Sacred Sexuality Quotes

Ô, Wanderess, Wanderess When did you feel your most euphoric kiss? Was I the source of your greatest bliss?

It was the wildness of it that got me going: the primal lust, the sheer needs of two people in heat, quickly finding ways to express their sacred hunger to each other in animal passion.

Our lips were for each other and our eyes were full of dreams. We knew nothing of travel and we knew nothing of loss. Ours was a world of eternal spring, until the summer came.

Why do they even call it that, "saving yourself"? Like we need to be rescued from sex? It's not like virgins spend their whole lives engaged in the sacred ceremony of "being saved" from intercourse.

Much healing can occur through the sexual act with a person you love and trust if the two of you can stay with each other during your most vulnerable moments. You enter into a sacred space, this unknown territory, from which you’ll emerge into new and unexpected states of being.

So I say, if you are burning, burn. If you can stand it, the shame will burn away and leave you shining, radiant, and righteously shameless

When we practice sacred sexuality we are working with cosmologically rooted principles, balancing the heavenly yang (male energy) of the universe with the all-knowing, life-giving yin (feminine energy) of the earth within ourselves.

We should be telling girls what they already know but rarely see affirmed: that the lives they lead inside their own self-contained bodies; the skills they attain through their own concentration and rigor, and the unique phase in their lives during which they may explore boys and eroticism at their own pace - these are magical. And they constitute the entrance point to a life cycle of a sexuality that should be held sacred.

Ô, Muse of the Heart’s Passion, let me relive my Love’s memory, to remember her body, so brave and so free, and the sound of my Dreameress singing to me, and the scent of my Dreameress sleeping by me, Ô, sing, sweet Muse, my soliloquy!

Lust, pure gorgeous lust: the sacred energy that elevates us, and makes us feel so special.

In the art of sacred sexuality, our bodies meet to physically express what is felt in our hearts and souls.

Your only real choices are to open fully and receive their gifts or crucify them and be relieved of their force...But you must be willing to feel your heart's terrors and wounds or else you will close and protect yourself, striking back at the source of openness you most yearn to become...

Your inner thighs like the petals of a newly opened lily Long, smooth and sensually captivating Drawing me into the center of the flower

When we feel good about ourselves, we send out positive “vibes” that are appealing to healthier potential partners.

To the non-initiate, whose experience of sexuality and bodily pleasure may be distorted by negative cultural conditioning, the introduction of sexuality into a sacred context is often mistakenly misconstrued as the ordinary pursuit of sex for recreation.

A man who is not as evolved as the woman he is with will hold her back, drain her spirit, and prevent the film of her life playing out to its intended conclusion.

Aligning with yourself, then another and you both aligning yourselves together further in harmony will summon source energy in ways you couldn’t imagine.

In a spiritual encounter, all relationships are seen as mirrors of the self, while the heart remains open to freely express and receive love without possessiveness.

Originally and naturally, sexual pleasure was the good, the beautiful, the happy, that which united man with nature in general. When sexual feelings and religious feelings became separated from one another, that which is sexual was forced to become the bad, the internal, the diabolical.

Your soul is your connection to the Divine. Sacred sex is an activity of joining souls in holy, celestial creation, expressing your appreciation for the gift of life, of sharing your body’s vitality with another.

Love makes temporary saints and poets of us all. We feel the source of life welling up inside us and long to express the joy it brings and share it with the partner of our heart’s awakening.

As God was expunged from American life, idols came in to fill the void; idols of sensuality, idols of greed, of money, of success, comfort, materialism, pleasure, sexual immorality, self-worship, self-obsession. The sacred increasingly disappeared, and the profane took its place.

No amount of talking about sex is going to diminish the mystery of the experience of it. Sex is Sacred, Not Secret.

To experience the most profound levels of sexual ecstasy, we must be willing to release, even if only temporarily, the drive for explosive orgasms and surrender to a quest for self-discovery and healing.

