A New Series—The Body Speaks

(In the first in this series of arti­cles, I pro­vided you with a handy lit­tle chart that pro­vides the loca­tion, descrip­tion, and char­ac­ter­is­tics of the Chakras. Use the link if you want to refer to it.)

• Two arti­cles ago , we began to look at the sec­ond chakra. I men­tioned that the Sec­ond Chakra area, located 2 inches below your navel, is part of a region that encom­passes the lower belly and the lower back.
• The area is the “Rela­tion­ships Area,” and rests upon the firm foun­da­tion of the First Chakra—the ground­ed­ness chakra.
• Last arti­cle, we looked at the lower back, the sacrum, and Pas­sion for Life.

This week, we turn our atten­tion to the lower belly, and to sex­ual pas­sion—what you might think of as Pas­sion for Passion’s Sake.

I’d like to sug­gest that, as usual, there are two ways of view­ing this—“Sex as Some­thing Prob­lem­atic,” and “Sex as Some­thing Sacred.”

Not S…E…X again!
I’ve had a belly full of that!

The front pelvis is home to sexuality.

As I’ve said repeat­edly in this series, none of the aspects we talk about are a “sep­a­rate thing.” For exam­ple, pas­sion for life is not a “thing” to talk about, or a “thing” you “do,” but is rather a deep aspect of who you “be.” We all have deep pas­sion, and most ignore it.

We speak of aspects of ourselves as if they were some­how sep­a­rate from us. You know, like when we walk into a restau­rant and “do the restau­rant thing,” but we know that we are not the restau­rant. Many peo­ple treat their sex­u­al­ity like this—Me here, sex there, I drop in and visit once in a while.

Our ground­ed­ness, our pas­sion, and our sex­u­al­ity are as much a part of us as our nose is. We are our ground­ed­ness, our pas­sion, and our sex­u­al­ity. And the rest of the aspects we’ll talk about in sub­se­quent articles.

Many peo­ple have knee-jerk reac­tions to their sexuality

– they’re so embar­rassed they don’t even want to talk about it (and some would pre­fer not to read about it in the blog… ah well…)

This is the “Sex is Prob­lem­atic” pos­ture, if you’ll excuse the pun. Many peo­ple “do” sex­ual things, while “hotly” deny­ing their sex­u­al­ity. Of course, the joke is that sex­u­al­ity is an energy, and as an energy, is sim­ply (and indi­vis­i­bly) a part of us — it’s there all the time. That we repress it, deny it, or try vainly to rel­e­gate it to the back burner does not change the fact that we are born, live, and die as sex­ual beings.

Today, I what I want to talk about is how you “be” sexual

It’s about your rela­tion­ship to your own sexuality.

Our cul­ture teaches us that exter­nals “turn us on”—we think it has every­thing to do with the way a per­son looks, the way she or he acts.

And then we get into all of the “I had no choice” stuff. We rapidly move to, “It’s not about me, it’s just this thing I can’t do any­thing about.”

It’s all Baskin Robbins

Our approach is to say that every­thing that goes on in our bod­ies and in our lives is only about us. All that buzzy sex­ual energy is just us, buzzing. This series is all about remov­ing blocks to the free flow of all of our energy, despite the fact that most peo­ple have no sense of their energy at all. Or their only expe­ri­ence is sexual—and boy do they embar­rass them­selves over that!

31 Fla­vors, and oddly,
it’s all Ice Cream!

Another of my semi famous illus­tra­tions is this:

Imag­ine going into a Baskin Rob­bins ice cream store.
You see 31 fla­vors.
Now, imag­ine that each flavour is a form of energy — cre­ative energy, the energy of pas­sion, sex­ual energy. One is choco­late, one is vanilla one, is tutti-frutti.
The key to this analogy—just remem­ber one thing:
while there are 31 flavours, 31 vari­eties,
it’s all ice cream.
And it’s the same with energy—it’s ours, and although it super­fi­cially may seem dif­fer­ent, it isn’t.
Thus the real ques­tion is,
will you use your energy or will you not?

This past week, a new client was receiv­ing Body­work. She was in the midst of expe­ri­enc­ing a lot of pain, as I pushed on her upper back and shoul­ders. Sud­denly she started laugh­ing, and said, “Wow! That hurts, and I’m laugh­ing, and it feels bet­ter than my best orgasm!” Baskin Rob­bins strikes again.

