One of my favorite things to talk about is sex. It's also one of my favorite subjects to teach not because I'm a nasty girl, but because I'm self-aware and 'innerstand' sex is life, breath, creativity and spirituality. It's how we all got here. Sex is everything to our existence and yet there is so much taboo and ignorance around the subject. It's not really our fault, considering many of us learned from others who also had no clue about the true nature of sex. Consider how you know what you know about your body and sex. There can be so much timidity around a discussion about sex, but I encourage more candid conversation, as this is one of the best ways to learn about something that is believed to be so naughty. Read more
After twenty-five years of Tantric practice, the essential unity of sex and spirit seems so obvious to me that I almost forget the rest of the world doesn’t necessarily see it that way. The Sufi teacher Hazrat Inayat Khan said, "Love is the sign of Spirit," and in my mind this always included erotic love. Recently, when a friend invited me and my teaching partner to give a talk on Sacred Sexuality at his Church, I realized I would have to find a way to explain myself that would make sense to the uninitiated. Here is what I said. Read more
Magic circles, or mandala, are symbols that form part of the knowledge you need to access the magic of eroticism. According to Tantric philosophy, once upon a time, the gods found an unnamed energy that vibrated in a perfect way between the heavens and the earth. They called it mandala, which means circle or circuit in Hindu.
The Tao mandala: Ying and Yang
Reading and studying have allowed us to reveal the millenary secrets of sexual magic. All the mysteries have been interpreted and explained in a practical manner, as exercises to be carried out in a certain amount of time and in a simple way, with the aim of heightening our level of sexual and spiritual consciousness through the different techniques. Read more
"In making love with a sense of the sacred, your body becomes a temple and your partner’s body a shrine."
Sex Magick Revisited
The idea of “sacred sex” frightens some people. The independent erotica author Roy Askham recently started a blog called Sex and Spiritual Life. Its purpose is to ask the question, “Can sex be incorporated into a spiritual path?” Askham has written a novel that combines BDSM themes with the theme of spiritual progress. The protagonist, Edward, discovers that sexual desires and spiritual seeking are not incompatible. Askham has received both positive and negative feedback on the combination. One blog commenter wrote, “I think our earthly desires have little to do with our spiritual path, unless we allow them to interfere.” Read more
Does the term sacred sexuality intrigue you?
Are you open to inviting rituals, new techniques and a spiritual practice into your sex and love life?
Sacred sexuality can transform you, your life experiences, and your relationships. I’ll tell you how:
The good news is:
You can enjoy sacred sexuality on any level of experience and dedication, and all rituals, techniques and exercises can be modified for solo practice or same sex couples. Select those that you enjoy and weave them into your current lovemaking practice. You will experience a deeper richness of life, health, and appreciation of yourself and others. Read more
Lissa and Michael are on a mission to change the world, one orgy at a time. And their plan just might work. Michael is a modern day priest of Dionysus, the mythological Greek god of wine, who is most notorious as the inspirer of ritual madness and ecstasy. The ancient Romans called him Bacchus, and made him the patron deity of agriculture and the theater. He was also known as the Liberator – the god who helps free the human spirit through ecstasy, or wine. Of course that was back in the days when Jesus could turn water into wine without anyone suggesting that he should go to an AA meeting. Even today many Christians sip a bit of wine, portraying it as the symbolic blood of Christ. One can't help but think that the dynamic duo of Bacchus and Jesus might have been a lot of fun at parties. "Wine, women, and salvation" has a rather nice ring to it.
A lot has changed over the past 2000 years, but the human thirst for spiritual enlightenment and liberation is still a powerful force in all cultures of the world. And, as the internet and other forms of modern media prove on a daily basis, we still have an insatiable interest in sex. Wouldn't it be nice if our spiritual lives and our sexual lives could team up and provide a whole new meaning to the idea of a "church social"? Indeed, this is roughly the sort of vision that Michael, Lissa, and other Pagans wish to share with the world. Sex, they would say, is sacred and should be celebrated as an integral part of our social and spiritual lives. Read more
Sexual energy is the life force moving through the whole body and when it flows easily, it energizes all energy centers. However, sexual energy can get stuck, particularly if the heart center is afflicted. When someone relates to sex addictively, it is often because of significant blocks or leaks in one or more of the energy centers.For the next few blogs, I will explore dilemmas associated with each energy center, progressing from the base of the spine to the crown of the head. These areas are:
- Permission: Healing the Cultural Wounding Read more
Is it sexy to be spiritual? New research has found that spirituality has a greater effect on the sex lives of young adults — especially women — than religion, impulsivity, or alcohol.
“I think people have been well aware of the role that religious and spiritual matters play in everyday life for a very long time,” said Jessica Burris, one of the study’s researchers at the University of Kentucky. “But in the research literature, the unique qualities of spirituality — apart from religiousness — are not usually considered.”
