The Ecstasy Returns (Whew)

I had my first ecstatic experience in a couple of months in the forest near my home today. I've not had one of these experiences since I gave the fullness of my heart to someone who didn't see it and decided they didn't want it once they did see it. They wanted my body for sex and my mind for the capacity to fantasize as they liked, but wanted nothing to do with my heart. My heart closed up after being objectified and rejected so profoundly. It hurt big and deep. It caused me to question whether I can continue my mission in vulnerability and open-heartedness. I've spent some time going deep inside to lick my wounds, healing through time, writing and loving relationships.

I live near Jacoby Creek and yet in the year that I've lived here I've never taken the time to visit the creek. As ridiculous as that seems, it's true. Today I was inspired on the way home to pull over and explore a path that I've seen hundreds of times on my drive into town. I have a friend coming to visit and I want to be a good hostess not just in my home, but in this amazing forest that surrounds me. I swear sometimes I feel the trees holding me, their roots underneath me, their trunks and branches around me and above me. As I wove my way through the mossy trees and walked through the water and watched little banana slugs on the path, skittering water bugs in the creek and spiders in a patch of wild flowers, I felt a big opening in my heart. I felt connected. I felt the magic of Oneness and the immense miracle of life that I am blessed to participate in. I felt the God in Everything.

Last night I felt my heart opening in a different sort of way. I spent some time with writing and art by people who are witnessing the tragedies of the world and bringing the stories to the American public in hopes of inspiring people to change the unnecessary harm we are causing/allowing to the earth and other human beings. I am recognizing how my capacity to feel so deeply through my empathy and to evoke feeling in others in all kinds of ways by very my nature is a gift to be used in a similar way. I used to dream of art projects in which I told the stories of people whose lives could be changed if enough people woke up to their true capacity for compassion and empathy and did something about the atrocities taking place every minute of every day. It's stories that cause people experience empathy, to feel for the suffering of others.

I watched an Eve Ensler video earlier today in which she talks about how she experiences Oneness through her body (please go watch it, it's profound and only 12 minutes long). She's recognized that her body is a reflection of the larger world, that the cancer that invaded her body is a reflection of the cancer of war, greed, and violence in our world. It's all the same. It's all connected. It's powerful and so very true.

God, I do feel so very deeply. When I approached my car from the creek this afternoon and looked up into the giant redwood trees, I started crying. Tears are how I express emotions that are too big for words. I could feel my crazy deep love for the Divine Spark in everything pouring out of me, streaming amongst rivulets of grief for the wounding of myself and the world. I've cried so many times in the last few days, nearly every time I'm in conversation with a friend. I am allowing myself to feel the fullness of everything I have experienced and am experiencing in my life recently - the grief and the happiness, the disappointment and the hope, the confusion, the doubt, and the moments of pure clarity. And of course the inexplicable depth of complicated love I have for a few people in my life.

I've missed the heartlight that imbued my life so deeply a few months ago - the light in me that responded to the light in the world with giddy joy and a connectedness that seemed to set my cells on fire. Ecstatic states were happening all the time. I recognize that like the myths of Persephone and Inanna, it is necessary to walk through the darkness in order to clear the shadows from the light I shine. I know that I needed to explore the depths of my sense of worthlessness and invisibility the way that I did so that I could discover just how valuable and visible and worthy of love that I am. While I've been deeply hurt, I am incredibly grateful for the experience and for the participation of the other person in my evolution. I am very frustrated by their shadow right now and working on forgiveness, but I still know their light and I still have love in my heart for them, whether they want it or not.

As I've said before, ecstasy and despair, it's all God.

I'm just so very so grateful to have the heartlight again, to bask in its warmth however long it lasts before a descent into the dark is required for the next stage of evolution.

Thank you for listening.

The Need to Serve

"…I would like to beg you…as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. Rainier Maria Rilke

As my relationship to Daddy continues to deepen, I find myself plagued with questions about who I am and what I truly desire out of life.

My desire to serve runs very, very deep. Serving the desires and needs of others brings me the deepest satisfaction I've known in my life. I've channeled that desire in many directions - starting a home for teen mothers when I was 19, volunteering for the HSU women's center, tutoring at risk teens, creating The Yoni Endeavor (an art/writing project towards women's empowerment), directing a Welfare-to-Work job training center, devoting my career to service organizations, The Conspiracy of Blessings (an art project in which I sent art blessings to those in need of a bit of kindness), co-chairing the Board of Directors of our local Pride organization, and being a Hostess for the Imps. No matter what is going on in my own life - no matter how crazy or depressed I was, no matter that I worked full time to support my family and was single parenting two children, no matter what relationships I was involved in - I have always needed a place to channel my desire to serve in order to feel any sense of satisfaction in my life.

While I understand that my Servant archetype is a fundamental aspect of who I am, I have struggled with how I feel about where I channel my service and what I receive in return. There is no such thing as true altruism. We always get something from giving, even if it's just pleasure from the act of giving. When we give to a person or an organization or a cause over the long term, it is vital that our needs for pleasure and reward are met, otherwise we experience burn out. I have found that I often reach a point of burn out with the places I've channeled my service because I'm not getting all of my personal needs for pleasure and reward met, whatever they are. For instance, I often serve by meeting the administrative needs of an organization because I'm really good and efficient at administrative tasks, even though I am extremely under-stimulated intellectually, creatively and emotionally by administration. I get the reward of service, but it's shadowed by lack of fulfillment in expressing my other gifts and interests, especially my intelligence and creativity.

I am so very good at meeting the needs and desires of others. As a single mother most of my life, I've always focused on meeting the needs of my children first. I also naturally put the needs of my romantic partners first, not because I believed I had to, but because I truly wanted to. I've always wanted to give as big and deep as I can. I just failed to realize that I have needs to be met, too, and that I would have even more to give if they are met. I have never, ever been good at identifying many of my own needs that can be fulfilled by others (I know how to self care), let alone getting them met. The shadow in my service has been giving all I have until I'm drained and not always knowing how, or feeling I deserve, to get my reserves filled back up with things from others that feed joy to my heart.

Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive. Howard Thurman

I've seen this quote often and I keep asking myself what makes me come alive. While service itself makes me come alive, it's often shadowed by the lack of reciprocity in meeting other needs and desires.

I've started questioning my lifelong belief that I need to serve the world in the biggest (from the world's point of view) way that I'm capable. My entire life has been committed to service in a belief that I am here to help facilitate the revolution of consciousness in humanity. And my desire to serve is so big that I've wanted to figure out where I can have the maximum impact. And yet I wonder if I have been partially driven by ego and partially by the actuality that I've not found truly rewarding containers for my service.

I have always desired to serve through building others up - empowering women who've been abused, supporting teen moms in becoming self sufficient, inspiring welfare-to-work single mothers to dream for themselves and their children, facilitating sexual confidence in my community - and have always tried to build up the person I am in intimate relationship to as well. I tried so hard to build up my ex-husband to pursue his bliss. I tried to build him up so that he'd have the confidence to develop friendship and community. I tried to be emotionally and spiritually supportive by offering insights, ideas and resources for healing and growth. But he didn't want those things. He wanted to remain a bakery driver and spend all his free time in video games because he was afraid to try to be more.

I've had other relationships in which my energy and love towards building up my partner didn't really go anywhere. Either they couldn't accept it or they weren't interested in it.

I realize that I need a much different kind of man than I have fallen for in the past. I need a man who is not afraid to be all of who he is, and who desires a woman who will build him up and support him in his power.

Daddy is such a man. Daddy does big world changing sorts of things in his work. He claims his power in the world, uses that power to make the world better, and then He comes home and claims his power as a Man who deserves all the devotion and worship that His bitch has to give. Daddy is big enough to hold what I have to give and He desires it.

Here's the truth of the matter:

Serving Daddy makes me come alive. Being a source of joy, pleasure, rejuvenation and building up for a man who shines his light so bright and earns my devotion makes me come alive.

The emotional, intellectual, spiritual and physical stimulation and intensity of the Master/slave relationship makes me come alive.

