Post six of seven, in section Hard Truths
Sexuality and power are some of the most complex and difficult parts of your experience to unlock and bring to life in a wholesome, connected way.
As a human animal so much of your safety, self-worth and social standing are wrapped up in power and sexuality. It is also where your life force comes from – one of your deepest connections to the Universe comes through a connection to eros.
Sexuality and power are also some of the places people are most primitive and wild, where rational brains stop being in control and bodies and intuitions have stronger impulses.
Most spirituality has dealt with all this by shutting the door to the exploration of power and sexuality entirely and putting strict rules around what can and can’t be done (mostly engage with these things as little as possible).
In a historical context this makes sense; when society was more violent, less equal and less safe a lot of the expression of these things was harmful to people and it would have been a lot cleaner and simpler to have these clear boundaries to try and encourage better behaviour in people.
It is easy to ignore how far we have come or how deep the collective trauma can be in relation to these topics. It is quite hard to digest the enormity of how bad this was, even in fairly recent history. It’s not easy to look at, but it’s important to understand the depth of the energies we are working with when looking at things like power and sexuality.
Just to touch on the seriousness of this matter, here is an extract from an article on the British Slave trade:
‘Thomas Thistlewood, an ordinary, bookish young Englishman who came to Jamaica in 1750 to seek his fortune, left a matter-of-fact diary of his three and a half decades as a rural overseer and small-time slaveowner. He considered slaves to be rational human beings and treated them as individuals.
[…]
In his diary are recorded 3,852 acts of rape or other forced intercourse with almost 150 enslaved women. Other than in the thoroughness of his record-keeping, he seems to have been entirely typical—if anything, relatively restrained—in his behavior.’
Rape, violence and dominance appears to have been a pretty common part of life basically whenever anyone could get away with it until relatively recently.
Modern society, although a huge improvement, is far from safe. It is not often talked about openly in conversation, but I’ve never met a woman who has told me she has never been sexually assaulted in some way.
Sexual assault statistics are notoriously difficult to get a good representation of. It is one of the most under-reported crimes and there are always questions around ‘what counts’. Some (relatively conservative) stats suggest that 1 in 6 American women will experience rape or attempted rape in their lifetime. There can be very little support for people reporting or recovering from these crimes. (Here is a UN article on violence against women).
It is also my experience that when men get a safe space to share, which is perhaps less common for them, many of them will share experiences of having been sexually assaulted.
One of the biggest issues around this is that shame is a strange part of experience. Rather than responsibility being given to the perpetrator of a crime, shame is attached to the person with the least amount of power in a situation.
In the example above, where the power is so clearly split, Thomas Thistlewood clearly feels no responsibility for the damage he is causing but I can imagine with no doubts that the women he abused would have felt dirty and ashamed.
The power dynamics are more equal and subtle these days, but they are still far from removed. The Me Too campaign revealed so clearly how power plays a huge part in sexual assault and oppression of the victims’ voices.
This is one of the reasons why sexual abuse is so sticky and in certain ways more traumatic than physical violence – shame gets loaded onto the victim and they believe on some conscious or subconscious level that there is something wrong with them.
In order to be able to heal from trauma, the traumatised parts needs to receive compassionate love either from yourself or someone else. When a person feels shame they are unable to open the traumatised parts of themselves to receive this healing compassionate love, because they believe they are fundamentally bad. So the trauma remains unhealed.
The unhealed trauma can have wide and deep impacts on every second of someone’s life, and can ultimately destroy any chance of happiness, peace or sense of safety in life for someone.
The societal shame and contraction around these issues also stops people talking about them and that ripples out, causing the continued allowing of these behaviours to go on out of sight.
It’s worth noting that a large proportion of sexual assault perpetrators were victims themselves. Cycles of abuse are often repeating.
But this also isn’t just a black and white thing of victims and perpetrators. The whole of society and everybody’s experience is affected by the ways in which people are contracted around these issues.
