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

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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."

Love and Fear

"Her wounds came from the same source as her power."
Adrienne Rich

I have been passionately interested in love and healthy relationship since I was a teenager. I don't mean romantic love, although I have had typical obsessions with romantic relationship over the years. I mean the Big Love, the Love that is the life's blood of the Universe, the Love believed by all the world's religions. The sort of love represented in the story of the sacrifice of Jesus' life for humanity. When I was a practicing Christian (ages 3-20), I was deeply touched by the story of Jesus and his immense love for us all. I desired to feel that love in my own life and be that love with other people.

I started reading Leo Buscaglia, the first university professor to teach love, when I was 15. I started working on my self development with Scott Peck's The Road Less Travelled when I was 16. Even in the midst of living with my mother's narcissism, addictions and emotional abuse, my stepfather's alcoholism, and my father's neglect I knew there was a happier way to live and I knew it was based in love.

Back then I perceived it as God's Love. As my understanding of God, religion/spirituality and love have grown over years of intellectual study and experiential living, what remains is this knowing deep in my heart that we are capable of living with so much more love than we do. We are so afraid, afraid every day in so many ways. I seem to have been born with an innate awareness of, and drive to create, the Love filled lives that we are capable of living. I can feel the potential of it and everything in my life is motivated towards growing deeper in love for myself and others. My deepest desire for relationship is to find others who will go to the depths of love with me, who will choose to face our shadows together and work to heal into greater experiences of love together.

There is very little black-and-white duality sort of thinking that I invest in anymore, but I do believe that all of our emotions and choices, big or small, are based in either love or fear. Love leads to expansion, fear leads to contraction. Love allows us to be big and shine our lights for one another, fear causes us to shrink into the shadows. Love leads to Oneness, fear leads to separation/isolation.

It seems that part of my ability as an intuitive/empath is to feel when people are making love or fear based choices. I just know, even when they aren't necessarily conscious of their own motivations. I also tend to have intuition about what a person could do to choose love rather than continue in a fear-based pattern. That isn't just intuition, I have a 15 year self education in self development, psychology, philosophy, religion and spirituality. I have a pretty good understanding of how the human heart and mind work (based on our current collective understanding, of course we still have much to learn).

It very literally hurts my heart to witness/feel people choose fear. Because it hurts, I judge it as bad. I don't know how to change that. I don't know that I should. I watched fear slowly kill my mother. Her fear eventually grew so big that she became psychotic with delusions. I watch my ex-husband sit day after day for 7 years in his bedroom in front of his computer because he was too afraid to interact with the world. He lives a very small and depressed life (and I lived that life with him for awhile because I was afraid to give up my delusions about our so-called partnership and be on my own again). I've felt the big impact fear can have, and I see it's little impact in people's lives every day (including my own).

For a long time I have struggled with the story that my mom, my ex, and others chose fear over their love for me. Because I chose my children when fear could have ruled my life, I have told myself the story that my mother chose her fear, her addictions, and her narcissism over me, as if it was a conscious decision she made very day. Same with my ex-husband. I believed he chose his fear over our family. I made it personal and I am working on changing that. It isn't ever about me, it's about their own relationship to love and fear. But even if I take myself out of it, the reality is that it hurts to watch the people I love suffer from fear based choices.

*

"Closing the heart is a self-fulfilling prophecy. When we close it, we attract more reasons to keep it closed. Opening the heart is a soul-fulfilling prophecy. When we open it, we attract blessings." Jeff Brown

Part of my grief process right now is accepting that Knight made a fear based choice four months ago (and actively maintained since) that prevents our relationship from being what it could be. It has nothing to do with poly. It has to do with what is, or isn't, between us by his choice. He told me this when we came back together, but I didn't want to believe it. I chose to hope for the potential for great love I could feel between us. I poured my whole heart into our relationship. But he did not do the same. And now I know that I can't be in a relationship that isn't whole. I can't be in a relationship where fear prevents love from flowing and healing from taking place.

The struggle I am having right now is with the story that Knight chose his fear over his love for me. I don't know how not to take it personally, how not to feel rejected. I realize that the bigness of my grief, and my anger towards Knight, come from the history of the people I love choosing their fear. This is a pattern in my life.

The struggle I am having right now is with my own fear. My fear tells me that I will always feel rejected in his presence. My fear tells me that I can never be emotionally intimate with him again, even as friends. My fear tells me that I am not strong enough to bear watching him having other relationships in this community, relationships that I have to watch unfold and be expressed through BDSM and sex in public, in front of me at the parties that I help create.

