I have many habits I’m sure that drive my friends a bit batty at times. One of them I’ve heard about several times from different people is that they never know when I’ll suddenly take a right or left turn – not literally while driving, but figuratively in my thinking or views or plans. It’s hard to know how others experience you. For me this apparently sudden movement makes total sense – it’s like I thought I knew where I was going and then suddenly I’ll catch a scent in a new direction and I just know I have to follow it. Not making the right or left turn would be illogical!
This is what happened September 11, 2004 in New York City. Three years after The Day They Wounded New York, on a day when the city was still very much trying to come to terms with its wounding, the scent of the question about Eros suddenly flared to life under my nose.
I was at a Women’s conference discussing talks from Eve Ensler, Jane Fonda and Gloria Steinem with other women in The Red Tent – the ball room in the Sheraton Manhattan transformed with thousands of yards of red fabric, hundreds of pillows and scented candles. Women from Iraq, Iran, Zimbabwe and Afghanistan told their stories of courage and hope and determination. There was no mention of better sex here ... the vagina was a warrior for respecting each other’s sexual gender and human rights.
And then I found myself at a booth for The Graduate Institute talking to a woman who was promoting a specialized Masters program in Conscious Evolution about my journey with sex and Eros and the dead end I found myself in. I don’t know if she made sense of anything I was rambling on about. I had never heard of conscious evolution and while I could read the words describing the courses in the program, I no idea what any of them were about. And yet I suddenly knew in the clearest possible way that I needed to take this program.
Four weeks later I was enrolled in a full time two year Masters degree that would involve gathering in Connecticut or NYC with 20 other people from around the US and Europe for 3-4 days every six weeks in addition to e-work in between. I had no idea how it would be possible for me to show up, why or what specifically I was showing up for. But what can you do when you know what you know, when the scent is drawing you to turn ‘over here’ even if you don't know where or what 'here' is? You have to go (because I’ve had times when I haven’t and that kind of dieing while alive is far harder for the soul and the body to bear than the risk of listening to the unknown knowing and finding yourself lost or confused or embarrased).
Longing
The morning wind spreads its fresh smell.
We must get up to take that in,
that wind that lets us live.
Breathe, before it's gone.
[Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks]
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
2/4: Better Sex Reaches A Dead End
I used to think I knew all about “change management”. That all change could be managed, like a project. But when I had to let Reclaiming Venus die, when I no longer had the ability to help birth another YES, the ground beneath me moved in a profound way.
At some point better sex, more whole-hearted enjoyable sex, healing sex, even hours upon hours of ‘tantric’ sex just didn’t seem to be going somewhere, anywhere that made sense … to me.
Learning is my thing, my gig, in work as an organizational consultant and I think it’s just what gives me juice in life. There is nothing than drains me more than having to take stuff in and spit it out just for the sake of making money – or having to ask others to do the same. Its like running on a gerbil wheel or some sort of mental masturbation … only without the orgasm, ever. What I mean by learning is growth, genuine curiosity, going for a walk without a path to follow. It is full of surprises, it’s hard work, often fraught with failure, confusion and it contains the seed of the most awesome sense of exhilaration and connection with Life.
A little more than a year into the YES journey the learning was gone and I suddenly found myself on the gerbil wheel asking, “why am I doing this anyway? What's the bigger point of it all?”
I was going broke trying to fund Reclaiming Venus. HRDC (Human Resource Development Canada) banned me from a favorite business project I contributed to several years in a row to help unemployed women because of my involvement in “sex work” … not sure what they thought I would do to the women, force them to talk about their vagina’s?!
At the same time many of the women who had attended the workshops and found some level of sexual healing by connecting to their erotic story, now seemed to be almost trapped in a perpetual peeling back of layer upon layer of healing ... as though sexual healing had become their occupation or worse yet, their addiction.
I just couldn’t connect to the fire any more. It was like all the internal lights went out. I couldn’t find a context for ‘a better relationship with our sexuality’ to rest in that made sense to me.
A woman who had been a great inspiration to myself and many other women, Betty Dodson, came out with a new book called Orgasms for Two. On the back cover she wrote, “Although the idea of pleasure might be frivolous in a world that appears to be on the brink of horrible disasters, I believe one of our best hopes for survival depends upon embracing and celebrating human sexuality as a healing force.”
Really?! I certainly didn’t see physical pleasure as irrelevant and couldn’t disagree about our world being on the brink – or maybe already in – disaster … but better sex, “healing sex” as a key to addressing our complex predicament? We’re going to address poverty, epidemic diseases, pollution, extinction, climate change, war, fundamentalism … with healing sex?! Dodson was not alone in her thinking, at least not within the ‘healing sex’ community (which was gaining a lot of momentum and growing into a sizable industry). This was a leap of thinking that I just couldn’t sign up for.