We grow by acknowledging there is an area within ourselves and within our life that can be stronger and re-aligned to our highest good. This acknowledgement requires honesty.

we can proceed without knowing or expectation

There is lovemaking that is bad for a person, just as there is eating that is bad. That boysenberry cream pie from the Thrift-E Mart may appear inviting, may, in fact, cause all nine hundred taste buds to carol from the tongue, but in the end, the sugars, the additives, the empty calories clog arteries, disrupt cells, generate fat, and rot teeth. Even potentially nourishing foods can be improperly prepared. There are wrong combinations and improper preparations in sex as well. Yes, one must prepare for a fuck--the way an enlightened priest prepares to celebrate mass, the way a great matador prepares for the ring: with intensification, with purification, with a conscious summoning of sacred power. And even that won't work if the ingredients are poorly matched: oysters are delectable, so are strawberries, but mashed together ... (?!) Every nutritious sexual recipe calls for at least a pinch of love, and the fucks that rate four-star rankings from both gourmets and health-food nuts use cupfuls. Not that sex should be regarded as therapeutic or to be taken for medicinal purposes--only a dullard would hang such a millstone around the nibbled neck of a lay--but to approach sex carelessly, shallowly, with detachment and without warmth is to dine night after night in erotic greasy spoons. In time, one's palate will become insensitive, one will suffer (without knowing it) emotional malnutrition, the skin of the soul will fester with scurvy, the teeth of the heart will decay. Neither duration nor proclamation of commitment is necessarily the measure--there are ephemeral explosions of passion between strangers that make more erotic sense than lengthy marriages, there are one-night stands in Jersey City more glorious than six-months affairs in Paris--but finally there is a commitment, however brief; a purity, however threatened; a vulnerability, however concealed; a generosity of spirit, however marbled with need; and honest caring, however singled by lust, that must be present if couplings are to be salubrious and not slow poison.

Our hearts are channels from which we experience and are connected to the divine flow of creation, it’s the channel in which we transcend our emotions and come to know love. In this space, we exist without constructs.

Everything shifts when you add another to any equation, if you have no stability within yourself first you will not be able to find it with another.

What I know best is crying and orgasm

The birth of a child is a sacred phenomenon.

We are the embodiment of the Love behind and beyond lovemaking.

For sexuality to reach a level worthy of being called sacred, it takes full cooperation of healthy and aware partners and healers.

Sacred sexuality is the marrying of souls.

When a man who looks at a woman only as an object of potential pleasure, he does not see the woman herself. He misses the essence of who she is, the treasures she holds in her heart, and the potential their relationship offers.

Holy intimacy is fostered with the marriage to two commitments: one to sitting in quiet solitude with the inner Self; the other to sitting in rapt attention with one's mortal Beloved

Having clear boundaries means that we are in touch enough with the healthy, loving part of ourselves to know what does and doesn’t work for our higher good, and to choose accordingly.

Loving yourself is being aware of how you spend your time. Eliminating purposeless daily activities and prioritizing will free up your time in order for you to focus on living in purpose.

Used as rocket fuel, sex energy can lift our consciousness to the stars to experience a state of being where love exists in and for itself and has no opposite. On a soul level, this is our natural state.

The Black homosexual is hard pressed to gain audience among his heterosexual brothers; even if he is more talented, he is inhibited by his silence or his admissions. This is what the race has depended on in being able to erase homosexuality from our recorded history. The "chosen" history. But the sacred constructions of silence are futile exercises in denial. We will not go away with our issues of sexuality. We are coming home. It is not enough to tell us that one was a brilliant poet, scientist, educator, or rebel. Whom did he love? It makes a difference. I can't become a whole man simply on what is fed to me: watered-down versions of Black life in America. I need the ass-splitting truth to be told, so I will have something pure to emulate, a reason to remain loyal.

The idea of heartbreak is spoken of in relation to love, but you were never truly in a state of love or you wouldn’t be experiencing heartbreak, instead, you are experiencing the withdrawal of an ego attachment you had to the person.

Inside every man there is a potential woman and inside every woman resides a potential man.

A radical transition to loving yourself often requires physical separation. It requires physical separation because you must relearn love beyond the physical body.

When you enter any relationship with doubt that doubt will be reflected back to you. You must trust yourself completely to attract another that can be trusted.