The immense opportunities for growth and self improvement make me come alive. Under Daddy's guidance I am improving myself physically (i have an exercise program now), psychologically/emotionally (i am working through insecurities and fear as i claim my erotic power), and spiritually (i am experiencing the Divine Spark in us both).

The conscious use of my erotic power to fuel my day-to-day joy makes me come alive. Daddy calls it pussy power. Being in touch with my erotic power and being turned on all the time gives me confidence and energy, keeps me smiling and makes me joyful in all my interactions, and inspires me to creativity.

I am not saying that I should give my life to Daddy and stop striving to serve my fellow humans in some way. I am not seeking to completely give my self up to a man like that. I know I have all sorts of things to contribute to the world as an artist, healer and community builder. And Daddy knows and appreciates that, too.

What I am doing is recognizing what makes me come alive and what brings me fulfillment in relationship, because relationship and intimacy make me come alive more than anything else. I'm recognizing what feels like a healthy and immensely rewarding way of channeling my need to serve into a container that allows me to express my service in ways that meet my needs as well as His. I am getting so many needs and desires met through this relationship. However things do or don't unfold with Daddy specifically, I now have a much better idea of the kind of man I truly desire to be in relationship to, and perhaps the specific shape I'd like that relationship to take. No matter how long our connection lasts, the rest of my relationship life will be positively impacted by what I'm learning with Him.

I've been telling myself for quite awhile now how unhealthy relationship immersion is and that it's healthier to focus on the work of my heart rather than who I'm in relationship to. But now I'm doubting the truth in those beliefs. I think it's a matter of being conscious of why I desire to immerse in a relationship like this. I'm not in relationship to Daddy because I have poor self esteem (I wouldn't have lasted this long with Him if I did). I'm not giving up any aspect of myself for Him (in fact He encourages me to be healthy by maintaining a sense of self and shine my light brighter). I'm not in this relationship because I'm playing out an old pattern (this relationship is different than any I've ever had). I'm in this relationship because Daddy and i make amazing magic together, magic that builds us both up in the rest of our lives, magic that brings us pleasure and joy every day. I'm in this relationship - that's also been rather awkward and odd some of the time - because it makes me come alive.

I have to admit that I've been looking really hard for how this is unhealthy, but I can't find it. He and I will have shadow patterns play out, as all relationships do. But my heart tells me this relationship is based on a sharing of light (paradoxically through darkness) and reciprocal support of each others service to the conscious revolution.

Coming back to the Rilke quote above, I want to live this question through this journey with Daddy - how can I shine my light brightest and be most fulfilled in expressing my deep need to serve?

Courting Kali & Mystic Awakening

I am so in love - with my self, with the Universe, with each and every person I am privileged to know. I feel as though I've finally broken through from the desire to be a mystic to the actual embodiment of a full on love affair with the Divine in Everything.

My heart is burning with love
All can see this flame
My heart is pulsing with passion
like waves on an ocean...

Behind the veils
intoxicated with love
I too dance the rhythm
of this moving world

I have lost my senses
in my world of lovers

~Rumi

I've read the erotic-mystical-love writings of Saint John of the Cross, Saint Teresa of Avila, Hafiz, Rumi, Rilke and others and I have hungered so deeply to know that Divinely Inspired Love. I have called myself a mystic for years, but I wasn't really living the experience, at least not like this. I have had a few ecstatic moments sprinkled throughout my life - truly feeling Oneness with All That Is - but they were rare peak moments on my spiritual journey, and often induced by drugs (peyote, ecstasy, acid) or intense community spiritual rituals. Very rarely did they just occur in every day life.

This awakening that is happening in me now - this state of near constant turned-on-ness and immense love that just keeps filling me up - this I have never experienced before. I've experienced ecstatic states every day this week.

I drive down the road from my house in the woods to town and every single time I am overwhelmed by the beauty of the flowers blooming in this early spring and the trees and the sky and the unique and beautiful homes that my neighbors live in. I go to the marsh for my lunchtime walk and I cry in a gratitude prayer for the amazing life that I've been given. I read an incredibly vulnerable blog from a dear friend across the world and I am suddenly able to perceive the Divine in everything - 20 minutes I cried and loved everything and everyone in my life and awareness. It was the most overwhelming and powerful experience of Divine Awareness / Oneness / Love for All-That-Is that I have ever known.

This mystical~emotional~sexual awakening is fierce and amazing. It is as deeply erotic as it is spiritual. I am experiencing the world around me through a sensual and erotic perspective most of the time. I am turned on in some way almost all of the time. I am experiencing the Divine in everything -- the music I listen to, what I read from others, in nature, and most especially in the people I love.

I sat with my bestest buddy during brunch today and cried because I am so incredibly in love with her and what she gives me. She was expressing her guilt around accepting generosity from others and has no idea just how much she gives by being her incredibly loving, kind, accepting, fun, cuddly self who makes me feel like one of the most beautiful people in the world when she reflects my light back to me.

Every moment of my life, no matter how ordinary, is now vibrant, rich with loving energy and meaning. All of existence is a miracle and I am aware of it nearly all the time now.

Kali, the Great Mother Goddess of the Hindu tradition, is the Source, the One that gives birth to All. Known as a slayer of demons, She destroys the army of mind-born delusions symbolized by demons that separate us from the Divine as our own true Self. To our bound, limited and contracted ego identities She may strike terror, at times appearing as a coal-black, sword-wielding, blood-smeared dancer of death and destruction. To our Divine Self, She is our supremely beautiful Beloved, our dear spouse, performing a ballet of incomparable grace, overwhelming us with love.

Kali - Hindu Goddess of Universal Creation and Destruction. Destroyer of Illusions. When you burn in Kali's Fire, your illusions and ego are burned away. I have burned in Her Fire so often that I have a very conscious relationship with Her. I've written about Her before. It's taken years for me to come to peace with the constant state of transformation that defines the modern mystic's journey. Now I am not only at peace with it, but I'm falling head over heels in love with Kali and Her power in my heart. The Fire feels different this time. I feel the creation - the pheonix rising from the ashes - more strongly than I feel the burning away of old illusions, patterns, stories and wounds.

I have recently engaged in a relationship with an amazing man who also has a conscious relationship with Kali. We are exploring both a romantic-sexual connection and a D/s relationship. It's only been three weeks, yet this relationship is already impacting my life in tremendous ways. Kali's Fire is already burning and it's delicious torment.

I've had two assignments so far and they both rocked my world. The first was to write an erotic objectification fantasy -- which was a challenge on multiple levels. I don't write stories - I write real life, I have insecurities around communicating my fantasies, and I am just learning about my objectification desires. The experience was awesome and so hot -- I was inspired by a new fantasy because of the assignment and I did a good job of writing a story because I wrote it while in an aroused state.

The second assignment involved a ritual over the course of three nights -- creating an erotic-submissive sacred space for Him around me and inside of me, reading a sacred text describing a spiritual-erotic ritual in honor of Kali, a contemplation of some questions, and then writing about my experience. What came from that exploration was self-altering. I saw the Divine in myself and broke through to a much deeper level of self love. I don't know if I can be vulnerable enough to write about that experience publicly, but maybe it will one day have a post of its own.

For years I have been hungering for someone who would dive into God with me through sex and relationship. I didn't/don't know how to have that kind of relationship, but I knew intuitively that experiencing relationship as sacred practice and sexual exploration as an expression of spiritual yearnings would be a powerful and transformative experience. And it is. I am now living this dream of mine and it is remarkable.

He is a catalyst for my process of mystical awakening. It started before Him and it isn't because of Him, but He is a Gift from the Universe in catalyzing my experience. There is awakening happening in Him, too.

Tonight He said He was considering the idea of our being in a triad relationship with Kali, the Divine. Imagine that, a triad relationship with God. Really? Is that possible? It's mad and it's amazing and it's right. It's what I desire more than anything else in the Universe. To know God through loving another person as deeply, as vulnerably as possible, that is the greatest turn on there is in my world.

He is wicked smart, deeply passionate about making a difference in the world, a beautiful poet, and so very many things that turn me on. One of His gifts is to mirror my light back to me in words, telling me what He sees in me, what He appreciates in me. As if He sees the Divine in me, too.

