Higher Love, part two

In part one I posed this question to myself and to anyone else who wanted to work with it:

What (if any) is the higher purpose of my specific set of sexual desires at this point in my life?

Two women responded, each of them reminding me about some things I often forget. Thank you both!

Rideflame of One More Sex Blog referred to her desires as gifts, and wisely reminded me that sometimes it’s just good to go with what you desire and figure it all out later. From her comment on my first post, she said:

I’m not sure that such gifts from the world may be understood before hand. My experience is that understanding comes much later…after the work has been done.

Gillette of Ex-Courtesan wrote a post on her own blog in which she really dug into naming her current desires as compared with her own past experience. From her post, I realized anew how we all oscillate many times during our lifetimes between the seeming duality of desires called submission and dominance, and that the sexual “playing out” of that particular Dance is only one small manifestation of the energy of the whole process.

Since I wrote part one of this post, I’ve been going through some stuff, which I touched on in this post, about feeling sexually and spiritually abandoned. In the comments to that post, Tom of The Edge of Vanilla wrote:

When I was younger, I really didn’t have the emotional/spiritual maturity that I do now - which is natural. Maturity means that we grow into our roles. 20 years ago, I’d probably have been frightened off by someone who had - or who longed for - a deep sexual/spiritual connection.

And since then, I have been thinking about the idea that “maturity means that we grow into our roles.” What is my sexual “role,” now that I’m maturing? What has it been in the past? And how have my own desires played a part in shaping that role, or perhaps in getting me to become what I’ve always been all along?

Well, sex and spirit have always been synonymous to me; they go together, they are both, for me, “desires.” It’s almost impossible for me to address one without the other. And because they go together for me, I find it difficult to “do” sex without intention (and by the same token, to do intention without sex!).

So, in that way, I think my role has always been that of a priestess; a sexual priestess who absolutely must have sex with intention. My sexual desires have almost always involved a will to spirit. And my spirit almost always involves a will to sex.

But just because I am tossing around the word “spirit” here, do not assume that I am always seeking the light. I do not seek to use sex as simply the vehicle by which to ascend to the lofty rarefied space of my 7th chakra in order to become free from the “baseness” of the body.

If you’ve read deeper into this blog, it should be obvious I am not a light-polarized New Age-y kind of person. There is in me a very ancient woman who knows the value - the necessity - of both dark and light. I know the dance these two must do - light and dark, body and spirit - in order to form a whole being; an experience of wholeness.

And that’s one reason I find it very difficult to operate sexually in this current social milieu. It seems in this day and age, that one must declare themselves on the side of either dark or light, bad or good, focused on the body or on the spirit.

If one tries to simply be what they are, with all those polarities flashing through the personality in all their conflicting confusing glory, well, then society and others in our lives are very quick to step in and tell us to shape up - be one thing or the other - mostly so that they will feel more comfortable in their own dualities and nobody’s precious little status quo gets upset.

There are just damn few examples of how to healthily and holistically do/be both sex and spirit in this world at this time. I have no temple, no touchstones, no true elders to show me, no Ways that seem familiar to me. Pagan religions have part of what I need, but not all. Social movements and “isms” provide some guideposts, but not enough. And my own sexual relationships have been peopled with those who have fear of integration in ways that I do not.

I have attempted to self-create my own sex/spirit Ways as best I can. And I must say, there are many more acceptable opportunities to do that now than there were when I was younger! Still, even though I’ve had a quite active and varied sexual and spiritual life, I still feel a serious disconnect in my own understanding of how those two things are best married in my life in the Now.

Recently, this desire to marry sex and spirit within myself and my own sexual expression has become overwhelming. I’ve come to the certainty that, for me, sex at this age (I’m 50) is meant to become something other than it’s been.