We are the teachers and saviors; the light bringers, way-showers and truth-tellers. Without us humanity would lose its way in the dark.

It is the time we saw Sex as the truly sacred art that it is. A deep meditation, a holy communion and a dance with the force of creation.

The completion of the soul's journey is proportionate to our ability to integrate spirituality the heart) and sexuality (the body).

Although healing may not be the primary focus of the sexual experience, sexual issues of repression or trauma can be brought to the lovemaking session and patiently addressed.

The ultimate goal for us all is to experience and integrate: (1) a union with God; (2) a union within our own being (mind, body, and soul); and (3) potentially, a union with partners.

When a woman allows a man to enter her he is either giving or taking vital energy. A man can only share vital energy if he possesses it. A man’s vitality lies in his inner work and reservation of his semen emissions, which contains vital energy, life force. Avoiding overly frequent ejaculations is key. Building your storehouse of vital energy takes maturity and discipline.

At the end of that class Demian said to me thoughtfully: "There’s something I don’t like about this story, Sinclair. Why don’t you read it once more and give it the acid test? There’s something about it that doesn’t taste right. I mean the business with the two thieves. The three crosses standing next to each other on the hill are almost impressive, to be sure. But now comes this sentimental little treatise about the good thief. At first he was a thorough scoundrel, had committed all those awful things and God knows what else, and now he dissolves in tears and celebrates such a tearful feast of self-improvement and remorse! What’s the sense of repenting if you’re two steps from the grave? I ask you. Once again, it’s nothing but a priest’s fairy tale, saccharine and dishonest, touched up with sentimentality and given a high edifying background. If you had to pick a friend from between the two thieves or decide which one you’d rather trust, you most certainly wouldn’t choose the sniveling convert. No, the other fellow, he’s a man of character. He doesn’t give a hoot for ‘conversion’, which to a man in his position can’t be anything but a pretty speech. He follows his destiny to it’s appointed end and does not turn coward and forswear the devil, who has aided and abetted him until then. He has character, and people with character tend to receive the short end of the stick in biblical stories. Perhaps he’s even a descendant of Cain. Don’t you agree?" I was dismayed. Until now I had felt completely at home in the story of the Crucifixion. Now I saw for the first time with how little individuality, with how little power of imagination I had listened to it and read it. Still, Demian’s new concept seemed vaguely sinister and threatened to topple beliefs on whose continued existence I felt I simply had to insist. No, one could not make light of everything, especially not of the most Sacred matters. As usual he noticed my resistance even before I had said anything. "I know," he said in a resigned tone of voice, "it’s the same old story: don’t take these stories seriously! But I have to tell you something: this is one of the very places that reveals the poverty of this religion most distinctly. The point is that this God of both Old and New Testaments is certainly an extraordinary figure but not what he purports to represent. He is all that is good, noble, fatherly, beautiful, elevated, sentimental—true! But the world consists of something else besides. And what is left over is ascribed to the devil, this entire slice of world, this entire half is hushed up. In exactly the same way they praise God as the father of all life but simply refuse to say a word about our sexual life on which it’s all based, describing it whenever possible as sinful, the work of the devil. I have no objection to worshiping this God Jehovah, far from it. But I mean we ought to consider everything sacred, the entire world, not merely this artificially separated half! Thus alongside the divine service we should also have a service for the devil. I feel that would be right. Otherwise you must create for yourself a God that contains the devil too and in front of which you needn’t close your eyes when the most natural things in the world take place.

For a large part of human history, people didn't really know how a woman's body worked. This is mainly because for much of human history, a woman's body was either too sacred or too sexual to study.

Assault survivors respond differently. There's no right or wrong way to react after being sexually abused. The assault can be so overwhelming that we may respond in three ways - fight, flee, or freeze.

Connected sex is a spiritual experience….It is spiritual because it’s a release from ego, a merging with the other, a discorporation into the atoms vibrating around us, a connection to the universal energy that moves through all things without judgment or prejudice. Thus, orgasm is the one spiritual practice that unites nearly everyone on the planet, and perhaps that is why there’s so much fear and baggage around it. Because…it is sacred. And every orgasm. Is in itself an act of faith. An attempt to reach out. And just for a moment. Relieve our separateness. Escape from time. And touch eternity.

