-Articles on Awakening The Sexual Priestess and Sacred Sexual Healing for Women

Sensual, Sacred, and Sexy: The Awakening of the Tantric Priestess

by Kim Oursler

A 52-year old woman stands outside of a circle of women, dressed in the colors of the rainbow. A red cloth is tied around her waist, dissolving into orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. She is a walking rainbow. The music begins, swollen with passion and purpose as she slowly glides into the center. Her hips begin to sway, her arms lift to stretch high above her head. She carefully begins to remove each piece of colored cloth as she dances around the circle in fluid movements. The dance has meaning. It communicates. Her movements sing out, I am no longer bound. I am FREE!  The dance intoxicates both the dancer and the women in the circle. The circle sits hypnotized as they witness the unveiling. She removes piece by piece in her own personal meditative dance, still connecting with the circle. Some women are lucky enough to receive a piece of the rainbow as she drapes a recently-removed cloth on women in the circle. The blue cloth at her throat becomes a symbol of her own binding. She pulls at it, the cloth insisting to stay wrapped around her throat. She surrenders the struggle and the cloth falls easily to the floor. She removes the final piece and reveals her shimmering form. Her body glitters with beauty, clothed only in her own perfection. She continues to spin and twirl, free from the bindings of the clothes, open to herself and to the world. As the music ends, the room erupts into thunderous applause! She gathers her rainbow clothes and collapses into her own space in the circle. She is radiant and perspiring slightly. Women offer their comments: You were beautiful! Stunning!   Now that was the Dance of the Seven Veils!  On and on, women in the circle exclaim supportive responses to the magical unveiling they witnessed. She takes it all in, positively glowing with delight and pure joy.

For women to unveil, they have to feel safe. Many hold great fear, shame, and body loathing prior to the dance. Afterward, women share how they felt. One woman shared: There is great healing in the body. It is huge to feel that kind of power and then to hold it.  Others mentioned a sense of expansion, exhilaration, and empowerment. The anticipation is a lot harder than doing it. It feels wonderful. It is like an important metaphor to shed more layers and step into more joy,  recounts another woman I feel powerful. I feel my body is a temple and it is both sacred and sensual,  exudes another woman.

There are many ways that women are awakening to their own Divine Feminine within these days; journeys of self-exploration into one’s own personal mysteries. As women move through levels of themselves, reclaiming their sexuality is the next natural step. There is a calling for the reclaiming of the sacred sexuality and women want to go into that territory in a natural way. Sexuality is almost an insufficient word. It is like the bud of the whole flower, the whole tree. One woman shares: I want to fully run and experience my own life-force energy allowing me to acknowledge the sexual part of myself that many women deny. It is not sexuality for others-it is sexuality for Self. It is being a woman who is open, who knows and can speak her Truth to anyone, a woman who knows what juices her and what does not, a woman who brings vibrancy into all that she does. Women need to make a commitment to Self in order to honor their own beautiful sensuality. Women need time and space to emerge from the inside out. Our daily lives allow much of the outside in. When we allow women time to relax deeply into her self, we see them become willing to take the journey of self-discovery.

The ding of Tibetan prayer bells called the women into circle. They formed an inner circle of women facing out. The remaining women formed a circle facing in. The two circles gazed at each other. They were asked us to look into the eyes of the woman facing her. She is your sister , then, See her as a child, see her giggling and laughing at age four.  Many smiled and began to laugh a little as they glimpsed the possibility of a newfound sister . Now see her Divine Feminine spark as you look into her left eye.  Each received the Divine Feminine mirrored back to them in the woman that stood before. With permission, place your hands over the heart chakra space of your sister, now whisper this into her ear, I apologize for the hurt that women have caused you & in this lifetime, and in all others.  Whoosh ! Something flushed through their bodies from their heart spaces, racing down legs, and joined with Mother Earth. Tears filled eyes, fear was gone, the suspicion was gone and they opened like children filled with the wonder of the world. One woman shared: I began to open the door of who I am and released a flood of truth, emotion, strength, and power. I wondered, What else is inside of me, aching to be released? And I know there is so much more.

