I had an insight yesterday, while teaching at the 2010 Spiritual Sexual Shamanic Practitioners Training in Sedona, that I want to share with you.
Here’s the essence of the idea: sex is our life force. It drives humanity. It drives innovation, creation, creativity, expansion, pleasure, bliss.
Sex moves life.
It can also be destructive, and takes many forms of what Jung would call our cultural shadow. We can see this in sexual abuse, dis-empowerment, lack of education, ignorance, fear, superstition, anti-life affirming, punishing, suppressive expressions.
We try to control this delicious call to life with our morals, ideals, and beliefs. Like the preacher standing in front of a group of students – raging about the evils of masturbation and sex – after just having had sex with one of his young students, so often we are troubled by the intensity, diversity, and inability to “control” our sexual impulses.
I was working with one student who very descriptively said to me, “I hate myself. I hate my sexual energy.” For her, the energy has been nothing but pain and suffering because she is very sexual but has no frame to put it in other than considering herself a “whore”.
She was referring to the number of sexual partners that she had, and she felt that everybody in her community knew and judged her as a whore.
It’s funny that “whore” is such a bad word in our culture – especially when we break it down. Why is a whore so bad? Because a whore represents a woman who consciously recognizes her sexual effect on people, stands in her sexual power, and uses that effect (read evil manipulation) to consciously earn money. This is a “bad” thing.
Really?
We all do this everyday, just not with sex. We consciously use our assets to earn a living. The damnation of “whores” makes clear our hatred of women who are empowered in their sexuality. It also makes clear our lack of even the most basic understanding of sex.
We are terrified of seeing sex clearly. We deny seeing its complex nature. We hate sexual ambiguities. It’s black and white: we are either “good girls and boys” or immoral whores and sluts.
Our sexual self loathing and self hatred is not about sex; it’s our cultural beliefs about sex.
I suggest that we push back against our cultural myths that proclaim adult, empowered sexual expression is immoral, dirty, bad, and wrong.
I suggest that we try on the belief that sex and sexual connection among consenting adults is an empowering, enriching, life affirming thing – which in my experience, it truly is.
xoox
