The Heart is a Gambler

"The way of the heart is the way of courage. It is to live in insecurity, it is to live in love and trust, it is to move in the unknown. It is leaving the past and allowing the future to BE. Only cowards can avoid a dangerous path, but then they are already dead. The person who is utterly alive will always take the risk. The heart is a gambler." Osho

Kali is having her way with me.

Everything in the physical Universe lives by cycles - ebb and flow, wave and trough, ecstasy and despair.

It is all God.

While being polyamorous and exploring love so openly exponentially increases the experiences of love in one's life, it also exponentially increases the opportunities for growth and heartache. Two months ago I was riding the high of several new attractions and exciting potentials, following my mission of vulnerability to dive deep into what the Universe offered without succumbing to fears and insecurities. I have been nurturing five on-going relationships that involve some sort of sexual and/or romantic component, but four of them are shifting into something different, if anything at all. The disappearance of beautiful relating is confusing and painful.

There have been other heart-achey situations to navigate as well. One of my best friends moved away, someone with whom I had a connection-date nearly every week, a significant loss. Some members of the Imps community decided to drag myself, my partners and the entire organization through the mud in a very public way. And my daughter is suffering from an emotional crisis.

I experienced an unusually bright and active winter, as did the Redwood Coast since we had more sun than we usually see in the Winter months. As the days progressed into the storms of Spring these last few weeks, I have been walking darker terrain. Misunderstandings. Confusion. Public drama. Rage. Rejection. Abandonment. Withdrawal. Self doubt. Guilt. Loss. Grief. Longing.

It always comes back to longing, doesn't it? Longing for something different than what is. Longing for something bigger, deeper, more. Longing for potentials to be fulfilled. Longing to belong, to be connected, to be touched, to be loved.

"Remember what you are & let this knowing take you home to the Beloved with every breath. Hold tenderly who you are & let a deeper knowing colour the shape of your humanness. There is nowhere to go. What you are looking for is right here. Open the fist clenched in wanting & see what you already hold in your hand." Oriah Mountain Dreamer

There is a deeper knowing coloring my humanness.

As I shift the focus of my life towards living conscious mysticism on a daily basis, I find that it is much easier to ride the waves of emotion and longing that move through me. I know them for what they are. While I experience heartache, I suffer very little. I am able to bear my own witness, to watch the shifts as they happen inside of me without reaction, and perceive the perfection in every situation. I still feel a wide range of emotions very strongly, but they move through me without creating chaos in their wake.

I have created a daily life in which I am supported in remembering that all is God, that I am God playing this human called April. I don't just know it intellectually, I feel it in every layer of my being.

I believe God is a consciousness that permeates everything, including us, and that this Divine Consciousness is dancing with itself through the manifest Universe(s). I like thinking that God is ecstatic in its experience of each individual being in existence - from star, to tree, to butterfly, to human. I believe that God wants to know what it's like to be me - and you - with all of our quirks in bliss and suffering.

God experiences first hand every birth and death, every blossoming and every fall from the tree, every love and every act of violence, every beautiful and terrible thing that exists. Can you imagine being conscious of Everything? Some part of me can at least intellectualize it. And some part of me feels an intuitive resonance with the idea.

This is why Mysticism and Tantra are becoming my frame for living. I desire to experience myself and you and everything in existence as God - consciously, as often as possible. I desire to awaken to the beauty of the Divine Experience in every shape that it takes.

My Heart is taking the biggest gamble - to be open and vulnerable in love to every experience and person that the Universe brings into my life - trusting that the deeper I go, the more God I will find.

Dancing in the Darkness: Introducing bitch

Last night I came to see you, my love.
And you said “Worship Me”

Slowly, delicately, I entered the fullness of you,
and smoldered against your flesh,
Touched deeply, I forgot myself,
Your fires burning away what I knew to be me.
~Phillipe and Paget


I have previously written about exploring archetypal pieces of myself: the Invisible Girl, the Victim, the Priestess, theMystic, and the Teacher. And there are others yet to be explored, like the Artist.

I have known for a long time that one of my archetypes is the Servant. Caroline Myss says that "The Servant engages aspects of our psyche that call us to make ourselves available to others for the benefit and enhancement of their lives." I love to serve -- in just about any way you can interpret that word. My whole life is about service -- whether in my work, my parenting, or my community relationships -- which includes being a service submissive within my sexuality. I have explored several forms of submission, but I recently discovered a whole new facet of my submission that I had no idea existed: the Slave.

