How Do You Discern Between Desires of the Mind Versus the Heart?

 I’m compassionately realizing how much safety women need to open our sexual being, which is often covered with layers of fear, shame, rage and guilt, under layers of what we think we should be feeling or what others have told us we should be feeling.

Because our sexuality is intrinsically tied to our feminine identity, when we feel disconnected from it, we judge ourselves to be somehow inadequate as women. Rather than honestly sharing with one another, we spend our whole lives working hard, building careers, raising families, trying to hide our feelings of not-enoughness, placing our Self worth in things outside of us. No wonder so many women live with a constant undercurrent of anxiety.

When we have opened to trust, we’ve often been betrayed-sometimes at a very young age before even having consciousness of our feminine sexuality.And yet knowing the ecstatic bounds of our sexual desire and pleasure and sharing the full circumference of it all with a lover is still one of the deepest longings of the feminine.

In facilitating a monthly sexuality circle, I’m discovering womens relationship with me is similar to their relationship with their own sexual energy. There is both attraction and repulsion, curiosity and fear.

One woman describes her journey of opening to trust me as follows:

“I first heard about you through your one woman show, Keep It Wet. I watched a clip and judged you to be too vulgar for my taste. Then I saw you on the dance floor at our local Sunday jam and was captivated by the energy and embodied joy you exuded. I thought, “I want some of that,” but every time I came close to dancing with you, I spun away, intimidated. It was a back and forth dance like this for nearly a year, during which I settled to know you from a distance. Then a friend told me about your women’s sexuality circle-and another friend and another. It was through trusting them that I first came to your circle. I didn’t know what to expect. I was both afraid and excited. The work we did that evening was amazing! I felt profound openings in my pelvis, heart and mind that continued days after the circle. My fascination and fear relationship with you grew its first roots of trust. I understood it wasn’t your power I was afraid of-it is my own.”

I recently learned that the psoas, which are connected to the sex organs, are the seat of Self worth-meaning when energy is flowing freely through the psoas and sex organs, we know our intrinsic worthiness. We don’t need a lover or beautiful clothes or to be good mother or have a successful career to feel desirable, valuable to life. We simply know that we are desired and valued by existence-that something would be missing without us that could not be replaced. This is what gives us fulfillment-that are very being is important to existence and existence cares for us.

Because the nature of feminine power is receptive, magnetic, to the degree a woman knows her Self worth or desirability is the degree she can experience her desire or creational power.

Contrary to statistics, desire need not diminish with age. Only our minds obstruct our capacity to feel our desirability and our desires. We hold onto past experiences when our desires were crushed by the world, vowing to never feel that deeply again, choosing to protect ourselves from the pain of disappointment by keeping our desires at bay.

The secret is that everything in this world has a veil over it placed there by the mind. Until the veil gets pulled off, we can only know the world as random, separate objects rather than our one eternal Lover. We filter states of being into conceptualized reality rather than receive them as pure, ecstatic experience. Which is why we often have to be betrayed by our concepts of love to experience real love. We have to have to be betrayed by our mind’s desires to know our deeper heart’s desires.

 I recently learned an exercise for discerning between the desires of the mind versus the heart, which I am experimenting with in my pleasure practice. The first step is to let go of judging which desires are good for me and which are bad and simply feel any desire as it arises in me. The second step is to feel not only the desire, but what its fulfillment feels like inside of me-continuing to feel the desire and its fulfillment for three days, allowing all to swirl inside my body, including information about what is blocking its fulfillment as well as how I can release the blocks.

At the end of three days, either the desire will disappear or it will manifest or I will be given clear direction towards its fulfillment.

 My dream is to start a Women’s Sexual Mystery School. I’ve been studying and teaching sacred sexuality workshops on and off for years. I’ve written out the nine modules for the mystery school and created new pages for it on my website. I’m launching its pilot in Santa Barbara, California in February of next year. My desire is to have my first woman contact me about bringing the mystery school series to her community as well.

This Tuesday morning I am holding her in my heart and in my pleasure practice. I will let you know what transpires between now and Friday morning.

I’m afraid, excited and wildly curious.