A gentleman came to see me some time ago. He was carrying many wounds around his sexuality, related to his adolescent use of pornography. Because he held so much anger towards his father, due to the emotional charge of that relationship, he expressed it while masturbating to pornography. As he grew into an adult, his entire relationship to sexuality was expressed as an act of aggression, the releasing his pent up negative energy; he was never able to merge his heart with his sexual energy. He acted out his aggression with women he held in low esteem, women who he found easy to judge, always magnetizing himself to women who had self-esteem and unresolved abuse issues. At the same time, he was never able to be present with them. He often disassociated from them in a porn fantasy.
He never sensually embraced women. He was unable to be present with them in the body, loving them or worshipping their juicy feminine shakti.
With the women he loved and held in a strong heart connection, he was unable to cultivate sexual energy or desire. It was this split, this huge emotional wound, that he desperately longed to release, to transform. So he came to see me.
I'm a tantric bodyworker. He left a mind-blown man.
He'd never been so fully present in his body during a sexual experience in his entire life. Indeed, he had his very first full body orgasm. He asked for help, he stated his intention for transformation, and received what he asked for because he was clear about what he wanted.
Our society is finally pulling its head out of the sand, letting go of its denial. Many of us are looking for transformation, rejecting the global catastrophe that threatens us in favor of the vision of a harmonized global village. But we've denied so many pervasive problems for so long, now many of us feel hopeless about the global situation, certain that we will see Armageddon, World War 3, complete economic collapse, or the end of time as touted by (mis)interpretations of the Mayan calendar system.
Those of us awakening to the global situation are calling for transformation. But at the same time we fear the exciting potential this desired transformation will release in us. The change that must take place needs to occur within each individual. The barometer of this transformation's success will be how each of us responds personally to events that transform our lives from the comfortable and known to the ineffable and unknown.
The publication of the essay Can Sex Work Be Shamanic? in Alternatives last year changed my life profoundly and dramatically, in ways I never imagined. It began as an innocent endeavor. I never considered my own transformation that might ensue as a result of publishing it. I simply felt driven to express something, and was glad to be offered the opportunity to present ideas and experiences I felt could contribute to the evolution of consciousness, which is ultimately all I care about. I had finished a two-hour Thai massage with Peter, the editor of Alternatives, on the last day of my Thai training at Breitenbush Hot Springs, and he asked about my background. Peter felt I had a special energy. In the conversation that followed I opened up about the Tantric work I do. He offered me an opportunity to publish an essay, and so was born "Can Sex Work Be Shamanic?"
Truth be told, I'd been asking that question for years. The essence of the essay belies the deeper unspoken question: "Can Sex Be Shamanic?" There is latent potential within each of us that is held in the field of our sexuality, and this potential often lays dormant and unawakened. Each of us has the ability to experience sex as union, an ecstatic full-body vibration of love. You can connect deeply, psychically with your partner, meditating simultaneously on profound physical ecstasy as well as the energy, always staying present, staying connected in the heart space, staying clear and in the flow of juicy yummy bliss. Down this path lies the potential for sexuality to awaken the kundalini and shift consciousness, awakening the visionary potential of multidimensional third eye activation. Ultimately, this path leads to the opportunity to experience the deep feeling of transpersonal sex, where we're not making love with the personality of our partner, but with the divine source – "God" or "Goddess" – as we begin to channel our divine energies while in the heightened sexual state.
I believe sex can be a transcendental, holy union. Indeed, this has been in my experience. Those who know first hand the massive floods of energy moving through the body, and the subsequent transformation of consciousness from "mundane" to "awakened ecstatic" need not question the opportunity that exists, even though most people are unaware of and unavailable for this level of freedom and bliss.
But to return to the massive shifts that happened to me after the publication of that article. First came a lot of attention, more attention than I knew how to deal with. I received more emails and requests for meetings than I knew how to handle. So I caved in, dropped off and focused on my personal life. Then a documentary filmmaker asked to work with me about the topics I discussed.
