Naked Coffee Friday: a Flower from the Woods

Walking the woods in springtime, tread gently among the dry brown leaves. Drop to the earth and see what's rising underneath them: a wild flower. A tall preacher man standing within the folds of the virgin's gown. Jack in the Pulpit, we call this flower.

In Lovemaking, notice that something new can grow under the dry brown leaves of habit and patterns of behavior. Be willing to feel this first in yourself. With your new, curious eyes, see if there is something new abloom within your partner, too. This one beside you whom you have known for years, so familiar now that you do not see him or her, this one has a flower unseen blooming in the humus of life.

Open your eyes and let all your other senses follow. You are both new creatures every day. Do not trample these new flowers with your habits of perception. Moments of intimacy are the moments these new flowers show up. They may not appear in any other light. 

Watch the ground under the old leaves for the new flowers. They are the signposts to ecstacy.

 

Naked Coffee Friday: Pleasure as Community Service

(this post, along with "God's Desire", combined to make the draft of a talk I composed for the Rotary  Club meeing. As yet, I have not delivered it to them, and I deliver it to you via this blog and my newsletter!)

Have you heard the expression “We are Spiritual Beings having a Physical Experience?” Consider this: We are Spiritual Beings having a Sensual Experience.
We are god made flesh for one reason only: and that is to FEEL!
To feel ourselves, to touch and be touched by life. To inhabit this sensual body that feels so good.  That has capacity for pleasure most of us have never tapped.

We human beings of all the animals, except maybe dolphins, in our consciousness of SELF and OTHER have a sexual relationship to EVERYTHING!

We have a Divine right to feel pleasure and to BE SAFE to feel our connection to one another, to feel natural without the walls, armor, fear, rules, ignorance of Truth.

I can hear you wondering: Sex is nice, sex is GREAT, well, it used to be… but isn’t it optional—except for making babies?
Seriously what does this have to do with the price of eggs or gasoline?

EVERYTHING! Sex is not limited to procreation or even feeling good making nookie. Sex is how we know the profound connection we have with all of LIFE.  Let me explain:

I believe that the root of all that we call Evil is disconnection from our sensual bodies, the ability to feel and know through all our senses that we are all connected. For some reason, in modern times, we've forgotten how to feel. We forget how to Love. Or we do so narrowly, with many conditions place on our feeling and Loving.

When we believe that disconnection is the truth, our loneliness is expressed in war, rape, victimization, competition, lack, struggle. As a society we suffer with PTSD. We see life and the economics of life in terms of winners and losers, and we will suffer any price to win!
Or to be RIGHT.
And we don’t believe we have won unless our feet are on the necks of a loser. It’s sick, and twisted, and oh so unnecessary! 

Even in the little village where I live, we are as likely to go to battle over opinion, values, and stewardship of resources as we are to step back and feel and create our way to a solution that supports more life for all.

We are each of us our own worst enemy. As individuals, we are at war within ourselves. We fight daily--minute by minute--to suppress as wrong, bad, or dangerous the very power of feeling that bring us into Life, and is the creative force we need to solve all our problems.

We grow up learning to stuff our sexual energy into a box, to behave ourselves and be “good”, on pain of very serious consequences. No wonder so many of us suffer with depression, high blood pressure, heart disease, cancer, diabetes and autoimmune disorders. The stress of suppressing our life force is LETHAL!

What if instead of racing around through our day stressed, conflicted, in pain, we intentionally sought out opportunities for pleasure? What if our work, errands, and interactions with clients, customers, coworkers, family were all about pleasure? What if we lived in a community of genuine, authentic pleasure seekers, and pleasure givers?

What if Pleasure were a Community Service?

Can you imagine what that could be like?
Imagine moving through your day FREE to feel?
Free to feel not merely good, but awesome?! Not simply awesome, but turned on?! Free, and big, and wide open for any and every good, delicious, opportunity to feel and share pleasure. No excuses or apologies, at all, because feeling really good, and being turned on is not risky, forbidden, or weird. It’s…. The Way Life Should Be.

