Sacred Sexuality

Sitting with my friend Roseanne in the darkening twilight, I ask her a question I've been asking many people lately: "What does sacred sexuality mean to you?" Roseanne hesitates, searching for the right words. "It's not something you can force... but once in a while, you pass through into something beyond, something transcendent.... It's like a great light... Life comes pouring into existence, and for just a second, you get a chance to look at it and see it happening."

Roseanne, a mother and housewife in her early fifties, is neither a student of Tantra, nor is she versed in New Age thought. In fact, she seems an unlikely source for information on sacred sexuality, raised as she was in a strict Mormon family where sex was equated with sin. Yet the long overlooked truth is that countless "ordinary" men and women feel a natural, intuitive reverence for sex as the place where "life comes pouring into existence."

At the same time, millions of Americans also carry a heavy legacy of sexual guilt and shame which blocks their ability to appreciate sex as a divine gift. Over and over, people tell me that their parents rarely or never talked about sex, and pretended to be asexual. "In my family," one woman told me, "there were no words for sexual parts or sexual acts.... When I was eight or nine, I got out a mirror and looked at my vagina and wondered if there was something wrong with me. "Is this okay?' I thought. 'Is this how it's supposed to be?'"
Many of us were raised in religious traditions that considered sex "unspiritual" if not downright sinful. In contrast, most indigenous people revere sex as an encounter with the spirit worlds. Sobonfu Some, a teacher from the African Dagara tribe, says that her language has no words for "having sex." The equivalent Dagara phrase translates as "going on a journey together"-a journey guided, according to Dagara belief, by the spirits of the ancestors.

Moreover, the Dagara believe that though this journey is taken in private, it benefits the entire community because in the process, the human and the spirit worlds are brought into alignment. Such ideas may seem a far cry from our own. Yet I have heard hundreds of women, as well as many men, describing sex as a mysterious, profoundly sacred power.

Janet, for example, responded without a moment's hesitation to my question about the nature of sex: "Sex is the light that streams from the body." "Sex is magic," said another woman, "it's a field of magic." And yet another told me in a tone of awe, "It's the primal creative force. It moves through you, but it doesn't belong to you; you can't possess it."

Sex is not a genital activity; in fact, it is not an activity at all, but rather an aspect of the creative life force also known as Kundalini, which can enliven and electrify us at every stage of life. For Cindy, a sculptor in her seventies, the moment of her sexual awakening coincided with her birth as an artist. "In that moment, I understood that this vibrant aliveness was me. That's who I am. All the creative work I have done since then comes out of that state."

Cindy has had several deeply satisfying relationships, but today, she is happily single. Grinning, she tells me, "I felt so empowered when I realized that I would always be a sexual woman, and that I didn't have to depend on a partner. The older I get, the more I feel turned on to spirit, to my own creativity, and most of all to the crazy, magical rush of life."
Naomi, a woman in her forties, made the exhilarating discovery of her own sexual power during a women's ritual at which each participant took off her clothes and offered a nude dance. Years of childhood abuse had taught Naomi to equate sex with humiliation. And so, she entered into her dance shaking with terror. Soon however, fear gave way to a mounting surge of ecstasy that coursed through her body and intensified until it exploded into orgasm. "This joy started coursing through my body until I was rolling around on the floor like a little animal, kicking my legs and laughing. It wasn't dignified or beautiful. It was a joyful, ecstatic exuberance exploding through my body."

Sacred sexuality can be etheric and gentle, or it can be bawdy, raucous, and funny. Cutting through the ego's pretentiousness, it reconnects us with the innocent joy of our animal bodies and gifts us with the medicine of wild, liberating laughter. Therefore, the ancient Greeks called Aphrodite the "laughter-loving" goddess who was always surrounded by children.

Jalaja Bonheim, Ph.D., author of Aphrodite's Daughters: Women's Sexual Stories and the Journey of the Soul
http://www.jalajabonheim.com
http://www.instituteforcirclework.org

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