"A Prostitute Compassionate Am I"

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Personal Love vs Universal Love

“Love is a many-splendored thing,” someone once said. In polyamory communities, there’s an oft-heard adage known as, “Love is infinite; time and energy are not.” Polyamorous people believe that they have the capacity to love and be in relationship with more than one person at one time. Not everyone is necessarily built this way, but no one can dispute that we all have multiple loves, of different varieties. We love our spouse. We love our parents, we love our kids, and we often love our friends. We are all maintaining multiple relationships at the same time, but with varying degrees of intimacy and different levels of time and energy commitments. The sexualoving component does not actually change that reality that much, except that we’ve been conditioned to believe that it should.

There is also another concept that most westerners don’t talk about or grok well or are even aware of sometimes. There’s a difference between personal love and universal love. I am able, especially while in the role of priestess, to tap into what I call the universal love. This is the source of all life, love and pleasure in the universe. Name it what you will, most religions have some sort of concept for this. I simply open myself up to it, dissolving my small, human, egocentric boundaries and allow myself to connect in to the web of all being. From here I can access the compassion to be able to accept someone in all their human faultiness and frailty while simultaneously honoring the glorious divine within them. Each person who comes before me as a supplicant, I love. In that moment, they receive all the love I have to give, totally and completely. When that moment is over, I may feel a lingering sense of that emotion, but it does not tie me to that person, and it doesn’t necessarily herald the beginning of a personal relationship with them.

I have even been known to “make love” to a whole crowd of people, while they watched me dance. I opened that energy channel wide and poured out all my love onto every single person I made eye contact with. In that instant of connection, I allowed myself to love that person completely. And just because it only lasted a second or two, and just because I then immediately moved on to someone else and established a loving connection with others, doesn’t invalidate that true moment of communion I shared with the first.

Each moment is precious and exists independently of every other moment. But of course, moments flow one into the other seamlessly, and we sometimes attach too much significance, expectation, obligation to each individual moment, which lessens its magic. Appreciate the moments of love and grace that touch your life, and you will be better able to appreciate your life as a whole, and the lives of those who touch yours.

www.TempleRedLotus.com

Celebrating Imbolc

Happy Imbolc, everyone!

Although not everyone who may read this is pagan, I wanted to share the following in celebration of this holiday that I celebrate. The ritual I describe is one that I designed, and does not adhere to any particular tradition within paganism. For the adepts, this is also fairly basic and may not meet your needs. Take what works for you and move on. If anyone else would like to share what works for them, I'd love to hear about it!

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Imbolc is the time of the quickening, when the earth begins to come back to life, in preparation for the blossoming of spring. This is the time of year in which we celebrate the Virgin or Maiden aspect of the Goddess, as she prepares for growth and renewal. In ancient times, the word "virgin" was used to denote a woman who was strong and independent, who was not tied to any man (neither father nor husband), a woman who could make her own decisions and direct her own life. She could have sexual relations when and with whom she desired, not when it was expected of her.

The lessons of the Virgin are appropriate for both men and women. During this time of the Virgin, you have an opportunity to stand up for yourself and your own needs, to ask for what you want and to take responsibility for your own stuff. You can clear out the old, to make way for the new, by doing some self-examination and being honest with yourself about what's holding you back from being the best that you can possibly be. Ask the Goddess in her Virgin aspect to assist you in becoming stronger about asserting your opinions, honoring your feelings, and doing the work it takes to live the life you want to live.

Masturbation Meditation:

This is a great opportunity to use masturbation as a sacred sexual tool to augment your spiritual practice. Remind yourself that your pleasure is your responsibility, and that there is nothing wrong with taking an opportunity to pleasure yourself. You'll want to make arrangements to ensure that you will not be disturbed. Also remember, in addition to your regular ritual supplies and tools, that you set aside, in your circle (whether on the altar or beside the bed), the supplies you'll need for your self-pleasuring ritual.

Sanctify your space and honor the elements or directions as you are comfortable and accustomed to. Then connect with the Goddess and state your intentions. ("Goddess, with this ritual, I desire to connect with myself more deeply, and to honor your gifts by pleasuring myself. I offer my pleasure, including whatever orgasms I may have, as an offering of love to you and to myself. Please guide me this day in feeling secure in the knowledge that I am a sacred being, that I am worthy of this pleasure.")

Sit or lie in a comfortable position, close your eyes, breathe deeply from your belly. Relax and begin to touch yourself lightly in non-sexual ways and places. Rub your arms, your legs, your back; scritch your head, massage your neck. Then gradually begin caressing yourself in loving ways, slowly allowing your hands to move to more erogenous areas. Allow the energy to become more erotic as you continue to touch yourself lovingly and sensually. When you are ready, begin to pleasure yourself in the manner you like best. Start slow and let the energy build. As you do this, repeat to yourself the following mantra: "I am sacred. Pleasure is sacred. I am worthy of this pleasure." The energy will build, your rhythm will increase, and your chanting may get louder (you can repeat it silently, as well, but when we say things out loud, our subconsicous works with them on a deeper level.) Continue pleasuring yourself and chanting your mantra until you approach orgasm or you're approaching some sense of satisfaction and culmination. Continue until you reach that energetic and/or physical peak, whereupon you will release the energy toward the Goddess, and you may shout, moan, scream or otherwise vocalize your gratitude to the Goddess.

