship blocks, tantra, and intimacy, and shares her insights on a new relationship paradigm which she calls - The Relationship Of The Future. 

Hello and welcome, Lana. I am very excited to have you as our guest today as I have not only been following your work but have been personally impacted by it. I still remember our first coaching session where you helped me remove some of the blocks I was experiencing around relationships and reconnect to my feminine power. Your work has evolved tremendously since then, and you have brought a whole new perspective on intimacy and relationships. Before we start talking about today’s topic, could you share what inspired you to enter your current field of work and begin guiding women on their relationship journeys? 

From a very early age, I was always fascinated with human relationships. At the same time, my biggest challenge was relating to other people and understanding the world of double standards. I felt our relationships could be much more authentic, honest and profound but I couldn’t figure out how to change them.

As a young adult, I was also intrigued by the dynamic relationship between the feminine and the masculine. I had a strong desire to explore the depth and intensity of this relationship. However, I couldn’t find any inspiring role models. My passion guided me to my first entrepreneurial experience when I started my own online dating agency for cross-cultural couples. Through my work with couples, I discovered my genius in the area of intimacy and relationships.

Later, I had other businesses and projects and achieved a lot of success. In my early 30s, I was guided to rediscover my genius. I moved to California and started my life from scratch. I studied Transpersonal Psychology, Tantra, Non-Violent Communication, Authentic Relating, Yoga and Expanded States of Consciousness work. My genius, experience and education became a great foundation for my current coaching business. I actually believe my work evolved far beyond modern coaching so I prefer to use the term “Intimate & Healing Arts”.

I focus on working with women on their intimacy, relationships and healing the feminine. I also love working with couples and guiding them to create a Sacred Union through Tantric practices and conscious communication.

In your experience with coaching women, what are the main blocks that tend to get in the way of attracting and building healthy and fulfilling romantic relationships? 

There are a few different challenges that most women have. I love working with feminine archetypes and relationship patterns each archetype tends to develop. Our archetype basically represents the way we are wired, our fundamental values and desires.

Most strong, driven women, for example, tend to attract more passive men and feel like they have to do everything themselves. Other women have “a good girl syndrome” and struggle with unworthiness and self-doubt. On a personal level, many relationship blocks have origins in the family dynamics and a relationship model our parents introduced to us.

Besides that, I must say there are universal blocks and challenges almost every woman on this planet experiences. These universal blocks are inherited from our culture after thousands of years of patriarchy.  These blocks are deeply imprinted in our body and psyche whether we are aware of them or not. They are passed to us from our ancestors, genetic memory and collective consciousness. They are strongly integrated into our societal behaviour, rules and cultural values.

What exactly are these universal blocks? These blocks are connected to our capacity to receive from a man without feeling guilty, ashamed or feeling like we have to pay back. Biologically and energetically, a woman is a receiver in a relationship with a man. She receives first and then she can give from the heart.  Of course, she multiplies everything she gives from the heart, in return, because she is also a nurturer. However, it is crucial for a woman to feel safe and receive from her man first.

Just think about it - we receive sperm from our man first and, then, we give life. Not vice versa. It is a universal pattern of life and we need to honour it.

However, in our society women have been oppressed for thousands of years. Her free will was violated. She lost trust in the masculine. She hasn’t been feeling safe to be in her true feminine power. 

The fact that our powerful female ancestors were blamed to be witches and burnt on fire created lots of fear in the collective feminine. We still hold this fear in our DNA. On an energetic level, even the most powerful women have a problem with relaxing into receiving and feeling safe with the masculine. Again, I talk about the energetics, not the intellectual interpretations.

After interviewing many successful women from different cultures for my documentary, I can see one dominant thread when it comes to the biggest challenge in a relationship between modern women and men. Women want to feel safe with a man. It means that we, modern women, as I already mentioned, still hold a lot of mistrust toward the masculine, and there is a strong need to heal these old wounds between us. Healing these old wounds between the feminine and masculine is the central focus of my work with women and couples.

After doing all the inner work and personal healing, we need to face our relationship fears together with our men. We do have medicine for each other and can help each other heal on the deepest level in a safe, nurturing container.

What advice would you give to our female readers who may be looking to attract a new and healthy romantic relationship? 

Beforehand, I would recommend doing their own inner work and personal healing first. Women hold so much power within! It is important to work through personal challenges, heal personal trauma and release the societal and cultural conditioning about the feminine and what our relationships with men “should” be.

If a woman went through a heartbreak and had a painful relationship experience before, it is crucial to take some time and focus on healing and feminine inner work first. Transitioning from one relationship to another without processing and healing won’t work well. We usually tend to repeat the same personal and relationship patterns if we don’t become fully aware of them and learn how to release them. This is the work I often do with women first.

I would also recommend liberating yourself from any societal “should’s”. There are lots of outdated values and unconscious rules we follow when it comes to romantic relationships. Those roles and inauthentic values create separation and pain in relationships.

An empowered modern woman wants to be free and, at the same time, experience the deepest level of intimacy and love with her partner. It requires a deep “knowing of self”, awareness, relationship education about the differences between women and men, emotional intelligence, clarity about her desires and a solid understanding of universal laws and cultural conditioning.

A woman who has done her own work becomes a leader in the area of intimacy and relationships and can create a deep loving relationship with the equally empowered masculine. Being an intimate leader is actually our natural expertise and strength. This is who we are.

I love that you bring up cultural and societal conditioning and how this can get in the way of creating the relationship dynamic we seek to experience. In your work, you speak a lot about “a new relationship paradigm”. Can you share a little bit more about that? 

