Your Sexual Template-Part of the series of “Living Beautifully In Your Body”
Let’s talk about sex, you and me, yes? I love to boast that it’s impossible to shock me, having worked in a women’s prison and on psychiatric units, and just from listening to countless women tell me their secrets for 25 years. I absolutely love being honored with these stories and I really love it when we get to go deep. I know that one of the biggest gifts I bring to the table is my ability to bring love and acceptance and a heart that does not judge when somebody wants to venture into these waters. It goes beyond my professional resume.. the truth is I am extremely comfortable in places that others may feel squeamish.
In our crazy society, where despite all of the voyeurism and tell-all tabloids, there is the other polarity of the old puritan ethic alive and well. And so our sexual histories and all of the richness that lives there, that impacts us so very deeply, doesn’t always get its due. And that really is too bad, because if you can take the judgment out and look at what’s there, there is so much life in our experiences.
This is what I was thinking about at the end of Sunday-morning yoga class, when we were “supposed” to be thinking about nothing.. in the “gap” between thoughts. I was here instead as this idea bubbled up and wanted to become a blogpost.
So who helped you create your sexual template? You have a sexual self. You have preferences, and fantasies and desires that probably tend to repeat. Themes that show up as part of your sexuality, as individual as your fingerprints. That’s what I’m talking about.. your sexual template. Something you cocreated with the lovers of your past and present.
My closest friend and I, whom I’ve known since preschool and daycamp, talk about sex a fair amount together. God bless those friends who we can tell anything to, seriously. And we’ve been talking a lot about how our sexual identities were formed, the lovers we had early on that absolutely shaped our sexuality.
Think about your first lover, the very first one… what have you kept from that experience? How do you remember it? It’s like when you’re interpreting your dreams… the details aren’t quite as important as how you felt about it all. Whether you felt more or less powerful.. more or less beautiful.. what were the parts that lit you up and thrilled you.. if any. What about if it wasn’t so good… where has the shame or fear or disappointment hung on?
What about the next one? For me, the first time had certain meaning but it was my next lover that I experimented with who really breathed life into my sexual being. My memories of us are vivid.. every sense of mine holds details of that time, that summer. I can hear the music that was playing (the Marvin Gaye/Diana Ross duets, in case you’re curious), the sultry evenings in Harvard Square. The joy of being so young, feeling wild and powerful in brand new ways. It was heady stuff, and even in the remembering in present-time, my entire neural network lights up. I remember his gorgeous face and the whole sexual haze of it all. All of it against the backdrop of my father being terminally ill, and how much I wanted to escape that truth. And it’s oh so clear to me that this particular sexual chemistry and my time with him created my unique sexual template. I can see how those tracks got laid down and became part of what I consider my sexual self.
Sorting through your sexual past and how it’s impacting you now is something that is worth doing. I have a client that I currently see who has been seeing the power of this…looking at the experiences that thrilled her and the ones that shamed her has lightened her sense of herself in amazing ways.
And make no mistake, sexual experiences and how you interpreted and internalized them have a lot to do with how you feel in your body. They have soo much to do with whether you are comfortable being seen, or whether you need to hide behind extra weight or distract yourself with disordered eating. But only always. And if your sexual template was created in pain, shame, guilt or fear, bringing it into the light with somebody who loves you and whom you can trust is an amazing beautiful gift you can have.
Your sexuality holds so much of your lifeforce energy… don’t compromise it. If there is weight there, pain there, shame there, set yourself free with some good solid therapy. And if you are blessed enough to have had the lovers you needed and that you deserved, send them love, blessings in the night from your heart, for helping you create something that you carried through your world.
When I hear Marvin and Diana harmonizing in those old songs from my wildhearted days, I can absolutely smell the Casablanca (Upstairs) bar, the food cooking in the African restaurant down the way, all of it. And although I am much older now, those moments in time, and so many others, gave me great joy and confidence that I am truly grateful for. Blowing kisses to the winds…with thanks for all of it.
With love from my wild heart to yours...
