The Alchemy of Love and Sex
The Alchemy of Love and Sex is real, potent, and transformative.
Love is the great healer. When we open to love’s presence, drinking in its essence, receiving it for ourselves and giving it to others, we become the great alchemists. It is our magic.
Love is an ethereal presence; an energy of mystery, of the sacred, a testament to the power of the things not seen.
When love is in our midst, our bodies become the containers, breathing in love’s ethereal energy and alchemizing it into a soothing balm, an antidote, the change agent.
Love transforms hurt, pain, longing, sadness, trauma, grief and isolation. These experiences pass through our lives, and they leave the ashes of their destruction. From these ashes, love creates new life, new possibilities, new growth.
Love is the life/death/life cycle in movement, a fluid, organic unfolding of healing and transformative power moving us from destruction, from the ashes, into new life.
SEX AS THE CONDUIT FOR LOVE
If we choose it to be so, sexuality can be a powerful conduit for love; an essential part of our alchemy. It has tremendous potential to restore a sense of connection to self and other; a sense of wholeness; a sense of TRULY being ALIVE.
Sexuality, and the infinitely vast ways in which humans express it, has a liminal quality and essence all its own. Meaning it has its own mysterious, spiritual and sacred connection to the life force of the universe.
Its mystery and sacredness offers us respite, by opening up a space of true aliveness, of found treasures, of pure and complete acceptance.
Its mystery and sacredness offers us respite from the chaos of the present, the wounds of our past, and the fears of our future.
Sexuality offers us the experience of being fully in our bodies, being fully in the present moment, and giving and receiving without judgment, shame, cultural constraints.
THE SHADOW-SIDE OF SEX
However, for many of us, this is not the experience of sex. Often, humans experience the shadow side of sexuality; which is the side in which we experience the destructiveness of betrayal, trauma, pain and grief, exclusion, judgment, shame, isolation, and deep disconnection from self and other.
And when humans experience the shadow side of sexuality, it is so profound, that we lose faith and hope in the healing, transformative power of love.
HOW DO WE RETURN TO OURSELVES?
Where can we go when we have lived in the realm of sexuality’s shadow? How do we restore our faith and hope in love when we are so deeply wounded? How can we return to ourselves?
These are not simple questions that have simple answers. And yet… there is solace and comfort in knowing that in coming together, in our human being-ness, healing, justice, and transformation is possible.
When I talk about healing, I am not offering simplistic solutions that are nothing more than band-aids that dishonor the truth of the wounding.
I am talking about a cyclical and integrative process that is a journeying-through. Through the depths of the pain and throughout our life cycle, into ever-unfolding new awareness, new understanding, new strengthening.
For when we acknowledge that this process is a process of a life-time, we honor the wounding, and we accept that while it has deeply impacted us, it DOES NOT DEFINE US.
RE-CLAIMING OUR SEXUALITY
The process of claiming sexuality back from the shadow world of hurt, abuse, trauma, and pain is a process of claiming our human-born right to love without fear.
To be our truest selves without judgment.
To experience pleasure, sensuality and bliss knowing that we are held in the protective arms of love.
To claim that we no longer will be limited by another’s rules, ideas, or mis-guided desires.
Therefore, this process of re-claiming our sexuality and re-wilding ourselves in order to step into our birth-right of sexual bliss and unconditional love, is a life-long experience.
Layer upon layer, with every experience building on the next experience, allowing pleasure more and more, creating safety more and more, freeing ourselves from all constraints, unfolding over time. And each unfolding holds its own unique and precious gift.
My Sacred Sexuality Course is starting on June 22nd. You can find out more by visiting my Wild Belonging online course announcement.
LET’S SET OUR INTENTION
So we must set our intention. An intention to enter into the sacred halls of our own inner sanctuary. To visit with an open heart and full curiosity. To destroy that which no longer serves us and to create new life by breathing prana into every cell of our bodies.
This is hard, hard, hard work. And not to be taken lightly or without true commitment. Therefore, very often, it also works most auspiciously if we do so in a courageous circle of sisters.
When we gather together in a sisterhood circle of unconditional love to support, witness and be present to each other, we find our truest power and most potent magic.
And when we do this for each other, we are also doing it for the broader community and the world. Healing the collective wounds of both the masculine and the feminine.
In our circles, we become the vessels of love’s transformative energy.
We become the ones who reclaim our bodies from the shame that has been absorbed and the objectification put upon them.
We redefine sexuality as we honor the woundings born in its shadow-world and plant the seeds for a new creation of our own sexuality as we step into its light.
This is the alchemy of love and sex working together, tapping into, accessing, and sourcing from the mysterious life force of the universe.
OUR STORIES, OUR HEALING
Like you, I have my own story. A story that has unfolded over my life-time; a story that contains experiences of both the healing power of love and the painful shadow-side of sex.
Like you, I have longed for freedom to live from my strongest, most authentic voice. From the sexual/sensual vibrations of my inner Maiden, the unconditional love of my inner Mother, and the wisdom of my inner Crone.
I have been on a healing and healer’s journey all of my life, often not sure where I was going, or where I would end up.