In a less serious capacity, almost everyone carries at least some small traumas around this from ways they have been treated, rejections they’ve faced or expectations they’ve had placed on them by society around sexuality.
On a day-to-day level it can easily cause people to close down their fullest expression and deepest longings.
Evolutionary Forces
Underneath your conscious experience is a web of personal and transpersonal structures that shape your experience of reality. The ones related to power and sexuality are some of the deepest parts of people.
It’s worth recognising that on a deep bodily level eros, power and sexual energies are very intimately tied together. One aspect of our evolutionary history is: it’s been the most powerful beings that have been able to express their erotic creative life-force through sexual reproduction.
Modern humans have much more flexibility and range of the different ways that these things – eros, life-force, power and sexuality – can be expressed. But the underlying intimate connection between these things remains.
Generally, it feels good to be empowered, to feel sexy and to be creative in the world.
It can feel so good that it creates an addictive or greed response. Or it can be so scary that it creates an aversive or fear response.
Underlying Energy
For a moment let’s take away the idea of sexual acts and just focus on the underlying energies of eros, power and sexuality; these are also some of the places most likely to include serious distortions, trauma or ignorance, because it is so messy on a societal or collective level. There is often a tangled mess of fear or greed around these topics at every possible level.
Even when people have been very physically safe, things like social pressure or bullying, and sexual or romantic rejection can make a huge impression on someone’s being and be some of the most formative experiences of their life.
The threat of bullying or rejection makes it immensely risky to be your authentic self and express your true desires. So rather than show up in an open way, people play power games to try and build a wall that keeps them safe.
‘At core, men are afraid women will laugh at them, while at core, women are afraid men will kill them.’
This quote hits on something deep in the powers that men and women have available to them and the thing that is most risky for them.
Women tend to have less physical safety but more emotional safety; men tend to have more physical safety but less emotional safety.
From working closely with both men and women both are unaware of the depths of the insecurity that the other is walking around in every single day and the way that it impacts their behaviour. Some are so used to living in their version of this, that they are unaware of how much it impacts themselves.
The Collective Unconscious
When I opened my experience to the archetypal realm and transpersonal subconscious part of collective experience, I was overwhelmed with the endless layers of the tangled mess that is human desire, power, sexuality and creative life force.
As I waded through the confusion, reintegrating parts of experience piece by piece, I could see how these themes were playing out at so many different levels through society.
In the darkest sense, it was the power games that shape some of the most oppressive ways of being. In a day-to-day sense, these subconscious transpersonal structures affected things like how men and women are treated differently in society, how people relate to their own worth and ultimately, how everyone is afraid of opening up because they don’t want to be rejected, get hurt or to hurt other people.
Through imaginal practice I was given a way of exploring these topics that was physically safe for me, but that allowed the darkest corners of the human psyche and emotional landscape to reveal themselves to me and clarify or purify to the core underlying energies.
Before embarking on this I had had a lot of experience of opening to shadow parts of myself. I had experienced the transformational impact of this in relation to a full spectrum of personal content and seen this process happen in other people.
When people have unleashed and subsequently reintegrated a shadow side of themselves, you can see the change in them physically and emotionally. They have released the contraction they have around the energy and allowed it to come back into a free-flowing natural expression of its underlying nature. Afterwards their eyes are brighter, they walk taller, they speak more clearly. They are able to access the underlying energy without being entangled in the shadow energy that can constrict it.
This level of processing in relation to the collective unconscious has given me freedom from contraction around a huge range of thoughts, behaviours and emotions that most of humanity is typically subconsciously gripped by in all social situations.
More importantly it has given me the capacity to be able to talk about these things and to allow other people to open to them in my presence. To hold an energetic presence where people can be in their natural full expression, without having to inflate or deflate certain aspects of themselves.
Underlying Naturalness
If you have a shadow, not only are you unable to access this part of yourself, you are unable to allow other people to be in this part of themselves, too.