It is time for the sacred, the sexual, and the spiritual to re-join. Patriarchal religion separated the feminine from spirituality, so it is the job of the feminine divine to repair that. We are recalling and repairing the original Divine Plan of our Creator which included the feminine as sacred, not separate. It is this empowerment of women that will return the Sacred Feminine and offer safe, profound transformation.

Awakening Your Inner Sexual Priestess~ Embodying Shakti for Healing Our World, is a 7-day retreat experience in Coasta Rica. During the 7-day retreat, women can expect an opening on all levels. A sense of sisterhood naturally occurs when women create an intimate circle for this sort of expansion. Trust and love for each woman creates safe space, and safe space creates a true connection for each woman.

AwakeningYour Inner Sexual Priestess: Embodying Shakti for Healing Your World  takes place March 3-10, 2007 at the Pura Vida (“Pure Life!”) Spa in Coasta Rica. For more information, please contact Anyaa at 828-788-0773 or anyaa@vzemail.net

Journey to Me

Twelve days ago I traveled to Costa Rica as a professional woman with a full life. As I sit in the San Jose airport pleasuring myself with the sun, soft music and the quiet conversations around me I wonder how I will describe my experience to friends. There is little to tell about the sightseeing and shopping offered to the typical tourist. How do I express that the energy of the forest, its air thick with moisture and the quiet presence of the Costa Rican people, created a cocoon of safety to do some of the most important work of my life. Did my friends know that before this work I could not feel the pleasure of the sun, that my every moment was intended to prepare for the next – not a friend to pleasure but a road to traditional accomplishment? A trade-off I willingly accepted at the age of 23.

In Costa Rica I became a tantra priestess. I choose this highly unconventional journey because in 54 years I have never had a satisfying sexual experience. I am a woman whose brain dominates and demands center stage whenever unchallenged. My heart is fully intact and active. It easily fills with love for those in my life. But I had little feeling below my heart having been desensitized by a life of sexual fear and disappointment. I have loved men and they have loved me. But I could not connect with them as a sensual sexual human being. In my relationships I simply used sex to put the necessary pieces in place for a relationship not as a way to give and receive pleasure.

I first learned about tantra at a dinner party. I don’t remember the exact words but I connected intellectually with the concepts. Although not always identified as such, after that dinner tantra discussions popped up regularly. Even in their roughest form the conversations focused on sexual pleasure as healing through an exchange of energy with a partner. Not as the intercourse that has never served my relationships or me. Frustration and acute disappointment followed my attempts to integrate what I was hearing about tantra into my relationship but I was not willing to give up on the idea that sex could be pleasurable and healing. That led me to Costa Rica where I learned that the first step to tantra is to be fully present in your body. I learned that to experience pleasure I have to love ever last wrinkle of my body and feel my energy from head to toes. Not easy for most women. I learned that in order to be present with another human being I must be fully present and accepting of myself. To my surprise there was little about sex but much about creating an openness that could lead to healing sexual experiences. The process, ten days of artfully organized and thoughtfully constructed exercises, created a powerful journey that led me to myself. I was not alone. The other women in my group, no matter how different, made the journey too. We were magnetic. Others vacationing at the Spa where our retreat was held were enchanted by the changes they witnessed in the priestesses. I have no doubt that they will be next.

Now, in addition to being a friend, daughter, sister, business owner, traveler, lover & I am a priestess. I accept that I am a woman with a balance of feminine and masculine energy. I know that my masculine serves me well in business and life but without nourishment for the feminine I am not whole, not fully present. Without it I respond out of lack rather than the incredible abundance in my life. Before this process I had the sun, the wind and love — lots of love. I recognized it intellectually. I just could not pull it close to me and savor it.

By doing this process I chose a difficult path. To connect with myself I had to release the anger and hurt, which kept me from accessing my wholeness and acceptance of the pleasure in my life. I did not know how the process would work – thankfully, for I may not have had the courage. But I was led to it, accepted it and experienced all of the joy and agony it spawned. The reward is not endless sexual bliss. We are too human to just turn on that switch. The reward is an openness to experience the pleasure that creates life in us and to recognize when it has slipped out of our day.