Yes, this is my favourite topic now. A new relationship paradigm is, in fact, The Relationship of the Future.

I believe our intimate relationships are overdue for transformation. Collectively, we have outgrown old, outdated relationship containers and experience urgency for a new relationship paradigm. We need a new belief system that will allow us to release the cultural conditioning around intimacy and remove the walls of separation between the feminine and masculine. 

The old relationship paradigm was the product of the patriarchy. The old system generated certain rules, beliefs and containers that served the system. Since women were oppressed for thousands of years, all these rules, beliefs and containers were not serving women at all.

In my work, I use the term “ relationship containers”. A relationship container is a combination of conditions and agreements that hold our relationships. The brightest example of the old relationship container is a mainstream marriage. Marriage ( the way we know it) was created thousands of years ago during the time of patriarchy. It is still a very conditioned, universal and outdated relationship container that needs to be transformed to hold our evolved intimate relationships. In the past, marriage was a survival container for women. It was not safe for women to be single or have relationships with men outside of marriage. Women often had no choice who they marry.

In the modern world, women are going through the second wave of liberation and empowerment. The first wave was a feminism movement that gave women their basic rights and freedoms. Now, we have become aware of our own feminine power and don’t want to mimic the masculine to succeed and thrive anymore. We, modern women, want more from life, career and relationships - we want to live our true potential. We also feel the urgency for a new, evolved container for our intimate relationships and life partnerships.

For the sake of clarity and transformation, I prefer to use a new term when I talk about a new, evolved relationship container as an alternative to a mainstream marriage, and that is the Sacred Union. I define the Sacred Union as an upgraded and expanded relationship container for a new level of intimate relationships. This container represents the Ascension of Intimacy for the entire human race originating from the ancient tantric teachings.

When I work with conscious couples, we focus on transforming their relationships into the work of Art. We redefine and reshape their relationship containers so they can hold the expanded consciousness, intuitive vision and mystical intimate experiences. We work on creating precise and refined conditions for their Sacred Union and the network of complementary relationship containers. The core agreement of the Sacred Union is truth and growth. Both partners equally commit to the truth and growth of their relationship rather than following societal “should’s”, “right’s" and "wrong’s” and cultural programming.

I strongly believe that the Sacred Union can hold both our desire for deep love and our need for personal freedom. Unlike a traditional marriage approach, in Sacred Union, we sustain highly charged sexual experiences between partners and provide longevity of their sexual attraction for each other. 

In the Sacred Union, we create relationship agreements, provide emotional safety, set up boundaries and bridge feminine and masculine sexuality. We develop intimate communication skills based on precise and clear language and align intimate relationships with the Universal Laws.

You have shared with me that you are currently working on an exciting new project which is a documentary called “The Relationship of The Future”. Can you give us a hint as to what we can expect to see in the documentary and when it will be released? 

Yes, this is the project of lifetimes! One day, I woke up and had an epiphany! I received a vision about a documentary and the name “The Relationship of the Future”. In this documentary, I am going to focus on 3 important paradigm shifts.

1. Transforming our relationship containers so they can hold our most intimate relationships and provide the best conditions to explore the deepest level of intimacy, creative partnership and exercise our free will at the same time. I have shared a lot about this paradigm shift in the previous question. In the documentary, I am offering clear and practical guidance about creating the Sacred Union and sustaining deep and authentic loving relationships, for a lifetime.

2. The second paradigm shift is about the practice of lovemaking for couples. I am a passionate Tantra practitioner and have developed my own Tantric approach - Femme Tantra - based on female sexuality and expanded states of consciousness. Femme Tantra is a profound psycho-spiritual approach enriched by the insights of transpersonal psychology, non-violent communication, consciousness research, the feminine empowerment movement and my own direct downloads. Within this new intimacy paradigm, we can only experience the deepest level of intimacy through expanded states of consciousness. It is now a scientifically proven fact that our physiological states change when we are aroused. During orgasmic experiences, our body produces DMT- also known as the chemical of the Gods and found in plant medicine used by shamanic practitioners to alter consciousness. Through a Femme Tantra practice, we learn how to expand our consciousness, activate our senses and navigate intimate flow through the focus on female sexuality. This leads to paradigm shift #3.

3. Female sexuality is a gateway to the deepest level of intimacy, healing and transformational sexual experiences, and mystical & transpersonal exploration. Right now, we barely have any education about the importance and complexity of female sexuality. All we learn about sexuality is the masculine sexual patterns and pathways.

There is no official education about intimacy and lovemaking and how female sexuality actually works. Most young men ( and women) learn about sex by watching porn. That’s why we have such collective distortion when it comes to understanding and practising sex. In our society, sexuality is often perceived as an area of shame, embarrassment and topic taboo because the way we were taught to practise it is distorted and one-sided. The masculine sexual pattern is fiery and rapid by nature. That is why, when it is not balanced by female sexuality and deep honouring of both polarities, it can become aggressive and destructive. Unlike the masculine sexual pattern, female sexuality is a network. It takes time to activate the female network of arousal and build up sexual energy. However, once it is activated, it has extreme diversity of expression and is directly linked to our spirituality and the transpersonal realm of consciousness.

Everything you share is very fascinating and not so openly discussed in the online space so thank you for joining us and sharing your insights with us. Where can our readers learn more about your services and programmes? 

My main website is www.theintimateuniverse.com. I have a customized approach to my private coaching depending on where my clients are at. Plus, I have foundational self-study courses that cover the new relationship paradigm on both educational and practical levels.

I can also be found on Instagram as @lana.elco and your readers can join my  Facebook community:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/herintimateuniverse.