Sex Positive Spirituality

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Hello, and welcome to speaking spirit where we talk about all things spiritual. Your host, john Moore is a shamanic practitioner and spiritual teacher. And now here's john.

John Moore 0:49

Hello, everybody.

ly's have been here since the: 1600

You know, to reduce it in very simple terms, um, pleasure, anything that you derive pleasure from was almost seen as sinful. So things like dancing, gambling, definitely sex, although, you know, certainly sex was seen as necessary for reproduction. And there are stories of infidelity in the early colonies. And you know, The Scarlet Letter letter, if you're familiar with that story was written about the Puritans, although it's it's fiction, it didn't, didn't actually happen. But certainly people could be punished for sexual, you know, sexual things for sexual sex crimes. And not I'm not talking about the sex crimes we have today, talking about like, adultery, or fornication, or, you know, things that were outside the prescribed sexual norms given by the church at the time. And we certainly had, you know, gave rise, you know, all of this sort of religious fervor, gave rise to the witch trials in, in Massachusetts, and, you know, I did have a, an ancestor who was arrested as a witch, but survived. By the time the, you know, there's a whole long, whole long story about that, about how, you know, somebody basically bought her, bought her freedom, I guess. And then the witch trials, people came to their senses eventually. So, I want to talk about how sex and spirituality can coincide in a positive way. And I'm going to differentiate a little bit, spirituality, and religion. And they can be the same thing, you may be a religious person. And one of the, you know, one of the things about religion, that may be different from spirituality for people who describes themselves as spiritual but not religious, is that religion tends to place rules, there tends to be dogma, right, there tends to be an organization that puts certain rules in place, and you have to follow these rules or there may be there may be punishment. Or there may, you know, you may have to follow these rules to get the reward would whatever that is, right. So, in Christianity, for example, you get to go to heaven. If you follow the rules, or in some belief systems, you go to hell, you're punished for all eternity if you don't follow the rules. And those rules certainly can be applied to sex quite a bit. Right. Lots and lots of rules about sex in the Bible. However, I do want to point out that there is a there's a lot of interpretation, there's a lot of interpretation. And you can see that the rules changed throughout the years. If you look at if you look at history, so um, my personal position as a person who is spiritual but not necessarily religious, as somebody who practices spirituality, on a professional level, I guess, for lack of a better term. You know, I practice shamanism. I am a shamanic healer, I see. People you know, I advise people. My personal position on sex is that any sexual activity between adults, that is consensual is fine. And consent is the key. Right? And I also mentioned the word adults. You know, in our culture, children cannot consent. You know, children are not legally able to give consent. And, you know, even if they agree to activity,