"The Slave archetype represents a complete absence of the power of choice and self-authority. Yet it is precisely the absence of will power that gives the Slave its potential for personal transformation. The ultimate spiritual task is to surrender one's will to the Divine--in effect, to become a Divine Slave...Regardless of how this archetype manifests, its core learning is to understand the paradoxical truth that you are only truly free when you have surrendered all power of choice to the Divine."Caroline Myss

Over the last six weeks I have given birth to a piece of myself. I believe she's been incubating in me for years, but needed the proper "midwife" to deliver her to me. I am learning all sorts of new things about my sexuality, my psychology and my mysticism through her existence.

she is called bitch.

she exists only to serve, please and obey Daddy.

When i am bitch, i am nothing but a mouth and body to be used as Daddy likes.
i have no power. i have no choice. i am Daddy's slave.

(Sidenote: Daddy is not Sir, the Dominant I have written of in recent posts. This is not about spiritual or emotional connection, Daddy is where I go to play in the dark and find out why being bitch turns me on so damn much. My incredible sexual-physical arousal response to being bitch is blowing my mind and my body wide open.)

About once a week in person, as well as through regular texts and occasional phone calls, bitch crawls for Daddy. When i crawl for Him, nothing exists except Him and i will do anything He commands.

i serve Him primarily through my mouth -- worshiping His body as he directs with my lips and tongue and through speaking/writing to Him in the ways He's trained me to. Daddy really likes to be worshiped through words.

Daddy has very dark desires.
He calls them knives,
and He wants me to tell Him i will do terrible things for Him.
Degrading things.
Humiliating things.

Unethical things.

This is a mind fuck. i had no idea how much i love being mind fucked. Daddy is wicked smart and knows how to get into my head. Our interactions are mostly psychological. Daddy tells stories and has me participate in them. Some of the stories go into the realm of taboo: situations that are not safe, sane or consensual.

(For my literal brain, it's kinda hard not to take the fantasies literally. I have asked myself repeatedly if I truly desire to be playing with a man who explores these kinds of fantasies and manipulates women (although somewhat transparently) in participating with him. But the man that is more than Daddy is very ethical - he lives and breathes social justice. And there is something in this exploration that I am learning about holding space for the darkness in myself and others, as long as it doesn't cause harm. Daddy doesn't cause harm, He desires bitches who get off on where he takes them. Like i do.)

He brings out the knives when i'm vulnerable, when i'm aroused beyond belief, when i'm begging to get off. He makes me get off to his fantasy, his desires, conditioning me to be aroused by what turns him on.

And the amazing (and scary!) thing is, it is changing me. i am finding myself aroused by some of his fantasies, situations i couldn't have ever imagined before, and even i had, they would have turned me off rather than turn me on. i even took one of his fantasies much farther than he did in my mind while getting off one night when we were communicating by text.

i almost didn't tell him about it, even though i knew he would want to know that he's getting to me, that he's penetrating my mind. That would make Daddy very happy. But he asked me the next morning if i was holding anything back and i couldn't lie, so i wrote him the fantasy because i couldn't yet say it out loud.

It is a challenge accepting how much it turns me on to fantasize about degradation and humiliation. The feminist in me rages at this some days.

In my struggle to fully accept bitch, i have occasionally been defiant, which is also new for me as a submissive. i've never been defiant. i take pride in being obedient and don't like how it feels when i disappoint the One i serve. But i've also had an equal and intimate friendship or relationship with every other Dominant i've played with to balance the power dynamic. This is the only relationship Daddy and i have. Sometimes i don't like that He always has the power and that the only desire or need i get satisfied is serving Him.

We don't have sex. He rarely touches me, except to grab my hair, hold me down while i get myself off, slap my face (as punishment that is deserved), pinch my nipples, or once in a while briefly caress me (he does cuddle in aftercare). The only way i get off is if i get myself off when he commands it or allows it when i beg for it. Even when we're apart, i'm not allowed to touch myself while fantasizing about Him unless i ask Him first. At this very moment i am squirming as i wait for His permission to fantasize about Him and cum tonight.

There is no traditional intimacy or validation, which is unnerving for me. i am having to stretch to understand where the intimacy exists and to perceive the ways He does validate me. Because of this, the opportunities to explore vulnerability -- my mission for the year -- are immense.

This whole experience is fantastic! i am stimulated and in deep self discovery at every possible level: intellectual, emotional, spiritual and sexual. The only thing i ever wish for is more physical interaction, especially if it's rough. He told me last night that's He's being somewhat gentle and subtle with me, and i don't know exactly what that means or why (except that He wants to be sensitive to my past trauma, which is great but not something i actually need), but i find myself wishing He wouldn't be gentle with me.

i want to go as deep into my darkness as Daddy can take me.
i hope it will please Him to take me there.