Intention is much of the battle. I intend to get up each morning feeling and loving my toes, fingers and the tip of my ears, to dancing through the day whether my partner is a corporate board, a dear friend or a man I love. And when I skip a day or two, I intend to be fully aware of the absence of that power I carry when I am whole and present.

I dedicate this to the three women who led me through this incredible journey in hopes that others who have lost touch with how beautiful and sensual their toes can be will find their way to them and this powerful journey.

A Grateful Priestess

Lisa Hart is a recently emerged priestess from Awakening You Inner Sexual Priestess: Embodying Shakti to Heal your World.  She is a business owner, spiritual seeker and writer living in the Mid-West.

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Dance of the 7 Veils

by David L. Forrester, III

Behind the woman’s smile

Behind the veil of her appearance

her competence

her kindness

her anger

her role

her power

Hides her true beauty

Hides her true self

She will not be seen

She will not be hurt

Louder than sweet music to the ears

The sound of healing rings within her

One by one she drops her veils

Showing all I long to see

Vulnerable she dances naked

Moving with all the essence of life

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SHAKTITantric title of the Great Goddess (Kali Ma), realized both as a sexual partner and as the innermost, animating soul of man or god, like the Greek Psyche, Roman Anima, Gnostic Sophia, Cabalistic Shekina, all based on the Shakti. Jung said she was the figure known as My Lady Soul: “Every mother and every beloved is forced to become the carrier and embodiment of this omnipresent and ageless image, which corresponds to the deepest reality in a man.”

Shakti is translated “Cosmic Energy.” She implies “power, ability, capacity, faculty, strength, prowess; regal power; the power of composition, poetic power, genius; the power or signification of a word or term; the power inherent in cause to produce its necessary effect &. [S]hakti is the female organ; shakti is the active power of a deity and is regarded, mythologically, as his goddess-consort and queen.” Every god needed his Shakti, or he was helpless to act. The Tantras say, “the female principle antedates and includes the male principle, and & this female principle is the supreme Divinity.”

Tantric doctrine said mortal women are “life itself,” and Goddess-like, because they embody the principle of Shakti. The sages “hold women in great esteem and call them Shaktis and to ill-treat a Shakti, that is, a woman, is a crime.” A Tantric synonym for “women” was Shaktiman, “Mind of Shakti” or “Possessor of Shakti.”

A Shakti was also a spirit-wife, or female guardian angel, who could be incarnate in the earthly wife or mistress, or a wholly supernatural figure. “An important division of the ‘mythology of woman’ is devoted to showing that is always a feminine being who helps the hero to conquer immortality or to emerge victorious from his initiatory ordeals &. Every Teleut shaman has a celestial wife who lives in the seventh heaven, where he meets her and makes love to her during his ecstatic journeys.”

Final union with the Shakti occurred at the moment of death, according to Tantric mystics. She was both the individual and the cosmic Goddess, absorbing the soul and body of the dying sage into herself, an experience of unsurpassable bliss on his part. “The possession of her, the cosmic Shakti, the living embodiment of the principle of beauty and youth eternal, is the ultimate quest, the very highest prize.” The Kulacudamani Nigama said not even God could become the supreme Lord unless Shakti entered into him. All things arose from their union, but she said, “There is none but Myself Who is the Mother to create.” The Lalita Sahasranamam said “The series of universes appear and disappear with the opening and shutting of Her eyes.” As the god required her power before he could do anything at all, so her worshipper on earth required the power of his own Istadevata, Shakti or lady-love.

The same system was followed by Middle-Eastern mystics like the Sufis, who deemed the mystic lady-love or fravashi essential to any man’s enlightenment. Early Christian Gnostics also worshipped Shakti under such names as Sophia, Pneuma, Eide, or Anima. Gnostic writings show that post-mortem union with one’s own soul was perceived in sexual symbolism, as in the Mandaean Liturgies for the Dead: the soul or “image” (Eide) embraces and caresses the dead man like a beloved woman. This Tantric idea came into the west by way of the Avesta doctrine that, after the death of a believer, his own conscience would welcome him “in the form of a fair maiden.”