He likes and desires my strength, my empathy/intuition, my intelligence, my spirituality, and my submissive sluttiness. He even loves my long letters. I can be all of myself with Him.

Three months ago I decided to change my life, to live more authentically and pursue the life of my dreams. Now the Universe is dropping my dreams in my lap. This love affair, it's not just catalyzing my personal growth around relationship, it's also helping me to understand my Divine Spark more, to figure out what it is I am meant to give to the world. It's all integrated.

I have opened my heart to the Universe, surrendering to where I am guided, following intuition through each new door that opens to me. The result is a new relationship that seems to be a dream come true, a more authentic relationship to the Imps that allows me to express my gifts more deeply and with more presence and joy, and this mystical awakening that is rocking my world in every possible way. It's touching me at work, making me more present to the people I interact with in the mundane every day world. It's touching my spiritual life through my new relationship and the spiritual gatherings I'm facilitating. It's touching my friendships as I experience a deeper love for everyone in my life.

I am courting Kali and awakening the mystic within me. This is the life of my dreams, right here, right now. I can't even imagine what the Divine has in store for me next.

*

Art by A. Andrew Gonzalez

Sexuality Meet Divine Spark

"...don’t talk to me about health benefits of sex and how to score the guy. Talk to me about being fully alive and harnessing the amazing energies within to create beautiful, transformative art, love, partnerships and a better world. Talk to me about sex that breathes erotic play, seduces me to fall off the edge of control, and dissolves, for a moment, life and death. Talk to me about the mystery of sex.

In its highest sense, our sexuality is a gateway to spirit, to the place where humanity meets divinity, and as such it is sacred. It offers us a readily available opportunity to experience the ecstatic union we all long for. If...that is...we dare surrender so deeply to the erotic dance, with ourselves, with each other.

I want to make love to life. What about you?" Lone Morch

*


Kelly Diels says she's good at sex.

I am realizing that I am good at sex, too. Really good.

And I'm wondering if it's kinda crazy to say so. This is one of those "who am I to ______" kinda moments. But I'm choosing vulnerability. It is this year's mission after all. And I'm honoring that it's just as authentic to say I am good at sex as it is to say I am good at writing.

I am good at sex and it isn't because of the shape of my body or how traditionally beautiful I am (not), nor is it because I know how to flirt and seduce really well, nor do I have a toolkit of well-practiced techniques.

I am good at sex because I give all of myself and because I have deep intuition about how to give another person love and pleasure.

Last night I had a magical experience with a long time friend who became a lover. He mirrored me through words, told me what he saw come out in me when I opened my erotic-emotional palette to him. Hearing myself witnessed and described in such a way, and noticing my visceral response to it, helped me piece together something that has been taking shape in my consciousness over the last year.

Something is opening in me, something that's always been hinted at in my sexual life but has yet to find full expression, although I'm getting closer all the time. Is this what reaching my sexual peak is about? Or is it something more?

It started with Knight and I thought that it was because of him, our crazy intense chemistry and good loving. But now that I've had other lovers, I find that it's inside of me and it's getting bigger, stronger, brighter.

It came out at the holiday social last month, the one I was so afraid to attend. I chose love for myself and my community rather than my fear of what might happen and the night stunned me. The entire night I flowed from one intimate connection to another, sometimes a kiss, sometimes a dance, sometimes a flirtatious conversation. Every interaction had an erotic charge based in love. And I had the potential of six play partners that night, which had never happened before (and I have no expectations of happening again). They were close friends or already lovers or a new friend who I felt would likely become a lover (and did). I had fantastic experiences with three of them and experienced a distinct lack of inhibition in my play and my connection with them in every case. I lost myself in the experience with them, gave everything I had to give in that moment, completely unaware of the party going on around me. I have to admit that at moments I felt like a sex goddess -- the full embodiment of Woman -- empowered, confident, and incredibly sexy.

Passion • To ignite. To feel all there is to feel. And to be OK with that. life by me

I love sex. I love the intimacy of kissing and licking and sucking and opening myself to penetration and riding someone to incredible orgasms. I love the play of giving and receiving, the play of assertion and receptivity, the play of dominance and submission. I love the experience of surrender to intimacy and nakedness and raw sexual hunger with another person.

Sex is not about getting hard or getting off, although they are wonderful flavors to taste in the vast buffet of erotic experience. Sex is always something more. My erotic palette blends the fiery red of raw physical hunger in my cunt with the watery blue of emotion held in my heart with the vibrant indigo of Sacred awareness that imbues my whole being. Sex is incredible magic.

I am very present during sex, giving the fullness of myself physically, emotionally and spiritually. I am very aware of how deep sex goes, especially kinky or power exchange kind of sex. That's why I can't do much casual, stranger sex. When I get sexual, I want to go as deep into the energy of shared pleasure as I can. I suck a man's cock passionately because I'm expressing my deep care for that man and appreciation of his beautiful masculinity. I thrust from the core of my being into the core of another woman when I fuck her with my hand because her emotional receptivity drives me wild. I need emotional traction for a good sexual experience.

Once I have it, it's on.

I love sex and it shows. I love having a curvy body and the ways that I can make it move when I'm beneath someone or on top of someone...and most especially when I'm dancing with or for someone. I love my hips - so much that I love the poetic anthems to the power of hips by Lucille Clifton and Maya Angelou. I love my mouth, all of the things I can feel and do with lips and tongue and teeth, and especially the way my mouth can bring someone so much pleasure. I love that I've been told by my last five lovers that I am great at giving head, not because I am I want to be special, but because it means I made them feel really, really, really good. Nothing makes me happier than to bring joy to others. I love that I am all woman with the fleshy body of a two-time mother and a receptive nature that takes people in and holds them in holiness in the temple of my cunt and my heart. I love that I have lovers who realize the sacredness of this gift. The more that gift is seen, the more I am driven to give it.

Being an empath, I feel my lover's orgasms.

Sex is so sacred to me because I can feel people inside of my heart as well as my body. It's uncomfortable or painful for me to be with someone who isn't fully present, who is just looking to get off, who goes only as deep as skin and isn't interested in the energy we are sharing. I think a lot of my friends don't quite understand that. But I am really glad I am wired this way. When I find a good partner, I get triple the pleasure in every experience - my pleasure, their pleasure and the magic of our combined energy.

I used to be a touch healer.

I used to do energy work on people and help them alleviate symptoms or heal physical issues. It started when I would give friends or lovers massages and they would say that they felt I had a healing touch because they felt a shift during or after my the experience. I learned to direct that energy purposefully. Now I can direct energy like that when I touch people sensually or sexually. I believe my passion for touch, for consciously channeling my care and love through my fingertips, can be healing.

These are all pieces of the puzzle. I am trying to figure out the shape of my Divine Spark and I believe it's time to honor that my sexuality is a significant part of it, in my personal relationships and in the work I am called to do in the world. It's so interesting that I can often feel the shape of other people's Divine Sparks to great specificity, yet I have struggled so long to recognize the shape of my own. Although I've been an erotic hostess the last three years, I have been focused on the advancement of the sex-positive philosophy and the sexual expression of others far more than my own. While I have become more vulnerable and uninhibited in my sexual expression in my personal life and at events, I've also continued to limit myself in significant ways out of insecurity (or lack of play partner who desires to go where I desire to go).

Now I see what has truly attracted me to sex-positive work all this time, and the explorations of the last year into sluttiness and sexual submission - it's all driven by my own expression and exploration of the profound mystery of sex.

I am being offered opportunities to explore the depth of my sexual passion - to feel everything there is to feel in sharing erotic energy with others.

In my personal life I have been offered an exploration of complete sexual submission to my dear friend turned lover mentioned above. I have come to understand that the explorations in sluttiness and sexual domination last summer were a little misdirected. I desire to experience complete sexual submission as an expression of uninhibited love and devotion for another person. I am not a stereotypical slut that feeds my raw sexual hunger through many casual encounters. I am a slut who gives that raw sexual hunger to one person I deeply respect to do with as they wish. There is a deep expression of love woven into the deep arousal that comes from submission and raw sexual expression. I am so turned on by the potential of playing with someone with whom I have a deep bond and can be completely vulnerable.

