New Possibilities After a Diagnosis of Erectile Dysfunction

When I met Peter, he, like many older men, was struggling to embrace a new sexual identity. He had been referred to me by a sexuality therapist who felt that he needed a direct, interactive, hands-on approach to assist him in his quest to create an initiation into this new sexual identity.

Peter was in his sixties, a twice-divorced veteran recovering from a brain injury that had left him clinically diagnosed as impotent. Over the decade prior to his injury, his erections had become infrequent, and when he did have them they lacked the gusto of those of his twenties and thirties. After a cerebral hemorrhage in 2011, his erections ceased altogether. In spite of this, he remained optimistic that it was possible to recreate what sex was and could be for him. He was ready to empower his sexuality, rather than to see himself as diminished or victimized by circumstance. Inspiringly, he viewed his situation as an opportunity to create a sexual renaissance for himself  – a new golden age as he entered his golden years.

He confessed to me that, over the course of his life, he had never truly enjoyed sex. To some extent, he had seen it as a responsibility or a duty, one more thing he had to perform or achieve in a certain way to prove himself. As a result of this pressure, sex had been unsatisfying and he was uncertain whether he had ever been fully present for it. Sex had been angry and rage-filled at times. A military veteran, he held close the experience of war in his body and suffered from emotional, physical and spiritual numbness and PTSD for decades. Peter mentioned that anger felt like the only emotion he had been truly in touch with until his brain hemorrhage in 2011.

“Early trauma and war left me angry all the time. Anger was safe. I knew anger. It was almost a friend,” he told me. “But when I had my brain bleed, my entire life changed. Something shifted for me in my brain chemistry that affected my emotional body. I was able to access the places of emotion I used to have as a boy before trauma set in. Places of freedom, joy, wonder, curiosity, happiness.”

As he spoke, the excited young boy who had been lost since his early youth began to emerge, playful, curious and ready to engage.

From a place inside of him that had seen too much war and trauma, he told me: “Part of me for years was ‘Missing in Action’. I believe this brain injury has actually brought me into a state of grace. It gave me access to parts of myself and a wholeness that before was completely inaccessible. The brain injury also left me without access to the direct flow of energy to my genitals that make erections possible.”

“What a gift,” I said. “It looks like you’ll have the opportunity to expand your pleasure to your entire body. Most people never make it that far and their pleasure often stays trapped only in their genitals.”

His eyes twinkled.

“That’s why I’m here,” he said with a big smile.

“How do you want to feel in your sexual expressions, play and experiences?” I asked him.

“Free, connected, expressed … present. Like I don’t have to work. I want to play,” Peter told me sincerely.

Peter’s brain bleed had also apparently bled right out the angry warrior energy that had previously filled him. I suspected that this inner warrior had finally gotten so angry he just exploded, perhaps on an actual physical level causing the bleed itself. This was a classic opportunity for a shamanic reset in the system – an injury, ailment or illness that becomes an ally and offers us medicine that we need on in the deepest levels of our being.

I escorted Peter over to my floor palette futon and we began with a simple sitting meditation, noticing where sensation was present in our bodies and speaking out loud the sensations we were experiencing. Next we checked in with our body’s desires and made requests to each other on how our bodies would like to be touched in a non-genital focused way for one-minute increments. The body’s desires are always changing so the minute-long increments gave a contained space to explore both immediate and changing desires. Because the genital focus in our interaction was off the table to create a new form of sensual relating, it opened up a world of new possibilities for touch, intimacy and sexual self-expression.

Each of us took turns making requests and unfolding the true desires of the body now that direct genital contact wasn’t hogging the primary focus. The body revealed all of these beautiful subtleties and we had the opportunity to explore not just where we would like to be touched, but how, what pressure, what quality of touch – like feathers, kneading, delicate fingernails, squeezing massage, deep or right on the surface.

We then explored the intention of how we desired to be touched – with love, with curiosity, with tenderness, with passion, with pure carnal desire.

This progressed to a gentle, “as if” role-playing game: touch me as if you were a mother cradling her newborn; touch me as if you were molding my body out of clay; touch me as if this was the first woman’s body you had ever seen; touch me as if the burning desire of the whole universe resided in your fingertips. Each ‘as if’ experience created a new and profound opening for both of us.

Next we stood up and disrobed in front of each other. I went first and asked Peter to simply be present and hold space for me while I did. I took off one piece of clothing at a time and we paused to breathe in between each one to notice what sensations we were feeling in our bodies and to speak on them. Then I invited him to disrobe as well. We stood and breathed. I then spoke what I observed about the story of his body in that moment, where my eyes were drawn to see and what they saw. Silver hair, warm twinkling eyes, hands that had held guns and babies, a stray hair here, a special freckle there, a long lean body trained both as an athlete and a warrior.  I asked him to mirror back to me what he saw, where his eyes were drawn to my body so that we could fully take each other in. Long brown hair, softness, rosy cheeks, large nipples, femininity. He did a beautiful job recounting what he saw. I received a new perspective for myself on being witnessed through his eyes.

We took turns now in longer increments sharing touch, only this time we focused on how we desired to touch each other. We asked permission with each touch and there was space to say no if it didn’t feel in alignment for us. We rolled around and played and laughed together for several hours as we explored how desire and sexual energy wanted to move through us.

As our sacred space came to a close, Peter confessed to me: “This is the most present I have ever truly been with a woman. I can actually feel the desire in my body and it can be expressed without the pressure to perform. I can’t recall ever feeling this free before. So much has just become possible.”

When the effort to move past scripts and ingrained patterns of touch and relating was presented, a new form of relating that is based on presence and authenticity has permission to unfold in the space shared between bodies. Our bodies are always changing and transforming and so are our desires and how they want to express themselves. When we work with the body’s true desire, we can be present to the possibility of expanding the pleasure palette within the body and its capacity for sensual self-expression.

Peter told me he is ready to actively pursue dating with renewed gusto and to explore the possibility of physical intimacy based on the new possibilities in sexual self-expression available to him. He is also complementing our experience with Western medicine, exploring possibilities for assisting his erections but also freeing himself from the imprisoning mind-set that erection with ejaculatory orgasm is the apex of sexual experience. There is a wide scope of supportive allopathic ways to just about guarantee an erection. What they can’t guarantee is any happiness from it. With Western medicine and the explorations into the possibilities of returning full erectile function, Peter now has a new space to play in – a penis that can maintain an erection with a template for presence and authentic connection.

