I’m sure like everyone I had a variety of responses while reading this week’s materials: excitement, disbelief, curiosity, and not-good-enough because I’ll never achieve a rainbow body or any other sort of incredible death. Intellectually, it is invigorating to imagine that a technology for Jesus’s...
I was really struck this week by the idea that Eastern philosophy treats mind/body unity as an achievement, that it is not a given and requires disciplined practice. While I don’t agree with this in theory (it’s already one and therefore nothing needs to be...
This week we examined some very colorful, erotic, fully-embodied traditions more identified with the community and nature than most. Antoinette Santos Reyes spoke eloquently about her Philipina heritage and how she had experienced an “explosion of imagination” (I loved that!) when talking with elders about...
I had the great fortune once to witness a Hopi dance ceremony in person. The authenticity and reverence were awe-inspiring. I watched the noble carriage of the body, an erect posture rarely seen in white culture, proud but not arrogant. There was rhythm from the...
Watching the Gurdjieff movement videos, I found them fascinating and strange, and strangely disembodied. The staccato of the movements was a little off-putting. The body is being used to represent expanded consciousness or cosmic laws, so is symbolizing anything other than interoception. The body is...
In the three forms of Buddhism presented this week, both Mahayana and Theravada share a worldview that the body is more than just an impediment on the spiritual path, it is foul, polluted and disgusting. In Theravada, the goal is to root out and eliminate...
The philosophy and teachings of Kūkai are another tradition that has been identified as sex-positive, although it cannot be said that it was. Kūkai lived in the 9th Century and was a Japanese Buddhist monk. Yuasa (1987) stated that while there was no theoretical analysis...
There exists a “myth” that the world was originally a matriarchal paradise and therefore was sex-positive, before the conquest of the patriarchy about 5000 years ago. Feminist researchers such as Eisler and Gimbutas have written extensively about this subject. Jeffrey Kripal (2020) even states, “Among...
My question became: which, if any, of the spiritual traditions of the world understood sex to be a valid path of spiritual development? Did any of the traditions value sensuality and the body, the couple rather than the lone practitioner? There’s big difference between spiritual...
I was surprised to find these three areas of life put together into one threshold until I heard the lecture (Erickson, class video) explaining that these three are potential exceptional human experiences (EHEs) that take us out of the mundane and put us in touch...