According to a research measure known as the Spiritual Transcendence Scale, those qualities are connectedness, universality, and prayer fulfillment. But the data found that of the three, connectedness plays the largest role in spiritual sexuality and leads to more sex with more partners, often without the use of condoms. Read more
Newly-wed Roman Catholic couples are being encouraged to say a special prayer together before having sex.
The specially-composed Prayer Before Making Love is aimed at 'purifying their intentions' so the act is not about selfishness or hedonism. Read more
Why is New Age spirituality so prevalent in the sex- positive community?A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece on this blog about my skeptical, materialist, atheist, entire non- spiritual view of sexual transcendence, and why you don’t need to see sex as metaphysical to see it as magnificent and meaningful.
I deliberately didn’t make the piece critical of spirituality and religion. Partly, that simply wasn’t the point of the piece: the point wasn’t to tear down the spiritual view of sex, but to offer an alternative to it. And partly, I’ll admit, it was because many of my friends and allies in the sex community have spiritual beliefs about sex, in some cases deeply held spiritual beliefs, and I was gun-shy about alienating them.
But I recently gave an interview to Greg Fish of the Weird Things blog, who read the piece and wanted to talk with me about it. And what Greg mostly wanted to know was the very question I’d been deliberately avoiding. He wanted to know why, in my opinion, so many people in the sex- positive community are so heavily invested in associating sex with spirituality and religion.
This is an attempt to answer that question. Read more
This morning . . . well I only had so much time. I had to pick up the car from the repair shop, make lunch for my son, clean, and go to the city to consult. Yet, I was feeling out of sorts, and disconnected from my love. What to do?
THE SACRED QUICKIE!
What’s the difference between a quickie and a sacred quickie? Read more
It is true that our relationship with sexuality is complicated by everything that makes us human. We are all experts on our own experience, so in that regard, everyone who speaks for themselves is absolutely right. Since we are all influenced by culture and ours is particularly ambivalent about sex, much of our feelings about the subject get reflected in attitudes: the meaning we attach to sex. I know there are other models of sexuality and the one most prevalent in popular media is the Biological model. The attempt to reduce sex to physical and chemical components, a bit like plumbing systems, is perhaps a way to control the mystery of it all; but the mystery is what makes sex so interesting. As a colleague of mine, Dr. Leonore Tiefer said, to limit sexuality to biology makes it more like digestion than dancing. I choose dancing.
Let's start with the experience of sexual energy. You can try this exercise by yourself. It helps if you know how to do pelvic rocking. Lie down with your knees bent, feet about hip distance apart, and your low back flat on the floor (don't try this if you have back problems). As you rock your pelvis back with a slight arch, breathe in and as you tuck your pelvis, breathe out. Do this for just a few minutes and then lower your knees, straightening them to rest on the floor and continue breathing. Visualize energy moving up your spine with the in-breath and moving down the front of your body with the out breath. Read more
Eleven minutes: that's the estimated time most couples spend making love and sometimes its not even much fun. Between one quarter and one half of long term relationships are beset with low desire and it is common for spouses to find other sexual outlets. We are living in a time when all the marital roles and rules have changed and old solutions don't seem to be working.
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So imagine living in a culture where sex was sacred and not a sin and sexuality was seen as a positive expression of the life force. This perspective was the norm in many cultures pre-dating Greek and Roman times and these societies date back 30,000 years. Even as late as 3,500 years ago those who lived on the island of Crete recognized sexual pleasure as a wonderful way to connect with spirit, renew the abundance of the land, and unite deeply with one another. In this culture sexuality was widely understood as a pathway to spiritual ecstasy. Read more
... Our sexual relationships can become fuller vehicles for intimacy, self-knowledge, and spiritual evolution. As you make love, look deeply into the eyes of your beloved. Feel the electric heat of your union rippling upward with your breath, transforming into Divine Ecstasy as you gaze upon the face of God. Practicing sacred sexuality primes the mind and body to accept and amplify the creative life-force and ecstasy that is slumbering within us. Read more
... According to a recent review article in the Dec. 3 issue of The Journal of Sexual Medicine, sexually unsatisfied women who practiced the Eastern techniques of mindfulness and yoga reported improvements in levels of arousal and desire, as well as better orgasms. In addition, yoga has been found to effectively treat premature ejaculation in men. Read more
Tantra (a Sanskrit word which means "woven together") is a term loosely applied to several divergent and even contradictory schools of Hindu yoga in which the sexual union of male and female is worshipped either in principle or in human practice. It has also come to be applied to sex-based religious practices developed in other religions, including Bon, Tibetan Buddhism, Taoism, Christianity, Judaism, and Transcendentalism. Read more