The shadow creates a strong greed or fear response; idolising certain aspects when there is an inflation and shaming other aspects when there is a deflation. Because of the non-dual nature of experience, people reject or idolise these parts in others as well as in themselves.
Whether someone is more likely to internalise or externalise their shadow affects how this shows up in their life.
The dynamics of how shadows replicate through relationships is a very deep way of understanding karma. Shadows and repression is an endless cycle that replicates through society and generations of people.
Liberation occurs when the shadows are freed up and the underlying energies can flow more freely and naturally.
When it comes to the energies of sex, eros and power, spirituality has largely dealt with this by shutting the door to them. Part of the collective shadow has been that historically, people did not have the capacity or encouragement to engage with liberating the depths of this aspect of experience.
Bringing it back into a full and free-flowing expression was too risky and unsafe.
My attitudes and experiences towards eros and the related energies were not created by philosophical, spiritual or religious ideas but by therapeutic practices.
I was heavily influenced by Jung’s approach to his own personal explorations and his approach to therapeutic practices.
Jung’s understanding of the archetypal realm was a radical way of understanding and approaching the human experience, that allowed him to tap into the fundamental goodness and sanity that underlies all experience. In order to understand and form these ideas, he himself spent 7 years navigating and opening to his own psychosis-like experiences, doing his own explorations of the archetypal realm and the transpersonal structures that shape experience.
One of the key aspects of being able to relate to this is that the soul or archetypal realm is not something that you can understand intellectually. It is not a part of experience that is created by your mind, it is beyond logical comprehension and comes out in the process of expression.
The archetypal or soul realm does not arise from thoughts that are created from the mind, it is created from underlying emotions, energies and resonances that echo through society and people’s beings beneath the surface of the conscious mind.
Non-Self
One of the ways in which I was able to open so thoroughly to the archetypal realm and the aspects of experience related to eros, power and sexuality was by experiencing it through a deep Buddhist realisation of the three characteristics – non-self, suffering and impermanence.
I recognised that the contents of experience didn’t say anything about me personally, that suffering was a fundamental part of experience and that things were not stuck – they had the capacity to change. I also recognised that by engaging with content in this way created a way out to liberation and freedom.
The Jungian approach was about engaging with the content deeply and seeing the deep underlying meaningfulness of all experience. The Buddhist approach was about creating a clear container for content to move through in a dispassionate and spacious way. By combining these approaches and holding space for the content in this way, it gave me deep insight into the nature of the archetypal and the soul realm.
In the same way that awareness is a shared experience that we are tapping into with our minds, the soul is a shared part of experience that we are tapping into with our intuitions. Our bodies are conduits for the shared Universal soul to express itself through.
By dismantling my personal boundaries and walls I was able to open to and allow the karma or the shared soul to express itself through me. There was no sense of identification with the content that was being expressed, which gave me a huge amount of freedom in allowing it.
By connecting to these underlying energies and allowing them to alchemise through my being, it meant that every aspect of being could be reintegrated in a wholesome way. Once a part is no longer repressed, it stops being a shadow and becomes a part that can be present in an open and spacious way.
One of the things that became clear through this process was that if it can be held with spaciousness and integrity then sexuality, eros and power are some of the keys for unlocking the deepest liberations and accessing the underlying naturalness of all experience.
It also has the power to transform how people relate to themselves and each other across every aspect of experience into a safer, more expressive, more empowered, more whole-hearted and more balanced way of being.
Spiritual Practice
Unless you are a monk or nun who lives on their own up a mountain, you are being impacted all the time by the way that you and society relates to the energies of sex, power and eros.
When people connect with anything – a person, a project, the world, themselves – they take their subconscious energies, desires and beliefs into every interaction.
How people relate to power and sexuality is close to the core of a person’s being and goes far beyond how they act during sex or explicit power struggles; it impacts every interaction they have.
