Wild Belonging: Healing our Broken World

Wild Belonging, is a portal into healing our broken world.

I recently launched my new online course, “Wild Belonging: how to honor the intimate connection between sexuality, compassion, and the cosmos.”

The course focuses on the practices of body love, pleasure, sensuality, sacred sexuality, and eroticism while creating a deep connection to the wisdom held deep in the heart of the cosmos and on mother earth.

But how do we, and why would we, focus on this now when our world is broken, and humans are hurting, scared, anxious, sick or wounded, and traumatized.

I want to address some of that here in this writing.

WHAT IS WILD BELONGING?

Wild Belonging is a radical response to the damaging tenets of patriarchy, white privilege and supremacy, racism, and social injustice of all kinds.

Wild Belonging is not about perfectionism, accomplishment, consuming, owning, or gaining. It is not about growth and plenty only for a few and scarcity for many. Inequality and injustice are bred through the principles of patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism. All things antithetical to a practice of Wild Belonging.

Wild Belonging is about living in a profoundly socially responsible way. A way that offers a new way of being on this earth. A way that upholds and is founded on equality, compassion, and the recognition that harming one, harms everyone.

It is born of the Divine Feminine energy flowing throughout all of life.

It is a way that honors the Life/Death/Life cycle.

A way that honors the cosmic and earthly wisdom as maps bringing ALL OF US home to a free, awakened, deeply connected, sacred, and intentional life.

Wild Belonging teaches us how to stand in the unknown, the unfinished, the up-ended, the disrupted, the mess, and the uncertainty while maintaining and nurturing a steadfast connection to a life of meaning and purpose.

Instead of running away, ignoring, numbing, or blaming, through a life of Wild Belonging, we learn how to be with the present moment, face the shadow and the darkness, and use that energy to create transformation. 

We learn how to live a life of unconditional love and compassion, of social justice, and immense reverence for all life. And we learn how to do so not only when we feel peaceful and at ease, but when we are in the shadows, the fear, and the darkness.

If the Life/Death/Life cycle teaches us anything, it is that Death is just as vital as the Life that precedes it and as the Re-Birth that follows it.

Wild Belonging is a life of continual beginnings and pathways of over-lapping and inter-looping cycles. It is not a linear experience to be tied up with a bow at some end point, while offering us contrived and unsatisfactory answers.

If you allow it and invite it in, Wild Belonging is something that will continually cycle through your life in ever-evolving adventures, experiences, nuances and depth.

Wild Belonging allows us to practice a sacred sexuality.  Sacred sexuality invites us to heal. As the individual heals, the collective heals. As the collective heals, the individual heals. All of this is possible because the nature of sacred sexuality is one of inter-dependence and non-dualism.

IT IS TIME

What is happening in our world now, is asking us to forge a new path, a new way of being, and a new way of interacting with the world.

We are being asked to embrace what is being revealed to us and to be with it in a radically different way.
This requires us to stop being ignorant; stop being silent; stop participating in practices that benefit a few and harm many.

We are being asked to open our eyes to see that, how we have ravaged the earth, our resources, and human life is ultimately how we have ravaged ourselves.

We are being asked to realize and awaken to the truth that when a few are privileged and protected, while many are oppressed, marginalized, and abused, we eventually have to face the destruction, disconnection, disease, and distress we have created with our own hands.

It is time to look so closely that we cannot avoid or ignore the fear that comes with looking. It’s time to stop being afraid of the fear and courageously gaze into the very heart of it, our fear, and all of humanity’s. Only then, we begin to see the truth. Only then we are open to the gifts, the healing, and the grace that comes through this depth of looking.

It is time to acknowledge how patriarchy, capitalism, white privilege, racism, heteronormativity, ableism, homophobia, xenophobia, transphobia, limiting constructs of gender and sexuality have harmed generations of people, the earth, and our connection to the wisdom held in the cosmos.

What harms one, harms all. There is no escaping this truth anymore.

The virus, the violence, the ignorance, the trauma, the chaos, and the disruption we are all experiencing now (in different ways, to different degrees, and in different intensities) are exposing us all to the underbelly, the shadows of our world, and the shadows within ourselves.

The question is, “Can we learn to be one with and connect to the life force, to the wisdom of our universe, and to our own Wild Belonging, even during times like this?”

And I say “YES”, because growth is not always about peace, love, and joy. It often comes from pain, death, and fear.

When we stop fearing death and fearing our own shadows, then we come into truest connection. Not only with ourselves. But also with our loved ones, fellow human beings, animals, this earth, and the cosmos.

HOW A LIFE OF WILD BELONGING HEALS

So if Wild Belonging is about embracing pleasure, sensuality, body love, and sacred sexuality how can we do this when we are living in times of darkness, and can no longer run from the shadows?

We do it by seeing and defining pleasure, sensuality, body love, sacred sexuality and eroticism not as indulgences or “guilty pleasures”, but as essential portals to living as awakened beings.

And when we live as awakened beings, we do no harm.

We cannot live unconsciously and awakened at the same time. If we are unconscious, we do not see how our thoughts, actions, and ways of living, hurt us and all other living beings and the earth. We do not practice compassion.

If we are truly awakened, we see everything. Not just the pretty stuff. The easy stuff. The stuff that brings comfort. But we see the pain, the shadows, the harm we have caused, the damage we have participated in.

And when truly awakened, because of compassion, we can hold all of this, without judgment and without further traumatization.

With compassion, we connect with our own bodies in love, we embrace pleasure and sensuality as elixirs of healing, we embrace our sexuality as a sacred experience, not just because it “feels good” (which is lovely), but because it is an essential practice in living an awakened life and connecting authentically to the life around us.

The more we practice body love, pleasure, sensuality, sexuality in awakened ways, the more we can open to the pure, organic, erotic energy of life and there we find tremendous healing and transformation.

If we are connected to the erotic energy of life, we live in the mindset of love, compassion, social justice, freedom, and equality for all. Eroticism is an energy available to all, equally.

Awakening, compassion, sacred sexuality, sensuality, erotic truth, and body love are all portals to healing, to connection, to being with life, to honoring all life, to embracing the imperfection, the unknown, the mess, the fear, and to embracing the truth that all of us are born of the stars and the light of consciousness.

Beyond what we see with our eyes, within the liminal spaces where the erotic and the mysterious resides, lie the secrets of Unconditional Love. Social Justice. Freedom. Wild Belonging.

When we choose to engage with the liminal, the erotic and the mysterious, it brings a profound responsibility to not only Do No Harm, but to be the difference that makes the difference.

As always, Peace in the Journey,
Jane

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Jane Ryan

Jane Ryan, LMFT, CST is a Licensed Couples and Family Therapist and an AASECT Certified Sex Therapist. She specializes in helping therapy participants nurture their intimate relationships, recover from purity culture & sexual shame, & embrace their true erotic nature. She supports women in reclaiming their embodied wisdom and living from their radiant, feminine power and essence as they enter the peri-menopausal and post-menopausal years.

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