The path of self-discovery Peter is on is one of enthusiasm and wonder rather than a quest to fix a part of himself that might be considered broken. Peter knows he can have new and deeply fulfilling sensual and sexual experiences and now erections can become a part of that experience with the support of western medicine and compassionate and caring health professionals. It was his commitment to creating a template to break scripts and old ways of being and to move into his authenticity that allowed for this to unfold. Peter wrote me a few weeks ago saying that he is having a marvelous time exploring penis pumps, injections and supplements to increase his erectile possibilities. He reports that they work and that every part of this journey continues to be a learning experience. He’s excited to explore all of these possibilities with his next partner from a place of presence and authentic connection when the right relationship comes along.

I wish for him presence, play, powerful penis pumps and new possibilities for relating as he steps confidently into this new identity of sexual self-expression!

Here is a closing piece of advice and comment from Peter:

Something I believe in so strongly is the act of getting support. Getting support from caring and loving sources. It is remarkable just how lonely and debilitating it is, processing the realities of impotence. What men need to know and understand is what I learned and frankly am still learning – unless you want to remain stuck in the world of feeling badly about yourself, you MUST reach out and trust. Men who are already in a loving relationship with a caring partner have in this regard a great advantage. Presumably that partner will be there for them and process with them the oftentimes painful truths that impotence brings to light. It is men such as me not in any such loving relationship who need to be reminded of this. Men who find themselves twisting slowly in the breezes, with not a clue, and nowhere immediately to turn. It is these men who need great comfort, and these men who need to know that the worst thing that they can do is to do nothing.  It is never easy and never over.

To those men reading this who might be embarking on a journey like mine, I’d like to say that there are no magical endings. There is much experimenting, much unknown to be explored, many turns along the way that will not be fulfilling. At its essence comes the willingness to commit to the process of healing and becoming whole.

 

 

Walking the Beauty Path

Walking the Beauty Path

 

Beauty – noun.

1. A combination of qualities, such as shape, color or form, that pleases the aesthetic senses, esp the sight.

2. A combination that pleases the intellect or moral sense.

3. The quality in a person that gives pleasure to the senses or pleasurably exalts the mind and spirit.

4. Something which embodies an unmatched aesthetic, regardless of external influences. To be truly beautiful reflects an unparalleled sense of eternity, unchanged by events or situations, which might otherwise compromise this trait.

We are taught that beauty comes from within. New Age positive thinking teaches us we are all beautiful and that women’s bodies especially are beautiful. We are taught our souls are beautiful. This is countered with society teaching us that beauty can be standardized or exists within certain forms. We are taught that beauty is packageable, marketable, that only a few possess it naturally and that the rest of us must strive to twist, contort, or conform to what has been declared the ever elusive standard of beauty.

Recently, I have found myself in an inquiry of ‘what is beauty and what does it look like when one embodies it?’ As one who is walking and teaching a path of sacred sensuality, how could I not look at beauty and aesthetics as part of this path?

Now when I say beauty, I feel that little prickle in system of vanity traipsing in the wake of standardization. ‘You mean six-pack abs? Cosmetics? Body modification? False appearances?’ screams my inner angry feminist. No, I mean Beauty – the unique embodiment of the light of Source shining through us. Beauty has a tremendous power. It has been worshipped in most all cultures to some degree – hence Venus, Lakshmi, Aphrodite, and the billion dollar beauty industry, Hollywood. It has also been rejected, rejected as false, seen as a mask of illusion or a manipulator of the natural.

The inquiry has taken me into my own path of beauty, where I am actively inviting it in and also exploring those moments where I have been truly surprised by beauty.

Beauty and I have had a quite a journey together. I trudged through a morass of misunderstanding and rejecting the concepts of physical beauty for much of my life. Some of my earliest memories of aesthetics or rejection thereof include: my mother chasing me around the house with eyebrow tweezers and a mascara brush; my angry feminist stage in college of wearing my hair up in what others called my ‘angry scarf’ and sporting army cargo pants with a militant personality, because I was worried I would be objectified instead of valued for my mind; my late college years of discovering my sexuality and its power and subsequently overly sexualizing my body to feel powerful; and eventually my naked yoga years of stripping away all forms of exterior beauty to open up to something more authentically beautiful on the inside.

My herbal teacher and pioneering second-wave feminist leader, Susun Weed, is a card-carrying Goddess worshipper and universal lover of women. Aesthetics and beauty-based rituals, however, were not something she touted in her repertoire. Her fierce temperament and Earth worshipping ways are more aligned with Baba Yaga and Gaia than with Aphrodite and Venus. A model in her early days, Susun now has a hearty woodswoman body for functional farm work and sports tie-dyed t-shirts and bug-repellant blue jeans. Her trademark fashion is a bandana worn around her forehead that contains her otherwise wild wiry hair. Susun encouraged her apprentices to bathe no more than twice a week and generally avoided soap especially anything scented. Conditioner other than nettle leaf infusion was seen as unnecessary and I’m quite sure she never willingly applied make-up at any time during 66 years of life. This was a priestess of the Earth and aesthetics were not a priority, especially for one who embraced farm life. Not only was beauty non-functional, any cosmetic enhancement was deemed unnatural. But whether consciously or unconsciously, Susun distinctly expressed herself through aesthetic choices. Her simple, functional, Earth-based choice of personal presentation was, in its way, as much a statement of her beliefs as a conservative office-worker’s or a Fifth Avenue fashionista’s. In recent years, my own preferences have shifted to a slightly enhanced version of Susun’s aesthetics. More ‘Gaia to feed and heal the world’ and less of the sought-after invocation of Venus or Helen of Troy.

Following in my teacher’s footsteps, it felt natural for me to be make-up free, barefoot and visually unobtrusive when speaking with the plants during our herb walks. That was how my herbal teacher taught and I mirrored that. When we are exploring our options of personal style, we tend to try on conventions to see if they work for us. Likewise we may try something on that apparently rejects the whole concept of aestheticism, unconscious of the fact that this is, of itself, an aesthetic choice.  I felt part of my calling in connecting women to their sexuality was to bring them to the Earth, Earth wisdom and Earth orgasm, and to take us away from any aesthetic preconceptions we had around what we perceived as sexy, seductive or sensual.

On an herb walk I lead this past summer for Awakening the Sexual Shamanic Priestess Retreat, I looked around at the women gathered and did a double take when my eyes fell on Juliette. Juliette had her silky raven hair coiffed in an up-do, had bright, fire-engine red lipstick painted on to accentuate the heart shape of her lips, and her hourglass body was draped in a sleek black gown adorned with silver beadwork. Juliette wore this on an herb walk. Juliette was a sex-workers’ rights activist by day and a ‘by choice’ high-end escort at night. She owned her sex and her beauty. She was someone who had stepped in and embraced her sexual aesthetics and beauty fully and it was jaw dropping to behold. Juliet was the kind of femme fatale that wore gowns on herb walks, because why wouldn’t a classic femme want to be dressed in her best to meet and commune with the flowering plants that remind us to own both our beauty and sexuality with their shameless display of blossoming genitalia?

