Dear Reader;
Welcome to Part One in a series of writings on Healing the Primary Sexual Wound.
The elements are as follows:
Life force, the essence of Human
Our place in the collective sexual shadow
Permission lost and reclaimed
Masculine and Feminine. What? Why?
The Age of Creation: birth, art, dimensional being-ness
Each element will include exercises and meditations to support the central teaching.
Part One: On the essence of what it means to be Human, and alive.
I remember the first time I saw, really saw, human death.
The idea of death was not new to me. I was young, but I had seen road kill shining in the headlights, squashed insects and flattened mice at the back of a dusty cupboard.
I had heard about death.
My cat had been taken away to be euthanized after cancer ravaged her soft, calico face. A young acquaintance had died when his kidney transplant failed. A friend at school lost her father to a sudden heart attack and there were rumours that they had argued hours before his death. She had said terrible things to him, things she could now never unsay.
I attended that funeral, my first time ever in a Catholic church, and was amazed by the mumbled Latin, swaying incense and cold judgement from the pulpit. And I’ll never forget my friend, convulsively sobbing as she was led from the church in a state of collapse.
I knew of death, but still I had never met death. That meeting happened with the passing of my beloved Granny who lived downstairs, the one who made me dolls by hand, fed me hot, milky tea in a porcelain cup with a biscuit balanced on the saucer; the one who comforted me by reading poetry from tattered, oilskin covered books. It was when Lily left that I saw death.
I was twenty years of age; she had passed while I was away at University. We gathered as a family in the parking lot of the funeral home. I remember having a headache, feeling randomly nauseous. We walked into the funeral home chapel and I saw the closed casket at the front of the room. I was standing far away, but my awareness of her body inside that box hit my heart as surely as if I had been punched. The devastation, not only of her loss, but the idea that the glow of her being, her vital love could disappear, was too much.
I thought I had accepted the idea of her passing, but the truth of it really did not enter my psyche until I walked up the aisle of that chapel and felt the absence of her life. I could sense her spirit was not present in that box. I felt her empty body through the wood. And that was how I knew that the essence of my grandmother, a black ribbon holding back her fine grey hair, BBC news playing on the radio, cat on her lap as she read her newspapers; my sweet Lily had left her physical form. The grief hit me as if an avalanche had poured through the sanctuary windows and swept me up the aisle and carried me away. I was very young, and I did not know where the spirit, the light of Lily had gone.
Since my youth, I have had a number of opportunities to meet death again. I have lost numerous loved ones and been present to watch the spirit take its leave. At times I have been called to midwife the death process. Each time I watched with fascination as the magic of the life force withdrew from physical form, the body, the shell we once identified as the one we love. That first instant of shattering connection to my grandmother’s silent body taught me much about death by showing me what it meant to be alive. I had not understood life fully, until that moment.
The impulse which imbues the inanimate with life, this is mystery, this is the absolute magic of incarnation, and any scientist who tries to tell you they can define it, or someday duplicate it, is telling you a lie. Life force is the mystical made into form; it cannot be manufactured, captured in a bottle, stolen or copied. It is energetic essence, and as such is born from a multi-dimensional plane. If we can disappear into death, we can also explode into life, and what a miracle to be having this experience, even in our suffering and challenge.
We can honour this animating impulse, and even be content with its essential mystery. But know that, without it, the trees would shrivel into eternal winter, the beings of land, sea and sky would turn to dust and all would be a lifeless desert with a heart of stone. We can even try to imagine the life force of Gaia coming to an end, but we would be imagining the impossible, for once ignited, this activation of Presence simply keeps expressing, eternally, in fact, a continuous exploration of full revelation. An encompassing desert of death is impossible, because life is everywhere. Like the arc between lightning and steeple, the electrical expression of life seeks connection with the highest point of reception, to be born and born and born again.