I am scared. I am scared of how much more this is going to hurt. I am scared that it will hurt too much. My fear tells me to shut down, to shut him out, to try and make myself cold so that I don't feel it. My fear tells me to stay angry so that I can fall out of love with him.

Now I face the choice between fear and love. What are the loving choices for myself and towards Knight as we transition away from a romantic relationship to each other? What is the most loving choice for the community as I try to navigate my grief as we approach a big party? Can I be a positive role-model by making it about love, by embracing Knight as my friend and his other relationships as part of his joy? I desire more than anything for him to be happy. I just wanted him to be happy going to the depths of love with me.

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It isn't about being fearless. Most of us will struggle with fear all our lives. We're evolutionarily conditioned for it and it's something we have to change as a species.

It's a matter of being willing to face our fear, to shine the light on our shadows in order to experience deeper joy, love, and intimacy. Most of us run from our shadows, especially in relationship. Yet there is nothing more intimate than sharing the evolutionary process with another person and actively choosing love in the face of fear together. There is nothing more vulnerable than exposing your darkest shadows to each other, forgive yourself and the other, and to choose to heal through conscious action to be happier and more loving together.

Needs

I am having a lot of difficulty with the concept of needs. So much of the reading I've been doing about conscious relationship, polyamory, self-love, etc. talks about needs, meeting our own needs as well as communicating our needs so that they can be met by our partners. But there is no real definition of a need vs. a desire. I am really struggling to understand what my needs actually are and how important they are. Is having most of my perceived needs met more important than being in a loving relationship that meets some of them?

As human beings we have basic needs. There are survival needs: food, shelter, clothing, etc. For a vibrant life, there are also needs for self-care and connection to other human beings (to be witnessed and intimacy through conversation and touch). But beyond that, can anything else be called a need?

If I am a healthy single person with friends and community but not dating, then anything that would be called a relationship need is null and void. I can live without sex with another person. I can live without romantic intimacy. I can live without the validation. I can live without everything that comes from romantic involvement. So what are my needs in romantic relationship and how many of them should I expect to be met by someone I'm dating vs. a boy/girl-friend vs. a life partner?

Over the last two weeks Knight and I have had a series of situations involving poor communication around the changes and losses taking place in our relationship in order to accommodate his relationship with Rose. I have been trying to determine what I need in order to feel emotionally safe and cared for in an intimate relationship with him (or anyone). One need I have established is to feel considered and included in decisions that affect our relationship and time together.

On the heels of our emotional heaviness, this weekend was the first kid-free weekend that Knight chose to spend with his other lover. We have spent all of his kid-free weekends together since our relationship began, except for the couple weeks between "breaking up" and coming together in this new relationship.

What I am learning about my experience of transitioning from a full-time life-partner relationship into part-time poly-dating relationship is that it isn't just the lost time that is difficult to adjust to, but his inaccessibility during that time. I can't call him for any reason, no matter what's unfolding in my life (unless it's an absolute emergency). I can't flirt by text with him when I'm feeling loving or sexual. Nor can I call on him when I am having a difficult day. He is inaccessible because he needs to protect his relationship with another. We have been communicating nearly every day of our relationship and now even that is decreased by this new relationship.

What caused me suffering this weekend was that after spending 7 hours cleaning and packing my house on Saturday and again on Sunday, I was extremely tired and sore and all I needed (desired?) was to be witnessed and held by Knight. I needed to be naked and raw with someone, witnessed and held in my experience, and he is the only person with whom I have that level of intimacy. But he wasn't available. I couldn't even reach out to tell him what I was experiencing. I was alone.

In the moment it felt like a need and I suffered for not having it met. But here I am on the other side, still a whole person (yet sad and confused because the man I love wasn't there for me). So was it need? Or just a desire? Is it a temporary feeling that will shift over time as I continue to share him? Or do I need a partner who is more accessible to me?

I am caught up in sadness and confusion (amplified by exhaustion and physical pain) and likely to darken our date tonight with my grief over the changes that keep happening to our relationship. This was the man I was going to share a life and a home with. Now I have to accept that not only is that dream not coming true, but I am losing time, accessibility and intimacy with Knight because of what he is choosing to give his other relationship.

I have a lot of questions coming up for me around the sort of poly arrangement that Knight desires to live and whether partnership could ever be an option. Can one be a life-partner if they are only sharing half their life -- half their time and accessibility, half their resources available for intimate relationship?

Knight talks a lot about desiring to treat us both like whole people. But I don't experience my wholeness being honored when I can only have my needs met on our date nights and the rest of the time I am on my own...like a single person. How do I continue to be completely vulnerable and open with someone in a part-time relationship whom I cannot depend on except when time is scheduled? Do I truly desire to?