Nothing about Juliette’s beauty was contrived or false. While glamorous and deeply aesthetically beautiful, nothing about Juliette was standardized. This beauty was a direct reflection of her soul fully integrated in her body temple. Juliette is a femme fatale. Juliette is sex and beauty. For Juliette to wear bug repellant jeans and a bandana would be asking an orchid to dress like a dandelion. Nothing about it would be authentic or true to her nature. The day that a red lipstick wearing femme fatale went on an herb walk with me was one in which my relationship to beauty changed. Beauty could be authentic and a reflection of our inner state and could also look quite conventional. The difference was this beauty was not trying to impress someone or mold itself to fit a certain form, it just is was. Same as a flower is not trying to be beautiful, it simply is beautiful.

We make aesthetic choices every day. The question is what do you want to make a statement about? What is your beauty? Whose beauty team are you on? Beauty elevates the soul, excites the senses. Beauty makes life more engaging. It magnetizes us. I was very excited being in Juliette’s presence just as I was very excited being in the presence of the flowering herbs on our walk. Beauty meeting beauty.

Beauty can also be considered resting or sitting well in oneself, good health and vitality, being the full embodiment of one’s own unique characteristics and how they are meant to shine. Meeting Maple helped me understand beauty as ownership of one’s own unique characteristics and soul energy. I first met Maple when she attended the monthly Naked Church service that I co-facilitate. She entered the room quietly, a petite gypsy-fairy spirit. While everyone clucked around before service catching up on small talk, Maple sat very still, eyes closed creating both a deeply meditative and electric presence around herself. When she opened her light blue eyes, they glowed and held the wisdom of other worlds. Maple is someone who holds my gaze. I find her presence reminds me of visiting a museum and being struck with surprise by a painting you didn’t know you were there to see but stops you in your tracks. Maple does not shave her legs and has one long dreadlock coiffed to the side of an otherwise hipster haircut. Her eyes are deep pools of sparkling blue and hold many stories. Her soul holds two-spirit energy, equal parts masculine and feminine. Her dress often looks like a collage of found garments that have been woven together to create a beautiful folk art collage of gypsy beauty. Without clothes, she somehow holds the same quality. At the Sexual Shamanic Priestess Retreat, I had everyone bring a tennis ball for sitting on for pelvic floor release work. Maple brought a potato. Maple is the embodiment of her own beauty. She has what is that ephemeral je ne sais quoi. There is no convention or standardization in Maple’s beauty, but the beauty she possesses is undeniable, a beauty which radiates from every cell of her body.

In addition to the women I’ve met in my work and community who have inspired me to rethink beauty, I’m moved to consider women over history who have served as walking embodiments of beauty. In contemplating beauty and its icons of past, I am taken instantly to the age of the courtesans, artists who were paid richly to cultivate their beauty and intelligence. Inspired to know these aesthetic feminine embodiments of art more intimately, my research led me to the discovery that several of the most famous and successful courtesans were not what one would consider conventionally beautiful. Several of the most famous courtesans in Venice were not particularly attractive in any way, yet they were a breed of woman that was irresistible – sought after by every man and envied by every woman. What these women did not lack was confidence and the ability to maximize on their charms – the most basic of beauty tenets. I am reminded of the great Mae West saying: ‘What is important to know is that every woman can have her own kind of beauty, if she’s willing to look for it and try for it.’

Beauty pioneers are often women who have swept in and taken over a standard convention with a certain amount of ownership of their own grace. Perhaps there was no greater rebel of beauty’s standardization than designer Coco Chanel, a fashion icon who helped women find their embodiment of beauty by famously liberating them from the constraints of the corseted silhouette. She was also a woman who perceived herself not to have been born beautiful. Chanel famously confessed to a lover: ‘I’m not pretty.’ ‘No,’ he replied, ‘you’re not. But I know of no one more beautiful than you.’ Coco Chanel owned her beauty and her intrinsic style helped create an entry point for other women to own theirs.

Like the famous Coco, pleasure revolutionary Mama Gena says: ‘Ownership is the key to beauty. You gotta dig on down and have yours.’ It is every woman’s job as an embodiment of the feminine to discover and embody her unique beauty calling card and then to work that card and those traits to maximize their potential. Mama Gena cites one particularly eccentric experiment, which involved throwing out everything in her closet except what made her feel the most beautiful. She was left with five garments. I don’t recommend this drastic a beauty experiment, but it warrants some consideration. Why would a woman want to drape her body in anything other than that which makes her feel beautiful? How would her life be altered if she felt she was truly and unequivocally beautiful?

Slightly less radical than Mama Gena’s beauty wardrobe make-over, I find that my own personal embodiments of beauty are ever changing and are often determined by occasion, season and inner states. On certain days I find my most comfortable pair of faded jeans and a v-neck t-shirt are what makes me the most beautiful, on another day, a Charlie’s Angels purple jumpsuit, and on another day a flowy Goddess dress, mostly because where I have chosen to source my beauty is from inside myself. It takes a lot of personal beauty ownership and inner sourcing to wear a Charlie’s Angels purple jumpsuit … a whole lot.

There is an astonishing amount of beauty available on the planet. We are not in scarcity of beauty, though standardization would have us think that it only belongs to a few. Our gifts and talents make us beautiful. Everyone is born talented at something. A certain innate gift is bestowed upon us all that allows us to excel in a particular area, an area of our lives where the stars simply seem to shine on us and we are able to rise above others.

My dear friend Cindy, for example, is perhaps at her most beautiful in her kitchen, talking to ingredients as she bakes and licking batter off spoons as she seduces her ingredients into just the right balance to create extraordinary sensations on one’s tongue. My soul sister Lisa and her eye for space and altar feng shui transform any space into an aesthetic feast with a few simple repositions of objects already there. I marvel at her eye for outer aesthetics as I know it comes from an internally aligned sensitivity of her own beauty.

A Practice of Self-Love

In an honest inquiry with beauty, however, I am also brought to looking past the places where we shine into the places where we feel there is no beauty. I want to examine body features, aesthetic inadequacies, voids of Goddess-given talent that others seem to have but where we come up short.