Sexuality is a multidimensional gift and act. It is a gifting through the act. It is a deep, spiritual connection with the partner and it’s also a pledge – to the Beings that we consciously call down when we conceive.

Why didn't I report it? Because when you are sexually assaulted by a relative, it's terribly complicated. Initially, I felt shock, numb, and powerless. Keep in mind, sexual assault is an act of violence; not sex. In addition, sexual assault is about power. It's common for victims to feel helpless.

Women, porn assets, whether they know it or not, are objects They are whores. These whores deserve to be dominated and abused. And once men have had their way with them, these whores are to be discarded. Porn glorifies the cruelty and domination of sexual exploitation in the same way popular culture, as Jensen points out, glorifies the domination and cruelty of war. It is the same disease. It is the belief that “because I have the ability to use force and control to make others do as I please, I have the right to use this force and control.” It is the disease of corporate and imperial power. It extinguishes the sacred and the human to worship power, control, force, and pain. It replaces empathy, eros, and compassion with the illusion that we are gods. Porn is the glittering façade, like the casinos and resorts of Las Vegas, like the rest of the fantasy that is America, of a culture seduced by death.

The most empowering thing one can do is give themselves permission to fully love themselves. Often we experience relationships that are toxic and we block ourselves off from love in all directions including within. The most important thing to remember is your relationship with your being is crucial for yourself and all other relationships.

Finding heaven while still on earth is one thing. What do we do with it once we’ve got it?

There is a supernal intelligence behind sexual arousal, the true purpose of which is to create for us ecstatic experiences of our own divinity.

Loving yourself is being honest with yourself and then giving yourself the space to heal and transform.

Your personal development doesn’t end when the relationship begins; everything in life requires consistent care to maintain. A working relationship involves accountability.

If you have the desire to change your life, your circumstances, your perspectives, hold fast to your inner commitments and listen to your inner knowing.

Being and living in love is a constant choice to be in the highest version of yourself.

No one can deplete you of love when you have the realization you are already love.

The timing of making a change is just as important as knowing you need to make one.

When you heal the root of lack in your life it allows for transformation to occur so that you can move from a place of holding on to people, situations, and relationships that are out of alignment with your highest vision of your life, to a place of letting go and growth.

Letting go is a practice, but the more you experience the joy and peace from being in alignment and remain committed to your growth the more easeful it becomes to remain in alignment.

Preparing for partnership is a process the male must want to go through. Sometimes there are life experiences that can trigger the desire to transcend his lower nature into a higher existence.

You must take care to know once you enter her you are merging worlds. You are reaffirming a sacred agreement of eternal connectivity. Her energy centers will be connected with yours. Your intentions must be the purest to maintain this kind of cosmic sacred connection. You will be connected on every level seen and unseen. You both will become witness to the universe at play. The cosmic etheric dance of devotion. Two existences intermingle creating a third existence of oneness with tantric overtones and harmonics.

Heartbreak should be a celebration not mourning because it’s an opportunity to get in touch with what your current beliefs are, and an opportunity to step back in alignment with what represents your highest good.

In the hierarchy of instincts, sex is considered to be the lowest, and the desire for the divine the highest. But here divinity is represented by the metaphor of sexual union – a hugely courageous way of looking at life. Such an image would be impossible in a culture where perspectives of the sacred evolved out of narrow ideas of morality, good and bad, right and wrong. This is only possible in a culture where an understanding of the sacred evolved out of consciousness. There is no distinction between the sacred and the profane in this symbol.

It is when you begin to accept yourself in totality that you come into alignment with your wholeness. For example, when you accept something in totality you are recognizing it within its full potential and full divinity.

Of all the great world religions, Christianity should value the body most. After all, it taught that God had in some sense taken a human body and used it to redeem the world; everything about the physical should have been sacred and sacramental. But that had not happened. instead, the churches had found it almost impossible to integrate the sexual with the divine and had developed a Platonic aversion to the body - particularly the bodies of women.