People want to feel alive, empowered and creative, as much as they want to feel peaceful, good and at ease. I believe that a healthy society relies on people being able to access the full spectrum of their being and that spiritual practice should support this.
It’s still a tricky topic. Exploring physical sexual acts has been an aspect of tantric practices for hundreds of years and it’s my impression that these sorts of practices are becoming more common and accessible. Being able to work with the actual direct energies of sex through physical acts is one powerful way of approaching this that requires a level of safety and clarity to do well. It can be found in some spiritual organisations and conscious BDSM communities. Choose carefully.
I also believe that people feeling their own power through, for example, hard physical training, is another practice that many meditators would benefit from.
Exploring these energies through this very physical, embodied route, is one option for practitioners.
It can also be done in a more therapeutic way. Working with these parts on a conceptual or energetic level through healing modalities can free up contraction around the underlying energies. For example, you could do parts-work with the bits that are related to eros, sexuality or power.
The liberation here comes from creating a safe space to unpack, allow, explore and distill these parts of experience, to reduce the resistance you feel towards them and ultimately make more space to be able to connect with yourself, others and the world in a sincere and whole-hearted way.
Finally, the work can be done on a more subtle or implicit level. If people are welcomed into a full, empowered, expressive version of themselves that doesn’t require a power struggle or an existential threat to their life-force, they can start to naturally unfurl into a more full, whole-hearted and balanced version of themselves.
Like a plant being given the right amount of sunlight and water, being in a healthy environment allows humans to fall into a more natural expression of their being.
In order to really thrive, you would probably need to do at least some work on all these levels:
- The physical embodiment of power and sex
- The whole-hearted healing and welcoming of different parts
- The embrace of the full expression of your natural life-force
An Example of a Healthy Model
I really like Jaiya’s content on the erotic blueprint. She describes five sexual types. She helps people understand which one is their natural style and also how to create more freedom and satisfaction in their sexual life by understanding this model.
The types are Energetic, Sensual, Sexual, Kinky, and Shapeshifter.
It’s really powerful to understand this model when it comes to sex and sexuality, but I also see a deeper and more expansive application for it.
When you are connecting with anything – a project, an idea, yourself, a relationship, the world – you are bringing in preferences and ways in which you have learned to interact.
You will have a limited range of what ways of connecting feel possible to you, based on what feels safe and welcome to express.
Connecting with your natural preferences, expanding the range of what is possible for you and understanding the different ways in which people connect can open up a much wider possibility for the ways that it’s possible for connection to happen.
This can improve your sex life, but it also has the possibility to impact your way on being in a much broader way.
If, for example, you are able to unlock your energetic side, this could create a world of possibility for more intimate and subtle relating to anything in the world.
Or if you opened up your kinky side, you may feel more empowered to surrender more in life or take up your space in the world and be dominating in a way that is still safe and boundaried.
Conclusion
Connecting with the energies of power, sexuality and eros opens the door to a fundamentally deeper form of awakening. It includes some of the deepest parts of you and gives you access to experiencing the entirety of being human as a beautiful and joyful expression of eros and life force.
Somewhere between the human capacity to heal, connect and be a full creative expression; and the meditative skill of being able to slow down, accept things as they are and be present with this immediate moment lies a mysterious third thing that can be incredibly beautiful, magical and joyful, even in the face of deep challenge.
It’s a place where you are a healthy container for expressing a wide-range of underlying energies that gives you enough liberation to be able to explore yourself and the world around you in an open-hearted, open-minded, grounded and expressive way.
For this to be real and whole it’s important that people are willing and able to process their shadows, particularly around these topics. Distortions and ignorance around the themes of sex, power and eros are some of the most corrupting forces in the world. If people want to create a world where they can exist in some kind of harmony, feel safe and respected, and have enough space to become a full and satisfying expression of their life force, then people cannot ignore working with these themes.