But the ultimate bomb hit two months after the essay was published: my landlord gave me an eviction notice. He'd discovered my work, my websites, my essay. He handed me an envelope filled with my writings and said I was "flying above the radar," not being discreet enough. I was given three weeks to move out of my cozy nest, the home I worked so hard to create, the massage temple space I worked so hard to cultivate. It was heartbreaking. I'd lived there for only 8 months, following 9 months of living out of a backpack and traveling around Guatemala, Mexico & California – all I wanted was "home" that entire time. An intensity of sadness crushed me completely and I grieved for days. But before the grief set in, my response to the eviction notice was total calm, knowing that this was divine guidance and that the spirits of the universe were communicating with me through this experience. They were instigating more transformation for me. It made perfect sense.
The timing of the eviction was also ironic. The two previous months were among the happiest periods of my life. This had nothing to do with the essay. Rather, it was due to the deepening of my ability to embody my spirit in my body that brought me the greatest happiness. For the first time in my life I felt like I was coming home. Not home as in a place. Not the kind of home that is created through materialistic acquisition. I was coming home into my self. I felt more present, more awake, clearer, more relaxed, more authentic, more fully plugged into my body. I did not feel disassociated from my body or my sexuality. In fact, I felt like my entire life had led to this time of finally gathering the various parts of my being and bringing them fully into the temple of my body. I felt whole.
Some amazing puzzle pieces aligned to make this happen. On Christmas day I received a phone call from a man who I'd been in love with for the previous year – the call helped me let go of his energy, which I'd held on to. I also began a daily smoothie regimen that included maca, cacao, acai, and vitamineral green. It transformed my digestive system, cleared me of all stagnancy and bloating. Once my digestive system cleared out, I released the energetic blockages I held in my lower belly (my second chakra), and released a lot of sexual energy. I returned to a largely vegetarian diet and made the most of my food. I received bodywork from a bodywork genius who tore me apart and helped me realize that I have hips. And most importantly I was cultivating a relationship with a gifted computer wizard, a genius for making phat psychedelic electronic dance beats. First we began co-creating music together, and then we began co-creating sexual energy together.
Becoming sexually activated with my musical compadre re-awakened me to the power of sexual energy. In the heightened sexual energy state, when I am ramped up in ecstatic states of physical bliss, when the outer walls of my labia are hard, when my yoni is an enormous orb of hot heat glowing from my root sending pulsations of bliss through my whole body, when I am that present and that free to be insanely joyful – that is when I become my full self. All parts of my being are collected and brought into my body. I can feel an enormous shift within my subtle energy body, and it feels like I become a goddess. The Goddess steps fully into my body. I feel activated, alive, liberated, blissed out, and powerful.
One of the most amazing things about sexual energy and states of union is the experience of releasing every last bit of tension held in the body. When every single cell in the body is infused with high states of pleasure and the body is deeply relaxed, the body does not hold onto any more tension – and neither does the mind. When the body is open, the spirit walks in.
What I am referring to is at the center of Tantric practice. After much meditation upon Tantric wisdom, I realized that the intention or goal of Tantra is to create the merging of dualities. It evokes the union of heaven and earth, the union of masculine and feminine, the union of body and spirit. Through Tantra we can bridge dualities and emerge into a state of wholeness. The Tantric path is about the interweaving of our energies with the fabric of the whole, the available chi of the universe. This is a deep path that requires intense dedication so you can master an awareness of energy, and become energetically aware of the movement of energy in the body. Many spiritual philosophies speak of the "higher self" as if we are by nature lower selves, disconnected from our high enlightened selves. I think our psyches are deeply split: split between our inner masculine and feminine, split between our conscious surface level awareness and our ignored unconscious denial dream self, split between our divine selves and our "shadow" ego selves. To merge and marry these aspects of our selves is to create wholeness within ourselves. That is the goal, because this is how we can finally experience complete peace and clarity and joy and freedom.