It is interesting to me that, one way or another, all living beings hold within them the capacity to generate new life. That to be born a woman, alive in her own life force presence, means to hold the capacity to give home to a new spark within her being. And that to be a man means to hold the capacity to initiate that spark. Isn’t it interesting that this initiation occurs during coitus in a union meant to be sacred, for thus, in the melding arms of divine pleasure, is how the miraculous is born.
It is not that the only purpose of coitus is to conceive, but rather that conception potentially occurs out of the experience of union and bliss, a taste of divinity in human form, generating an opportunity for life force to be born again. It is through sexual arousal that the most innocent moment of incarnation can occur. The purity of the embodied infant is the direct result of sexual passion. This is no accident. There is nothing without purpose and reason in the structures of Creation.
For centuries the dogma of myriad religious and cultural traditions have told us the opposite. We have been taught that the sexual impulse is rooted in the “privates”, something hidden, covered and shameful. Even the structure of our human form reminds us, as the male genitalia mocks itself at times with its rising and vulnerable diminishment, and the female turns herself inward, a flower with petals darkly closed.
If we trust that our material design reflects the journey of the soul in human incarnation, as we see with our eyes and feel with our hearts and digest with our bellies, what might these shy parts of ourselves teach us? And how does our physiology dance with the unseen expression of spirit?
Consider the sail of a boat as it becomes animated by the wind. Without that wind, the sail is simply folded fabric. But once awakened by the breath of nature, that sail can propel a great craft into the acrobatics of movement, purpose and destiny.
We seldom question the origins of our own sexual desire; we simply witness its presence or absence. And we isolate it when it appears, measuring the appropriateness of its expression and timing. But if we can take a step back into an allowing that our sexual essence is not limited to personal intimacy, we open up a whole new world.
In truth the human form is a manifestation of electrical frequency. We exist because we vibrate. It is this frequency which defines us, and when it separates from our physical form, this is what we know as death. Just as I could not feel my grandmother in her deceased body, when this flow reroutes itself into the non-physical, our bodies are no longer needed and they begin their return into deconstructed matter. Similarly, when the soul chooses to incarnate, our life force encompasses the foetus, claims it for its own, and the journey of separation from the mother begins. This dance, this union is ultimately the beginning of our greatest potential for godliness, for bliss. And such an animation is certainly not reserved for a specific genitally based expression. It lives in our entire being, and shines from us and through us, out into the waiting world.
To know the full experience of this form of sexual expression we may turn to tantric practices, or spiritual practices which may lead to a sexual experience. These are powerful, subtle understandings, and may take a lifetime, or many lifetimes to explore, but they begin with our willingness to witness our own life force essence. To observe it, honour it, and cultivate it as the ultimate gift of the Creator. In its authentic expression, this frequency is as far from shame as hate is the antithesis of all that is holy.
If you are alive, you are imbued with the potential for bliss, and experiences of profound creation. If you are in body, you are in relationship with Divine expression moving through you. And if you are in human partnership, you have the potential to expand this aspect of your being to fill your intimacy in new ways.
It is true that many religious traditions take us on a different path. The fear of the power of sexual expression has led to centuries of abuse, denial and pain. It may be that for some, abstinence is chosen as a way of purifying the spiritual principle, but for the many, many who walk a path of trusting the body to teach the soul, we are asked to reclaim the gift of our life force presence, and to invite it to magnify, heal and uplift us into reunion with Source. We recognize that pleasure, passion and divine love are indistinct, and may be accessed in absolute safety, beauty and trust. Wherever pain has left its mark, we are asked to witness and listen. There is no more powerful wound than a sexual wound, and thus its healing may transform us like no other.
Who were you born to be, in your wholeness? How might this power be asking to express through you? What limitations are you ready to release as you dissolve old patterns of suppression? As an awakening creator, what does the frequency of your own life force call you to create? I would love to hear from you.
For the nature of Source is eternal creation, generative as the potency of all Divine love.
Listen to one example of the universal expression of Life Force as vibration.
much love,
Adi
Life Force