My greatest turn on is love. And it doesn't have to be the big fireworks, all encompassing, you're-the-one romantic love. It can be love with anyone whom I share chemistry with. I am finally understanding the dance between the lover of sex and the lover of love within me.

At the community level of sharing my erotic divine spark -- this next party is a new opportunity for me. Instead of hostess, I will be co-head of vibes. I won't be exhausted from spending two days (several weeks) setting up the event. I will be focused on my strongest area of contribution and leadership. I am excited about the possibility of shining my light brighter than ever in the party environment. Drawing on the energy of this sexual vitality that I'm unearthing can help me do that. It's my hope and desire to contribute to and role-model an empowered sexiness through vulnerability while working and in my play. It won't be about whether or how or with whom I play. It will be about me being turned on (there are so many things about a party to fall in love with and turn you on without a partner) and really embodying my erotic power in everything I say and do.

I'll tell you what feeling this erotic power grow in me is doing -- it's causing me to fall head over heels in love with all of my life. I am more engaged in everything and everyone. I am more aware of all kinds of sensual pleasures and I experience delight many moments throughout the day. And cultivating so much yummy goodness makes it easier to choose good stories when I am in the complicated and messy and painful moments. Reinforcing joy in my life on a daily basis is making it easier to trust in the goodness of every situation, no matter how confusing or seemingly hurtful.

I am making love with life and I am truly beginning to feel that life is making love to me in return.

Or like Gnarls Barkley happens to be singing to me right now, "Maybe I'm crazy."

Honoring The Priestess: A Story of Overcoming Resistance

"One of the favorite archetypes found in the 78 cards of a Tarot deck is the High Priestess, Key #2 of the Major Arcana. She represents spiritual awakening and development of the universal intuitive mind. Awesome and mysterious, the High Priestess sits before a veil that drapes the entrance to a temple. The temple symbolizes the higher knowledge, spiritual knowledge, the sacred truths (both personally and cosmically), or the Holy Grail that we all seek. This temple holds both sacred, universal secrets as well as the guidance required to unravel our own personal issues. Behind her is the veil between this world and the “other” world – the veil that separates that which we know from that which we long to know. She is the guardian of the occult, of hidden knowledge; the scroll that she holds represents arcane teachings – lessons that those on a spiritual path must learn. She emphasizes the essential role of the unconscious mind as a source of those sacred teachings that direct the soul’s evolution and growth."

As mentioned in previous posts, I initiated myself as a Priestess to the Divine when I was 23 years old, in the Wiccan tradition. I felt called. I have felt called to Divine Service for as long as I can remember. But I have been resisting it just as long. Tomorrow I finally live up to that promise I made 14 years ago by facilitating what I hope is the first of many spiritual gatherings and rituals in my home.

"Despite the somewhat glorious title of "spiritual superheroine" - being a redvolutionary isn't about being invincible or perfect or being "spiritual" or "enlightened" - it's about being yourself - the full messy, raw, dirty, funky, authentic lovely human self. A woman willing to be this transparent and vulnerable, a woman willing to reveal her true self in this world no madda what - is revolutionary, rare, daring, a superpowered strength - and I think it's one of the main reasons we're here." Sera Beak

Mine has been a long process of ordination -- nearly 15 years before I've finally accepted the mantle of spiritual leadership of some kind. Ordination is the sixth Sacrament in Christianity, the commitment of one's gifts to Divine Service. I have sought ordination in various ways over the years, but never taken the inner and outer transformation required to completion. I've been unwilling to surrender completely and I've let my ego have it's fun. I've been afraid. I've used single motherhood and the need to provide for my children as an excuse for not pursuing the work of my heart. I've given only a fraction of my life to projects of sacred activism. I've stayed on the path just enough to justify myself -- I am growing and evolving, I am becoming more conscious, I am making progress. Yet all along I've been dissatisfied, because I know I'm not living in integrity with what I know about myself. I am not living in the fullness of my Divine spark.

My truth is that I am so completely in love with God and so committed to the awakening of all beings that my life cannot be joyful without complete surrender to Divine Service and Sacred Activism. To be in integrity with who I am, I must admit to myself and everyone else that I feel called to a spiritual life. It's been scary to use the word Priestess. It feels powerful and presumptuous. I have been afraid to claim my power, afraid of the responsibility it requires and afraid of how others will perceive me if I presume to call myself what I am.

“Power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political and economic change...What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.” -MLK

Redvolutionary, Priestess, Shaman, Hierophant, Bodhisattva - all of these have called to me over the years and the implication is the same. I am driven to contribute to the awakening of the human race. I am destined to be a bridge builder between the sacred and the mundane. By my very nature I bring consciousness and healing into all of my relationships and every day life. I facilitate community experiences that encourage consciousness raising, sacred intent and transformation/evolution. I bring knowledge and wisdom from spiritual traditions to the people in my life. I use my intuition to deliver messages from the Universe to the people in my life. In many ways I am already living the archetype of the Priestess in not-so-subtle, yet un-named ways.

I realize that I haven't given myself enough credit for how the spiritual is woven into my life so completely. I am incredibly hard on myself about not being evolved/enlightened/spiritual enough, as if I have failed. Yet when I look at what I say and what I write, what I share with others, it is filled with spiritual ideas and language. When I look at how I've led the Impropriety Society from a place of love and inclusiveness, I recognize that my work is imbued with spiritual love and compassion. When I consider all the reasons I do community service, I honor that I am already living the vow of the Bodhisattva. While I am imperfect on a daily basis, I do strive to live with as much consciousness and sacred awareness as I'm capable at this point in my evolution.

While I may have been resisting obvious spiritual leadership, I have been living a spiritual life and having an impact on the lives around me. And while maybe I could have stopped resisting my full commitment to ordination sooner, maybe everything has unfolded exactly as it is meant to for the greatest potential for Love and Awakening for myself and every life that I am honored to touch. Perhaps this is where faith matters most, believing in myself and the imperfect perfection of my own journey.

On my birthday last July, I drew an archetype card for the coming year. Maybe it was always destined that my 37th year would be my year of ordination:

The Monk/Nun: The positive aspects of this archetype are: spiritual intensity, devotion, dedication, persistence, and perhaps wisdom. ...the Monk archetype may show up in the ability to be single-minded, assiduous, devoted to a spiritual path or to any great achievement that requires intense focus. In this sense, novelists and entrepreneurs can carry the Monk as readily as spiritual adepts."

Coming Out of the Spiritual Closet

From today's entry in Mark Nepo's The Book of Awakening (I want to give this book to everyone I know):

Being true to who we are
means carrying our spirit like a candle
in the center of our darkness.

If we are to live without silencing or numbing essential parts of who we are, a vow must be invoked and upheld within oneself. The same commitments we pronounce when embarking on a marriage can be understood internally as a devotion to the care of one's soul: to have and to hold...for better or for worse....in sickness and in health....to love and to cherish, till death do us part.

This means staying committed to your inner path. This means not separating from yourself when things get tough or confusing. This means accepting and embracing your faults and limitations. It means loving yourself no matter how others see you. It means cherishing the unchangeable radiance that lives within you, no matter the cuts and bruises along the way. It means binding your life with a solemn pledge to the truth of your soul.

It is interesting that the nautical definition of marry is "to join two ropes end to end by interweaving their strands." To marry one's soul suggests that we interweave the life of our spirit with the life of our psychology; the life of our faith and truth with the life of our doubts and anxiety. And just as two ropes that are married create a tie that is twice as strong, when we marry our humanness to our spirit, we create a life that is doubly strong in the world.

Yes. This is what is seek, to make myself stronger in the world by marrying my humanness to my spirit. I am withdrawing from Imps leadership - and the pursuit of full-time/partnership relationship - because I need to learn to hold space for humanness, first my own so that I can better hold space for others. I am choosing to dive into my spirit, to strengthen my relationship with the Divine within so that I can better relate to the Divine in the others. I am pulling back and examining every life choice from the perspective of integrity and desire: is this aligned with what I know about myself, what I know about Love, and my Divinely inspired desires for my life?