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Re-Vamping the World: On the Return of the Holy Prostitute by Deena Metzger

Once upon a time in Sumeria, in Mesopotamia, in Egypt, in Greece, there were no whorehouses, no brothels. In that time, in those countries, there were the Temples of the Sacred Prostitutes. In these temples, men were cleansed, not sullied, morality was re-stored, not desecrated, sexuality was not perverted, but divine.

The original whore was a priestess, the conduit to the divine, the one through whose body one entered the sacred arena and was restored. Warriors, soldiers, soiled by combat within the world of men, came to the Holy Prostitute, the Quedishtu, literally meaning the undefiled one, in order to be cleansed and re-united with the gods. The Quedishtu or Quadesh is associated with a variety of goddesses including Hathor, Ishtar, Anath, Astarte, Asherah, etc. According to Patricia Monaghan in The Book of Goddesses and Heroines, Astarte originally meant She of the Womb, but appears in the Old Testament as Ashtoreth, meaning Shameful thing.  It was understood that war, holy as it might be, still separated men from the gods, and those who had blood on their hands had to engage in a ceremony of purification in order to participate in civil society. As the body, the sexual act, was the means for this re-entry, and pleasure, inevitable, its accompaniment, still the essential attribute of sexuality in this context, was prayer.

In Pergamon, Turkey, we can still find the remains of the Temple of the Holy Prostitutes alongside other temples, palaces, and public buildings on the Sacred Way. Whatever rites we imagine took place in those other buildings, it is a Western habit of mind to associate the Holy Prostitutes with orgies and debauchery, to emphasize the sexual and ignore the spiritual component. But originally, these women had been one doorway to God.

The first patriarchs, the priests of Judea and Israel, the prophets of Jehovah, had condemned the holy prostitutes and the worship of Asherah, Astarte, Anta and the other goddesses. Morality was the pretext behind which ecclesiastic power was consolidated as priests systematically replaced women as intermediaries between men and God.

Women had been the essential link to the three worlds. Through the mother one came into this world; through the Mysteries, the rites of Demeter or Isis, one entered the underworld; and through the Holy Prostitute one came to God. Access was personal and unconditional. In the days of the Quedishtu every woman served the gods as Holy Prostitute, often for as long as a year. This was contradictory to the hegemony that a priesthood required.

For the sake of power, it is often necessary to set the world upside down. Therefore the priests asserted that what had been considered sacred was depraved, that what had been a way to God was, in deed a way to perdition. Reversals such as this are not uncommon. Incoming religions often co-opt, then reverse, existing spiritual beliefs and practices. So Hades, the spiritual center of Greek paganism, became Hell. The descent into Hades, the core of the Eleusinian Mysteries, and a spiritually required initiation for anyone concerned with soul, was prohibited. By the middle of the fourth century, the Christians had suppressed the Mysteries and installed hell as a place of punishment from which people had to be saved. Where once Pindar had written, Thrice Blessed are those who have seen these Mysteries for they know the end of life and the beginning, later Dante was to inscribe, Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.  Similarly, Dionysus, the life god, became Satan, as Adonis, the consort of Aphrodite, was co-opted into Christ. Mary Magdalene the Holy Prostitute was converted and transformed, Aphrodite became Eve became the Virgin Mary. The reversals were absolute. Psyche’s journey toward soul was altered when the ordeals of Aphrodite, the mother of Eros, no longer beckoned the Self.

Three of the essential roads to the three worlds were blocked or debased. Maybe the gods did not die in Nietzsche’s time but centuries earlier with the subversion of the priestesses and the secularization and degradation of the holy body.

This article is about seduction, about vamping. About eros. An attempt to restore a tradition, to reinstitute a way of seeing the world. It is not about literally restoring practices; it is about recovering the consciousness from which those practices derived.