You don’t look at other people as competitors or even strangers. You don’t have to get anything from anybody. You already have All you need within You.

As a Spiritual Being having a Sensual Experience you can feel good. Curious about everything that comes your way. You live in Abundance, and complete sufficiency. No separation or loneliness.

You have everything you need within you.
You are confident of your skill, knowledge, smarts, your beauty, your virility,
You know that you are LOVED.

Your life becomes a life of giving and service. You give from the overflow of your fullness, with nothing to prove, only Love to Demonstrate.

The Mind does not understand this truth.
But the Body does. Your Body knows. Your body hungers and thirsts for pleasure and freedom.
And if you are still breathing and getting up for a 7AM Rotary meeting, it is not too late to know yourself as the object and the subject of God’s Desire.

********* 

I hope you are inspired to think that pleasure and sexual energy can have a big impact beyond ourselves.  If this sounds intriguing, but difficult, I assure you, it just takes some training and practice. I can help with that. Please call me at 207-619-DIVA, or email me by replying to this letter, and we'll schedule a complimentary consultation to talk about it.

Inhabit Your Body: Movement

You are your Body. Enjoy yourself.

Aware of your breath’s touch inside you, today’s invitation is movement.

Begin with awareness of how much your body moves with breath. Ribs, belly, back, limbs. Where does your breath carry your body? Work it--Expand your body on the in breath and contract your belly muscles on the out breath. If you are sitting in a chair, shift your weight, rotate your torso, roll your head, rotate wrists, shoulders, and ankles. Stand up, slowly. Feel it all.

Noticing movement, you will notice where your body is holding tension or pain. Move that area. What happens to the sensation?

The only purpose to this movement is experience of the body’s sensation of movement. If you are a dancer, athlete, yogi, allow your curiosity to notice something new about your body as a moving being. Can you see the trees, grass, or water? Let your body move in concert with their motion: shimmer leaves, sway branches, ripples.

Movement is our dance with gravity--surrendering to and defying. Play with it. Notice how naturally a movement that defies gravity creates a surrender elsewhere in your body. When you are at home, lie on the ground outside, or on the hard floor, or a soft bed and move. Explore your body’s horizontal relationship to gravity.

When you focus your attention on your movement, do you notice you are holding your breath? Breath supports movement, as a biological process and as a spirtiual one. Breath allows Father Sky and Mother Earth to meet within you, and make love.

Your Body--You Are.

Stretch, pastel on paper, ©2009 Carla Sanders

Inhabit Your Body: Breath

Inhabit your body, not inhibit.

“I am not my body.” It’s an often spoken woowoo splatitude.

Who are you if not your body?
Let’s just get over “I am not my body.”

The most intimate relationship you will ever have is the one with your own body.
Which is truly the relationship with yourself.

The more intimate, loving, sensual, aware, attentive, appreciative your relationship is with your body--Your Self-- the richer your experience of Life is.

Don’t take my word for it.

Spend a few minutes in loving appreciation of your body right now.

Feel the sensation of your breath flowing past your nostrils, gently swelling your chest and belly.

Feel the gentle friction as the wind of your breath blows against your insides.
In, out, gentle sweet touch of air.

What else do you begin to feel--a glow of vital sensation throughout your body in response to the touch of your own breath? Be open to the possibilities.

Cultivate curiosity about your body, its sensations, and your thoughts and feelings that arise in your exploration. Be equally tender and accepting of both pleasant and unpleasant sensations, thoughts, feelings.

Greet everything that comes up with love. If you reject or resist a thought or feeling that is painful, love yourself anyway.

This is not a test. It is an invitation from your Lover, Your Body, to be at ease with yourself.

Naked Coffee Friday: Betrayal

Tonight Nut Tmu-Ankh is offering the final Bliss Now: Orgasmic Relationships teleclass. Yes, I am plugging the class tonight, and the recorded series. It's incredible work, whether you are single or partnered.

