The Perfect Conduit

I’ve spent much of my life being unconventional in my approach to healing work. For years I have included sexual energy as part of the healing process. That’s unconventional enough for most people, but I have also experimented with another area that feels even edgier to me.

When I first started doing sexual healing work, I kept a clear distinction between me, the “healer”, the one who was holding the space, and the “heal-ee”, the one who was receiving the healing. But as I worked more intensively with people, it became harder to maintain those boundaries.

I have done lots of long sessions – being together all day, or several days in a row. I have even camped in the desert for a week with a client. With that amount of exposure, the artificiality of the “healer/healee” relationship begins to dissolve.

At first when this would happen I was horrified. I wasn’t supposed to let my own issues be activated! I wasn’t supposed to cry, or feel uncertain or vulnerable. But it was like trying to stop a river. If it were there, it would flow.

Surprisingly enough, I found over and over that the more authentic I was, the more the client received. I tell the story of one of those times in my book, Tales of a Sacred Prostitute. As I allowed myself to be vulnerable, I allowed my client to be strong, to not be identified as the weak one. To be a man, and to learn how to hold space for a woman.

This issue recently surfaced again. I stopped to see a client at the end of a long trying trip. I was tired and barely recovering from a massive psychic attack received earlier that week. I arrived at his house worn out; bare bones.

Meanwhile, he had built up an expectation that our time together would be ecstatic, that I would show him a glimpse of enlightenment. (No pressure!)

In our last time together, we had begun to work with how his energy could feel invasive to a woman. I had started teaching him about how to husband his energy, to use it to attract a woman rather than invade her.

As we got together again, he told me about a workshop that he had just attended. To make a point about how women and men experience the world differently, the leaders had asked how many woman had considered their personal safety in the last week – parked under a light, didn’t go down an alley, etc. All the women raised their hands. Then they asked the men. None of them raised their hands. My client was having trouble understanding this and found it hard to believe.

As the day wore on, between brief glimpses of enlightenment, issues began surfacing in me about safety. On many occasions, I felt invaded by him. I don’t think this had anything to do with him; it was the issues I was carrying before I got there.

So here’s where it gets sticky. Am I wrong for having my issues? Did I serve him by those issues arising? Since the things that I was feeling are very common feelings in many women, perhaps I was acting as a conduit for that particular energy – a woman feeling unsafe and invaded. Perhaps I was giving him the experience that he needed in order to learn to be with a woman in an intimate relationship, to learn how to be in order to build trust.

I often expect myself to be the perfect channel, a portal to enlightenment. There are times, moments usually, when I can be that. But then there I am, a messy human being like any other, doing the best that I can.

When I begin a session, I always ask that I be used by Spirit for service to the highest good. I try to surrender as much as possible, and let my personal self get out of the way. But what if Spirit is using my personal self, my personal issues, as part of the teaching or healing for that person? Can I surrender enough to let whatever happens just be there in the space?

What if the other person doesn’t like it? What if he had an expectation of something that didn’t get met? It’s easy to doubt myself at that time. But the words to a song keep coming through:

“You can’t always get what you want . . . But if you try sometime, you just might find,
You get what you need.”

Star power

A few weeks back, we set up our Scarlet Sanctuary at an event and opened the door. The idea of the Scarlet Sanctuary, the way we do it, is simple - we provide loving, compassionate, non threatening sensual touch to anyone that wants to experience it. Everyone, regardless of race or age or size or style, is greeted with Qadishti Eyes of acceptance and that Heinlein sense of "Thou Art God/dess". They are brought inside and intimately led to receive.

(Receiving, we discovered, is very hard for some people. For lots of people. Just to lay there and allow yourself to just be, just receive erotic touch, and not feel like you are supposed to do anything).

As it happened, "Everyone, regardless of..." was tested for me personally at this event, as I found myself working on a 'Star'. Now, I do not mean TV Star or a Hollywood Star (although she may be in movies). But in this case, she is a star of the erotic circles. Would you have heard of her? Well, if you run in my circles, then yes, but the fact that I knew who she was, and she was one of the first people I ever saw lecture, was threatening to throw me off balance. Both my own sense of awe at working with her and my own ego (look who I am working on) were observed as possibly causing this to be less than sacred.