I need to fall in love with my self and my dreams. I need to learn who April really is and fall madly, deeply in love with all that I find: both my Divine Spark and my imperfect human filled with quirky desires that are spiritual and hedonistic, generous and narcissistic, creative and ordinary, playful and dark.

Letting go of the Impropriety Society is one of the most difficult things I have ever done. But over and over God has asked me to turn my heart towards my spiritual longing, and over and over I have only gone so far and then said no, I will go no further. I would entangle myself in relationship or creative projects, and exhaust myself so that solitary time was spent vegging out in recovery rather than in soul-feeding activities (art, writing, reading, spiritual practice, yoga, etc.). I would keep my spirituality subdued, so that the people who know and love me best really have no idea how important God and the spiritual life is to me. And my emotional, physical and spiritual health suffered for it. I am not living in integrity with my faith and my truth.

This is how deep my faith is: I have known every single moment of my life that there is some kind of God/Universal Energy/Sacred Presence, something that binds all of life and feeds the passionate energy of evolution. I believe conscious growth and evolution is the point of everything. We are pieces of God experiencing all of life through evolution. And somehow it's all powered by Love.

I have always, even in my darkest moments, felt held by God and trusted the power of Love. This seems to be a rare life experience, to not have known one moment of doubt or faithlessness. I don't know how to explain my deep abiding faith in God and Love, especially in light of how much trauma and loss I have experienced in my life. Maybe I was born with it. Maybe faith is part of my unique genius.

It is this faith that keeps me choosing open-heartedness as much as I possibly can no matter what happens in my life, no matter the heartache and painful experience that comes from being vulnerable. I trust that I cannot be broken. I trust that God and Love will keep me safe and thriving in life no matter what circumstances come my way. I trust that the only thing that holds me back is my fear, which is why I work so hard to become conscious of my fears and fear based behaviors. I shine the light into my darkness so that I may act in enlightenment and love as often as possible.

And maybe this genius for faith and my desire to contribute to our collective evolution is why I am drawn to this idea of sex positive spiritual guidance (coaching, counseling, whatever), with a creative twist (using art/music/writing projects as part of the coaching process), as the kind of work I desire to be doing in the world. I believe this is my bliss, the vocation I have been looking for since I initiated myself 15 years ago as Priestess/Bodhissatva, surrendering my life in devotion to lightening the suffering of all beings. That has always been the driving motivation of my community service, art, writing, and my flavor of giving friendship and love.

My first step towards this goal is putting out an invitation very soon for spiritual community to gather in my home on a biweekly basis to share ritual, prayer/meditation, study and discussion about the spiritual journey (and whatever else we decide to do together). Through conversations with community members I have found that for some of us there is a hunger for spiritual connection. We believe in some kind of Divine Presence or Universal Energy or Sacred Connection, and we see its importance and expression in our relationships. We don't feel comfortable in churches. We don't know of any spiritual communities for sex positive, bdsm practicing, queer and poly freaky people. Even the ones that embrace freaky folk don't bring discussions of these parts of our lives into the spiritual conversation. And what we get from the sex positive community doesn't fill our longing to share our personal spiritual journey with others who feel a connection to the Sacred in some way. I desire this in my own life and so I am going to try to facilitate the creation of it within our community.

The interesting thing is that I have been thinking and talking about doing this for two years. Truthfully, I've been feeling called to it for many years in various forms and I have kept saying no. I probably have friends who doubt I'll follow through this time because they've been listening to me talk and not act for so long. But I can't ignore the longing in my own heart any longer...or the fact that a week after deciding to resign from the Imps the Universe sent me a friend who specifically asked me to do this because she needs it, too. It doesn't get any more obvious that I am being called than that.

Being true to who I am is bridging transcendent spirituality with immanent earthy human life and sexuality. To marry my own soul is to marry the importance of my spiritual path to the rest of my life, despite the fears of exclusion, rejection, loneliness, etc. I am following God's call to come out of the spiritual closet and am trusting that my tribe and community, who has held all the freakiness and quirky Aprilness I could throw at them, will continue to hold me, support me and connect with me where I am most in integrity with the truth of who I am.

I am trusting Love.

***
Image Source: Born of Light by Meganne Forbes

Longing

Here,
in the center of my chest,
their constant dwelling:
the persistent yearning
the insistent craving
the unbidden imagining
the desire awakening
the daydream, the nightdream
the reverie unfolding:
the language of longing
drawing me home.

~ Jan Richardson, In Wisdom’s Path

Sometimes it aches, much like grief. Sometimes it feels dark, like emptiness. Sometimes it feels like incredible passion that has no outlet for expression. It comes in waves. It will come when I am alone. It will come when I am surrounded by others. It will even come when I am in another’s embrace.

Longing. A deep reaching for something I can feel, yet mostly remains just out of grasp. It feels like I crave something much bigger than my heart can hold, possibly bigger than life itself.

"Longing is the core of mystery. Longing itself brings the cure. The only rule is, suffer the pain. Your desires must be disciplined And what you want to happen in time, sacrificed." ~Rumi

I have been contemplating and reading a lot about longing. Actually, the Universe has been talking to me about longing. I am attempting to truly understand this place I keep returning to. No matter what path I follow, no matter what I do with my life or what relationships I form, I keep coming back to this incessant and deep longing for something more. I can project onto other people or creative projects for awhile, but it never lasts. I return to what feels like the vast space between me and everything, me and God.

Intellectually, I know it is a longing for Oneness and direct experience of the Divine. That is the source of all our longing, a desire to return to where we come from, where there is no separation or isolation. Wearing a skinsuit (as a dear friend puts it), sets us apart from one another. While we can penetrate each others bodies and experience communion through shared energy, we can never truly become one while we are in skinsuits. I cannot join you in yours, you cannot join me in mine.

Oh but we try. I have been first hand witness to a couple hundred people attempting to assuage their longing for a few brief moments as they dance and play and fuck in a room together. I have had rapturous moments with lovers in a union of love and orgasm. We crave sex because it is the closest thing to Oneness most of us know.

And then there are those of us who have tasted Oneness through ritual, altered states induced by substances or body modification or prayer, and energetic experiences with individuals and groups. My empathic experiences certainly feel like Oneness.

No matter how we get there the experience is brief. Few of us have attained enlightenment – which I believe is a full time conscious experience of Oneness with All That Is. The rest of us get brief tastes...and we may likely become addicted to them.

I know all this intellectually, I know to the core of my being that spiritual connection is a vital expression of who I am, and yet I keep turning away from it. I lack discipline and I find distraction in what feels good, especially intimacy (oxytocin, touch, emotional vulnerability) and relationship (validation), which may be addictions, and justify it as conscious experience through which I am evolving. I am evolving in many ways, but I am also stagnating spiritually, returning to the same place over and over again.

"Our longing is the way." Rumi

Here. Where the longing is so great I feel it physically in my chest. It's time to dive in to the mystery, to follow the trail along which longing leads me. No more distractions and avoidance. No more hiding. My longing is the way.

Masochism: Lessons in Pain & Unbounded Power

I have a very special friend with whom I have a complex and strangely intimate relationship. He is special because he is a fellow mystic with whom I can share my journey in the most intimate ways. He is special because he was my closest friend after my mother died and an amazing gift in my grief process (although not always in the nurturing way you might expect). But my friend is also a sadist who will consciously and joyfully take me into the places that scare me both physically and emotionally in order to help me face my fear, heal and evolve. This creates a tension in our relationship.

I am a masochist - spiritually, emotionally and physically. I willingly move toward fear and pain. It forces me to grow, to dive deeply into my own darkness and fly out more spacious. It gives me release. It tests my resilience and endurance. And physical masochism allows me to express and transform spiritual and emotional heartache through my body.

My masochist is powerfully attracted to my friend's sadist. The pain he is capable of inflicting with joy is terrifying, more than I know I can handle. And yet I feel a strong desire to surrender to him, to allow him to push me to my edges.

It isn't the same as the submission I surrender to Knight. My masochist and my servant-submissive archetypes are very different. Masochism isn't about service to another's will. It is about surrender to fear and pain, in the hands of someone I trust not to harm me.