What was the impact of the suppression of the Holy Prostitute? Many of the practices that honored the way of the woman ceased. The Eleusinian mysteries, which had provided immortality, were suppressed; the male mysteries of the Cabeiri, designed specifically to redeem those with blood on their hands, were suppressed; procreation was infused with anxiety and guilt; fertility festivals which had provided a link between earth and spirit were condemned. When the priests separated the body from the gods, they separated God from nature, and thereby created the mind/body split. The world was secularized. We can only speculate as to the consequences, through we must assume there were consequences when men returned from war without the ability to clean the blood from their hands, when the physical, quotidian community between the gods and the people was not reconvened. It was not woman per se that was attacked, but the gods who were exiled. Perhaps the world as we have come to know it, impersonal, abstract, detached, brutish, was engendered in that division.

In a sacred universe, the prostitute is a holy woman, a priestess. In a secular universe the prostitute is a whore. How do we relate to this today, as woman, as feminists? Can we resanctify society, become priestesses again, put ourselves in the service of the gods and eros? As we re-vision, can we re-vamp as well?

Vamp: A woman who sets out to charm or captivate by the use of sexual attractiveness.

Re-vamp: To mend, repair, renovate, refurbish or restore.

What does it mean to revamp a society? It means that we vamp again, become sexual-spiritual beings, priestesses serving eros and in this way we resanctify the society. It means that we identify with eros though society forbids it or seriously disapproves, even if it seems foolish, inexpedient, even when such acts make us vulnerable. It means that we attempt to rededicate ourselves to the old gods of the body, the feminine and the earth.

It is, however, exactly this rededication to the principles of the feminine which is so problematic. The feminine has been so devalued and degraded, has so little power in the world, we have suffered so much loss of opportunity, have been so oppressed, it is difficult to enact the feminine in the world without feeling as if we are opening ourselves to further violation. So we are caught in a terrible paradox. To feel powerful, we learn the very masculine modes that are so oppressive. In either case we seem to participate in our own destruction. Nevertheless, there is a leap of faith to be made: that the reinstatement of the erotic power of feminine consciousness will help to sustain us individually and contribute to the survival of the species and the planet.

When contemporary feminism was established sufficiently to offer real hope and possibility, women who had formerly considered themselves atheists felt called to spiritual matters. The goddess and goddesses were reinvoked. There was an extraordinary interest in spirituality, myth, rite, and ceremony. The spiritual instinct buried in a secular universe erupted.

This spiritual vision engages several heresies: the re-sanctification of the body while returning to the very early, Neolithic, pagan, matriarchal perception of a sacred universe. As a consequence secular thought, itself, is deposed and the entire universe that we have so carefully fabricated in our own image is deconstructed with all the attendant psychic pain of living, at least for a time, in debris until we learn to negotiate in the new world.

Susan Griffin writes the following in the last chapter, entitled Eros: of Pornography and Silence :

The psyche is simply world. And if I let myself love, let myself touch, enter my own pleasure and longing, enter the body of another, let the dark parts of my body speak, tongue into mouth, in the body’s language, as I enter, a part of me I believed was real begins to die, I descend into matter, I know I am at that heart of myself, I cry out in ecstasy. For in love, we surrender our uniqueness and become world.

If we become world through love, then love is essentially a political act. If we become world reaching to the gods, then love is a spiritual act, which redeems the world. How then do we become Holy Prostitutes? How do we bring this essence into being? How de we restore the temple? How do we engage this consciousness without imitating old behaviors? How enact the erotic and the spiritual in ways appropriate to these times?

Inevitably the one who takes on the Holy Prostitute, in these times, becomes a heretic, enduring the agony of consciousness that occurs when one holds one worldview and the majority holds another. One commits oneself to eros, bonding, connection, when the world values thantos, separation, and detachment.

The Holy Prostitute was once Everywoman. In the service of the gods, she made herself available to those outside the province of the gods. How might the contemporary Holy Prostitute bring the sacred to the ones who have been defiled? How might she or he take in the other? What rituals and ceremonies might a contemporary sacred whore devise as a context for making love with the other  or the outcast for the sake of the reintegration and revitalization of the society, especially when it is not sex we are after, but something far deeper?

