Divine Sex

Thank you to my friend Gary (G1) for telling me about the new Visual Thesaurus. Have you tried it? It’s very cool.

Happy Iranian New Year! Norooz Mobaarak! My friend Saman tells me it became spring at 20:07 today. So whatever you were doing right at that time, you will do all year. I was sleeping. Oops.

Yes, I came straight home after the second day of training and promptly fell asleep. I was needing a good long nap. Now I have energy to blog before getting even more sleep. Then at ten on Wednesday morning (today…ack!) I have the appointment to terminate Jungian Analysis. Anna already knows that is the purpose of this session. I told her I wished I could slink away quietly but suspected that it was important to terminate in person and she concurred. It’s very important to terminate therapy face to face. Ok.

And why am I stopping now? Well, I’m just not getting as much out of it right now as I should be and that’s because I’ve stopped putting as much into it. I’m no longer journaling my dreams. I no longer feel the level of trust and faith I once did in that method to provide me with my answers.

Stopping therapy is also part of my current stripping down of my life. It feels like my life is a room and one by one, I am taking out all the pieces of furniture. When I’m done, I’ll see what feels right to put back.

I also think that after 3.5 years, it’s time for a break from that way of thinking. Sometimes therapy can make you walk around all the time with the focus on what’s not fixed yet. I think walking away from that framework for a while could be good for my self-esteem. We’ll see.

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I promised I would share with you from Chapter 11 of The Red Book. Here are some excerpts to whet your appetite for this little book.

…Contrary to traditional belief, sex and sexuality should not be estranged from your spiritual practice or awareness, locked away like some guilty secret and only brought out after a few glasses of wine. As Tantrists and mystics have been declaring for centuries, sex, with the right awareness and intention, is actually an incredibly valuable and wonderfully powerful tool for spiritual growth.

Let’s slip into something a little more comfortable for a moment. Ask yourself this: What feelings flood over you when you’re having really incredible, mind-blowing sex? Ecstasy? Total bliss? How about some intense physical and emotional power? A feeling of deep connection? Or is it sort of an out-of-body meltdown, especially during orgasm? Do you feel so connected to the present moment that you lose all sense of space and time and bed sheets? Is there an “Oh my God!” exclamation point thrown out to the universe every once in a while? Well now, interestingly enough, that all sounds very similar to how thousands, even millions of people all across history have described their most powerful and numinous spiritual experiences. In fact, the similarities are so great that many researchers now say that the ordinary act of lovemaking can be just as viable a path to higher states of consciousness, to a connection with All That Is, as meditation or prayer or any other traditional religious or spiritual ritual. How great is that?

Author Sera Beak goes on to tell us about the transcendent erotic experiences of Carmelite nuns hooked up to EEG machines and PET scans. Beak continues…

Who first brought the notion of a mystico-erotic connection to God into the previously ascetic, de-sexed church? Why, women, of course. Many scholars believe two powerful nuns in particular, Julian of Norwich (1342-1416) and Teresa of Avila (1515-1582), helped usher in a whole new perspective on the inherent sexuality of the divine connection; both women claimed to have personally experienced the divine sensually and sexually, via their physical bodies, experiences that led many within the Church to assume they were mistaking God for the devil (and oh, how very wrong they were).

In short, these nuns believed God could be and quite often was experienced as an erotic energy. To them, the body was not a hindrance to divine connection but actually a sacred place where we can become more familiar, more intimate with the divine.

Beak encapsulates for us the whole history of the Church and sexuality, the demonization of the sexual woman–certainly not a new thought. If anything, Beak’s Red Book is a very compact digest of hundreds of years of scholarly study. She also takes us on a sexual tour of world religions, from the Kama Sutra to early Taoist pillow books, stopping to touch on Gnosticism and the Kabbalah along the way.

My own sexual path started on an unfortunate note and seemed to get worse from there as I bounced from childhood abuse to adolescent promiscuity, confusing sex with love and approval. It has taken a long time for me to reach a healthy place where I am friends with my sexuality and very comfortable in my own skin. Hooray! And now I’m wanting to go one better than just “okay with it.”

I have long had an interest in Tantric sex and own at least five books on the subject. If I had to choose just one of them, I would recommend Soul Sex: Tantra for Two. But back to The Red Book. I love this passage:

In Tantra, consciousness is not just in the mind; it permeates the physical body too, making the body not just a fleshy thing that our spirits have to drag around this planet or an obstacle to the divine but a living, moving road map to and temple of divinity.

…According to Andre Van Lysebeth, author of Tantra: The Cult of the Feminine, to a tantrist, pleasure and enjoyment are not self-serving or meant just to satisfy the ego, because a tantrist knows that Shakti (the active female energy) experiences pleasure through the tantrist and is already embodied within the tantrist. In other words, when you experience pleasure, the divine experiences pleasure; you work as a blissful, co-dependent team.

Beak addresses sexual wounds, misogyny, social mores and hang-ups and all sorts of things that can serve as barriers to sexual and spiritual healing. She even gives us a list of questions and some exercises to help us feel more at ease with our sexuality, more self-accepting and loving toward ourselves. She reminds us many times that she is not recommending any one approach or path. For some, becoming more sexually conscious can mean giving ourselves a healthy period of celibacy.

…You certainly don’t have to light candles or use exotic names for your genitalia or find your G-spot in order to connect with the divine. What is important is trying to be as conscious during sex as you would during any other part of your spiritual practice. Conscious sex can heal, help us release stuck emotions and energy patterns, and bring us closer to our lovers. It can make us feel, well, more alive. In present time. All senses turned on high. And that’s a place I just know the divine likes to touch.

…Treat your body as divine. Treat the body of your lover as divine. To put it simply, don’t just go through your regular motions in bed; be aware of the divine energy swirling around you as you have sex. That awareness can make all the difference.

Right on.