For the past year I have been praying, sending my intention out to the universe, to fully embody my spirit in my body. I long to fully anchor my divine self and see my divine self as my true self, to not identify with the unconscious confusion and chaos self, but to identify with my conscious, fully aware authentic self. Because I want to see Heaven emerge on Earth, I feel I must anchor my heaven in my earth body. Clearly in no time in my life did this occur more profoundly than when I stepped fully into my sexual energy and meditated in deeply blissed out energy.
Imagine what the world would look like if there were millions of women who were anchors of ecstatic bliss energy. Imagine if there were millions of women who were eschewing convention and walking their path towards their authentic nature, who let go the norms of social conformity in favor of following their heart bliss. Imagine if the world was filled with juicy mamas who love to be loved, and love to get loved on. Imagine if millions of women were fully in their bodies, fully activated in their sensuality, fully released into their creative liberation.. What kind of world would we be living in? We would live in a world where people would rather make love than cut down trees or enslave other people. We would live in a world where we wouldn't need prostitutes. We would live in a world where everybody was met and loved, cared for and nurtured, such that the only thing we would want is to make sure others are getting enough too. We would live in a world where the top priority is to take care of each other, because taking care of each other is taking care of the whole. We as individuals are a part of that whole.
But we don't live in that kind of world. And I don't need to remind you what kind of world we live in instead. I could list the environmental degradation, the wars in other people's homelands, the widespread deaths of bees, the corruption in the highest levels of our society… We live in a world that has suppressed the feminine for thousands of years. Our culture killed all the witches, all the holders of esoteric magic and wise women who knew the plant secrets. Our culture put corsets and bustles on women and disfigured their spines so they couldn't relax into their bodies. And a woman needs to have a good, flowing, healthy, undulating spine in order to have sexual power.
Our culture told people to have sex within the confines of marriage. Our culture put high heels and makeup on all the women in order to disfigure their hips and hide them behind masks of inauthenticity. Our culture has not told women that they are beautiful for their authentic beauty. Instead we have a culture of women who get rhinoplasty and botox. At the same time, other cultures have maimed and bound the feet of women to look like lotuses, and have dismembered the erogenous jewel of a woman's sexual body – the clitoris. Christianity and Islam, as well as other religions, have suppressed women and our sexuality. Many in our culture have been told to only be sexual with one person for procreation within the confines of marriage and to have sex with a sheet between bodies, with a hole in the sheet for the penis to go through, so no pleasure is possible.
How many clients have come to see me over the years that haven't made love with their wives for 15 years? The numbers of men who haven't been lovingly met and haven't received intimate nurturing are astronomical, enormous. I once met a sad man who only a year before had separated from his wife of 16 years, whom he hadn't had sex with since the day their first and only son was conceived within the first year of their marriage. His wife refused to display any signs of affection throughout their marriage. She wouldn't hold hands, hug or cuddle. This is an extreme example, but it paints the picture of imbalance between genders that is sadly rampant. I feel that a culture of men who haven't been loved, met or nurtured is a culture doomed to act out that extreme emotional wounding by cutting down trees, degrading the environment, creating wars and enslaving others. I believe the root cause of all planetary and social imbalances is a result of sexual repression and gender imbalance.
Men have been just as suppressed from their authentic sexuality as women have. But we live in a culture where, generally speaking, women's power has been repressed by dominant masculinity.
There can be no more denying that the suppression of women has kept them from achieving their authentic nature and their sexual power. The tools of physical disfiguration – corsets, foot-binding and clitoral modification – as well as the guilt trip tools that dissuade the psyche from pursuing physical pleasure, have kept women from knowing their true power, from standing in their bodies as radiant, ecstatic, blissful beings of joy. But I am not a feminist who is angry and vindictive about four thousand years of patriarchy. I do feel, however, that in today's society we don't need to do that anymore.