In this inquiry and reflection on beauty, I am reminded of my own beauty insecurities at various stages of my life. In high school, I had small breasts. I hated them. I always thought they were too small, not even enough for a handful. My sophomore year of high school, during a grueling rehearsal schedule, I dropped fifteen pounds. My clothes became too large for me. My bras hung off my shoulders. My mother took me to Kohl’s for some new clothes. I will forever remember the moment I was standing in a Kohl’s dressing room trying to find a bra to fit only to discover that even the A cups were too big. The air conditioner in the dressing room was blowing down on me and it was coldcoldcold and my nipples and breasts shivered and shriveled even closer to my body. My chest look emaciated and like a boy’s. I left the dressing room in tears and my mother and I left the store. She took me to a Sonic drive-in and we ordered a limeade and she told me that plastic surgery could be an option in the future as prices for such work had in the last few years become quite reasonable. My mother, bless her, was trying to provide a fix to the problem. Breasts too small? Make them bigger! Thus buying into the conventional standard of beauty and creating an entry point for me to manipulate and reconstruct my breasts to meet that standard. What I really needed from my mother at the time, however, was to be taught self-love and for her to remind me of what about me was truly beautiful, as well as perhaps finding something that I loved about my breasts.

Raised in a family and culture where self-love and alignment with one’s individual traits of beauty were not modeled, I traveled my own healing path of beauty embodiment by sourcing my beauty from aligning with the seasons and cycles of the natural world. In my journey of embracing beauty, my truest connection and sourcing has always come from my connection to nature and the natural world. The Navajo teach and practice a spiritual tradition that is called ‘walking the beauty path.’ When one is unbalanced or out of harmony with their beauty, they must return to the natural world to find it. To walk in beauty as the Navajos define it means to hold balance and harmony with all things, all people, all nature and all events in your life. When you achieve balance among the pendulum of polarities, you are ready to walk the beauty path.

I did not get a boob job. Instead I practiced and taught naked yoga and Earth-based spiritual traditions that consistently remind me and place me in right relationship with my body. In my late twenties as my body filled out, so did my breasts. As my body size naturally fluctuates over the years with different phases of my life, I have a developed a practice of loving kindness to my breasts in all their forms and phases. Currently, I massage my breasts daily right after my bathing ritual and infuse with them with visualizations of pink and green for the heart chakra. I do this as I sit in what I lovingly have declared the boudoir area of my bedroom that has a red cushioned chair, Victorian fans and a collection of vintage black and white nude boudoir postcards featuring women of all shapes who appear to be celebrating their bodies and their sensuality. Make no mistake, I don’t wake up every day and think ‘Ah yes, I will lounge naked in my boudoir and lovingly massage my body with scented creams.’ This is a practice. Like showing up to one’s yoga mat, sometimes we jump at the opportunity, and at other times we must drag ourselves through temper tantrums, pouty toddler phases, and I’m-not-worthy moments to practice self-love. The effects of a self-love practice, however, have very tangible reverberations. On a return visit to my hometown a few years ago, an old friend from college actually asked me if I had gotten a boob job. ‘No,’ I replied, ‘I practice loving kindness to my breasts.’

In my session work with women, I have the pleasure of witnessing women blossom and unfold to their true beauty. I have had the honor and pleasure of facilitating session work for a Hassidic woman named Miriam who wanted to explore deep sensual reclamation work. It is incredibly rare for a woman from such a conservative community and religious background to actively seek out session work that supports authentic sensual embodiment. Miriam was healing from childhood sexual abuse and was currently in an emotionally toxic relationship. We explored several simple movement-based practices and healing bodywork ceremonies to bring her into a safe, soft and sensual connection with her body. After our fourth session, she asked me: ‘Isis, does this work change your physical appearance? Because I am noticing my features changing, and I like them!’ Her eyes were becoming more open and her lips rounder and fuller. She was looking like a woman turned on, lush and alive! ‘Miriam,’ I told her, ‘We are all born beautiful. Sometimes life circumstances or situations cause us to forget this beauty. What’s amazing is that you’re open to returning to it.’

Today I find myself in a stand. A stand for beauty. I honor the beauty of my body. I honor the beauty of my spirit. I honor the beauty of those who find their own beauty and shamelessly flaunt and embody it. In my stand for beauty, I ready to walk the beauty path. On the beauty path, we return to balance, a state where we accept and are accepted, where we don’t feel the need to justify who we are or require validation from others, where we perceive our own beauty as continuous with the beauty in the world around us. Clearly perceived, beauty, so fragmented in our contemporary culture, is actually what can connect us to the larger beauty energies and mysteries of the universe. Each of us is a facet of a magnificently beautiful universe. To align ourselves with this beauty is to be one with it and to find it reflected everywhere we look and in everyone we encounter. Beauty is and you are a unique part of it. Walk the path.

The Navajo Beauty Way Ceremony

In beauty may I walk

All day long may I walk

Through the returning seasons may I walk

Beautifully I will possess again

Beautifully birds

Beautifully joyful birds

On the trail marked with pollen may I walk

With grasshoppers about my feet may I walk

With dew about my feet may I walk

With beauty may I walk

With beauty before me may I walk

With beauty behind me may I walk

With beauty above me may I walk

With beauty all around me may I walk

In old age, wandering on a trail of beauty, lively, may I walk

In old age, wandering on a trail of beauty, living again, may I walk

It is finished in beauty

It is finished in beauty.

Sexual Shamanic Priestess Tenets

Sexual Shamanic Priestess Tenets

 The Sexual Shamanic Priestess is an ancient archetype that is returning to our consciousness to be reactivated. The Sexual Shamanic Priestess nourishes the cycles of orgasmic energy and inner rhythms and cycles of herself, her community and all of creation. In stepping into this archetype, we step into the wholeness of our power and repair our fragmented connection with Mother Earth and the fragmented connection between our sexuality and our spirituality. Through pleasure, love, ritual and Earth based wisdom and reverence the Sexual Priestess holds the wisdom of oneness with all of creation. In this powerful all women-retreat, we will journey to awaken the Sexual Priestess within each of us, reclaiming our individual and collective sexual power, opening to our authentic creative and sensual self-expressions and entraining our dance with the cycles of nature and the cosmos.  I’ve been crafting a list of tenets of the Sexual Shamanic Priestess.  This is the beginning.  I’d love to hear yours!

Sexual Shamanic Priestess Tenets

 

The sexual shamanic priestess…

 

Is one with nature.

 

Honors and celebrates all of nature’s cycles and all of the cycles and phases of womanhood.

 

Maximizes these natural cycles to direct energy with intent for personal transformation, perfect health, abundance and manifestation of her desires adhering to the shamanic principles of right relationship.

 

Nourishes her sexuality and sensuality with the governing principles that her body is her own to share and celebrate as she desires and that all acts of love and pleasure are her rituals.