I have been a single mother, navigating life on my own and for other human beings, since I was 17 years old. Even within my so-called marriage I was alone in significant ways -- the only (4.5 out of 7 years) or primary breadwinner and the only one to keep the house and family functioning while my ex-husband played on his computer all day and night. I very strongly desire a life-partner -- someone to share the day-to-day joys and responsibilities of family, someone to share community with, someone to provide support when life gets rough, and someone who desires to meet most of my emotional needs in intimate relationship. I desire to have someone I know will at least strive to be there when I'm falling apart. I also desire to go as deep into conscious and spiritual partnership as possible. I just don't know how that's possible in a part-time relationship.

I am deeply concerned that no matter how much Knight and I love each other, we just may not be compatible in our desires for relationship or structures of polyamory. I am not giving up yet. I am just trying to see the truth of the situation.

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.

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.

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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

Longing

I feel accountable to the self-care resolution of writing every day. I have written today, quite a bit on a couple different post drafts. But they aren't for sharing yet.

I am tired. I am not clear on my motivations in my writing. I am uneasy tonight.

My weekend was so incredibly full and I did not get enough sleep. While my experiences were primarily joy-full intimacy, they were also deeply meaningful and emotionally complex, giving me much to process emotionally.

Sharing Knight with another woman was a big, big deal. It was an amazing opportunity to consciously choose compersion rather than my old stories of invisibility.

Sharing a cathartic scene with Knight was also a big deal. I am too tired to give proper words to the bigness of that.

And Fire was fantastic, deeply sacred and hilariously irreverent. We gave and witnessed powerful sharings.

I am being offered complex opportunities to practice relating from a spiritual perspective. It's a lot to process. And it seems after every great physical and emotional energy sharing, exhaustion sets in and emotions fall. I am heart-achy today.

After fire I was feeling wound up and asked Knight if I could come over and cuddle for a few minutes. I felt I needed a transition from the fullness of so much intimacy to the quiet aloneness of my home. Knight helps me ground. Being held by him helps me regain my center. He graciously said yes.

We cuddled. We talked a bit. And I settled into a peaceful state.

We both felt some desire for sex, but we consciously decided that was not our intent. I asked for support in grounding, he desired to provide it. We flirted, but we held to our agreement.

And then I got up and went home by myself. This would have normally been our week of living together at my place. Leaving his place was bittersweet, as is sitting here without him now and knowing I'll wake up tomorrow without him. On the drive home I felt a deep longing for him. To sleep with him beside me. To wake up to him. Oh god, how I miss starting my day on his chest, breathing him in, kissing his lips, kissing his cock. For me, there is no better way to start the day than that. I miss it very, very, very much. But this longing is not an experience of suffering.

I long for the intimacy we share. It is good and healthy. Sharing life with each other makes us happier and our lives richer because we both love intimacy in relationship. We both believe in relationship as a spiritual path and practice (we just weren't living what we believe). There is much light and good in our merging that it is appropriate to long for it, as long as it is without the suffering of attachment to fulfillment.

I realized this longing, that I know he feels as well, is a gift and its own experience of our intimacy. How blessed am I to have someone that my Divine Spark longs to unite with such intensity. I would much rather have this -- the longing, the heartache, the complexity and uncertainty, the back and forth between my heart and my ego to make the healthy choices -- than to not have it. I am blessed to love and be loved by this man and to get to share the process of evolution with him. Whether we are sharing a bed or not, we are always united in our heart connection. Every moment of our love shared is a gift and a potential experience of union. We are always One where our Divine Sparks meet, witness, play with, love and long for each other.

Grief

When I can transcend the overwhelming experience of it, I find grief to be a fascinating process. I have been grieving the loss of my partner-relationship for 8 days. I am wired to experience my emotions fully. Repressing my grief is not an option. It's not healthy for anyone, but as big as I experience my emotions (which is both a blessing and a curse), it is especially not healthy for me. It will explode in some way if I don't honor it and there will be wreckage. I'm striving to minimize wreckage in my life.

However, being functional and having the will to stop myself from a downward spiral is also vital. I can be swept away by the emotion and create suffering. I had a long-term relationship with the darkness of sadness and madness. Sometimes they still try to tempt me back into their arms. I have to be vigilant about physically getting up every day and spending time in the light. I also have to be vigilant about making connections with other people -- being witnessed and supported. It is so healing to have a tribe that cares for you.