technically doesn't matter. And same thing for people who are, you know, maybe mentally disabled or under the influence of certain substances, you know, they're not, you know, they're technically not able to give consent. So consent, consent is key consensual activity is the key, non consensual activity is never okay. And that's really it. For me, that's really where I draw the line. Other than that, any sexual activity is, is fine. It's totally fine. And in fact, many, you know, one of the things I want to talk about today is how sex can be part of your spiritual practice, and can deepen your spiritual practice, and can enhance and can, you know, bring joy to your spiritual practice. So, you know, I'm not going to talk about the range of sexual activity, because there are, you know, that could be a series of podcasts in itself. But I do want to talk about it from a spiritual perspective. You know, most people even in the West, were familiar with things like Tantra and the Kama Sutra and the, you know, that the temple carvings in India depicting all these different sex acts, for example, right sexual positions, ways of raising energy. So there is at least one tradition, where sex was seen as sacred as a sacred act. Um, but if you look, and you could do some, you could do a little bit of research, even go to, I was looking earlier, as I was getting ready for this podcast. I was looking through Wikipedia, on the practice of sacred prostitution, for example, which is, exists in history, all over the world. Almost every culture, almost every culture has this idea of sacred sex workers. And not all of them are female. There are male, male sex workers as well listed in some of these cultures. And it was considered a sacred act to have sex in a you know, in a temple. You know, maybe, for example, a temple to Aphrodite. Or, you know, we see it in sumur. We see it in Babylon. We see it in Asia, certainly, lots of places in Asia, we see it in Mesoamerica. So, there is something pre Abrahamic religions right before the, you know, before Christianity, Islam and Judaism sort of took over a lot of the planet. There is a tradition of sacred sexual activity. In fact, special temples sometimes built for that purpose. So what's going on here? Why, why is that the case? Why is sex such a taboo in some cultures? So, anyway, I grew up in this, you know, I'm gonna go back to my upbringing and where I grew up, so I grew up in this new england culture, where even today I feel like we're still suffering from our puritanical past, though that be more than 400 years ago now. I feel like you know, particularly me growing up even though I was growing up in the middle of the what was considered the sexual revolution, and, you know, sex started to be talked about on television and the radio and songs. Songs are becoming more explicit in our culture in Western culture anyway. Um, even though that was happening, I still grew up in a culture where sex was something that was whispered about it was hidden, it was in the shadows it was, you know, there was certainly a lot of it going around. And then this is what happens when something is seen as shameful when something natural, something that can be beautiful, something that we all have the impulse for. is pushed into the shadows, it becomes a shadow activity becomes perverted, and I don't mean sexually perverted. I mean, it becomes this impulse becomes perverted comes in the wrong direction. So there becomes a lot of

sex crimes against children, we see that in religious institutions that enforced celibacy, for example. Um, and my personal opinion, my, you know, my personal opinion on that I'm not bashing anybody's particular religious belief for or practice, you know, I'm not trying to do that, but I do think that enforced celibacy is unnatural. Some people consider themselves asexual, and that's totally fine, too, that's a fine choice as well. If that's your choice, if that's how you feel, if that's honestly, you have no sexual impulse. I don't necessarily think that people with you take somebody with healthy normal sexual impulse, and you say, guess what, you're not gonna have an outlet for that for the rest of your life. And just pray that away. Um, I think that it's a little bit of a recipe for disaster. And I think, again, it pushes, I've talked about the shadow quite a lot, I will continue to talk about the shadow, it pushes those impulses into the shadow. And if you do not have a way, a proper way of dealing with that, it's going to come out in a way that is unexpected, uncontrolled, you know, and perhaps victimizes other people. I think there are, I think there are very good practices out there. I think mostly coming from the east, what we consider the east, you know, there are tantric practices, not necessarily tantric sex, but tantric practices of converting sexual energy into, you know, other forms of spiritual energy. I think there are ways of doing that. But I think the you know, when that's missing, when that outlet is missing, when that way of converting that energy to something else, and it's just pushed into the shadow and not acknowledged that, gosh, I'm a human being. That's, you know, that's a recipe for disaster. And we've seen that we've seen that with, you know, perhaps millions of cases of child sexual abuse, millions. That's mind boggling to me. Absolutely. Crazy. To me. And again, you go back to consent, and adults, and children can't consent. And, um, you know, it just, it's just not okay. So there's something you know, there's something definitely going on here. There's an elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about. And that is, I think, forced celibacy, or enforced celibacy. Nobody seems to be talking about that aspect of the of the clergy child sex abuse problem. So anyway, I digress. I do want to talk more about sacred sexuality and sexual sexuality and spirituality and how they can sort of live hand in hand. So again, going back to where, where I grew up, you know, there's this underlying idea that sex is specifically for procreation for making babies. And that should only be done with the person that you marry. And if you're not married, sex is wrong in the eyes of God. So, you know, for the, you know, most of human existence prior to prior to organized religion, there was no marriage. Right? I mean, people may have coupled, but there wasn't, you know, there weren't churches, there weren't all of this thing. So, you know, well, I think marriage is a fine and grand institution.