 

Celebrates and honors her body and the bodies of others and connects and shares from a place of generosity, fullness and love.

 

Practices self-inquiry.

 

Knows and honors that her sexuality is hers and is also an extension of the Earth’s macrocosm of sexual life force energy.

 

Serves as a conduit of an essential sacred energy that exists within nature and a translator of this wisdom.

 

Sexual shamanic priestess is an embodiment of the Goddess and bringer of sexual joy by which animal instincts are transformed into the art and practice love and love-making.

 

Reinstates sexuality in its fundamental position as our birthright and a holy body blessing

 

Seeks to support and empower other women in accessing their sexual sensual life force for pleasure, creativity and health.

 

She brings her soul gifts to service her community.

 

I’d love to hear what the your tenets are for the Sexual Shamanic Priestess!

Please Comment Below.

AND Save the date for our the Sexual Shamanic Priestess Retreat  in upstate New York at Galiana July 12th-14th!

Love,

Isis

Embody the Inner Animal

Repost from 3/14/12

The fifth week of the Sensual Shaman Immersion we explore our animal spirits, and like previous Immersions it proved to be both powerful and transformational for the entire group. We journeyed to reclaim our inner animals and spent an evening roaring, purring and prowling our way through the animal kingdom. There are always some surprises in the group. A timid, vulnerable woman unleashes her inner lioness, a hummingbird teaches even the largest and most serious of participants to be light and playful in his body. While it feels unfamiliar and new for most people to embody their inner animal, I must say that I have the leg up from living with one.

 

The very first card I ever gave my husband was a portent of our entire relationship. I picked it up at a rest stop in Tulsa when I was home visiting my family and mailed it to him a few weeks after we had met and were dating. It had a beautiful soft and sensuous Victorian woman with flowing hair draped over a roaring lion that was at her feet. Inside it said “Missing you something fierce.” I knew then, however much on an unconscious level, that the animal spirit inside of Mark would always be front and center in our relationship.

 

My husband is a prime example of what it means to live with a fully realized animal spirit on a daily basis. He’s a large man – 6’-2,” 245 lbs. He grew up his life being called “animal,” “beast,” “simion,” “neanderthal.” The animal in Mark, however, is perhaps the thing I love most about him. He’s a hybrid, no one animal but parts of many. Lion – being born under the sun sign Leo, he always walks with a certain amount of pride and power, Silverback Gorilla – distinguished in his community as one of New York’s long standing ‘characters’ and is often the eldest among his peers – note: I refer to him as my silver heart as the hair on his chest was the first hair on his body to turn silver while the hair on his head remains a beautiful rich brown. Lone wolf – always straying from the pack to explore new territory and ways of being, Large Workhorse for his massive strength, ability and endurance in physical work and German Shepard for his loyalty and protective nature of his home and family. What was once yelled at him as taunts and jeers in his early years, are now celebrated in our house as beautiful ways of being. My husband is, at his heart, someone who is totally at one with his inner animal. Needless to say, even in an urban environment, I live in the wild.

 

In most of us however, the animal spirit lays dormant or has been conditioned out of us. It is only in the most extreme circumstances, and usually beyond our control, when we ‘snap,’ that the inner animal roars awake in us for the first time. The animal spirit can and usually rises up in us in moments when we are backed into a corner, where there are no other options but to attack, devour, hunt, consume or fall victim to it. At its most unconscious shadow level, it could be violence and power-over. But what about at a conscious level? Could it be raw passion, intuitive desire, comfort and quick thinking survival? What about the animal spirit when it is consciously celebrated instead of beaten, judged or jeered at? Could the animal spirit be devotion? Could it bring us into tribe energy? Could it put us more intuitively in touch with our bodies, our environments, each other?

 

Our inner primal animal spirit is in our ancient brain – the brain stem, the sacrum and tailbone. It’s deep, deep in the cells of our body. An energy and ancestry we’ve evolved from over millions of years that continues to exist within us, but often on a very repressed, refined, caged level. We are taught to have manners, not enjoy our food too loudly, don’t exhibit too many signs of pleasure, be quiet during sex and certainly don’t roar, scream or cry during ecstatic states of orgasm. We’re surely not invited to burp, fart, growl, and never scratch your back against a tree.

 

Somehow, this animal repression and levels of refinement never really registered with my husband, Mark. In fact, the more he was taunted by his sisters, family, and other children that he was an animal, the more defiantly he embraced it. My husband’s animal spirit has evolved over the years from early days of bullying and beating up his sisters, into playful love-centered expressions of aggression that ultimately bring us closer in our marriage. He’ll wrap me in big bear hugs when I enter the home, hold me down in spooning position when I get too distracted by my reading or computer-work to be present in my body. He devours my home-cooked food so visibly with pleasure that I have found a new dharma for myself over the years in the kitchen.

 

But with audible pleasure, can come the expression of audible rage. My husband’s alpha animal spirit is so strong that people will often challenge him on the street, purposely running into him, bumping his shoulders, confronting his personal space. “I can take him,” the inner animal of another male speaks silently as they confrontationally approach Mark. I used to be rattled by these otherwise unexplainable interactions that were completely unprovoked. Mark would directly trigger a primal animal response in others simply by being in their presence. For the first year I was with Mark, I found these interactions absolutely baffling. Why were men so threatened by him? I found my answers in the animal kingdom. There was a need to challenge, flex, crow when another male came in proximity of an alpha male. Mark generally avoids these encounters with a brush off of his shoulder, but in his earlier years before I knew him, his young ego had his fair share of brawls and anger black outs and attacks of rage when confronted and the challenger would often be left scampering with his tail between his legs, or unconscious on the floor in front of him. In the animal kingdom, potential alphas will confront alphas as a way of attempting to overthrow the current alphas power and mark and claim their territory. When the potential challenging alpha is defeated there is a submissiveness to the current alpha and a deepening of respect.

Betas outwardly acknowledge Mark’s power size and presence – even strangers will walk by and immediately refer to him as “Big Man!” “Hey, Big Man, Yo, Big Man, You got a dollar Big Man?”

 

 

Another ‘Mark’ of the animal kingdom I’ve come to love and appreciate is loyalty and protection. One night, after being out and about forty-five minutes later than I communicated to Mark, I came home and found Mark waiting in the hall of our apartment building, standing at the door like a German Shepard. Shocked, I asked him what he was doing out here. “Honey, listen, you’re late. I’m like a German Shepard waiting for its owner to come home. I’m most loyal to you and will wait for you forever, but it also makes me crazy when you’re late. I become hyper aware of everything. I wish you could crawl inside of me and feel for one minute what I feel for you.” I imagined a silver back gorilla beating his chest on the top of mountain screaming “I Love YOOOUUUU!!!” I smiled, my shock of seeing my husband waiting in the hall receded and I stroked his face. “That’s why I love you” I told him smiling.