Womanism is feminism's vulgate. It asserts that women are the oppressed or the victims and never the collaborators in the 'bad' things that men do. It entails a double standard around sexuality where women's sexual self-expression is seen as necessary and even desirable, but men's is seen as dangerous or even disgusting. Womanism is by no means confined to a tiny, politically motivated bunch of man-hating feminists, but is a regular feature of mainstream culture.

Never Give Up on YOU: Each day you wake up you choose the reality you’re going to live in based on your thoughts. Today choose to love yourself fully and embrace all that you are. There is no one on the planet exactly like you, embrace what sets you apart and find beauty within yourself.

The problem with the Bible, the Qur'an, the Torah - or any sacred text - as an authority is that so much depends on how the text is read and the interests of the reader. The Bible has been used to justify slavery, apartheid, the suppression of women, the 'evils' of sexuality, the 'evils' of homosexuality, a male-only priesthood, the denial of any priests at all, the supremacy of the Pope, the irrelevance of the Pope, the authority of the Church, a denial of the authority of the Church, a feminist agenda, war, pacifism and almost every other position that people may wish to hold.

Above all, we are in need of a renewed Enlightenment, which will base itself on the proposition that the proper study of mankind is man, and woman. This Enlightenment will not need to depend, like its predecessors, on the heroic breakthroughs of a few gifted and exceptionally courageous people. It is within the compass of the average person. The study of literature and poetry, both for its own sake and for the eternal ethical questions with which it deals, can now easily depose the scrutiny of sacred texts that have been found to be corrupt and confected. The pursuit of unfettered scientific inquiry, and the availability of new findings to masses of people by easy electronic means, will revolutionize our concepts of research and development. Very importantly, the divorce between the sexual life and fear, and the sexual life and disease, and the sexual life and tyranny, can now at last be attempted, on the sole condition that we banish all religions from the discourse. And all this and more is, for the first time in our history, within the reach if not the grasp of everyone. However, only the most naive utopian can believe that this new humane civilization will develop, like some dream of “progress,” in a straight line. We have first to transcend our prehistory, and escape the gnarled hands which reach out to drag us back to the catacombs and the reeking altars and the guilty pleasures of subjection and abjection. “Know yourself,” said the Greeks, gently suggesting the consolations of philosophy. To clear the mind for this project, it has become necessary to know the enemy, and to prepare to fight it.

This is where the break in the relationship begins. Instead of focusing on the original purpose and intention of being in a relationship you are focused on changing the other person. Instead of perpetual growth and movement forward, you will find yourselves going in circles, burnt out and drained.

Each and every interaction we have with another is an exchange of energy on some level, once you’ve learned the importance of cultivating your inner being, an understanding of your sacredness is also birthed within you and an awareness towards the way in which you share yourself and spend your energy.

You must get to the root(s) of the things that are present in your life that are anti-you. Generally, a true mirroring is needed, but this mirroring cannot happen if you are still interacting with the things and people that affirm the lower self, that affirm the you that is out of alignment with wholeness.

There is no place for the resistance to go but to project outwards until you clear it within yourself. When you make the choice to surrender and release judgments you’re able to receive new information from another source for the purpose of growth; in this case for the purpose of growth within the relationship.

Eventually, you stop needing to have the experience of heartbreak. And you stop needing to have the experience of heartbreak when you realize you are already whole. If you are already love no one can come into your life and take away the love you’ve cultivated and become. When you go into a relationship whole and you decide to end it, you leave the relationship whole, when it was truly based in love. No one can deplete you of love when you have the realization you are already love.

We need to realize that any individual, and generally it is someone that we call a boyfriend or girlfriend, lover, mate, husband, wife, friend, consort, or anyone that is getting us to learn more about ourselves, to see aspects of ourselves that we don’t typically like to see or want to see, is, in fact, our actual soul mate.