Until we got started. Once we got started, it was no longer about her as The Star, nor was it about Me the Qadesh Working with the Star, it was just two people. It just a receiver and a giver. She simply was another human, another person, full of sensual love. I was just a giver, allowing my ego to sleep while I ministered to another of the beutiful beings that inhabit the world.

Beyond that, her response and mine, become a matter like many other sessions, but one too private feeling to post here.

The important thing I took away from this experience is not that everyone is just another person. But instead, something that I was told at the very first sacred sexuality event I ever went to was brought to mind - "Everyone is a star"

Learning Opportunities

The previous few months had been, in a word, challenging. The kink event we’d attended in February ushered in an unprecedented period of transition in my relationships. My mate and I had weathered storms I’d never anticipated, and our girlfriend was experiencing a blossoming that, though beautiful to see, had her fairly involved elsewhere. As we prepared to attend another large kink event, I found myself nervous and unsure of myself. So many situations were still unresolved, so much still hung in the balance, and I was terrified that something I might do, or not do, would tip the scales one way or another. I found the sense of uncertainty overwhelming.

I'd planned to spend Saturday night primarily in the Scarlet Sanctuary (yeah. hiding...and yeah, I know...I'd been hearing "Mother Abbess" from The Sound of Music reminding Maria that "These walls aren't here to hide behind, you have to go face your problems" all week in the back of my head). But sacred touch is something I *know* I can do, a place where I fit (and focusing on loving other people is a really good way to get my mind off myself). My mate and I started off the evening by watching our girlfriend and her new girlfriend scene with their mutual crush, a woman who really knows how to work with energy. Then he walked me to the Scarlet Sanctuary, kissed me, and promised he’d come back for me later. I walked into the “intake area”, and waited until one of the folks running things emerged from the Sanctuary space (not wanting to interrupt the flow of anything going on by just walking in), and let her know I was ready to get started. And immediately found myself in the "aftercare" area, being asked to help someone ground who'd had an emotional reaction to the sacred touch and needed holding. I recognized the lady - she'd been in a class earlier that the four of us (myself, my mate, our girlfriend and her girlfriend) had attended - a class on "releasing control", that turned out to be an extremely good "how to do relationships honestly and openly" kind of class. And I remember this lady talking about polyamory, and that she was having a hard time dealing with the transition in her relationship...and here she was, sobbing in my arms, admitting all the fears that I'd been dancing around with my mate the past few months, and facing something *this* weekend that I was facing (on a slightly different scale) *the following* weekend...needing my help to deal with the very things that had me hiding in the Scarlet Sanctuary in the first place.

Sneaky bitch, that Goddess of mine. *sheepish look* Kind of a dirty trick, but OH I got the message loud and clear.

I forget sometimes that I'm not the only one who gets scared. But I've been given tools to deal with it, and after all this time and all the BAD and all the pain, I've been blessed with wonderful partners who work with me and help me through it, and with all that blessing, I need to share what I know. What I've learned. "Tricks of the trade" of poly relating, so to speak, I guess. And, if I was going to hide out in the Scarlet Sanctuary to get my mind off myself, Mom wasn't going to let me get away with it without making me face my own demons, and helping someone else through the fire (thus helping myself). So I did. And continued - we exchanged e-mail and blog addresses before she left that night. And we've been talking. And it's been helping - both her ('cause she told me so) AND me. In my case, working with her got me out of myself and helped me remember the GOOD stuff, instead of focusing on the fears. Which is what I needed most of all, I think. Not that I still don't have fears – even though my mate and I walked through that particular fire and came through tempered and stronger than ever. But I know my mate loves me, and we're solid, and as I made it through this challenging period, we’ll make it through others when they come along. And as I've been the shoulder for someone who's been hurting, I know I have a host of shoulders to lean on when I need it.

So "What have you learned, Dorothy?"

You may try to run away from your problems, but you never really leave your “own backyard” behind. And apparently, when it comes to deity, my mate isn’t the only one who dances with tricksters. :) Mine are just a little less obvious (but a lot less subtle when they wanna be).