My friend and I have had several impact scenes over the years, but always at parties, always light because they were limited by time and space. He is moving away from Humboldt soon and I have been experiencing a growing desire to see what would happen if we allowed my masochist and his sadist to dance without limitation before he goes. I expressed my desire to him recently and discovered he had the same thought.

Last Saturday night we danced. It was an ordeal. It blew my body, my mind and my heart wide open. It mirrored my current emotional experiences in powerful and excruciating ways. I am overflowing with insights. I believe that I was subconsciously seeking an ordeal all along, knowing that my friend would push me to my edges and beyond.

This dance was different than any other BDSM scene I had done before. It was the most physically and emotionally trying scene I have experienced. We started with dinner and a mystical conversation. As we moved into scene space, we talked about some of the things that came up for me (like how it freaked me out when he slapped my face). I was very vocal, which I usually am not. I talked about feelings and fears I was experiencing in the moment. I admitted when it hurt. I cried torrents of tears. I called him names. I stood up for myself when he taunted me. I even fought back to make it stop and refused to allow certain sensations to continue. It was the first time I refused to completely surrender to the physical play.

But I experienced complete surrender emotionally. I shared my raw pain with no inhibition. My habitual pattern is to keep my pain to myself, both in scene and in life. I pride myself on my endurance, strength and resilience. I hide away with my darkness as much as possible. It scares me to be so vulnerable as to share my raw pain with another and trust that they can and will hold me. But I put it all out there with him. I was afraid he would judge me as weak for carrying on, or that he would disappointed if I didn't go as far as he thought I could, yet I didn't push myself any further than I believed in that moment that I could go. I accepted my limits and I expressed the hurt when I reached them. I believe there is a lesson in this for me in "real life."

This scene was also different because my tolerance for pain has changed. I am far more sensitive. While I can still endure a lot, it feels like pain rather than intense sensation that can be processed and even enjoyed. We couldn't break through to the "forever place" (that magical transcendent bottom space that usually comes from an intense scene). In my head I asked myself several times why I was putting myself through it, why I kept surrendering to more hurt. I eventually refused to take any more. All I could see was fear of pain. I couldn't see the spaciousness on the other side.

I looked into the mirror of the experience and saw that I fear that the heartache I am currently experiencing around poly and my triggers will never end. I am afraid my wounds will never heal and it will hurt forever. And I am frustrated that either path I take -- staying with Knight in a poly relationship or giving him up -- both lead to pain. It feels like I have no choice about hurting.

But they are two distinctly different kinds of heartache. Giving up my relationship with Knight would be the loss of the greatest love I have known and tremendous grief. Facing my demons in poly relationship will (likely/hopefully) lead to more love and a healing of these gaping wounds I've been carrying around and picking at since my mom died. I will come out more spacious and joy-full on the other side.

I think I have become too identified with pain (read the link - it's really good!). I think I might believe that my wounds will be open wounds forever and evolving will always have to hurt. Maybe I believe life itself is painful. Maybe I even believe that I deserve to hurt.

From the link above: "Personally, I haven't run from my pain. I compensated for it. I spent so much time accommodating it, "working with it", paying attention to it –- NOT avoiding it, that I neglected my very agency and power: my joy. Unbridled, unabashedly sweet, essential joyousness."

I think I am afraid of my power unbounded by the limits of fear and heartache. I am afraid of my own bigness. I am reminded of this well-known quote:

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

I am interested in seeing what unfolds in the coming days because I have a sense that even though we couldn't move me into the "forever place," we broke something open in me energetically. I seem to be extraordinarily sensitive, not just to other people's energies, but the energy of life itself. Those ecstatic states I recently wrote about? More. Bigger. Deeper. I feel the Divine moving through me in strong currents, a sort of electricity through my body and my heart. I feel Oneness, my connectedness to all of life through my Divine Spark.

Lunchtime at the marsh today I really felt recognition that the God in me is the God in everything, which makes me as big as the Universe. It brought me to tears.

One of the things we talked about over dinner before our scene was my frustration with feeling disconnected from the Divine. Even with my new spiritual practices, I have been struggling with really feeling connected to God like I did when I was younger. My intuition is telling me that this new opening to the energy of life may be my door into the personal relationship with the Divine I have been craving.

What might life be like if we are capable of sustaining a sense of Oneness most or all of the time in all that we do? What might our relationships be like if we are aware that we are relating God to God in every conversation and in every touch?

It sounds so far-fetched, doesn't it? Who am I to talk about being God? Yet everything I have studied and experienced in my life has led to this and it is what I strive for -- to know myself and you for the delicious (and quirky) facets of God that we are.

On the practical level, there is something in this for healthy polyamory, too. When talking to my friend recently about my struggles with Knight's growing love for another, he asked the question: what if I see her as an aspect of myself in the Divine? What if I see her as an aspect of the God in me who will love and hurt him differently/uniquely, but just as perfectly as I do for his evolution into his own Divine nature? Where is the room for fear and jealousy in that awareness?

So many big questions. I look forward to living the answers.

Cultivating Ecstasy

"We can learn to cultivate the quality of a great lover in the way we live our daily life. Ecstatic moments can be cultivated on a daily basis when we enter into a love affair with life." Margo Anand

To bring some Light into this story, I desire to illuminate the fact that not every day has been hard and painful. Some days have been full of joy and ecstasy.

In this amazing process of transformation, I am experiencing spontaneous ecstatic states. Moments or hours of pure bliss. A sense of being so very alive that I am literally buzzing with aliveness. My body vibrates. My heart and spirit feel so expansive I feel that I could hold the world in my love. I have had moments that are so joyful I am almost embarrassed to share them with people, because I'm not sure they'll understand.

Relationship is part of my spiritual practice. It is in intimacy with others that I have my deepest experiences of Oneness. I feel that I am cultivating my relationship to the Divine through my relationships to my self, Knight and others. In my morning prayers I pray to keep my attention on the Divine Spark in others throughout my day. I am also striving to nurture deeper connections in my friendships. Some of my ecstatic states are sourced in these rich interactions.

Sometimes the ecstasy comes when I'm with Knight or just after I've been with him. I am finding that as we work through the challenges of transforming our relationship and opening to poly, we are deepening in our intimacy with and desire for each other. Our time together is very rich and our sex has been phenomenal! I have opened up to a whole new experience of arousal and orgasm.

Sometimes the ecstasy comes after significant emotional breakthroughs. The day after I wrote the love letter to the Invisible Girl was an ecstatic day.

Sometimes the ecstasy comes from spiritual practice: prayer and contemplation, spiritual study, ritual, etc.

Sometimes the ecstasy comes from walking in nature. I have moments when walking at the marsh overwhelms all of my senses with beauty.

While I know that it is unreasonable to hope to sustain a permanent ecstatic state (at this point in my evolution anyway), I do hope to cultivate a deeper relationship to my ecstasy so that I can bring it to the surface at will.

"Let's toast Every rung we've climbed on Evolution's ladder. Whisper, 'I love you! I love you!' To the whole mad world." - Hafiz

Image Source: The Ecstasy of Alexis Amore James Roper

Love Letter to the Invisible Girl

I feel lighter and happier today than I have since Knight started his new relationship nearly two weeks ago.

Those who know me well have heard me talk a lot about The Invisible Girl since my mother died nearly two years ago. The Girl is an archetype in me, the way that I have come to perceive my inner child. She is the part of me that never outgrew the pain of the invisibility that came from living in the shadow of a narcissistic mother. She is the part of me that doubts I can be seen and loved for who I am. She is the part of me that is terrified of abandonment, and becomes incredibly sad or throws temper tantrums when I feel unseen or I'm afraid I'm losing someone. The Invisible Girl is the part of me that gets triggered and overwhelms me with fear.

I have been trying to work with this part of myself, to really understand our relationship so that I can manage trigger experiences, and eventually learn to prevent them from happening at all. I have spent a lot of time observing her when she freaks out, especially since I have been in relationship to Knight. While I have had incredible insights into the source of my fears and the reactions they stir up in me, I haven't felt like I've made any real progress in managing the Girl or her triggers.

I've learned recently that the problem is when I observe her, I hold a lot of judgment about her, and even hatred for her existence. I have believed that her existence is evidence of my crazy brokenness. I've blamed her for making my emotional life so difficult. I have been incredibly unkind to her.

