I have a similar relationship with sexual energy as I do with God. It’s been both my closest companion, my most feared enemy and my greatest mystery.
In spite of my fears, I have faith in sexual energy to heal myself and the world the same way nuns have faith in the Virgin Mary. I’ve always known it to be one of the purest forms of consciousness, rather than simply a means of satisfying physical and emotional wants and needs. And yet the discrepancy between my actual experience during love making and what I know to be true, keeps me feeling separate from its fullest expression through me.
In cultivating a daily relationship with my sexual energy, I’m humbly discovering how little I know about myself or it,
and how I spend most of my life hovering outside my body. Which is shocking to me, as I love to run on the beach and dance, and I’ve always prided myself in my deep connection with nature. But in its shamanic presence, I can’t hover. I can’t hide anymore behind orgasms that allow me to override feelings I haven’t wanted to feel. I can’t be satisfied with the dopamine-highs induced by simple physical satiation or oxytocin-highs that come from romantic projection. I can’t pretend to be someone I’m not, because my sexual energy knows me better than I do, and is constantly revealing to me everything that is not my Self.
I feel like I should add a warning here: “Do not try this at home.” Because fire is fire.
Even and especially the subtle body kind, which is the pure fire of consciousness. And playing with it is dangerous, at least to our egos. And until we are ready to stand in the middle of its all consuming flame (as many of us had to do against our will in the past)-until we are absolutely committed to knowing the truth of who we are, beyond our past and the roles we play in this world, and even who we think we are as spiritual beings-it may not be wise to awaken our feminine sexual energy.
But if you’re hungry to be alive and be in a world that’s alive and interconnected. If you’re a deeply desirous soul like me, who hungers to know what it means to be a woman not only in your own skin, but what a world would feel like, look like when it is held in awakened feminine consciousness, then read on.
Okay, I’m embarrassed to admit I thought a pleasure practice would be about pleasure. Right? Not exactly. It’s also about feeling whatever blocks my pleasure. But I have to first find the blocks to feel them. And this requires fire – a sustainable fire, with enough heat and light to penetrate the coldest darkest places within my being. It’s taken me about a month to build. But now the damn thing won’t stop burning! It won’t stop when I don’t want to go any further down the rabbit hole. Unfortunately, I also don’t know the way back anymore.
I completely trust my sexual energy to guide me where I need to go, and I don’t trust it at all (which has probably played out in most of my relationships with men).
Every blind step requires me letting go of control and surrendering to not knowing. My resistance surprises me, as I love traveling to foreign countries. But there’s nothing to experience here. Only an endless sea of thick, heavy gray – above, below and all around me. So heavy it’s hard to breathe. The smaller I inhale, the more the gray closes in, triggering feelings of helplessness.
When I look for my sexual energy to save me, it’s no where to be found. I’m all alone in the suffocating gray, that seems to have swallowed my body up in it.
Without a body, I can’t move. I can’t cry out. I can’t do anything but feel this gray numbness. My frustration is so intense all I want to do is close my eyes, close my awareness and die here. But I’m too afraid. I’m so afraid. I hate myself for how afraid I am! I hate that I can’t remember why I’m so afraid! I hate that I’m going to die here not knowing!
And somehow all the hate and rage makes a crack in the gray, enough for grief to come through.
Not an orgasm in the conventional sense, but the beginning of a much deeper pleasure – one that can never again be stolen from me or distorted – one that is born of forgiveness.