*

Grief travels in waves. When the loss is brand new, they are tsunami waves that threaten to drown. It feels oppressive. It creates a sense of being pressed down into the darkness. It is pressure and it is constant aching. It can literally be difficult to breathe. It is in the body as much as it is in the heart. During this stage I spent considerable time in the darkness of my bedroom, on purpose. Besides the incessant crying, I felt physically ill. I took days off from work. Beyond the necessity of caring for my teenage daughter's and my own basic needs I was not functional. I couldn't think clearly. The stories were looping incessantly.

As time passes the waves become a little less oppressive every day. The pressure slowly releases. There are actual waves with crests and trenches. They become further apart. I can be distracted from the heartache. Time with friends can make me feel lighter and focus my attention on how much love I have in my life. Vegging out on movies between intense processing sessions can immerse me in someone else's story for a while. Working can let me think in non-emotional ways and provide a sense of accomplishment.

*

Some waves are pure emotion. Unstoppable tears. Sobs wracking my entire body. Raw heartache. No words or thoughts provoking the feeling.

There are the waves of shame and regret. I wish I had made different choices. I wish I had never learned to use words as weapons so well and I wish I knew how to stop doing so when I'm scared or feel invisible. I wish I took care of myself and I had more emotional control after big events...or enough consciousness to recognize when I'm on a trip. I wish I wasn't so judgmental and critical. I wish I was more unconditional and patient. I wish I was more graceful when I was disappointed. I wish I had loved him better.

There are the waves of wounded stories. Stories of blame and victimhood. Stories of abandonment and neglect. Stories of shame and not-enoughness. There are the stories we tell ourselves about the other person and run through the filter of our fears from past events. We analyze how they acted, what they said, what their actions meant. We tell ourselves how they failed us or how they made our worst fears come true. I won't tell you my stories right now. I don't want to share negativity or reinforce them.

The other waves are about particular losses. Time spent together. Precious daily rituals. Laughter. Flirting. Touch. Being held. Laying on his chest, hearing his heartbeat as my fingers caress his throat and rub his ear. Uninhibited communication. Trust to the point of sharing those things we are most ashamed of and afraid to be rejected for. I could go on forever. There are a kajillion things I feel I've lost.

The wave I'm in right now that is keeping me from sleeping and compelling me to write is grieving our sex life. We had an amazing and passionate sex life. After 14 months we still couldn't get enough of each other. We flirted all the time. We were uninhibited in expressing our desire for each other. We have significant compatibility around physical affection and sexual intimacy as primary expressions of our love. We were adventurous. We pushed limits together into new and mysterious parts of ourselves. We shared our sexual relationship with our friends and community. Our first few parties together, we had many people telling us how much they enjoyed our energy when we played.

And then there is how sexy and desired I feel with him. He awakened something in me, opened me to a new comfort and confidence in my sexuality. I was in the process of losing more and more inhibition and insecurity with him, allowing myself to express my love and desire through erotic expression. I had more I desired to give, to share, and now instead I must figure out what to do with this tremendous sexual energy that courses through my body when I think of him.

I have been watching movies when I need downtime from emotional processing and intentionally avoiding stories with romantic themes. Absolutely everything reminds me of us. But I watched the musical Nine tonight, not realizing how sexual of a movie it is. While there are no actual sex scenes, there is a ferocity of sexuality in the story and performances. I was turned on. I thought about how much we would enjoy watching certain scenes together. I thought about how much I've wanted to do an erotic dance or strip tease for him. And I realized I can't feel arousal or touch myself without crying. I can't fantasize because I can only fantasize about being with him. Sexual release without him present feels alien. I haven't masturbated much at all during our relationship because I didn't feel the need. I was satiated with what he gave me.

There is light and shadow in my grieving our sexual relationship. It is an alchemy of not-so-healthy yearning (we are both addicted to being validated through sex) and a truly loving desire to merge body, heart and soul. Sometimes sex was about physical or emotional need. Sometimes it was an expression of intimacy and our immense love. But other times we achieved a Divine Spark to Divine Spark connection. (We both professed a desire to explore Tantra and deepen the blending of sexual and spiritual, but never followed through. I keep asking myself if things would be different if we had spent more time intentionally seeing and experiencing the Divine in one another, sexually and otherwise?)

I am no stranger to immense grief. I have survived many losses. It's been less than two years since my mother died. Grief used to be crippling, but I believe I am learning how to navigate grief in a healthy way -- to fully express my emotion but not create unnecessary suffering.

And I believe there is meaning to be found in sharing my grief journeys with others. Thank you for holding space for me to do so.