It is said that our greatest pain must come from those who love us the  most – precisely because of the love, not from any lack. If we can learn from this, then perhaps intimacy is our most powerful teacher and worthy of the suffering it engenders. In this way, our deepest shame comes from that which may lift us to the greatest heights: our sexual nature.

Sex is a most Divine gift and yet we have been taught over and over, in culture after culture, age after age, that it is also our greatest sin. We fear sex. We become addicted to it. We sell it, we lie for it. We inflict it as an attack upon those who do not want it at all.

We withhold sex as punishment from those we once seduced. We hunger for it when it is absent. We tire of it when it is present too much, or too easily. We use it at times to lie, to betray, to insult and to condemn. At other times it becomes the most heart-breakingly pure expression of love the body can bear, and we are astonished; we are One with pleasure; we sip a tiny taste of liquid god.

We remember moments of sexual memory that are as fragrant after ten years as a rose picked yesterday. And yet we also manage to forget so many profound and truthful moments after the fact, after all the surrender is done. We come to our sexual energy as children, and yet it is hidden from us and denied. We insist it is dangerous and only for adults, and yet adults know nothing, and in their sexuality, behave like children their whole lives long.

We fabricate it and by so doing, fornicate with it, because we make it a prostitute, when it was intended to be our graceful, blissful lover. We hold it up in awe, and we revile it with nine tongued whips upon our backs. We deny it to ourselves as the darkest sin, and then we are expected to be ready to give it as the ultimate act of love.

We whisper about it from behind cloaks of murderous shame, and then we grieve the ignorance of our children when it is their turn to love. We judge others for it and then sentence them to banishment, torture or bizarre deaths, because deep, deep within us, we judge ourselves with such a merciless eye that it is too painful to look, and so we content ourselves by building doctrine that tells us to cover ourselves, to run from the garden and be ashamed of the natural joy that so desperately yearns to be expressed and welcomed home.

We want to be without thought like other animals, to step away from the control of daily life and tumble together like dry grass in a wind. We want to forget all wrongs and know that this holy exchange of scent, skin, eyes and heart is a blessing, a heavenly blessing, and so should we not do everything in our power to give it a joyful, proud, respectful place in our lives?

Should we not be more concerned about the practice of organized killing that is such a large part of the human world, and less troubled about images and tattletales about two people making love? Should we not recognize that our dark sexual experiences are the result of dark sexual beliefs, and not the other way around?

Should we not consider that our sexual natures offer a significant clue leading to the great truths of our hearts and that without full body, full mind and full spirit loving, we are denying chance after chance to uncover more wisdom than we had ever thought?

Like any appetite, sex calls us to fulfill a hunger for a reason, to feed us, to nourish us, to help us grow. And as we come to know the exchange of energy that burns within us when we are open to fully connect, then we see, we finally see that we are nothing but this energy and we can shape it, build it, sustain it, and offer it utterly to goddess and god.

And this, to tell you the truth, is the reason we have sexual impulses at all. The reason for yin and yang, x and y, socket and plug. We are meant to join because we do, in a profound way, complete one another in our union. Not because we are broken when apart, but because together we are given the chance to come face to face with ourselves over and over again. Understanding because we attract. Learning because we repel.

And oh the coming and going, the in and out, the back and forth. Oh how the motions of it all hold us entranced as we love and lose, and love and leave, and then long for love again. We are unhappy in withdrawal and then unhappy in deep embrace. We blame our pain on the other, and then we thrust and parry some more. But we cannot stop. We do not stop, unless the fear overcomes us and then we bury, we crush, we anesthetize, and miss what could have given us life until our last breath.

To love our sexual essence is to love our most profound creative gift, our deepest vulnerability, and claim our greatest joy on Earth.

Isn’t it perfect? Isn’t it time?

much love, Adi