Sacred Sex

Last arti­cle, I men­tioned the sacrum, the tri­an­gle shaped bone located near the base of the spine. I also men­tioned that the word sacrum derives from the same root as our Eng­lish word sacred. Given the fact that it’s “just” a tri­an­gle shaped bone, one could won­der why it was so named. Unless of course, the “namers” thought there was some­thing sacred about it, or about the area of the body it’s located in.

Obvi­ously, I think that this is the case.

The thought that sex­u­al­ity and sacred­ness are a pair is an old con­cept. For exam­ple, it likely pre­dates the devel­op­ment of Tantric Yoga, which is a pretty mis­un­der­stood thing altogether.

Tantra is not just about sex, although sex­ual prac­tices are an ele­ment. In our oddly sex­u­al­ized yet sex­u­ally repressed soci­ety, Tantra = sex is the only part most peo­ple are aware of.

Tantric Yoga teaches a way to use all of our senses

to come into a state of height­ened aware­ness, insight, and “awak­e­ness.” Sex is seen as one of these sen­sual avenues.

The Sex­ual Gate

Many, many blog posts ago, I talked a bit about ancient Hindu tem­ples. Although this tem­ple design went out of favor, for many hun­dreds of years, this was the design: if you looked down on the Tem­ple, you’d see a man­dala — cir­cles within cir­cles. Walk­ing in from a gate, you’d pass through other “gates of under­stand­ing.” One whole cir­cu­lar wall, just out­side the cen­tral sanc­tu­ary, are carved with fig­ures engaged in quite the exu­ber­ant sex­ual activity.

Such mas­sive sculp­tures were stun­ning, dis­ori­ent­ing, and filled with mean­ing. And the chief mean­ing was: you have to pass through this gate (you have to learn what is being taught here) before you can enter into your full sacred­ness and poten­tial. Inter­est­ing con­cept. Freaked peo­ple right out.

Horny monks and nuns…
oh, boy!

I read Scott Peck’s
“The Road Less Trav­eled” soon after it was pub­lished in the early 80s, and by the late 80s and early 90s often attended his work­shops. The lec­tures from the work­shops were later com­piled into a book, “Fur­ther Along the Road Less Trav­eled.”

Now, Scott Peck was an inter­est­ing guy, in a buttoned-down sort of way. I don’t think I ever saw him not wear­ing a tie. He had a bad back, so he sat on stage, stiffly, perched in a very straight chair.

One day, he announced a cof­fee break, grinned, and said, “Be sure to come back — we’re talk­ing about horny monks and nuns.” And sure enough, he did.

The lec­ture is included in the “Fur­ther…” book, under the rather bor­ing title,

“Sex­u­al­ity and Spirituality.”

Here’s a quote:

“Sex­u­al­ity and spir­i­tu­al­ity are not, of course, exactly the same thing. They are not iden­ti­cal twins, but they are kiss­ing cousins, and they arise out of the same kind of ground, not only in myth but in actual human expe­ri­ence. The fact is that sex is the clos­est that many peo­ple ever come to a spir­i­tual expe­ri­ence. Indeed, it is because it is a spir­i­tual expe­ri­ence of sorts that so many chase after it with a repet­i­tive, des­per­ate kind of aban­don. Often, whether they know it or not, they are search­ing for God. It is no acci­dent that even athe­ists and agnos­tics will, at the moment of orgasm, rou­tinely cry out, “Oh God!” ” p220

And another:

“Or as a Joseph Camp­bell para­phrased it, “When one has lost one­self in the rap­ture of love, the part­ner is of no more impor­tance than the por­tals of the tem­ple through which one has passed to the altar.” ” p221-2

Shades of the tem­ples of old.

Peck described him­self as a charis­matic Catholic, so his lan­guage is decid­edly Chris­t­ian. One of his sub­head­ings is, “God as a Seducer.” There, he wrote,

“God could have made sex as sec­u­lar as breath­ing or eat­ing. But instead He brushed it with a spir­i­tual fla­vor, and He did this very delib­er­ately, I think, in order to give us a taste for Him. Because about every­thing else, He wants to lure us to Him.” p231

In Zen, we take the oppo­site stance, in that we con­sider every­thing to be sacred. Breath­ing, and eat­ing, sex and pas­sion, and every­thing else are ways to bring our­selves into the present moment with full aware­ness. It’s not nec­es­sary to do God talk; it is nec­es­sary to under­stand that all of the expe­ri­ences of life con­tain sacred­ness, (or “enact” the sacred.)

If I approach an activ­ity with full con­scious­ness, I have, in that action, entered sacred space. Just like walk­ing through the gate of the Temple.

You begin to see why the Sec­ond Chakra region, the Rela­tion­ships Region, is so pow­er­ful, and yet so unexplored.