The matter tonight is Secrets, Privacy, and Lies: Healing Betrayal. At the Orgasmic Living community, Nut has posted provocative questions and I haven't been able to answer them! This topic stymies me. 

So I bring it here for you to help me. Jealousy, betrayal, lying, secrets, privacy, possessiveness. It's as bad as it gets. Maybe you'd rather have your coffee somewhere else than talk about this subject today. But I hope you hang around.

When I was young I loved someone, the first time I felt the power and possibility of love--and sex.
I was ill prepared for any of it, blown completely off center by what I was experiencing. I lost myself in love, and in this other person. When he left me for someone else, it was beyond horrible. I did get over it, but it took 30 years! I tried never to inflict that kind of pain on someone, or be on the receiving end of it. But it happened anyway.

Nut Tmu-Ankh says this: BlissTip: property values have no place in our bonds of Love ☥

and "A love grudge can rob you blind, broke & Bliss-starved. You deserve so much more."

What is it about betrayal-- the rage and the pain-- that brings out more feeling of love? Is this love or ownership?  Why would we rather suffer than forgive? What make it so hard to move on if that 's the answer?

Are we wired for betrayal, on either side of the fence? Is monogamy a futile idea, or the result of a market ing campaign?  How does love among more than two people work? Which is our natural species tendency?

Come on, you must have opinions, beliefs, and experience around this topic.

What do you have to say for yourself?

Orgasmic Alchemy 1: Spiritual Beings having Human Experience

You've heard the expression "We are spiritual beings having a human experience."
What does that mean to you? Pause and feel your experience of embodied Spiritual Being. Breathe.

What do you feel?

Imagine:

A brand new baby, born into intimate physical relationship to mother, held by her, mouth latched to her nipple, receiving warm milk from her body. Touch, warmth, food, peeing, pooping, intimate physical comfort, pleasure, and safety. Add connection with father, siblings, and grandparents, extended family; soon curious exploration and learning, all innately connected to the pleasures of being in a  human body, including genital pleasure. Even as babies we humans can reach to touch our genitals with hands, or feet. Even diapered, we are aware of our genital pleasure centers. Just observe babies!

You see, when we are babies, we remember! the pleasure of where we come from, the orgasm of generating into a body when egg receives sperm, the liquid sojourn inside mother, where the fetus actively explores her/his developing body before birth, the intense but critical initiation of being born into air through the narrow gate of Mother's Temple.

The innocence of being a Spiritual Being having a brand new sensual experience of being a human.
Do you remember that?

If you were born in an industrialized nation the last two-thirds of the 20th century, chances are your birth was a traumatic isolating experience including sterility, bright lights, prodding, piercing, and if you are a man, peeling off your foreskin, followed by separation from mother, and feeding of imitation food from a rubber nipple.

Exploration restricted by rules and expectations, and from the earliest infant touches of your own genitals, you learn NO. There is something wrong there or maybe even dangerous. You learned all kinds of moral and cultural restriction in even having your own feelings  and thoughts about sexual pleasure. And as you got older, the rules and restrictions around sexual behavior become a prison. It was as if someone else owned your body and your feelings. Your personal enjoyment and expression is a shameful theft, a secret sin. Perhaps you learned to exploit that secret garden for pleasure and even heal it, but at the cost of your innocence, your birthright.

If you were so lucky as to have a birth/family upbringing that nurtured your sensual Beingness, you've lived with a sexually traumatized society as a back drop. It is hard to be natural.

Now, one decade into the 21st century, we like to say we are Spiritual Beings having a Human Experience.

We come here in our innocence made to be sexually connected to this beautiful world. Our orgasm is our remembrance of our Spiritual Being. Knowing oneself as a Spiritual Being requires owning the innocent full-bodied feelings of our Sexual Human Experience.

Let's remember.