Many women are waking up to their authenticity, to their creative potential and divine liberated selves. I know countless artists and witchy wise women who are creatrixes within this matrix. These are beautiful women who delve deep into their creativity, journeying with their art forms -painting, poetry, song, handmade clothing. These women journey and dance, and honor their bodies. These women nurture themselves, educate themselves about how to best take care of their health with healthy food and plant-based medicines. These women love each other and support their sisters, encouraging each other to grow and become more expansive and creative. This new wave of women is the embodied resurgence of the Divine Feminine on Planet Earth.
But the suppression of women is buried deep into our collective subconscious. Even though our culture has seen waves of women's liberation since the seventies, many women still don cloaks of disfiguration and sublimation. In my neck of reality – where my women friends are brilliant artists, juicy mamas making homemade bread and doing plant and sweat ceremonies, dancing ecstatically and going on healing retreats – I am in a bubble of empowered, powerful women. But I recently went to a Mormon church on Easter, and walked into a room of women giving their "testimony" about their "faith." The room was filled with women who didn't seem present or in their bodies. They didn't speak with conviction about their faith. They didn't share stories that expressed their hearts. Instead, they gave testimony to a belief system that they had been indoctrinated into, but which none of them seemed to deeply believe in. Their shoulders were rolled foreword, they wore high heels and makeup and looked so uncomfortable in their bodies.
Over the centuries and throughout cultures, most suppression of women has been perpetuated by women themselves. It is the elder African women who dismember the clitoris of the young girls. It is the elder Chinese women who break the feet of young girls and wrap them in cloths. But we must not give in to bitterness or feel victimization about these injustices. Instead, we should realize that we can take our power back. If we want to live in a world that is whole and healthy, we must decide to become whole ourselves. Because we are each facets of the whole. When you are a weak link in the circle of the whole, then you aren't doing your part to hold together the integrity of the whole. If we want to live in a world of balance, we need to re-embody the Divine Feminine.
When divine, powerful, goddess women reach critical mass on Planet Earth, you know that big shift will happen. It will make more women want to step into their juicy, ecstatic, erotic, powerful, creative selves. The attraction becomes magnetic.
To all you women who don't know how to get from point A to point Z, but think the journey looks appealing and the end result even more appealing, all I can say is this: be receptive to change. Become an agent of transformation. Do not hold onto what is not serving you.
Getting back to my own story of being evicted, this huge change that forced me out of my comfortable cozy nest in fact offered me six weeks of travel and spiritual pilgrimage. After my journey I moved into a home more beautiful & divinely magical home than my old one. Often the doors of transformation take the form of something that seems horrible and heartbreaking at first. But when we surrender to the magic of what is, we make ourselves available for potent potentials of miraculous meetings.
One of my major realizations after the eviction and then hanging out with the Mormons is that we live in a culture that is absolutely afraid of sexual liberation. The suppression of sexuality is deeply ingrained in our collective consciousness. It is the repression of it that causes sexuality to be expressed in the forms of prostitution, strip clubs and online porn. This happens because the men are hungry and need to be fed. We live in a culture that criminalizes whores, denies them recognition and visibility, and secretly tolerates hoards of them because society would go haywire if whores weren't available. At the same time, they are brandished as shameful lepers by society.
But if women weren't suppressed in their bodies or their psyches and we were free to be powerful pleasure beings, if sexuality wasn't so deeply repressed and the life force love energy within each one of us so deeply malnourished, we wouldn't have any of this collective shame about owning our right to freely enjoy joy. We would step into ourselves, and we would step into each other, with gratitude for the gifts that each of us is to each other. We would step into our bodies with gratitude for our pleasure receptors. We would honor each other when we each nurture ourselves. Ultimately, by doing so, we would co-create peace on Planet Earth – because the priorities would shift from war, corruption, media lies, and economic disparity to nurturing, feeding, and loving each other, supporting the achievement of our highest potentials, so we can contribute to the whole by nurturing ourselves.
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Artwork by St. Even :: http://www.divinereflections.ca/