 

When we understand and fully embody it, our inner animal spirits are our allies. The animal spirit tells us exactly what we need, what to eat, who our mate is. Animal spirit is our rawest, most primal instinct. I remember growing up baffled by how birds knew how to fly and migrate or how foxes knew how to hunt. “How do they know?” I would ask my parents. “They just know,” was the only answer I could pull out of them.

 

This ‘just knowing’ is part of Mark’s magic. His animal instincts are now consulted in an oracle fashion by my female friends. Mark’s senses are so heightened they have become magnified. His nose is infamous among my friends. Why? Because he can smell when a woman’s is about to menstruate. He smells and senses it somewhere deep in his very acute animal brain. If one of my women friends is experiencing a late cycle she will often consult Mark. He will then come up to her hold her in an embrace and inhale her and be able to tell her how many days until her next moon with about a 90% accuracy rate. He knows when he’s in an elevator with another woman if she is menstruating and will then give me the report. The woman in apartment 12B and 6A are menstruating right now and the woman in 4D will be in two days. The woman in 8F is going through menopause and 9G is pregnant. “How do you know this?!” I would exclaim after such direct statements were being made. “Babe. I just know,” Mark would say casually and then walk off. He just knows.

 

In fact, this very knowing has made my relationship to my beloved husband so successful and has also deeply nourished our marriage. When thinking of an animal that has been domesticated in our world, what do they need to thrive? – love, good food, attention, exercise and play. If anything goes out of balance in my marriage and relationship to Mark or feels strained I come back to the basic tenets of husband husbandry – love, good food, attention, exercise and play.

 

My new love with the theatre group Dzieci was a great learning opportunity for Mark and my’s relationship. I had become intensely passionate about working with this group of artists and all of sudden all day Sunday and one evening a week plus performances I was grooving and shaking with my new community. I felt the fear arise in Mark’s system – will I still be taken care? Will I be fed? Will I be loved? A few weeks in to my new schedule, I felt a nagging suspicion that something was out of balance in our marriage. I checked in with Mark and almost word for word he voiced the above concerns – Will I still be taken care of? Will I be fed? Will I be receive enough love? The crock pot has balanced out my new schedule and husband husbandry. I prep good smells that keep Mark’s inner animal humming all day reminding him I’m there in spirit and that all good things are coming and his inner animal feels safe, nurtured and honored.

 

Before meeting Mark, I had wrapped myself up in doomed relationships by avoiding my inner animal spirit. I avoided asking myself basic animal instinct questions in favor of civilized concepts like ‘do they look good on paper?’ instead of ‘do I like the way my partner smells?’

 

In opening to your own animal spirit, I recommend to actually take a shamanic journey where you ask to be shown and introduced to your inner animal. There’s a lot of projection in this work. Everyone wants to be a lion, or tiger, or bear, or sleek panther, but some people are jackrabbits, or dolphins, or spiders. In one Immersion I had a beautiful woman who was an eel. After you claim and entrain to your animal spirit, I invite you to research and ask yourself these questions – How does your animal mate? Is it a life long partnership, is it polyamorous, does it practice serial monogamy? Is it an alpha? What living situation, nesting arrangements make it the most comfortable? What does your animal eat? I have seen time and time again people with a strong inner animal that has been deeply repressed and these people have become vegetarians as a way of justifying that they are better or more conscious about their diets than meat eaters while depriving their bodies and spirits of true nourishment that would provide them strength. I’ve also seen individuals awaken to their inner animal spirit after a session with me or a shamanic journey and immediately go out and devour a pork roast or a bucket of KFC. “Something just awoke in me,” they would say. While I don’t advocate unfettered ravenous meat eating, I do support conscious meat eating with gratitude and celebration and also respect the handful of years I was a vegetarian for giving me the information on how to consume meat consciously.

 

My animal spirit has changed and evolved over the years, some come to me only once and some for years. I’ve worked with Spider who has taught me the beauty and power of weaving all aspects of my life together, Phoenix who is a healing spirit and has helped me recover from adrenal burnout, and most recently Mama Grizzly Bear who is helping me move into my protective mother energy and serve as a way to embody my largeness including my rage in a conscious direct, creative and useful way rather than repressing it.  Some animals may stay with us our entire life, others may visit to bring a message or usher us into a new way of being.

 

This week I asked my husband to pick up a new shower curtain liner. He went with his co-worker to Duane Reade to grab one on his lunch break. Perusing the selection he chose one labeled Safari that had prints of lions, tigers, cheetahs and zebras. “Why are you getting that one?” his co-worker asked. “You wouldn’t understand. It’s an inner animal thing. My wife gets it.”

 

In the coming weeks send me an email and let me know of your roars, growls and howls.  

 

Fiercely,

Isis

Sexual Identity Break-downs

I took sometime this week to catch up with a woman who attended my Awakening the Sexual Shamanic Priestess Retreat.  Ami identified as a heterosexual woman, but after the retreat she found herself confused because she felt like she had met a twin flame, fellow soul mate who she was incredibly turned on by who happened to have a female body and self-identified as a lesbian.

Going to the retreat opened the door for my sexual priestess to walk in this world.  I feel like I am an adolescent who is just learning what it’s like to be in a woman’s body.  I actually self pleasure now on a regular basis. I am so sexually charged and just want to explore and express this but I am not sure how, the “opportunities” here are not worth it to me. That brings us to the current situation….. the girl.  Wow! There is so much attraction and desire and fantasy around this woman.  I have all of these mixed emotions going on.  It’s also this really exciting, adventurous, thrilling, sexually charged experience that I would love to explore but am terrified to do so. I wouldn’t even know where to begin with such a sexual being. She is someone who has had many partners and who is not afraid of physical contact. Me on the other hand am just figuring out my own body let alone how to bring someone else pleasure and I don’t kiss just anybody. It takes a lot just to do that.  My heart tells me I’m in love with her.   I do feel I might be bi-sexual which opens up Pandora’s box. This is all so new and scary and exciting.   I know this is not a matter of the head to figure anything out but rather the heart to explore and experience.  I think I am finally really in my body as a sexual being and I’m ready to see what that feels like with someone.  Your work is definitely a contributing factor. 

Dear Ami,

Thank you for writing.  It sounds like there’s some real attraction between you and the woman that you speak of.  This attraction has the potential to create a sexual identity rebirth as your old views of our sexuality collapse and a new framework emerges.