What I am learning in my studies into radical self-care is that my Girl needs to be mothered...by me. I need to hold and comfort her when she is terrified. I need to accept our feelings rather than resist them. I need to talk her to with kindness and compassion. I need to help her understand that I don't need her to protect me any longer. I need to find out what we truly need to feel safe and secure (as opposed to what she thinks we need).

Yesterday morning Knight had a date with his new lover. I started out the day all right but by early afternoon, when I hadn't received any texts from Knight, the Invisible Girl started throwing fits. Before and after his last date we had flirted by text and it had helped me feel connected to him. I told him how much it helped. So even though I didn't outright ask for it, I expected him to do the same yesterday (unexpressed expectations = inevitable disappointment).

As the Girl started telling me stories about how he's forgotten me, how I don't matter, how he likes his other lover better than me, etc., I realized I needed to do something to shift the momentum. I drove to the marsh to change the scenery and connect to nature, which always helps calm me. As I sat in the car, I was suddenly inspired to write a letter to my Girl.

While I have resisted the idea of communicating with parts of myself through dialogue or letters, as has been suggested by a variety of sources but always felt sort of hokey to me, I'm beginning to understand what a healing practice it is. For the first time I accepted everything that I was feeling and I felt significantly different afterward. I felt lighter. I felt hope that this may not last forever.

I woke up this morning feeling expansive again.

Here is my letter...

Precious Girl -

I know you are scared. You feel like we are in the dark and it reminds you of the closet we used to sit in when we had no one and truly doubted we existed at all. You wonder if we continue to exist if no one is present to witness us. Do we continue to exist to our Love if he is seeing, touching, loving someone else?

But we are real and we are loved. We are a Divine Spark - a child of the Universe. Not only do we exist, but we are amazing. We are so very strong and resilient. We have overcome so much together. And our story is witnessed by many. We are loved by many. We have never been so visible or loved before. We have touched so many lives with our poetry, our art, our writing, our service to community, our friendship, our vulnerability, and our willingness to share our story to be a light on the path to healing for others. There is so very much to love about us.

We are not alone - even when we are. People do not stop loving us just because we aren't interacting. We are loved every minute of every day by everyone that we love every minute of every day, whether we are consciously thinking of them or engaging with them or not. It is no different for those we love than it is for us.

I know you're scared by this new relationship, but the truth is that Knight made us first, to his own detriment, and we still felt invisible. It isn't about his new lover or him. It's about us. It's about me. It's about how I have been rejecting you when you most need to be held.

I am sorry. I am so sorry for making you more invisible by rejecting you and believing I am broken because you are inside of me. I am sorry for hating that you are a part of me. I am sorry I haven't given you the love we need when you are only trying to protect me.

It's not our fault that mom couldn't see past her own crazy to really see us. It's not our fault that the fathers in our life could not see past their own fear and addiction to see that we needed to be saved. It does not make us unlovable that our parents could not love us well. They really did the best they could.

Mom's illness is not our fault, and it's not hers either. I think she was an Invisible Girl, too, and she never figured out how to heal. Let's love her rather than blame her.

Precious Girl - it's time to heal. It is time to believe in ourselves. It's time to believe that we are our own super-hero and we can save our self.

Really look at our life, our story, and see how we have been our own super-hero all along. We saved our self from insanity. We saved our self from violence. We saved my children from a legacy of brokenness. Now it's time to save our self from this fear of something that is no longer real so that we can have the fullness of love we desire.

It's time to rewrite our story together.

Speaking the Truth & The Work of My Heart

Ronna Detrik, who writes insightfully about women and truth-telling, shared this last night...

"I’m going to do the work that I know I need to do, that I must do, that I’ve been waiting my whole life to do, without waiting for an audience...I’m not going to care anymore whether people like me when I speak my truth. I’m never going to ask for permission again. As Eve Ensler said, “I am going to hold who I am in the face of anything.”" Patti Digh

Wow!

I feel the power in those words. I feel it from the the heat in my heart and flutter in my chest to the goosebumps moving across my skin. I am feeling the call to do the work I've been waiting my whole life to do.

Tonight I had dinner with someone who spoke of her need to stop making herself small, and how she has always felt like her heart is bigger than her body can hold. I know this feeling. It's time to stop making myself small because it's too sissy-woo-woo, hippy dippy to be vocal about my passion for living a sacred and conscious life. It's time to stop being afraid that people will find me ridiculous if I share what is meaningful to me. It's time to stop being so damn quiet and timid.

How is this for ridiculous? I have been feeling embarrassed for how passionate and big I feel about this transformation that I am going through. I'm talking about the shift in my relationship to Knight, but I'm not really talking about the other significant shifts happening for me. I feel embarrassed when I am around my friends that I am blissed out for reasons I can't put into words other than I am so incredibly in love (with everything). I am having mystical experiences, but I am not fully trusting them or myself. When I am on my own I am often big and expansive, but when around others I make myself small again. I am afraid to talk about my excitement for this process. I haven't been telling anyone how I think that sitting down with this blog every night is helping me create the life of my dreams and that through my commitment to speaking my truth I am going to find My People and the work of my heart. This is BIG, EXCITING stuff and I have been too afraid to trust it or myself enough to share it, and afraid to trust my tribe to hold space for it it.

Havi talks a lot about finding "your people." Your people are the people who resonate with you, who believe in you and your ideas, and who like whatever it is you offer from your most authentic and quirky self. Today I found one of my people. Someone who jives with what I'm sharing here in my blog. Someone who is excited by the fact that I identify as a mystic. Someone whose life is touched by my story and who is touching my life with hers. I need to trust my relationships can hold me, and if it turns out we don't resonate anymore, I need to trust my people are on their way to me.

Today Kelly Diels came out with the work of her heart and she is inspiring me in ways bigger than words can describe, especially since there are commonalities in what turns us on. Ronna and Havi also inspire me. They have created the work of their heart and they each radiate love through their work in their unique and quirky ways.

You must lead with your strengths. You must choose the things that light you up so that you can light the way for yourself, and for others. Kelly Diels

This is my bliss: Relationship. Intimacy. Connection. Empathy. Sharing our stories. Learning and evolving together. Creating together. This is what I want to be doing all the time, relating to people who resonate with me, both personally and professionally -- through writing, through art, through working with people one-on-one and in small groups, and through community leadership.

I believe that my work with the Imps has been leading me toward recognizing my bliss work is intentionally working with people around sacred and conscious relationship. When I pull all the threads of my life together, it all leads to sacred and conscious relationship...with my children, my partners, my friends, my community, my world. Growing towards deeper, richer, and more consistent experiences of love is my passion. I love Love. I love to love. I desire to be a walking embodiment of love, every minute of every day with every being that I interact with. That's what makes me a mystic. I am in love with all of existence. I focus that love in my relationships to other people. I see and feel the Divine Spark in others and I desire to get closer to it, to feel the warmth and bask in the brightness of light that each person has to share with me. I facilitate events so that people can feel free and open to express their Divine Spark through their creativity, sexuality and relationship. I build community because I know that we feel safest in expressing our Divine Spark when we're with people who support us. Mysticism is the driving force behind my work with the Imps and yet I've been hiding it in the closet as much as possible.

The pieces are coming together. The Universe is talking to me through all of these amazing women (and many other teachers) and I am listening. I am finally beginning to see what the work of my heart looks like and I am finding the courage to speak my truth as the ultimate act of love.

For more inspiration, check this out...




***Image source aussiegall

Sacred Sexuality

An aspect of reclaiming the Sacred in my every day life is putting intention towards Sacred Sexuality. Sex is a significant aspect of my creative and loving expression -- as a lover, as an artist and as a community builder. I have long desired to unify my sexuality and spirituality, but have not put real intention toward it.

I desire to relate to my lover(s) and friends from a Sacred perspective, where I express my devotion to them and longing to merge in Oneness with them through acts of intimacy. I seek to experience my sexuality as an expression of love for both the Divine Spark and the unique person with whom I am blessed to share intimate experiences of union in primal hunger, lust, pleasure, sensuality, cuddling, kissing, play and/or sexual fulfillment. I know that bringing the Sacred into my sexual and relationship life will lead towards greater experiences of love.