My career as a therapist has led me to this place:
- A place of helping women find their own wildness and exuberance in loving, in the expression of their sexuality, and in their truest nature.
- Providing offerings to help women thrive, celebrate, and experience deep connection to themselves and empowered relationships with others.
- Teaching women to love their bodies as the perfect vessels they are, fiercely rebelling against the diet culture and anti-aging “solutions”; fiercely refusing to accept the false images the patriarchy has violently put upon us for way, way too long. These images are LIES and they are what the patriarchy has crafted to distract us from our immense power and magic and inner knowing.
And this is what I would love to offer you here as much as I can.
In my online course, Wild Belonging you will learn how to honor our own rhythms, to celebrate your sexuality and body, to cultivate a well-spring of compassion, to awaken your connection with the powerful, cosmic magic that is waiting to bestow its wisdom on all of us.
LET’S GATHER HERE
My dream, crystal clear now after years of work, after years of not knowing, after years of being on so many different paths, has always been to offer opportunities of healing for women; creating a sisterhood that is able to source from the alchemy and magical transformative power of sexuality and love.
And in so doing, healing the wounds of the collective sisterhood, our history of abuse, trauma, and deep wounding.
It is time that every woman is free to embrace the spirit of the Goddesses who have gone before us. These Goddesses have sacrificed for us, created magic for us and have carved the way for us, through the fire, the darkness, the tortures, the outcasting.
No matter their plight, they have always understood the healing, empowering magic of sex and the redemption found in unconditional love.
We honor you: Lilith, Mary Magdalene, Aphrodite, Isis, Parvati.
In my postings here, I want to offer this space as a container for safety, for a new and fierce language of freedom and sovereignty, for possibilities and practices that enable us to shift, heal, redefine, and transform our pain, hurt, disappointment, betrayals into the most beautiful experience of unity, of wholeness, of aliveness.
If you are ready to experience this, if you feel called to explore this further, even if this stirs up fear and trepidation within you, I encourage you to reflect deeply on your own sexual story.
How would you like your story to guide, empower and transform you? How would you like your story to lead you to living and claiming your birth right to experience the healing power of unconditional love?
What are you ready for now, at this point in your journey? Is this a time for more solitary work? Or is it a time for entering a circle of sisterhood and be witnessed as the beautiful creature you are?
Wherever you are now is perfect. It is exactly where you need to be. Honor yourself in this moment.
Blessings and, as always, peace on the journey before you.
Jane
P.S. If you feel called to join my Sacred Sexuality course or circle, please stay tuned for details coming in 2020.
P.P.S. For a sample of the kinds of things offered in my Sacred Sexuality circles, please read the Meditation Practice and Journal Prompts offered below.
MEDITATION PRACTICE
Create a safe, container for yourself either out in nature or a quiet space indoors. Bring in your most treasured symbols and objects that represent parts of your beautiful self: candles, incense, essential oils, pictures, items from nature, or crystals, etc.
Add soft music if you like, and create soft lighting with candles or dim lamps.
Sit in a position that is most comfortable for you.
And take three deep breaths to ground and center yourself. Picture your root chakra being grounded lovingly into Mother Earth.
Place your attention on your yoni, your perineum, and your internal womb space. Begin to breath into these spaces and imagine the tissues and muscles here being infused with love and healing energy. Imagine with every breath that your yoni, your perineum, and your internal womb space is opening, receiving love, receiving peace, receiving pleasure. Feel the energy, the pulsation of life.
Breathe deeply here for as long as it feels right for you.
When you are ready, and with clear intention, move your attention to your heart-space. Begin to breath into your heart and imagine the tissues and muscles here being infused with love and healing energy. Imagine with every breath that your heart is opening, receiving love, receiving peace, receiving pleasure. Feel the energy, the pulsation of life.
When you are ready, focus your attention on both your yoni/perineum/womb space and your heart space together. As you breathe in, picture your breath filling the lower chakra spaces and then flowing upward to your heart. Then as you breathe out, picture the breath circling from your heart downward to your yoni/perineum and womb space.
As you do this, picture these areas synchronistically supporting and nurturing each other. Your heart linked intrinsically to your yoni and your sexuality.
Repeat this mantra as you breathe in and out connecting these spaces:
“I am whole. I am safe. I am free. I am a beautiful, sexual and sensual being who is capable of giving and receiving the fullest pleasure and unconditional love.”
Finish the meditation with a prayer of gratitude for the healing that has begun.
And so it is…
JOURNAL PROMPTS
From this day forward, I claim……. for myself.
I find pleasure in….
I find joy in…
I find beauty in…
I no longer am a prisoner to….
Part of what I am discovering about my sexual and erotic nature is…
Part of who I am sexually and erotically is…
I love myself by…
I love others by…
I accept the healing power of love and my own sexuality by…
Jane Ryan
Latest posts by Jane Ryan (see all)
- Winter’s Essential Beauty - December 19, 2023
- Reclaiming Our Heart’s Desires: A Path to Recovering from Purity Culture, Religious Trauma, and Sexual Shame - September 12, 2023
- Creating Your Own Pleasure Model of Sexuality - April 19, 2023
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