More profoundly, Nihilist "simplification" may be seen in the universal prestige today accorded the lowest order of knowledge, the scientific, as well as the simplistic ideas of men like Marx, Freud, and Darwin, which underlie virtually the whole of contemporary thought and life. We say "life," for it is important to see that the Nihilist history of our century has not been something imposed from without or above, or at least has not been predominantly this; it has rather presupposed, and drawn its nourishment from, a Nihilist soil that has long been preparing in the hearts of the people. It is precisely from the Nihilism of the commonplace, from the everyday Nihilism revealed in the life and thought and aspiration of the people, that all the terrible events of our century have sprung. The world-view of Hitler is very instructive in this regard, for in him the most extreme and monstrous Nihilism rested upon the foundation of a quite unexceptional and even typical Realism. He shared the common faith in "science," "progress," and "enlightenment" (though not, of course, in "democracy"), together with a practical materialism that scorned all theology, metaphysics, and any thought or action concerned with any other world than the "here and now," priding himself on the fact that he had "the gift of reducing all problems to their simplest foundations." He had a crude worship of efficiency and utility that freely tolerated "birth control", laughed at the institution of marriage as a mere legalization of a sexual impulse that should be "free", welcomed sterilization of the unfit, despised "unproductive elements" such as monks, saw nothing in the cremation of the dead but a "practical" question and did not even hesitate to put the ashes, or the skin and fat, of the dead to "productive use." He possessed the quasi-anarchist distrust of sacred and venerable institutions, in particular the Church with its "superstitions" and all its "outmoded" laws and ceremonies. He had a naive trust in the "natural mom, the "healthy animal" who scorns the Christian virtues--virginity in particular--that impede the "natural functioning" of the body. He took a simple-minded delight in modern conveniences and machines, and especially in the automobile and the sense of speed and "freedom" it affords. There is very little of this crude Weltanschauung that is not shared, to some degree, by the multitudes today, especially among the young, who feel themselves "enlightened" and "liberated," very little that is not typically "modern.

When you lose the idea of lonely you close the doorway for dependency to seep through. When you are whole you have a connection to self, and a connection to self is a connection to source. A connection to source is a connection to all, and you realize choosing to be lonely is choosing to be ignorant to the divine’s presence within your life.

Your first relationship is with yourself. In order to cultivate the relationship with yourself, you must first understand you are not your learned behaviors or beliefs, you are not the constructs of your learned love behaviors, you are not your personality but your personality is the way in which you are currently choosing to express your perceptions.

Relationships fail because the people involved have a hard time managing and navigating the relationship with their self and the relationship with the other as a whole. And when you take into account the relationships within each partner’s lives, such as friends, family, and acquaintance, the relationship requires more effort, understanding, and communication to properly navigate.

When you have your best interest at heart, because your first relationship is with yourself and you will not have someone else’s best interest at heart before having your own, you wouldn’t purposely choose to open yourself up to a detrimental experience. You would apply your knowingness and understand the importance of choosing to enter into situations that preserve your inner work.

We are not born women of color. We become women of color. In order to become women of color, we would need to become fluent in each others’ histories, to resist and unlearn an impulse to claim first oppression, most-devastating oppression, one-of-a-kind oppression, defying comparison oppression. We would have to unlearn an impulse that allows mythologies about each other to replace knowing about one another. We would need to cultivate a way of knowing in which we direct our social, cultural, psychic, and spiritually marked attention on each other. We cannot afford to cease yearning for each others’ company.

You can enter into the relationship whole and understand the value of why you are choosing to work in union with another. The relationship is a merger, not a buyout, meaning you wouldn’t come to another and desire to be in partnership to dominate and control the other person. You wouldn’t partner or merge with someone who you didn’t believe in their life’s work, or you don’t honor the work they’ve done to grow into who they currently are.

The abyss that divides the two modalities of experience — sacred and profane — will be apparent when we come to describe sacred space and the ritual building of the human habitation, or the varieties of the religious experience of time, or the relations of religious man to nature and the world of tools, or the consecration of human life itself, the sacrality with which man’s vital functions (food, sex, work and so on) can be charged. Simply calling to mind what the city or the house, nature, tools, or work have become for modern and nonreligious man will show with the utmost vividness all that distinguishes such a man from a man belonging to any archaic society, or even form a peasant of Christian Europe. For modern consciousness, a physiological act — eating, sex, and so on — is in sum only an organic phenomenon, however much it may still be encumbered by tabus (imposing, for example, particular rules for "eating properly" or forbidding some sexual behavior disapproved by social morality). But for the primitive, such an act is never simply physiological; it is , or can become, a sacrament, that is, a communion with the sacred.