And, at the same time, it seems that my desires are becoming much less about the specifics of what turns me on, or even as a means of communion with another person, and much more about an almost urgent re-creation of my own self. It’s as if my sexual desires have become the desire for re-birth, and the desire for rebirth has become sexual. Considering that I am going through menopause, this makes sense in that I am, quite literally, transitioning into another phase of being “woman.”

In other words, I am well aware that I am feeling driven to adjust my entire life to accommodate some sort of new sexual “me,” but I just have no freakin’ clue about what that actually is, what it might feel like or look like.

And then, I read this… an interview with Barbara Marx Hubbard, Sex, Immortality, and the Future of Women, in which she talks about the evolutionary significance of sex and how, as we mature, sex serves just as sacred a purpose as it ever did, and perhaps even more so:

In evolutionary sexuality, or what I call “co-creational sex,” rather than reproducing the couple [procreation] or engaging in intimacy and sexual pleasure for recreation, the sacredness of the intimacy is compelled by a vision of the couple evolving through their union.

In that sense, evolutionary sexuality is comparable in its sacredness to procreational sex. While nature’s purpose is to reproduce the species through procreation, in co-creational sex, we are using the sexual impulse to evolve the species for the highest purpose.

As I read this, something started to click. And then, she’s goes on to say:

As we live longer and longer lives, more and more women are entering menopause. They are no longer producing eggs, and yet men continue to produce sperm until they die. So I began to ask myself, “Is there a higher purpose for the sperm, since the man continues to produce so many of them?

And if he loves a postmenopausal woman and she has no eggs, is it possible, through intentionality, to unlock a higher purpose within the coding of the sperm? What if the woman desires, above all else, not a new baby, but a new body and a new being—sensitive to spirit, capable of self-healing, self-generating, and self-evolving?”

This really astounded me! There is so much talk these days about how a woman at menopause must re-create herself. But nowhere else have I found anyone talking about how sex after menopause can be evolutionary in this specific way. Sex as an evolutionary force, not just a nice diversion if you make sure you use enough lube and try your hand at a little light kink aimed at “spicing it up” a bit.

And the whole idea of men and their life-long life-giving sperm actually being valuable and desired in the process of a woman’s re-creation! Wow, this is certainly not a very currently hot topic. And how amazingly validating for men!

Or, really, to take the gender completely out of it, how valuable is any intimate partner - of any gender - in this magician’s trick of regeneration we women are called on to pull off at menopause. Just as we are not meant to create babies alone, we are not meant to regenerate ourselves alone. Duh!

Of course, a woman, at any stage in her life is responsible for her own actions and choices to make her life into what she wants it to be, as in every person. But this idea that two people are actually co-creators of each other as they age is just so beautiful to me!

So, to revisit Tom’s comment: “Maturity means that we grow into our roles.” Yes! And now I understand a whole lot more about just what that means for me, and just where my own sexual desires have been leading me all along.

Long ago, I found a satisfying (to me) definition of what a priestess is, a definition I’ve used for many years to describe what it is I am and therefore, what I do:

A priestess is a reflection of that which she serves.

Since “that which I serve” has always been simply Life and Love, I used to understand my role as sexual priestess to mean that as a mother I mediated spirits into form through sex (sacred procreation, as Marx Hubbard puts it), or as a lover, acted as a mediator of spirit for all the sexual partners in my life - both those who I chose as life partners and those who petitioned my services as a whore.

My purpose as priestess then has traditionally been to offer myself to Life and Love and to allow myself to be a reflection of that, a mediator, a go-between, a devoted server.

But now, I’m not so sure I can name my role as “priestess” any longer because I’m starting to see that maybe, as we mature, those of us who previously served as sexual priestesses become less of a reflection of that which we serve, and simply more of the thing itself.

In other words, maybe I am no longer “useful” as the serviceable mirror through which Life and Love make themselves known not because I am “getting old,” but because I am becoming somehow closer to being the original vision itself.

A complicated and very subtle differentiation… with wildly profound implications!

Image Credit: Unio Mystica by A. Andrew Gonzalez