Um, I think there's a lot of, you know, we have greater than 50% divorce rate in the United States, for example. So maybe it's not all it's cracked up to be. And yes, sex can lead to children being born. And it is the main way until we invented, you know, modern until modern science came along and invented other ways of, you know, in vitro fertilization and things like that it, I mean, it is still the main way that babies are created. And so it's very easy to look at that and, you know, slap on the, the idea that, okay, the the only purpose of sex is to make new babies. But that ignores a whole range of the human experience. Right? It ignores the idea that sexual activity, releases positive hormones releases hormones that make us feel good, it triggers our reward system. And, you know, again, you could you could be single minded and argue that this is an impulse towards making, you know, making children, right, or our species needs to reproduce. And so, you know, we evolved to have, you know, to derive pleasure and to release stress, and all of these, you know, all of the positive things. In medical science knows that, you know, regular sex or sexual activity is, is good for you, it's, you know, it's stress relieving, it has good effects on blood pressure, and all kinds of things. And so, you know, it's a very healthy activity. I like to look at things from several perspectives from, you know, really simply from a body mind spirit perspective, right? If we were just to divide human experience into these three areas. Okay, so body we talked about that there's, you know, sex has a physical effects that's positive on your body, gave great hormones that come out from sexual activity, lower blood pressure, all kinds of great physiological things happen to you. I'm sorry, about the mind aspect, right. So when we relieve stress through sexual activity, or we become closer with somebody or, you know, all you know, all of these things, again, you could have you can, you can have sex and just a physical level and not have that emotional, mental connection with somebody. But you may be missing an aspect. And that's fine. Again, I'm not going to judge. I'm not going to, I'm not going to judge anybody for any consensual activity. I'm just saying that sex can can be. Sex can be a mind body spirit experience, you can have a transcendent spiritual experience during sexual activity. This could include a partner and it could be so low as well. Or it could include more than one partner again, I don't judge activity that's consensual. So when I talk about solo activity, I talked about masturbation, for example. You could certainly have that have a mind body spirit experience. And again, to go back to practices like Tantra, which are about sort of transforming spiritual energy into spiritual energy. And, you know, there's a whole there's a whole science there, you know, whole, lots and lots of I am not an expert in Tantra. I've, you know, looked at it briefly, but there there's a whole, you know, whole experience there. from, from a shamanic perspective you know, there, there is a merging, so I'm just talking about sex with a partner. Now, there's a merging of energy. And if the experience is positive for for both individuals, and I would argue that you should be

should is shoulds a tough word because it implies a judgement but it's not really a judgement here. I'm just saying if you want to get the most out of sexual experience, if you want to have a mind body experience, mind body spirit experience when it here's an insider tip when both people win, if you're having experience with one other person, when both are dedicated to an intent on the other person having the maximum experience, there's a melding of energy, there is a, you know, you are as close as you can be to another human being, you are really experiencing the other person's energy field. And you can grow both energy fields that way. Both people can come out of the experience, feeling satisfied feeling, you know, peaceful but energized, feeling fulfilled. And that's, you know, that's a pretty amazing spiritual experience to me. That's when, when sex can become spiritual, at least in my experience. And when you can also have experiences with people and we've maybe we've all experienced this at some point in our life, where one person is not necessarily when one person is more of a taker, or one person is more just along for the ride, or that sort of thing. And that experience is I can tell you not as satisfying as both people being intently into the moment, there's a mindfulness piece, where you can be just completely absorbed in the present moment. And it can become a transcendent experience so sex can become a transcendent experience. So let's talk about the concept of sex and sin for a moment. Because there is no shortage of religious dogma that is placing certain activities and sex within the realm of sin. And sin is a weird word. Right, the roots of the word sin in means to like miss it. At one point meant like to miss your mark, like an archer missing a target that they were shooting for you kind of you kind of messed up. You kind of missed your mark. But also we have the word like, you know, from Western religion perspective, we have the word abomination creeping in a lot, as well. This is an abomination. So you you have offended, you have offended God. Right? You've done something that offends God. And again, I don't want to bash on anybody's personal beliefs. But, you know, one of the reasons why I consider myself spiritual but not religious, is that I find it challenging to imagine an omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, loving God, that is everywhere. And everything that could be offended by something. Like a fence. Like I think we're anthropomorphizing I think we're placing, I think we're honestly writing down some rules, and we want to, you know, back before we had, you know, law enforcement investigation, and we use the threat of hell to keep people in line. And that's really all I'll kind of say about that. And some of these rules, you know, if you read if you read the Bible, and you read, you know, all of the rules that were written down that are you know, practiced by some observant people, even today many of them were made sense at the time right so prohibitions against pork and shellfish for example. In the in the Bible, or you know in in Leviticus Anyway, um you know, back in the day those were unsafe foods, you know, pork, you know, you get trichinosis from and shellfish you know, certainly to get bacterial infections from and so those were those were, you know, health guidelines.