Allow yourself to wallow in the after-glow with yourself and the Goddess for a few minutes. Allow the feelings of pleasure and satisfaction to gently and naturally subside. If you feel silly, embarassed or any other seemingly negative emotion, forgive yourself, hold yourself in compassionate space and assure yourself that all your feelings are valid. If you're feeling joy, power, happiness...revel in it....and thank the Goddess again! :)

This is just one suggestion for how to use sacred sexuality to honor and work with the energies of this season. Happy Imbolc, no matter how you choose to celebrate or observe it! :)

In sacred love & sensuality,
Inara

Linking Sacred Sexuality and Peace

In light of the recent flurry of interest in the Global Orgasm project, I wanted to post an essay I wrote a few weeks ago which links sacred sexuality, peace and the concept of sacred play ("lila" in Sanskrit).

For more info on the Global Orgasm event, check out these links:

globalorgasm.org

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/1120-02.htm

And now, on to my essay...

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Essay - Connecting Sacred Sexuality, Sacred Play & Peace

Inara de Luna © August 2006

I've been asked to give a workshop at the Peace Day Festival, which has been themed "A Day of Play," and was told that my classes on Sacred Sexuality would fit in beautifully. This has challenged me to define the connection between sacred sexuality, peace and sacred play.

To me, sacred sexuality is twofold: (1) the process of using sex and sensuality as the vehicle through which you experience recognition of or appreciation for the divine in yourself and others, and (2) a practice toward integration of your being on several levels: the body, mind, heart and soul; the male and female aspects; the human and divine; the sacred and profane. Through the process of recognition of the divine and the process of integration, a sense of peace and harmony is inevitable. This is true whether you're working primarily with yourself, in a relationship, or in a larger community.

When working with yourself, learning to see the divine within helps you to achieve peace because you are no longer at war with yourself. Once you recognize your own inner divinity, there is no more reason to beat yourself up over little things, you can see that your body is a beautiful temple of the divine, no matter what its shape or size, and you are more in touch with your innermost feelings, desires, boundaries and personal power. Of course, there is more that goes into achieving a state of peace, but we'll delve into that later.

When you are able to consistently appreciate the divine within your lover, partner, parents, siblings, children, etc…you can be more forgiving, more compassionate, more open, more vulnerable, more trusting. The Divine is all these things and so to see them in your very human partner opens you to interacting with them from a place of divine grace. This isn't to say that you won't still get angry or irritated with them at times, but it does help you to work out differences and difficulties with more mutual respect, patience, grace and maturity. When you connect with the inner divine of your partner, you don't operate from a presumption of distrust of their motivations or intentions.

Once you learn to appreciate the role each aspect of your being has to play in creating your overall Self, you can integrate them and become Whole and Holy. The body, mind, heart and spirit all work cooperatively to keep you healthy and happy. Your inner masculine and feminine traits and energies are balanced and equal, allowing you to temper justice with compassion, strength with vulnerability, and assertiveness with gentleness. Once you've begun to achieve these integrations, the separations between human and divine, and that between sacred and profane, begin to blur and disappear. The yin/yang balance becomes a merged union of Wholeness, in which seeming opposites are actually found to be complementaries. And once you've experienced this oneness within yourself, it's not such a stretch to expand that understanding beyond yourself to incorporate everyone around you, and to fully know that we are all indeed interconnected.

Once you can sense the interconnections between all the beings on the planet, and appreciate that the divine resides in all things and beings, it becomes impossible to hate and make violence on anyone else, because they are a part of you. To harm another is to harm yourself. Peace then becomes inevitable as we learn to maintain our state of harmony and interconnection. This process of learning to maintain our state of harmony and interconnection is truly about making love, not war.

Neither sacred sexuality, playfulness nor peace can exist in the face of hate, distrust, fear or animosity. All can be experienced in and contribute to an atmosphere of love, trust, compassion, harmony and serenity.

Sacred play is about honoring the divine role that playing fills in our lives. The harder we work, the more we need to relax, engage in leisure activities, indulge our creative natures, and enjoy pleasure. If we don't make room for these things, our lives begin to resemble a wasteland, empty of enjoyment, emotion, satisfaction or serenity. Material accomplishments can only go so far in buoying us up...we need to balance our doing with simply being. And divine play can help us with that. During play, children are completely focused on the activity of the moment. Their attention is absorbed, they are wholly present, and their feelings of joy are readily apparent in the look in their eye, the big easy smiles, the bursts of laughter, the clapping of hands.

It is said that "God" was playing when he made the world. He wanted to experience some of this for himself and so incarnates as a physical being every now and then. It's fascinating in the way that a captured beetle fascinates a toddler.

Approaching our adult sexual lives with a sense of childlike wonder, innocence, playfulness, attentiveness, hyper-focus, and present-awareness can only enhance our joy and pleasure in the interaction.

Interweaving then the three concepts of sacred sexuality, divine play and world peace is a process of recognizing each other's inherent divinity, integrating all the disparate parts of ourselves so as to recognize our own divinity, playing with each other in ways that celebrate each other's strengths, fulfill each other's needs for affection, pleasure and acceptance, respecting one another's processes, listening to one another's needs and complaints from a place of maternal, compassionate, detached Witness, holding safe space for each other's growth and healing to take place.

Can you imagine a world in which the leaders of conflicted countries could come together in a yab-yum embrace, engage in an eye-gazing exercise, express their heartfelt needs, fears and hurt places, ask one another for forgiveness and express what they feel would help heal the situation, and then tickle one another until both fell over from laughing so hard, finally to be bathed by the temple priestesses before celebrating their newfound unity by engaging sensually with each other or the priestesses themselves? What a world that would be….