Lisa
Ande Lyons says
Lisa! What a beautifully written piece pouring from your heart with the purrrfect message for all – thank you! Thank you for peeling back the layers that keep us from truly surrendering to our oh so sensual sexy selves. Deepening intimacy with our beloved Selves and our Beloved Partners creates a much deeper intimacy with our lives. As David Deida says, “Surrender is the doorway to the deepest possible sex.” I would add ‘to the deepest possible relationship with our Selves.’ I appreciate your awareness of what keeps us from truly loving and knowing our Selves – thank you for sharing your gifts with the world Luscious Lisa! With love and deep appreciation, @AndeLyons
admin says
Hi Ande! That’s high praise from the Queen of Desire , thank you. Our sexual selves as you know hold so much that relates to the magnificent life force that wants to run through us… our creation energies, our Divine Feminine selves that we can claim and revel in at any moment. Our sexual selves hold so many pieces of our nature… setting it free with a little bit of inquiry and attention is always good. Love your work and you.
From my heart to yours,
Lisa
Jason says
I was both deeply inspired and deeply hurt by this article.
I am inspired by the fact that there are individuals like Lisa who are both enlightened and courageous enough to explore sexuality so insightfully and candidly in a world that has for thousands of years conspired to suppress not only sexuality, but female sexuality in particular.
Yet I am hurt by how this article has poignantly reminded me of how my own sexuality as a man was shaped by nothing but pain, abuse and betrayal – first at the hands of a religious minister, and then at the hands of my two and only lovers who both secretly despised men and saw me as a trusting and innocent soul from which they could leech life force and act out their desires for fantasy and vengeance.
While my self-image is modest at best, both my lovers imagined that I would be similar to how Lisa described her second lover. They described me as an “ideal” man – fit, muscular, strong and chiseled facial features, and yet also intuitive, intelligent, sensitive, and expressive; in many ways breaking the archetypal heterosexual stereotype. Yet because of my deep sexual wounds from childhood, I was not whole from the inside out, and was therefore not able to cash the sexual cheques that their imaginations were writing. I also lack the “bad boy” sexual aggressiveness and machismo, which resulted in me being rejected and discarded.
Lisa is absolutely correct when she speaks about the importance of sorting through your sexual past and how it’s impacting you now. Yet I would take this point further…it is also important to consider how your present actions can deeply impact the sexual identity of another person. A relationship of any kind involves not just one person, but two. Moreover, how you treat another human being sexually could mirror how you see yourself, and the resulting sexual experience tends to both reinforce and shape that inward image – much like a morphing, self-fulfilling prophecy. Although I have reservations and misgivings about Neale Donald Walsch’s work, I rather like his description of SEX as being a “Synergistic Energy eXchange”.
A very important point that I feel needs to be made is that spirituality and sex go hand-in-hand. If your spiritual self-image has been wounded in some way, so too will your sexuality, and visa-versa. I don’t believe that it is a coincidence that experiences of religious suppression tend to be concomitant with some form of sexual abuse. For that reason, any trips that you plan on taking down amnesia lane into your past should include a pit stop to that first church, mosque, temple or secret garden where you first contemplated the meaning of your existence and how you got here. What you believe about the after-life, your past lives, the life-between-lives and your spiritual identity are most certainly going to impact your sexuality. That is, of course, if you see sex as more than just physical copulation between two bodies.
The subject of sexuality and healing sexual wounds needs to be taken to a whole new level. For starters, the different layers of sexuality need to be recognized: the physical senses. The carnal drives. The paradoxical intermingling of intimacy, vulnerability and reckless passion. The soul’s maturity, evolution and desire versus the biological programming of the body it occupies.
I know from my experience, research and contemplation that sexual attraction is NOT a choice; at least not on a biological level, and probably not on a spiritual level either. There is a lot that goes on in our bodies and our subconscious minds that we are not consciously aware of. We do have the ability to consciously choose whether or not to act out a sexual desire with another person, and the decisions we make can influence not just what we see as our identity in the current life, but in how others see their identities.
If we make a conscious choice that is in complete harmony with our innate drives and pulls, we are no longer wasting energy by fighting against ourselves, and as Lisa pointed out – to be at war with yourself sexually will burn up a lot of energy indeed. Yet sometimes we are forced to go against what our immediate physical drives are telling us to do in order to achieve some lofty ideal, higher purpose or simply our soul’s deep agendas which transcend the physical bodies that we are in. Religion takes a dogmatic and extremist viewpoint by asserting that you can only achieve your soul’s desire for spiritual awakening by repressing your sexuality, and in my view – that type of extremist one-size-fits-all thinking is very harmful.