And, you know, it made sense in the days before religion, you know, refrigeration I'ma said religious ration refrigeration, and, you know, in health inspections and all of those things, right. I think prohibition against sexual activity. Were there there were a couple of reasons for those in sort of most cultures, religious systems, I'm not just talking about, you know, the Abrahamic religions. One was that, throughout history there, you know, sexually transmitted diseases were rampant. Right. Throughout most of history, we didn't have a way of treating those. So, you know, you know, we can look at all sorts of, you know, syphilis outbreaks throughout history, and all kinds of stuff like that. So I think these things were, you know, women had to be a virgin when they were married, and that sort of thing. I think a lot of that actually, was to control sexually transmitted diseases, one aspect. So there's, there's a lot of talk about, there's a lot of description of, you know, women who are virgins being clean, clean or unclean? Right, very simplistic view of potentially potentially carrying disease, right. And, of course, of course, the emphasis was placed on women. Of course, it was because we were living in a patriarchy. So of course, you know, we were living in a patriarchy, we're living in a patriarchal system, meaning we have to put all this pressure on women, and push women down, and all of those things, so. So I think that was one reason, I think, I think a second reason why sexual prohibitions in many religious systems came about was that marriage and children were a way of exchanging property and having sort of lead, you know, passing property down through, you know, from generation to generation and property rights were frequently passed through males and all of this thing. And so if you, you know, if you had children out of wedlock, and, you know, it made decisions about where property went. Much more complicated, right. So I think that was a second reason. And I think, I honestly think a third reason is that, you know, there were these temples were ecstatic sexual practice was performed, right. And, you know, that put a lot of power in the hands of women. It put a lot of power in. And males who were maybe practicing homosexuality, in these temples, there were there were temples where there were homosexual prostitutes, and prostitutes, an interesting word they may or may not have been paid, it might have just been a sacred service. I don't, you know, there's a lot of debate about that still, in academic circles, circles, I haven't studied it academically, so I can't speak to that. So. So there's a lot of power there. A lot of spiritual power. In, in sex, right? In static states, there's a lot of power. And so there are a lot of prohibitions around that. There are a lot of powerful people wanting to maintain power. So you got to remember that patriarchal systems are a big pyramid scheme, where you have very few people on top, and a whole lot of people on the bottom, a whole lot of people on the bottom, right, very, very wealthy, powerful people on top, and a whole lot of poor people to keep those wealthy people on top. It used to be so for example, one small example in the Christian world. All you know, there was a point in time where all Bibles were written in Latin.

