Join me in Creating Sex Positive Culture!
Why not commit to living a more playful sensuous ecstatic life?
Join me in co-creating a culture based on a Love Ethic that increases the amount of closeness, intimacy and pleasure available to everyone. What is a love ethic? In order to participate in one, we must have a common definition of love.
I offer you the definitions of love that I teach in my classes and counseling practice:
“To truly love, we must learn to mix various ingredients- care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication.”
bell hooks “All About Love”
“Love is the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.”
“Love is as love does. Love is an act of will-namely both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice.
We do not have to love. We choose to love.”
From “The Road Less Traveled” by M. Scott Peck
In the spirit of my deepening commitment to world transformation, I ask you to listen to what I am saying with a sense of curiosity and an open mind. Some of you have, out loud,by telling jokes or under your breath just loud enough for me to hear or with your body language let me know that you are afraid of the word sex. I do not take any of this personally because I know how afraid our culture is of sex. Please take a deep breath with me and suspend your concepts about who I am and what I do. Instead feel into your own body and see what your experience of me is while I am with you in this moment. Take a moment to check in with your own physical experience here and now.
What would it be like to live in a world without sexual shame, fear of rape, assault or abuse? Wouldn’t you like to find out? Many times when I speak with you I wonder if I am really being of use. I am aware that people have judgments about sex positive culture. How is talking about jealousy in a public forum useful? Why investigate a self- repressed desire to be dominated or to dominate? What could be important about looking into an unpleasant childhood incident of guilt or embarrassment? Is it clear to you that attending to your personal sexual healing can be the cause of transformation on both an individual and societal level? Because it is. Let me repeat that: attending to your personal sexual healing can be the cause of transformation on both an individual and societal level.
Marianne Williamson in her book “The Return to Love” wrote:”Personal transformation can and does have global effects. As we go, so goes the world, for the world is us. The revolution that will save the world is ultimately a personal one”
Part of the hazard of doing sex positive work in a sex negative culture is that people discount or disregard sexual healing work. Sacred Sexuality is seen as unimportant, frivolous, or even a contradiction in terms. A great many people are seriously distressed, suffering from the belief that they are un-loveable, un-desirable or permanently damaged in some way. For many of us, these internal messages were generated in past experiences of abuse that have not been fully cleared. Traumatic incidents lodge themselves in us as energy blockages and create what Eckhardt Tolle (author of The Power of Now, Stillness Speaks and A New Earth) calls “the Pain Body”. Most of us are run by our ego identified self which thrives on our pain body. We are unconscious, disassociated and emotionally distressed. We are unhappy, dissatisfied and certain that this is “as good as it gets”.
Why is it important to attend to our own healing, sexual and otherwise? We are living in a time of “Inconvenient Truths” (thank you Al Gore) when human suffering and narcissism has driven other species into the fastest rate of extinction since the coming of the ice age. We are living in a time when the earth’s capacity to sustain “life as we know it” is becoming questionable. These concepts are no longer apocalyptic conspiracy theories; they are a glaring scientifically evident reality.
There is a direct connection between our ability and willingness to consciously inhabit our bodies and our ability and willingness to attend to the Planet’s well being. Sexual wounds are often the deepest and most repressed wounds of all. Conversely, when we shine the light of conscious aware attention on these wounds a powerful and holistic energy shift can occur. Releasing ourselves from the past allows us to become present in the here and now. Until we attend to and accomplish our own sexual healing, the World; the actual physical Earth we live upon, cannot have our conscious attention. Sexual Healing is now the existential responsibility of every human who is interested in having human evolution be a part of the Earth’s future.
Fortunately it is possible to heal through play, pleasure and sense awareness. Sexual Healing does not have to be an ominous re-traumatizing process. Some of the simple tasks at hand are:
1)Investigating where we are silent and choosing to speak,
2)Seeing where we are numb and bringing our attention to these places,
3)Listening to each other and finding we are not alone,
4)Holding a compassionate space, within for our selves and without for others, to be seen and witnessed,
5)Asking for, offering and providing physical affection as an end to itself.
With all of this in mind, please consider participating in the events I host or teach. Refer yourself or a loved one to me for healing work or consider creating and inviting others to Living love Revolution or Sex Positive events of your own. This talk was given to the Seattle Interbay BNI group on Tuesday June 16th. Adapted from original blog entry for January 2007
Copyright held by Reverend Teri D. Ciacchi MSW