These questions are old and familiar, easy to ask, so difficult to answer.

The first task is to allow oneself to believe that the body is a spiritual field, that sexuality and erotic love are spiritual disciplines, and that, as a consequence, eros is pragmatic. Then one can honor the feminine even where it is dishonored or disadvantaged. From this vantage point, we can begin to scrutinize ourselves to see when we violate or when live accordingly to these principles.

Here, then, are further questions we might ask ourselves:

Whom do I close myself against?

When do I not have time for love or eros?

When do I find eros inconvenient, burdensome, or inexpedient?

When do I find eros dangerous to me?

When do I indulge the erotic charge of guilt?

Where do I respond to, accept, provoke the idea of sin?

When do I use sexuality to distract rather than to commune?

When do I reject eros because I am rejected?

When do I abuse the body?

How do I reinforce the mind/body split?

When and how do I denigrate the feminine?

When do I refuse the gods?

When do I pretend to believe in them?

When do I accept the gods only when they serve me?

How often do I acquiesce to the real world?

Recently, I was confronted by a large, luminous woman, approximately eight feet tall, clearly an image of a goddess, though I had never before encountered such a figure in any of my meditation. Her hair was light itself. As she came close to me, I was filled with awe at her beauty and terror at her presence. I knew my life would be altered if I were to take her into me; I would have to give up many of the masculine modes I had adopted in order to negotiate successfully in the world. The woman was powerful, but her power was of receptivity, resonance, magnetism, and radiance. She had the power of eros; she drew me to her; I couldn’t resist her; I was afraid.

Immediately, I was reminded of a statement by my friend, Dianna Linden: When it comes to the bell, we all want to be the clapper. We don’t want to be the body; but it is the body which sings.

Through this figure, I, myself, experienced the terror of the feminine so often referred to. I found myself afraid of my own nature, but even so, I refused to step away from myself. At that moment, I committed myself to eros and the heresy of the sacred, to the slow and excruciating process of trial and error, investigation and insight, through which the Holy Prostitute might enter the world again. She is the woman I aspire to be.

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Tantric Lover (anonymous)
The Lover asked: How would you like me to touch you? And The Lover answered:I would like you to touch me as if you were going away tomorrow, far far away, and you wanted to remember the feel of my body, the texture of my skin, the hills and valleys that make up the landscape of who I am…I would like you to touch me as if you were blind, knowing that you love me, but unable to see me. Touch my face, my breasts, my belly, my toes… learn what I “look” like, imagine me in your mind as your hands explore my shape.

I would like you to touch me as if your hands were healing hands, radiating love energy with every stroke. Feel the energy penetrating through skin, through flesh, entering into the cells of my body.

I would like you to touch me as if you gained your nourishment through your hands. Feed on me, drink deeply and draw from your touch the love that I hold for you.

I would like you to touch me as if you were feeding me through your hands, as if by your touch I am nourished and sustained. Every inch of me cries out for your touch, yearns to be fed.

I would like you to touch me as if your hand were a feather, lightly caressing the edge of my being.

I would like you to touch me as if your hands were paintbrushes, and as you caress me, you are coloring me in brilliant, sparkling, dazzling hues.

I would like you to touch me as if you were erasing the outer me, allowing me to reveal my inner self to you.

I would like you to touch me as if you had carved a sculpture, and were now feeling its finish, smoothing out any rough areas, enjoying the finished product.

I would like you to touch me as if your hands were fire, burning away the dross and leaving only the pure gold of my soul. I would like you to touch me as if your hands were sponges, soaking up the essence of my being.

I would like you to caress me as if I were made of dry clay, and by dampening my skin you enliven my spirit.

I would like you to touch me as if my skin were soft velvet.

I would like you to touch me as if you were a musician, and your touch brought forth different sounds from different parts of me.

I would like you to touch me as if I were a rare jewel, precious and valuable.

I would like you to touch me as if I were your Lover.