Since this is mostly a woman’s forum, let me share what I have learned through my life experiences and sexual abuse. What makes a woman feel that gut level attraction for a man is a drive that operates according to it’s own rules, regardless of what society or religion preaches, or even what the woman herself “consciously” chooses.
Even if that guy from school or from the office acts like a complete jerk – you are still attracted to him for reasons you cannot understand. Conversely, the well-mannered, well-dressed, “nice guy” with a nice car, great career that buys you flowers, opens the door for you and hangs on your every word is absolutely guaranteed to kill any feelings of sexual attraction that you experience for him.
Ask most women what they want in a man, and depending on how much society has thoroughly suppressed their sexual natures, they may give you a whole bunch of “logical” answers based on what their churches, parents, peers and logical brains tell them is the “correct”. Yet have a close look at the guys that they end up dating or feeling deeply attracted to – they are usually the exact opposite. Simply put, “nice” guys are NOT attractive, and there are biological reasons for that. Nice guys simply don’t survive in this world, and men who (like me) are soft, gentle, intuitive, introvert intellectuals are not only going to perpetually struggle with sexuality and with relationships with women, but they also tend to be targeted by sexual deviants, usually of the religious kind.
I don’t mean to suggest that this applies in all cases, 100% of the time. It all depends on whether a person is acting according to their primal urges and desires, or according too their soul. In cases where the soul is young and still desires to experience the sensual pleasures of this world, there will be complete harmony between their inner selves and outer actions. Examples of this could include Tantric dancers in India who celebrate their sexuality. In cases where a soul has been damaged by living on Earth, the inner biological drives and desires of their soul may be in complete conflict with one another, resulting in a person who lives a life feeling like they are prisoners in their own bodies.
I am glad that Lisa is comfortable in places that make others squeamish, because that is precisely what is needed – to walk across sexual ground that others dare not tread. That means looking at all of the layers of what makes humans human. It will mean exploring spirituality. It will also mean breaking down the perceived divisions that occur between “male” and “female”, and getting to a point where the men and women stop trying to control, subvert, discriminate against, gain superiority over or marginalize the other, because while our bodies and brains may be different, our souls come from the same place. It also means asking deeper questions such as “What does my SOUL want to experience?”. Only YOU can be awakened to that truth. In fact, your soul could want something that is completely different from what your body wants, and your sexual fantasies and inner conflicts may hold important clues to that. As you peel back the layers, you may begin to ask questions such as “how can my bring my soul’s desire into alignment with my physical self?”
Every sexual encounter is an immensely powerful encounter, and within each one of those encounters, you must balance the needs of your body, your mind and your soul’s deepest desires, and bring that into alignment with universal and spiritual laws. Also, you must do so in harmony with another soul that co-creates the sexual experience with you. If you act in a way that goes against universal laws or hurts another person in some way, you will find that acting in harmony with your body ultimately brings you suffering on another level, in which case you may have to suffer short term by exerting self-control or “suppression” of your physical desires in order to experience a deeper freedom and fulfillment which far surpasses the physical sensations of sexual pleasure. When you achieve that, you may find that you either move beyond physical sex because you have found something so much more fulfilling, or alternatively, you find a hidden dimension to sex that you never thought existed – the alignment of sexual desire, soul desire and spiritual harmony and love between two souls. That will produce the best sex you could ever hope to have.
Life is full of paradoxes and apparent contradictions. On one hand, conflict about sex produces profound suffering and energy wastage. Yet on the other, resisting something of value short term in favour of something of greater value long term produces character, and the deeper and more evolved your character, the deeper and more profound will be your human – and indeed sexual – experiences. The key is then knowing yourself, knowing your soul, and knowing how to use conflict as a tool to bring about greater harmony and intensity of expression and pleasure. When you achieve this, you will automatically become more aware of others and their needs – and you will automatically act in a harmonious way that does not harm them. After all, they are another form of you.
Jason
Lisa says
Hi Jason.. thank you for your deeply thoughtful and vulnerable response.I am sorry for the abuse you’ve experienced but moved by the amount of thought and reflection you’ve put into your views on sexuality.. yours and the topic overall. And.. it’s always great to have a male perspective around here. Many blessings.. Lisa