So I did the thing my dad had taught me to do when I wasn’t sure – just sit still and wait, be patient. Just wait. I shut down the website, stopped the radio show and writing e-zine features, and didn’t offer anymore workshops. Without a sense of purpose, I couldn’t fake it. With feelings of failure roaming around inside, I went back to consulting full force.
Confined to sex, we pressed against
The limits of the sea:
I saw there were no oceans left
For scavengers like me.
I made it to the forward deck
I blessed our remnant fleet –
And then consented to be wrecked,
A Thousand Kisses Deep.
I’m turning tricks, I’m getting fixed,
I’m back on Boogie Street.
I guess they won’t exchange the gifts
That you were meant to keep.
And quiet is the thought of you
The file on you complete,
Except what we forgot to do,
A Thousand Kisses Deep.
[Leonard Cohen, 10 New Songs]
At some point better sex, more whole-hearted enjoyable sex, healing sex, even hours upon hours of ‘tantric’ sex just didn’t seem to be going somewhere, anywhere that made sense … to me.
Learning is my thing, my gig, in work as an organizational consultant and I think it’s just what gives me juice in life. There is nothing than drains me more than having to take stuff in and spit it out just for the sake of making money – or having to ask others to do the same. Its like running on a gerbil wheel or some sort of mental masturbation … only without the orgasm, ever. What I mean by learning is growth, genuine curiosity, going for a walk without a path to follow. It is full of surprises, it’s hard work, often fraught with failure, confusion and it contains the seed of the most awesome sense of exhilaration and connection with Life.
A little more than a year into the YES journey the learning was gone and I suddenly found myself on the gerbil wheel asking, “why am I doing this anyway? What's the bigger point of it all?”
I was going broke trying to fund Reclaiming Venus. HRDC (Human Resource Development Canada) banned me from a favorite business project I contributed to several years in a row to help unemployed women because of my involvement in “sex work” … not sure what they thought I would do to the women, force them to talk about their vagina’s?!
At the same time many of the women who had attended the workshops and found some level of sexual healing by connecting to their erotic story, now seemed to be almost trapped in a perpetual peeling back of layer upon layer of healing ... as though sexual healing had become their occupation or worse yet, their addiction.
I just couldn’t connect to the fire any more. It was like all the internal lights went out. I couldn’t find a context for ‘a better relationship with our sexuality’ to rest in that made sense to me.
A woman who had been a great inspiration to myself and many other women, Betty Dodson, came out with a new book called Orgasms for Two. On the back cover she wrote, “Although the idea of pleasure might be frivolous in a world that appears to be on the brink of horrible disasters, I believe one of our best hopes for survival depends upon embracing and celebrating human sexuality as a healing force.”
Really?! I certainly didn’t see physical pleasure as irrelevant and couldn’t disagree about our world being on the brink – or maybe already in – disaster … but better sex, “healing sex” as a key to addressing our complex predicament? We’re going to address poverty, epidemic diseases, pollution, extinction, climate change, war, fundamentalism … with healing sex?! Dodson was not alone in her thinking, at least not within the ‘healing sex’ community (which was gaining a lot of momentum and growing into a sizable industry). This was a leap of thinking that I just couldn’t sign up for.
So I did the thing my dad had taught me to do when I wasn’t sure – just sit still and wait, be patient. Just wait. I shut down the website, stopped the radio show and writing e-zine features, and didn’t offer anymore workshops. Without a sense of purpose, I couldn’t fake it. With feelings of failure roaming around inside, I went back to consulting full force.
Confined to sex, we pressed against
The limits of the sea:
I saw there were no oceans left
For scavengers like me.
I made it to the forward deck
I blessed our remnant fleet –
And then consented to be wrecked,
A Thousand Kisses Deep.
I’m turning tricks, I’m getting fixed,
I’m back on Boogie Street.
I guess they won’t exchange the gifts
That you were meant to keep.
And quiet is the thought of you
The file on you complete,
Except what we forgot to do,
A Thousand Kisses Deep.
[Leonard Cohen, 10 New Songs]
1/4: The Birth of YES
There is a question that has captured me about Eros. Perhaps it’s been there my whole life, waiting. I equate its birth with a lunar eclipse and a workshop for women on how to ejaculate that happened about nine years ago. I know when I write about the ejaculation workshop some sort of chemical/physical sexual response will rise within you. It does for me too. I almost want to fake the story, to write the “beginning” differently. But this is the way it is … sex is the beginning of Recreating Eros but it is just the beginning and somehow to follow the thread of the question I want to pursue we – as a culture – need to go beyond the beginning, without losing it.
I wasn’t always so sure of this … that the question of Eros I’m interested in is about more than sex.
Nine years ago when those two events happened I definitely thought a revolution in Eros was all about better sexual relationships – with ourselves and with our sexual partner(s).