It also sounds like you might be bi-curious, or your curiosity might lead you into bi-sensual or bi-sexual realms.  Stoking the flames of a fiery attraction to someone of our own gender can raise your inner eye’s eyebrow if you’ve previously self-identified as only liking the opposite gender.

There are several layers of polarity around the masculine and feminine we can examine in our states of attraction – one is, what kind of body does the person have, then, does that body sexually prefer their own gender or the opposite, then, does their energy body hold core masculine energy or core feminine energy that prefers same core energy or opposite core energy.

An experience that has stretched my understanding of energy body attraction is a BDSM couple M’Lady & Marine who often presented workshops at Dark Odyssey – a national kink conference.  M’Lady was a domme, who was a woman who identified as a lesbian with core feminine energy.  Marine was a born a woman, identified as a woman with core masculine energy.  Marine’s core masculine energy was so strong, it trumped most of the masculine energy in the room from even male bodied, male-identified, core masculine male energy.  I myself recall having an incredible visceral emotional, physical and psychological turn-on just being in the same room with Marine.  I myself, self-identified at the time as bi-sensual enjoying sexual relationships with men and close physical and emotional intimacy with women, but I was sexually turned onto Marine because of the core masculine energy she held. Her body, while it was physical technically a woman’s body, looked like that of a well-trained Marine – sharp physical features, big hulking muscles and a strong internal core.  To add another layer, he was also the submissive in the relationship with M’Lady.  It was more than my sexual identity could metabolize at the time which increased my body and energy turn on because it was something I didn’t have an inner container for at the time. So to recap we have a female, lesbian, domme with core feminine energy who’s partner is a female lesbian submissive with core masculine energy.

Sometimes bi-sensuals are also called bi-romantics.  The same goes for pan-sensuals – they are romantically attracted to the person and that individual’s energy, though not necessarily on a sexual level, or their entry point of attraction is romantic and energetic and then that leads to sexual attraction.  Bi-sexuals find themselves sexually attracted to individuals of both sexes.  Same with Pan-sexuals which also includes sexual attraction to trans, cross-gender, intersexual, hermaphrodites and asexuals to name a few.

Over the course of our life, our sexuality and its self-expression can grow, change and evolve, much like our spirituality and our politics 😉  New information, new insights can recalibrate our entire being.  Sounds like your system said “I was a woman, attracted to men, but now there’s this woman I’m attracted to, what does that make me?”  Answer: More attractive!  If this is the only woman you’ve found yourself attracted to and you regularly find yourself attracted to male-bodied men with core masculine energy I invite you examine if the woman you are attracted to her because she has masculine energy.  Are you attracted to her physical body, or her energy body?  Is your sexuality becoming more fluid into a place where just attraction is present or is it important enough to you that that attraction has to relate to a specific set of genitals.

I am at this point in my sexuality something I call pan-sensual, for me this means being attracted to the energy of the person rather than a particular gender-body or body’s genitals.  This also for me includes sensual experiences with and in nature with the elements, the ocean, Source.  I have at other times identified as heterosexual and bi-sensual.  Nature is always changing and evolving and so are we and so is our sexuality.  When we get to a place of sexual identity break-down there is often a great deal of turn on in our bodies because there is extra charge around the situation.  If we are attracted to someone/something in a way we don’t understand or that steps out of our box, the ‘taboo’ can make it more attractive, hence the Pandora’s Box reference in your email.  Bottom line – Enjoy the evolution!

The Infinite Journey of Transformation

The journey of healing and transformation is endless. Celebrating our holy bodies, being embodied can be an excruciatingly painful process. It takes great courage. It takes great faith. Eve Ensler was an igniter for the work I do today.

 I am humbled and awe-struck by this courageous woman’s continuous evolution and path as a storyteller, a humanitarian, a global healer. Directing the Vagina Monolgues as my senior project in college in 2003 launched my path, created the opportunity for me to meet my first spiritual mentor, wove together my passion of theatre with sexual self-expression and women’s rights.  Sometimes on a journey we peak and never move on, resting on our previous laurels.  What is so beautifully transparent in this video of Eve Ensler is that the journey of evolution, healing and transformation is an endless one.  We can never peak and rest on our laurels.  Ascend, ascend, ascend.   Transform, transform, transform.

I often hear people who are beginning their journey say “I want to be enlightened. I found the modality!  It’s yoga, Reiki, Tantra, Christianity, Buddhism etc.”  My shamanic teacher, Kenneth Ray Stubbs reminds me there are levels of enlightenment.  Just when you think you’ve climbed the mountain fully, there’s another mountain waiting.  We will constantly be transforming and evolving.  We’re not done.  Any modality will only take you so far until the personal journey takes over.  Our personal journey will navigate the modality and the modality will assist the path until it doesn’t.  Eve thought writing about vaginas would help her reclaim her body acceptance and sense of self-love and for a while it did.  Creating The Vagina Monologues and V-Day movement put her in purpose on her path and awakened her dharma.  But what really brought her fully into her body and self-love and personal power was cancer.  

Eve remains a heroine of mine – always evolving, ever on the path, ever transforming.  

Here in this link she speaks about her journey.  It is worth your time to watch this. It could be the most important part of your day…
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/eve_ensler.html

Woman’s Body Nature’s Body ~ A Journey to Rock Lodge

Woman’s Body ~ Nature’s Body

Paradise. Absolute Paradise. Those were the only words when thinking back on my day at Rock Lodge that were adequate to describe my experience and all to brief visit to this magical sanctuary.

“Packing light?” my husband joked with me as I put my sarong, towel and hat in my canvas beach bag.  Conspicuously missing a swimsuit, I smiled. I had been wanting to visit Rock Lodge all summer – a naturist paradise. Beautiful lake, scenic hiking trails, wildlife and nature in abundance and the option to be absolutely clothing free. I had offered to teach a yoga class at 11:30am that day and after a few wrong turns on my adventure there, I arrived just in time for the class. I was joy-filled to see wonderful yogis in the class as old as 70 and as young as 7 each celebrating their body and the spirit of yoga sans clothes. In my yoga practice thus far, naked yoga had been about consciously removing clothes, the identities behind them, finding a new deeper layer of freedom that isn’t generally available in the rushed metropolis of New York life. Now I was faced with a group of people who already had that layer of freedom. There was no disrobing ceremony.These powerful group were already uncompartmentalized, in celebration of their body, loved yoga and wore whatever clothes at Rock Lodge that felt appropriate in the present moment.Sitting, meditating, Om-ing with this community, I thought – heaven is truly here on earth.This is what a world looks like without violence.