Mephistopheles' contentious, often ambiguous relationship to Faustus is a reference to tantra just as it is to alchemy. It resembles the shifting tactics of a guru who varies his approach to his pupil in order to dissolve his resistances and prepare him for wider states of consciousness. Both Faustus and the tantric aspirant stimulate and indulge their senses under the guidance of their teachers who encourage them to have sexual encounters with women in their dreams. Both work with magical diagrams or yantras, exhibit extraordinary will, "fly" on visionary journeys, acquire powers of teleportation, invisibility, prophecy, and healing, and have ritual intercourse with women whom they visualize as goddesses. The tantrist [sic] is said to become omniscient as a result of his sacred "marriage," and Faustus produces an omniscient child in his union with the visualized Helen, or Sophia.

From its inception patriarchy has relied on salvation narrative to underwrite its program of genocide, ecocide, sexual repression, child abuse, social domination, and spiritual control. This script works beautifully for the dominator agenda because it was deliberately written for it. How can a story about love, forgiveness and divine benevolence endorse the perpetration of evil? This seems impossible and against all reason, until we realize that the story is not what it appears to be. The salvation narrative of the Bible is a story of perpetration, conceived to support and legitimate the dominator agenda. History shows that the religious ideals attached to salvation narrative have consistently been used to legitimate violence, rape, genocide, and destruction of the natural world…In the final balance the people who commit and promote violence and murder in the expression of religious beliefs may be a minute fraction of the faithful, but they are the ones who determine the course of events, shape history, affect society, and threaten the biosphere…To dissociate from the salvation narrative would be the most effective way for peace-loving people to end their complicity in the dominator agenda.

There are an accountability and maturity to the process of self-love. It’s arriving at a place where you’re able to recognize the need and benefit of loving yourself first. You understand the value of bringing things to light instead of hiding from yourself. You realize the process of being in relationship requires you to be truthful, open, and honest with yourself because you are now extending the same access to the person you are in relationship with to be truthful, open and honest. And if you can’t be honest and accept who you are then the person you are in relationship with won’t be able to either.

Through the substance of human flesh flows life. Life is more than matter. Religions that attempt to keep the body sacred while denying the Creator's hand are in the same boat as skeptics who try to protect life while saying it is nothing more than matter. All the desacralizing that has engulfed our culture lies in this very struggle to understand the place and sacredness of the body. The right to every individual life, even the one still in the mother's womb; the pleasure and consummation of sexual delights, reserved for the sanctity of marriage; the injunction against suicide; the care and protection of one's health; the injunction against killing; and the command to love others more than we love ourselves and to work for their good-all of these flow from the fact that this body is a dwelling place for God. Our world would be a different place if we comprehended this sobering privilege. Having lost this truth, what we are left with? Pornography and the cruel degradation of men, women, and children; death in the womb in the name of personal rights; the breakdown of the family for myriad reasons; the profanation of sex in our entertainment industry; violence in unprecedented proportions. One can only weep for the bleeding and loss. In losing the high value that God has placed on the body, we are in free fall, at the mercy of greed, cruelty, and lust.

This is sacred space. Libation . . . instead of pouring water on the ground, I pour words on the page. I begin with this libation in honor of all of those unknown and known spirits who surround us. I acknowledge the origins of this land where I am seated while writing this introduction. This land was inhabited by Indigenous people, the very first people to inhabit this land, who lived here for thousands of years before the Europeans arrived and were unfortunately unable to cohabitate without dominating, enslaving, raping, terrorizing, stealing from, relocating, and murder- ing the millions of members of Indigenous nations throughout Turtle Island, which is now known as North America. I write libation to those millions of Indigenous women, men, and children; and those millions of kidnapped and enslaved African women, men, and children whose genocide, confiscated land, centuries of free labor, forced migration, traumatic memories of rape, and sweat, tears, and blood make up the very fiber and foundation of all of the Americas and the Caribbean.