Here is one rea­son why so many rela­tion­ships are in trouble.

Peo­ple get into rela­tion­ships expect­ing to find “God”—they expect to find per­fec­tion, com­ple­tion, and uncon­di­tional love (the tra­di­tional char­ac­ter­is­tics of God,) from their part­ner.

In other words, with­out know­ing it con­sciously, lovers want their part­ners to be like “God” for them—or per­haps bet­ter put, to be like a genie for them. They want “sacred per­fec­tion” from an end­lessly obe­di­ent “lover.” And, they for­get that their lover is just like they are—a human being.

Inter­est­ingly, in Zen, human beings are per­fect. It’s that, in their per­fec­tion, they are also whole. They have needs, thoughts, desires. And, they are stuck and blocked. In other words, whole.

So, just when you want your part­ner to be com­pletely atten­tive to your needs, your part­ner is star­ing off into the mid­dle dis­tance, doing his or her own thing. (“How dare he? He’s here to meet my needs, not the other way around!”)

There’s noth­ing imper­fect about this. It’s just not what you wanted. It’s sort of like how most peo­ple pray. Prayers become long lists of whin­ing, fol­lowed by telling God what to do next. “It’s not going well and it’s your job to fix it.”

Come to think of it, clients tell me this about their part­ner all the time. If you get my point.

Solu­tions

Explor­ing your depth of pas­sion for life, you sex­ual pas­sion, and your rela­tion­ships is the work of a life­time, because such work requires moment-by-moment ded­i­ca­tion, pres­ence, focus, and self respon­si­bil­ity. This in-depth work of pas­sion mak­ing, stand­ing on the firm foot­ing of ground­ed­ness, allows us to enter into the next stage, (and the next article!)

Next is the devel­op­ment of a self image that includes the total­ity of our being. And stand­ing there, one becomes aware that all oth­ers are also sin­gu­lar, inter­est­ing, per­fect (yet strug­gling) human beings.

Move it or lose it

The whole point of sacred sex­u­al­ity is to increase, deepen, free, and move your energy. I sus­pect you could say that about all of the arti­cles in this series—it’s all about mov­ing energy. We are back to Baskin Rob­bins. Hun­gry yet?

In Body­work, we spent a lot of time and atten­tion on loos­en­ing the tight mus­cles that bind the pelvis. There are many ways to loosen up and open up this lower belly region.

When I went out to The Haven for Phase I, I was pleased to see how much atten­tion they gave to this work. We did all kinds of pelvic move­ment exercises—we danced, we moved, we focused.

Here are some approaches we take around here to free up the sec­ond chakra region.

Lie down over a Bol­ster

Some­where, over a bolster…

Or a rolled up blanket.

The idea is to find some­thing round for half round to insert under your back at the small of the back.

You can start off with some­thing small, like a rolled towel, and work up to a bol­ster that might be six or 8 inches tall.

The idea is to let go of hold­ing and just sort of col­lapse over the bolster.

A yoga pos­ture

But mommy told me to keep my knees together!

Supta bada konasana is the per­fect Sec­ond Chakra posture.

It’s pretty easy to see the setup here in this pic­ture, but the key is twofold.

First, you’re lean­ing back over a bol­ster that is par­al­lel to your spine, which again opens the small of your back. It also allows you to relax your belly. Sec­ond, your legs are flat on the floor, bent at the knees, with the soles of your feet touch­ing. This opens the pelvis, and gets your knees apart, in a good way of course.

If your knees don’t touch the ground, roll up two tow­els and put one under each knee. Relax, and breathe into the lower belly.

Dance

My God!
It DOES move that way!

This is a big­gie — we do a lot of danc­ing in our work­shops, and stole the idea from The Haven. Two weeks ago, we men­tioned the idea of “danc­ing until you drop” as a form of med­i­ta­tion. This week, think about your hips and your pelvis.

The Sec­ond Chakra Region moves in three ways.
1) it turns in a circle—think the Hula.
2) it rocks side to side—think salsa danc­ing.
3) it tips up and down—use your imagination!

Need­less to say, there’s music that is suit­able for each of these three things.

The really key one is the third one. As a mat­ter of fact, this motion is so impor­tant that we teach it as a part of breathwork—you learn to breathe and then you learn to add a pelvic tilt. You can see a breath­work expla­na­tion on our web­site.

As far as the danc­ing part goes, I’ve never found a bet­ter song than Alan­nah Myles’ “Black Vel­vet.” Down­load a copy, buy a copy, play it, and move.

Next week, on to the Solar Plexus and Self-Awareness!