Bliss Now: Sexual Healing

"It's Sexual Healing - Wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up" ~Marvin Gaye

Let me introduce you to the Priestess of my initiation and Diva Mama of the Temple of Wombn, Nut Tmu-Ankh Butterfly Dreaming. She is also my friend, mentor, and we are Mission Partners in helping the world wake up through Sexual Healing.

This Friday, March 26, Nut holds a rare teleclass open to everyone, part of her Bliss Now series.

This week the topic is Sexual Healing.  Nut Tmu-Ankh writes:

"We all re*member Marvin Gaye’s song and the YOUniversal Truth it touches on that we all know, yet seldom have the courage to explore openly, and with the lights on:

Sex heals.

Sadly, in our ignorance, most of us close ourselves off from this incredible healing power, but you can choose to own what others barely dream of. At the cellular level and throughout the 7 Bodies, the power of Orgasmic presence iz an inexhaustible healing resource everyone can own & apply.

After all, it’s only natural. "

Our six-part teleseminar series on Orgasmic Relationships continues Friday, March 26th @3:30p pacific time, with...Sexual Healing: the Power of Orgasmic Presence to Sooth & Transform any dis-ease of Body, Heart or Mind

Click here to register.

I hope you will come to this class, and while your are visiting the Orgasmic Living community, you will take a look at the previous four sessions of series on Orgasmic Relationships.

via orgasmicliving.ning.com

Naked Coffee Friday: more about intimacy

It's Naked Coffee Friday. I am enjoying the beans my son the coffee roaster sent me for my birthday. They are so fresh and oxygen rich that the fresh grind fizzes up and flows over the lip of my aeropress. I love fresh roast, fresh ground.

Last week's Naked Coffee on intimacy roused lots of juicy thoughts. I'm sharing a blog post from Diva Omidele from the Orgasmic Living community. She's writing here about the Case for True Intimacy.

She writes about being angry when she realized she'd settled for something less than she knew to be intimacy in a long relationship.
I know that feeling.
I am not settling any more, not with myself or with friends, or lovers.
What do you think? If you are settling, what might work to kindle intimacy? What are the risks? What's at stake, either way?
Oh, shit. I'd love to have a light hearted topic, but I am just so damn serious!

Coffee's good. Anybody want to change the subject?

Naked Coffee Friday: Intimacy

© 2007 Merqueen and Lover by Carla Sanders, Porcelain bowl backlit by sun

Intimacy. Here's that word again. It keeps coming up in our conversations round the woodstove. We say it like we know what it means.  But I don't know what it means. Does it mean the same to me as it does to you?

In our post Victorian sexual era, intimacy is still a modest euphemism for sexual intercourse. Is that all there is to intimacy? Does sex really have anything to do with intimacy?

What does intimacy mean for you? How do you express it, feel it, share it? Do you fear it? Does it elude you?

Really getting naked today. Let's go round the circle. What does intimacy mean for you? 

I'm listening, and the water's boiling for the French Press.

Sex does not=relationship - A Man's Advice to Women

Naked Coffee Friday! My world is scoured clean by fierce wind and rain. You may be buried under snow. I hope you have a snow day and can hang out with me for a while.

Sex does not=relationship - A Man's Advice to Women

Last week I came across this blog post and I wonder how it lands on you. I don't know the author's name (fill me in if you do). I read it as a lively, vehement reminder that women and men must be awake, self-responsible, and not living in fantasy-land when it comes to relationships and sex. Some of my favorites:

"Listen to what he says, NOT what you want to hear. Stop INTERPRETING the meaning of what he says to fit your purposes. If he says, "I'm not lookin' for nothing right now" --DON'T tell yourself, "Aw, he just scared of getting hurt. I can change his mind.." NO YOU CAN'T. He said exactly what the hell he meant. Men don't have to lie when so many women are already DEAF."

AND

"Show our ASS to the door if we pressure you for sex too soon."

What do you think? Do women bear some responsibility for men's bad behavior? And does it work opposite? Does that question also work if the genders are reversed?

I haven't had my coffee yet! I'll be back after a visit with my grinder and Aeropress.