One cold, snowy night in January 2000 I sat for hours on a swing under an enormous old Oak tree watching a lunar eclipse for the first time. Something in that process brought forth an inner image of something more that was possible – could I sound more vague?! It had to do with love and wholeness and growth. It was felt-sense, something I "saw" with my heart and my gut - not a logical vision. Strangely though, the vision was clear.
I had no idea what had happened, only that I felt inspired, alive and suddenly certain, at a very uncertain time in my life that I needed to pursue this felt-sense. That pursuing it was perhaps the most important thing for me to do. I had no idea what this meant, practically speaking, in my every day life of work, children to raise, laundry, dishes … a marriage that I had been trying to salvage for some years with no success.
Five months of pain and ripping apart later, and paradoxically with a new sense of erotic tension flowing through me, a friend suggested I attend a cool new workshop for women in which another woman would teach us, through instruction and live demonstration, how to find our g-spot. I signed up … nervous and apprehensive.
I emerged filled with excitement and eagerness to go home, pull out the hand mirror and practice. There was something else that emerged within me out of that session that surprised me more than what I had learned about my own body: a sort of activist voice. I say ‘sort of’ because I had never felt this kind of passionate anger in this way. It was an entirely new experience for me and I really wasn’t sure how to respond to it.
I tried to describe it to my girlfriends …
“Why don’t we know these things about our bodies? I came from a family who spoke openly and positively about sex and our body, which is pretty unusual, and I still didn’t know this stuff about the anatomy of my vagina. Hell, when I told my gynecologist about the workshop, he didn’t seem to know about the g-spot either! Why does speaking about our clitoral organ feel like either dirty porn or a cold, clinical analysis? Something’s wrong here!”
Friends invited more friends into the discussion. Soon I was hosting workshops which we called Reclaiming Venus. In my living room, art centers, holistic health centers, and remote country church parlors I was talking to women about their relationship with their sexuality … their vagina, their sexual feelings and beliefs, the seasonal fluctuations of hormones that run through them. Reclaiming Venus became a call for recrafting YES: Your Erotic Story.
After hundreds of YES conversations with women through workshops, a Reclaiming Venus website and a local radio show, I was sure I'd tapped into the expression of the passion stirring in me and found the way to express it.
"I wanted a perfect ending. But now I've learned the hard way that Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next."
~ Gilda Radner
I wasn’t always so sure of this … that the question of Eros I’m interested in is about more than sex.
Nine years ago when those two events happened I definitely thought a revolution in Eros was all about better sexual relationships – with ourselves and with our sexual partner(s).
One cold, snowy night in January 2000 I sat for hours on a swing under an enormous old Oak tree watching a lunar eclipse for the first time. Something in that process brought forth an inner image of something more that was possible – could I sound more vague?! It had to do with love and wholeness and growth. It was felt-sense, something I "saw" with my heart and my gut - not a logical vision. Strangely though, the vision was clear.
I had no idea what had happened, only that I felt inspired, alive and suddenly certain, at a very uncertain time in my life that I needed to pursue this felt-sense. That pursuing it was perhaps the most important thing for me to do. I had no idea what this meant, practically speaking, in my every day life of work, children to raise, laundry, dishes … a marriage that I had been trying to salvage for some years with no success.
Five months of pain and ripping apart later, and paradoxically with a new sense of erotic tension flowing through me, a friend suggested I attend a cool new workshop for women in which another woman would teach us, through instruction and live demonstration, how to find our g-spot. I signed up … nervous and apprehensive.
I emerged filled with excitement and eagerness to go home, pull out the hand mirror and practice. There was something else that emerged within me out of that session that surprised me more than what I had learned about my own body: a sort of activist voice. I say ‘sort of’ because I had never felt this kind of passionate anger in this way. It was an entirely new experience for me and I really wasn’t sure how to respond to it.
I tried to describe it to my girlfriends …
“Why don’t we know these things about our bodies? I came from a family who spoke openly and positively about sex and our body, which is pretty unusual, and I still didn’t know this stuff about the anatomy of my vagina. Hell, when I told my gynecologist about the workshop, he didn’t seem to know about the g-spot either! Why does speaking about our clitoral organ feel like either dirty porn or a cold, clinical analysis? Something’s wrong here!”
Friends invited more friends into the discussion. Soon I was hosting workshops which we called Reclaiming Venus. In my living room, art centers, holistic health centers, and remote country church parlors I was talking to women about their relationship with their sexuality … their vagina, their sexual feelings and beliefs, the seasonal fluctuations of hormones that run through them. Reclaiming Venus became a call for recrafting YES: Your Erotic Story.
After hundreds of YES conversations with women through workshops, a Reclaiming Venus website and a local radio show, I was sure I'd tapped into the expression of the passion stirring in me and found the way to express it.
"I wanted a perfect ending. But now I've learned the hard way that Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next."
~ Gilda Radner
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