*

It's fascinating how I am relating to and expressing bitch. As I've written in previous posts, I don't really do pretend, role play, acting, game playing, etc. I have a very literal brain and I can't help but be who I am. Yet this interaction is a strange combination of real interaction and imagined scenarios that invoke powerful visceral response.

bitch is a part of who I am, so I'm not actually role-playing. Yet some of what Daddy has me talk about isn't actually true. Within our play, i am to say or repeat anything Daddy tells me to, whether it's true or not. It's taken a bit of time for me to get into the flow, to know what's real and what isn't in Daddy's world.

When I am interacting with Daddy, bitch is the only part of me that I am allowed to be. I cannot be any of the other parts of me that feel powerful, comfortable, strong, bright, creative...all the parts of myself that I know and love and feel confident about. I always feel unsettled with Him because I can't rely on everything I've learned to depend on in attracting or seducing someone.

And because bitch is new to me, I don't know how to be her yet, or how to succeed in serving Daddy. I am insecure and lack eloquence in communication -- Daddy's favorite ways of playing -- and it's frustrating because I am good with words! Yet I struggle in meeting Daddy where He desires to go. Or at least I did.

I seem to have made a breakthrough in that regard the last week or so. Daddy has allowed me a bit of room to find my rhythm through intuition rather than exact direction in worshiping him. He's such a good Daddy because He sets his bitches up to succeed and is willing to coach/train/condition me as much as i need.

What fascinates me so much about my desire for this experience of being nothing-but-a-bitch is how it doesn't seem to provoke the Invisible Girl, at least not yet. And if it eventually does, it's a perfect situation for working with her in a very conscious and emotionally safe way, because I don't have a bond of emotional intimacy with Him.

And where does my mysticism come into this? It's the act of worship. When i am bitch, Daddy is my God. All i see is His Divinity, in both the light and the dark. When i worship Daddy, i am worshiping both the man who deserves my worship because He turns me on so well, and the God in the man, the God in Everything.

I am also worshiping and expressing the Goddess in myself.

Sir, the Dominant I've written about before who gave me spiritually oriented assignments, He serendipitously sent me a reading a few weeks ago that included the following passages:

"...the female is symbolically representative of the negative, dark, and hollow aspect of the world, without which the masculine, positive, light, and solid aspect cannot be manifested or seen. The very word "Tantra" is connected with the art of weaving, and denotes the interdependence of warp and woof in woven cloth: the one cannot hold together without the other...

...Some understanding of Tantra is therefore a marvelous and welcome corrective to certain excesses of Western civilization. We overaccentuate the positive, think of the negative as "bad," and thus live in a frantic terror of death and extinction which renders us incapable of "playing" life with an air of noble and joyous detachment. Failing to understand the musical quality of nature, which fulfills itself in an eternal present, we live for a tomorrow which never comes - like an orchestra racing to attain the finale of a symphony. But through understanding the creative power of the female, of the negative, of empty space, and of death, we may at least become completely alive in the present." Alan Watts

I am diving into my own darkness and worshiping the feminine by expressing absolute receptivity, submission, and surrender. Just as bitch exists because Daddy inspires her, Daddy exists because bitch holds the dark and empty space for him to. I hold Daddy as who He is, worshiping Him rather than judging or rejecting Him for His darkness. bitches are actually quite special because they can hold the darkness.

I am learning how beautiful this kind of energy exchange can really be. I see it even more deeply in Daddy's relationship to his full time slave. While I only express bitch when I want to, she is his bitch 24 hours a day. That is powerful and awe-inspiring devotion.

I will never be that kind of bitch or submissive. I have too many Masters to serve -- God, community, children, etc. -- I cannot serve only one. While my entire life is about service, I spread my love far and wide rather than devote it to one person or one cause.

But when i am in the present moment with Daddy, He truly is all that exists. i am extremely focused. i have found a whole new capacity for meditation when i'm worshiping Him. i have no April thoughts. my only thoughts, when i have them, are about whether i'm pleasing Him or need to adjust what i'm doing to bring more pleasure. Mostly i have moments of pure worship, being One with the Music of the Universe by dancing with Daddy.

This life and the practice of Tantra is a Dance.
I am dancing with all of my heart, every single day.
I am dancing with the Divine in everyone and everything, including Daddy.
I am loving dancing in the Divine Darkness thanks to bitch.

*

Image Credit: Dancer in the Dark by Klas Smeby

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

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.

*

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.

*
"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