Talking over a potluck supper that evening with my host Sandy, he mentioned of one young woman – 18 years old, a budding opera singer and regular at Rock Lodge since she was 11.‘She will never have an eating disorder’ Sandy said very frankly to me over our potluck. ‘When one grows up with body love and acceptance in all shapes and sizes and sees their parents embrace that, one never feels the need to alter who they are.’ I knew exactly what he spoke of. I envied this young woman who had been in paradise at 11 while I grew up struggling with body issues from pre-teen to adolescence. I stared at this young woman at all the women at Rock Lodge and was overwhelmed to tears with gratitude that a place like this existed on the planet. I recalled instantly, like moving through a memory box of pictures, the snapshots of shame I had felt in body from a young age – my rejection of wearing shorts in middle school because of my perceived ugly legs, walking out of a room backwards after making love with a college sweetheart so he couldn’t see my ass and thighs that I thought were unsightly, feeling the self-judgement and loathing of my body the first time I was naked in public as the young French boy I was dating stripped encouraged me to join he and his friends in the skyclad hottub as I tried to hide myself and my shame under the darkening night.

Now during my paradise day trip to Rock Lodge, after swimming across the lake twice, I pulled myself up onto a dock in the middle of the lake and sprawled flat on my stomach ass and thighs completely exposed to the sun, the elements, the community with not a twinge of shame in my body. No thought of hiding, concealing, judging what my body should and shouldn’t look like. Here was the quite ecstasy of one-nesss. I hiked. I swam. I talked with old and new friends. I bared myself to the world. I marveled at a young Israeli mother and her seven year old daughter who practiced side crow pose on the swim deck naked as a… crow ;)Accompanied with her mother, an accomplished yogi practicing next to her, I saw what my body would have been like if I had the muscle memory to both be in side crow and to be naked publicly free of shame at seven years old and wondered what my life would have looked like if that support had come from my mother and if I had grown up with a mother who loved her body instead of loathed it. I wondered for sometime what our world would look like if mothers taught and modeled for their daughters that their bodies were both sacred and shame free. It would be in blood. It wouldn’t be something we would have to search for, starve ourselves for, we would simply be in it, naked in nature, in side crow, in love of our bodies.

I recently re-read Eve Ensler’s The Good Body. Eve has created a world wide campaign to stop violence against women since 1998 with her play The Vagina Monologues. On her journeys interviewing women across the world for her later play, The Good Body, Eve conceded that when so many women were so dissatisfied with how they looked, they had very little time or energy left for the war in Iraq. Eve was one of these women, on a masochistic self loathing journey to banish the belly she acquired recently brought on by her aging body. Consumed with her own judgment and self-hate, Eve toured the world interviewing women about their relationship to their bodies. Among the women she interviewed across the planet 95% of women said if they could change one thing they would lose weight. For 13 years Eve has been bringing awareness with her V-Day campaign to stop violence against women, but what her most recent findings revealed after her revolutionary play The Vagina Monologues is that as much as women want sexual empowerment and self-love, what we really want even more is to be skinny, to shrink, to disappear. Her astonishing play focuses not on men being the abusers of women, but on women being our own abusers and targets of self inflicted violence creating our own self-hate and spreading that curse among our sisters and our children.

In moving through the Metropolitan Museum of Art a few years ago, I spent sometime among the exquisite statues of Greek and Roman Goddess that show beautiful full figured woman, round, curves, softness and deep, powerful, unabashed femininity. I remember exactly what I was wearing that day, a long blue skirt that flowed like water and a brown and white cowl neck sleeveless shirt and sandals. The skirt was very long and I had picked up end of it and tucked it in the waistband to allow me more freedom to walk through the museum. As I was staring at a particularly beautiful statue, two women approached me and tapped me on the shoulder. “Are you one of them?” they asked me pointing at the statue. I had no idea what the women were referring to and I stood looking at them befuddled. “You look like them. You look like the statue. Are you Greek or Roman?” It took a second to sink in – these two women thought my body looked like the body of a Greek Goddess. I smiled and looked back at the statue “Maybe I am,” I said, with a twinkle in m eye.

Goddess knows it’s taken me years to come to love my body and to understand that my soul chose this body or my Earth walk. Even with a regular practice of yoga, self-pleasuring and conscious nudity, having grown up with both a childhood and a world that holds such a small idea of what beauty is, I find myself from time to time pulled down the vicious cycle of self criticism, until a moment happens on my yoga mat, or at Rock Lodge or in the Met that reminds me –hey – I’m a fucking Goddess.

To my sisters – the curse stops here. We have the option to step into our beautiful bodies and our Goddess-hood and teach this to our daughters. We are this next generation.

Holy Body Worship “Naked Church”

HOLY BODY WORSHIP “NAKED CHURCH”

Holy Body Worship, lovingly called “Naked Church” is a clothing optional worship service led by Rev. Goddess Charmaine and Isis Phoenix each month in midtown Manhattan. Having recently abbreviated our name to ‘Naked Church’ we are taking this time to redefine that this continues to be a ‘clothing optional’ event.

Holy Body Worship is an Interfaith spiritual service that celebrates the intimacy and uniqueness of the body and soul relationship through honoring and acknowledging the body as a temple and recognizing it as the vessel our soul chose for incarnation. The option of being naked or skyclad during Service is used to further the expression of reverence and celebration of our body soul relationship to Source. Our bodies are miracles, beauty, complex ecosystems, walking art – each unique, holy and a piece of God/Goddess/Source. The ‘clothing optional’ is simply that – optional. You are never required to be nude during service. It is a matter of choice and truth in the present moment based on how your body feels and wishes to express itself. In service, we view nudity as a form of transparency and intimacy. We bare our soul’s and the places that have been hiding or living inauthentically and bring ourselves back to authenticity, transparency and one-ness. If we feel guarded when we remove our clothes it’s not a form of celebration and we’ve actually moved our relationship to body/soul/source out of union or one-ness and into fragmentation and inauthenticity. However, if you have felt guarded your entire life, perhaps this is the moment to experience your union and one-ness through exploring nudity, through moving through fear and embracing yourself ‘holy’ and completely in this moment.

In Holy Body Worship, we choose to be nude or to celebrate with others who are nude in order to explore a deeper level of intimacy with our bodies, our souls, each other, the divine. To remove that which keeps us separate – and to bring us back into right relationship with body, soul, Source. Whole-y Body Worship celebrates and takes a stand for the right to choose to worship your body naked or clothed or in any state of disrobe that feels appropriate to you in the present moment and also acknowledges that that decision may change from moment to moment. We invite you to ask yourself what makes you feel powerful, holy, wild, sensual, free, and totally you and to celebrate your body soul union from that place?