I predicted that, in order to live a vital life, prevent disease, or optimize the chance for disease remission, you would need: Healthy relationships, including a strong network of family, friends, loved ones, and colleagues A healthy, meaningful way to spend your days, whether you work outside the home or in it A healthy, fully expressed creative life that allows your soul to sing its song A healthy spiritual life, including a sense of connection to the sacred in life A healthy sexual life that allows you the freedom to express your erotic self and explore fantasies A healthy financial life, free of undue financial stress, which ensures that the essential needs of your body are met A healthy environment, free of toxins, natural-disaster hazards, radiation, and other unhealthy factors that threaten the health of the body A healthy mental and emotional life, characterized by optimism and happiness and free of fear, anxiety, depression, and other mental-health ailments A healthy lifestyle that supports the physical health of the body, such as good nutrition, regular exercise, adequate sleep, and avoidance of unhealthy addictions

I’m familiar with the concept of bacchanalia and Dionysian revels, of course, but it strikes me as utterly bizarre that women should want to spend an evening together drinking and purchasing such items, and, indeed, that this should pass as ‘entertainment’. Sexual union between lovers should be a sacred, private thing. It should not be a topic for discussion with strangers over a display of edible underwear. When the musician and I spent our first night together, the joining of our bodies would mirror the joining of our minds, our souls. His otherness; the flash of dark hair in his armpit, the buttons of bone at his clavicle. The blood scent in the crook of his elbow. The warm softness of his lips, as he takes me in his arms and …‘Erm, Eleanor? Hello? I was just saying … we’ll need to go now to catch the bus, if you’re coming to Mum’s?

In their book Warrior Lovers, an analysis of erotic fiction by women, the psychologist Catherine Salmon and the anthropologist Donald Symons wrote, "To encounter erotica designed to appeal to the other sex is to gaze into the psychological abyss that separates the sexes.... The contrasts between romance novels and porn videos are so numerous and profound that they can make one marvel that men and women ever get together at all, much less stay together and successfully rear children." Since the point of erotica is to offer the consumer sexual experiences without having to compromise with the demands of the other sex, it is a window into each sex's unalloyed desires. ... Men fantasize about copulating with bodies; women fantasize about making love to people. Rape is not exactly a normal part of male sexuality, but it is made possible by the fact that male desire can be indiscriminate in its choice of a sexual partner and indifferent to the partner's inner life--indeed, "object" can be a more fitting term than "partner." The difference in the sexes' conception of sex translates into a difference in how they perceive the harm of sexual aggression. ... The sexual abyss offers a complementary explanation of the callous treatment of rape victims in traditional legal and moral codes. It may come from more than the ruthless exercise of power by males over females; it may also come from a parochial inability of men to conceive of a mind unlike theirs, a mind that finds the prospect of abrupt, unsolicited sex with a stranger to be repugnant rather than appealing. A society in which men work side by side with women, and are forced to take their interests into account while justifying their own, is a society in which this thick-headed incuriosity is less likely to remain intact. The sexual abyss also helps to explain the politically correct ideology of rape. ... In the case of rape, the correct belief is that rape has nothing to do with sex and only to do with power. As (Susan) Brownmiller put it, "From prehistoric times to the present, I believe, rape has played a critical function. It is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear." ... Brownmiller wrote that she adapted the theory from the ideas of an old communist professor of hers, and it does fit the Marxist conception that all human behavior is to be explained as a struggle for power between groups. But if I may be permitted an ad feminam suggestion, the theory that rape has nothing to do with sex may be more plausible to a gender to whom a desire for impersonal sex with an unwilling stranger is too bizarre to contemplate. Common sense never gets in the way of a sacred custom that has accompanied a decline of violence, and today rape centers unanimously insist that "rape or sexual assault is not an act of sex or lust--it's about aggression, power, and humiliation, using sex as the weapon. The rapist's goal is domination." (To which the journalist Heather MacDonald replies: "The guys who push themselves on women at keggers are after one thing only, and it's not reinstatement of the patriarchy.")