that we've been living in for: 1000

en running in our culture for: 1000

, you know, growing up in the: 1980

years ago, or: 2000

don't have sex outside of marriage. Don't, you know? Don't masturbate don't do X, Y or Z. Because if you do, you're going to be punished. You know? I just I don't I don't buy into that personally. And I don't want to, you know, again, it's hard talk about this stuff and not come off. Attacking anybody's spirituality, I'm not trying to do that. I realize I may have. And I apologize. But you know, I live, I live in a world where I, you know, I've experienced, again growing up in a culture that comes from Puritanism, which is, which was outdated when it was when it existed 400 years ago. And I believe that has caused, personally, I believe that that repression has caused a lot of problems over the years for people, for individuals, psychologically, you know, from, you know, socially, caused a whole lot of a whole lot of mess. judgment and shame are not positive things. Shame is shame is incredibly destructive, incredibly destructive. Shame, the idea that we are broken, the idea that we are bad, the idea that we are not worthy of love or human compassion, you know, that there's something wrong with us. Because we have normal human compulsions, or any of those things. Shame is, shame is incredibly destructive. Its destructive to society, it's destructive to the individual. You can't have society without healthy individually, you can't have a healthy society without healthy individuals, right? I'm sort of like saying, Well, you know, in generally, I'm healthy, but my heart is failing. Right, then generally, you aren't healthy. You know, unless you take care of you take care of the problem with your heart, you know, your, your other organs are going to suffer for sure. So you can't have a really healthy society without healthy individuals, I think. And I think shame causes a lot of mental health problems. You know, and I, you know, I can tell you, I can speak from personal experience having lived through a lot of childhood abuse, there was a certain amount of shame in that for me, and I did suffer for many years for that and never talked about it. And I talk about it fairly openly now. Because it's part of my path and overcoming that shame, that none of that stuff was my fault. You know, I certainly felt like it was a part of me somehow, I don't know. You know, it's weird, we, you know, we go through this stuff. So, in places where our spirituality enforces a level of shame, I do think it's unhealthy. And I think it's something to look at. And I think it's something to ask yourself, whether you accept that part of your spirituality or not the part that causes you shame, or does not allow you to live who you are. My whole I have a, you know, this, this idea that, you know, for people who know me on a personal level, that I just want people to feel like they can be who they are around me. And I remember I had a dear friend many years ago, who and I had suspected for many years that he was gay, for example, um, but he had not come out of the closet. And so it wasn't for me to ask or to force the issue or whatever. I just accepted him as a dear friend. And you know, one day, you know, one day he came out to me and I was so it was. It was, I think, a more emotional moment for me than it was for him.

Which is, which is interesting, because it was such an honor. It was such an honor for me that to understand that I had been enough of a friend to him that he felt safe coming out to me and I can't you know, I'm I you know, I'm a straight male and I don't I cannot understand. I cannot fully understand or comprehend. And what it must be like to live in the closet for most of your life, and then, you know, come out to people that you care about and come out to your friends and not understanding how they're going to react. I, like I don't have an understanding of that from a firsthand perspective. But I can think about how gosh, oh, my, you know, I can, I can understand it for as an outsider and say, Wow, that you know, what a step. And so it's a very emotional thing for me. Because I really want the people around me to just be who they are, and to be honest, and to be able to be vulnerable with me. And for me, not to judge them. And for them to feel safe, I want to be a safe person for people. And so, um, you know, that's something I wouldn't you know, if you're listening to this, it's something I would I would encourage for for you as well, I hope that if you're listening to this podcast, that you are someone who's in touch with your spiritual side, to a level that you that you understand what being a safe person how important it is, to be a safe person in the world. I would encourage you to at least think about that. You know, the people in my life, how can I be a safe person for them? How can you know, not just about sexuality, but about anything? How can you be that person who doesn't judge? You sets aside any of your cultural conditioning and just looks at this person with you who as a human being, who, you know, can be vulnerable, but is also an aspect of the Divine as as much as anybody else? And how can you be with them? How can you be witness to them, and without judging, holding them without judgment. So with that, hopefully, I'm not getting too preachy on you. Not my intention. But it's something that I feel very strongly about. I want, I would like you to think about that. And I would like you to think about how we can make spirituality, more sex positive, how sex can be less embarrassing and shameful and part of our human experience and part of our spirituality.

And with that, I will leave you I would encourage you to if you have any comments or questions or topics or anything that you'd like me to discuss in the future. please get in touch with me through my website, and the announcer will tell you where that is.

Announcer: 1:03:36

You have been listening to speaking spirit with your host, John Moore. For more info or to contact John go to MaineShaman.com that's maineshman.com