I desire for the people I love to attain their greatest potential in life and in love. Within the practice of polyamory, when I can recognize sex as an expression of love and longing to merge with the Divine Spark in another, it no longer feels like a threat to my relationship with my lover. It becomes an experience of shared love and abundance. It is a beautiful gift that I wish for my lover and their other partner(s) to experience with one another. When I live from the spiritual perspective that all relationships are Divinely Ordained, and that there are gifts that each person offers another for their potential evolution into deeper experiences of love, then compersion naturally flows for my lover's other relationships. I know that if my lover is drawn to someone for intimacy, no matter how the relationship manifests, they must have a potential gift to offer him for his spiritual development. In light of that, I desire to never again allow my fears to compromise another's (or my own!) expression of intimacy with others.

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Last night I transformed my experience of longing for Knight into a rich sacred-sexual experience. After writing the blog post, I was considering how much I miss kissing Knight's cock in the mornings, which led me to thoughts about cock worship, which led to a fantasy about a sacred-sexual experience of worshiping his cock as a manifestation of the masculine creative life force. Instead of imagining a typical blowjob, I visualized an experience of spending time in devotion to his cock as an expression of my devotion to him -- both the man and the Divine Spark within him. Instead of having a quick self-pleasuring session with the goal of orgasm, I lingered with the fantasy, exploring it in rich detail as touched myself softly and slowly. My arousal was so intense that even though I did finally release, I am still carrying the arousal with me today.

My body is buzzing with arousal. I carried it with me to the Marsh for my walk at lunch and it was greatly enhanced by the energy I could feel in the nature around me. The wind embraced me wildly. Bird songs filled my ears with songs of desire. I felt deeply connected to the flowers and trees. I slipped into a private place, leaned against a tree, and deepened my arousal by caressing my clit. It may be the most erotic experience I've had with nature.

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"He who desires perfection of the soul must worship the lingam." - Linga Purana

In Sanskrit, the cock is called Lingam. Lingam means "wand of light." I love the idea of meditating on the cock as a wand of light -- a symbol of light in the man and the Light in the Universe.

I have had a love affair and worshiped the female counterpart, the Yoni, for years. I had a multi-year art and writing project about the Yoni. I have deeply explored the Sacred within the Yoni from a variety of perspectives. And when I am gifted with a sexual experience with a woman, I always experience the Sacred in worshiping her yoni with my mouth and hands.

But as I've written before , I had a much more complicated relationship with the lingam until Knight. It seems that my love and adoration for his lingam continues to deepen.

The difference between last night's fantasy and so many I've had before involving Knight's cock is that this time it was purely about the expression of my devotion rather than about what inspires my own arousal. Usually I fantasize about cock worship within the context of submission to Knight's dominance. I love it when he grabs my head and "forces" me to suck his cock. I love it when he fucks my mouth to the point of making me gag and taking my breath away. But this fantasy wasn't like that. It had nothing to do with force or dominance. In fact, it was more about his surrender to my devotion. I imagined a love-making session that is focused entirely on him and the pleasure to be derived from worshiping his body with my own.

Tonight is our only night together for the forseeable future, due to both the logistics of other commitments and the uncertainty around our unfolding relationship. Rather than take the time for granted by just doing "whatever", I desire to bring Sacred intention to our time together. I am going offer him the gift of my devotion through an experience of cock worship as I fantasized it last night and today. I've done some reading on lingam worship in the Tantra traditions for inspiration into both the symbolic and practical. I hope to share an experience that will be as much a Sacred Gift to him as the cathartic scene he gave me Saturday night was to me.

***Image Source: Willow Arlenea

I am a Masochist for God

I have often said that my biggest kink is evolving. I am literally turned on by the process of conscious growth, especially periods of intense transformation.

The truth is that I am a masochist for God. The deep surrender that I give as a submissive in BDSM play is a reflection of the greater surrender that I strive to give to God every day of my life.

I love, love, love the process of growth. I savor the burn of Kali's Fire. Yes, it is painful to grow, but pain does not have to be suffering. It can be traumatic to let parts of my self that are no longer needed to die. It can hurt like hell to break out of self-imposed fear prisons and allow the heart to expand into love. But it can also feel exhilarating, exciting and joy-full as new pieces of my self are revealed or new connections are weaved between pieces I've already known. There is tremendous relief in the emotional releases that occur throughout a dark night of the soul. And then I always come out the other side with a permanent transformation into greater awareness and deeper love. The whole process makes me feel very alive.

The last few days I have been high on this glorious experience of transformation, even in the moments of my deepest vulnerability, discomfort and heartache. Knight said the other day that I am glowing. Something significant has shifted in me and the insights are flowing faster than I can document them. I surrendered to the Divine and to Love in this experience of losing my life-partner and it's like the floodgates have opened emotionally, intellectually and spiritually. I am buzzing with the thrill of it all and where I know it will lead me.

I am learning so much about how wounded souls relate and what is needed for relationship to thrive in healthy love. But I don't think I'm just learning it for me, I think I'm learning it so I can share it with others. At the same time that I'm having all of this growth around relationship, I am also having some amazing insights about my life purpose.

I am one of those people who believe we all have a unique genius or Divine Spark to give the world (a Divine Spark is the God in us being expressed as a unique personality). We all have a calling to something that only we can meet with our strange combination of personality quirks and life experiences. I recently came across the recommendation of noticing what people say they appreciate about you and how that is a reflection of your purpose. At the Imps leadership meeting several weeks ago I was told by someone that what they most appreciated about me is my journey -- how I am always striving to grow. I am realizing that consciously pursuing the fullest expression of my Divine Spark, and sharing my process of growth with others, is a significant aspect of my unique genius. Oh, I am an evolution genius! I think that the Universe has put me through the school of really hard knocks, given me an obsession with experiencing the greatest potential of love, and then compelled me to write about it, make art about it and do healing work, as a means of giving others a light on the journey.

I have been telling myself for years that I don't have the credentials to help people on their evolutionary journeys. I've been keeping myself small in administrative work because I don't have a piece of paper that says I am qualified to coach or counsel others. I haven't written a book or started a business of some kind because I feel like I'm not an "expert" in anything. And yet I haven't felt the call to go back to school. In fact, even though I am a passionate learner, institutionalized learning and I are not compatible. Over the years I have been feeling the intuitive knudge to trust there's another way to transition into healing work. But I've had no solid leads on what it could be, until recently, when I started coming across people who are doing healing work that also don't have pieces of paper, but have tremendous life experience and self-directed learning. People who trust themselves and claim their gifts with boldness and confidence.

What I haven't been trusting is that I have been going through a different kind of education that allows me to help others from the place of having been there and made my way out. Instead of going to years of school to get a degree in Pyschology, I have lived through the process of healing several significant traumas and transforming my own mental illness by studying psychology, consciousness and spirituality and applying what I learn to my own life. I have not been giving myself the appropriate credit for being my own therapist and spiritual teacher.

Many years ago, someone who was helping me on my spiritual path told me they believed that I lived through so many difficult experiences, and have such a strong capacity for empathy, so that I could accompany others on their journey through the dark night. Instead of sitting in a classroom and talking about how violence affects families, I have lived through and then healed violence in my own home. Instead of learning how to counsel others in a formal setting, I have been putting the healing work that I have learned into action in my own relationships. Instead of writing a doctorate thesis, I have been working on the frontlines of building a community through striving for healthy relationship and deeper love.

I started this post thinking about how I am head-over-heels in love with God and Life right now. But I'm ending this stream of consciousness with the realization that I'm falling in love with my self. I have been so focused for so long on making myself better, that I haven't realized I already am. I've been focusing on my fears and where I need to heal so intensely because I believe I'm still broken. But I'm not.

I am not broken.

I am whole. I will always be in the process of evolution toward greater awareness and deeper love, but I am whole right here, right now.

And I have so much to give others from that wholeness.

Excuse me while I go sit with that and cry for a bit.

Oh, and thank you for witnessing me. I really appreciate it.