I recently reconnected over the phone with an old girlfriend from high school. When I told her about my pleasure practice, she laughed and said, “I’ve got a full time job, a husband and teenagers-I don’t have time for pleasure!”
Beneath the sarcasm, I could hear the judgment in her voice. Or maybe it was mine.
“Women are being sold into sexual slavery! Children are starving! Wars are going on! The earth is dying every moment! There are much more important problems and better uses of your time and energy! You are masturbating your life away!”
And yet, only when I’ve strayed from my pleasure path (usually because of this voice), did I feel like I was masturbating my life away.
I believe each of us holds a unique piece for the whole of Existence, and all of our pieces somehow fit together and support each other like a jig saw puzzle. On a human level, we may only affect the people around us, but as a soul, our energy can affect other galaxies. Just because we don’t understand how it all works doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.
For example, what if when I am breathing, rocking on my pelvis, doing deep cervical kegels, and spiraling my sexual life force energy up my chakras, a young woman in Somalia finds the courage within herself to say no to her vagina being cut, knowing she may lose her family and never marry and be unable to survive on her own.
My friend (who is really my own anti-feminine voice) might tell me, “Sure. That sounds like a noble explanation for self pleasuring.”
I’ve been trying to defend myself to myself all of my life. What I’m finally learning is I have to just bravely go on without my approval. Because to make relationship with my sexual, life force energy-to make love to myself-is to go deeply into the unknown. To know my Self with a capital S, I must see myself not just as a soul in a body, but as a soul who has had many bodies, who exists beyond space and time.
I am remembering the words of an old coyote teacher who once warned me that I must know my immortal Self to face my immortal enemy.
Otherwise, I will be too afraid and turn back. Or I will try to fight like a human and deplete my life energy. He told me that this enemy has no respect for my humanity, because it came before me. And that its respect could only be earned through bringing my immortal self to its domain, which in shamanic language is the dark forest and in modern psychology is the subconscious.
In other words, I have to be willing to feel the pain of all the masks I’ve worn across all lifetimes to try to hide, hurt or destroy my feminine Self, knowing that even others who have brutally violated me, are a part of myself. I have to be willing to not only forgive, but to know myself as the liar, betrayer, rapist, child molester, murderer and still forgive myself.
At the time my teacher’s words made for a good heroic story, which I thought I’d lived. Now I’m humbly understanding, “No-you really really have to do this.”
It’s not enough to simply know ourselves beyond all of our masks. We have to go on the journey. We have to go into the subconscious forest where we first broke our Heart by denying our Self-where light first separated from dark, and form separated from formlessness, and humanity from nature, and masculine from feminine, and so on and so on. It’s not enough to remember union in our minds through non-dualism, or in our hearts through love.
If we want to realize our incarnate divinity, we have to re-member our separates parts in our bodies through sexual energy.
According to Tantric texts, the masculine chakras are the root, solar plexus and throat, which are the centers of consciousness pertaining to our life force, power and expression respectively. The feminine chakras are the pelvis, heart and third eye, which correspond to desire, love and higher vision. The crown chakra is where consciousness unifies with itself.
When masculine life force is infused by feminine desire, it wakes up and becomes sexual energy, which is the most potent energy on earth. But without desire, which is the directional pulse of creation, our life force remains unconscious. The same is true for power without love and expression without higher vision. On all levels, feminine consciousness is what enlivens, guides and illuminates raw energy.
It all begins in the second chakra! Awakening and honoring feminine consciousness and desire is not just for the liberation of women, but the exaltation of human life force and potential.
Rock on, Lisa – I mean roll on – or both!