(watercolor & colored pencil tarot art by me, for my dear friend Julia’s birthday as a collaborative project.)

:: sex ::

For time immemorial, Saints, Mystics, and Gurus have all tried to reveal the same truth to humanity:
The nature of reality is Ecstatic.

Those who have been touched by God all come back and share the same message -- that the purest nature of the reality is, in fact, heaven. Existence is ecstatic unconditional love, and anything less is a mere illusion. That ecstasy is not a fantasy or an escape from reality -- it is reality, unobstructed. It’s all that’s left when fear, control, resistance, and separation fall away.

In ecstasy, we reunite with Source -- the creative womb from which all things emerge. We move beyond the confines of our small, limited, controlling self and into union with the whole of existence.

Ecstasy is the fuel of the gods. There is no better ingredient with which to make magic than ecstasy, because in this state you are already inhabiting the highest and clearest possible frequency. You are playing in the field of potential, being opened to possibilities that the limited self could never engineered on its own.

Ecstasy gives birth to the magician within us.

And there is no more powerful source of ecstasy or magic on earth, than in lovemaking.

Sexual energy is the most creative energy in the cosmos. It is the force that creates life itself. But its power isn’t limited to the creation of a human being… All of creation is sexual: reality dividing into difference, difference longing towards union, and from their meeting, the new is born.
“The One becomes two, so it can have the joy of becoming One again.”

Sex is the incarnation of spirit into matter.

Conscious sex is the most fertile soil in which creative seeds can be planted. It is the literal portal between worlds, where we can draw spirit (in the form of an idea, a wish, a desire, or life itself) into matter.

Our sexual energy can be refined, expanded, and directed -- transporting us into states of ecstasy, dissolution, orgasmic delight, cleansing, revelation, and creation. Conscious sex is a transforming force not only within a relationship, but throughout the whole of our lives.

And yet, as with all things in this universe, there exists a paradox: the best sex and the most powerful magic simply can’t occur when we are attached to an outcome.

The catalyst for magic (and life-transforming sex) is surrender.

This is precisely why lovemaking is the most powerful form of magic there is -- because to do it consciously and spiritually requires a deep and ego-obliterating surrender into unconditional love, beyond all preferences, comforts, ideologies, and fears.

Surrender is the golden key without which you simply don’t get to play in this magical realm. Unlocking the door means splaying your entire being wide open on the altar of love, and trust-falling into the dissolution and unfathomable expansion of “self.”

This is what creates the context for the most aligned manifestations imaginable, because in the deepest electromagnetic lovemaking, you are washed clean of all patterns. You are liberated from all of the gripping, controlling, attachment, and resistance. All “illusion” melts away, and you are blissfully reunited with the Truth of Love, and the reality of ecstasy. You become powerfully purified, along with your desires and intentions, so you can become the clearest possible channel for creation.

You come to know control as a poor man’s substitute for being moved by God. And deep sex as nothing more than “waiting sweetly with one another, while God enters the room.” -Chris Bale

What happens when we release every impulse to control / to get somewhere / to make something happen?
What happens when we simply embody desire all the way, let it ravish us, without chasing or directing it?
What happens when we become so present and so surrendered that we literally merge with the experience of life itself, unable to discern where we end and it begins?

How is our resistance to these things related to our deepest sense of self-worth? Our okayness in life? Our relationship with our soul, and the divine?

This is the essence of lovemaking, in sex and in life: to surrender our defenses and merge with all that is -- to allow our life experience to penetrate us all the way, unconditionally and beyond personal preference, in order to make love and create our highest possible reality.

A beautiful realization I’m come to in my life is this:

Every single life-changing transformation I’ve experienced has been a process of subtraction rather than addition.

The best way to explain what I mean is through one of my favorite Rumi quotes:
“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”

We do not “manufacture” pleasure, fulfillment, joy, creativity, ecstasy, or love. Each of these qualities has its own creational intelligence, it’s own stream of consciousness that we are either inhabiting or pinching ourselves off from. This can be proven by the simple fact that you don’t get to choose how you experience any of these states: you don’t choose what you desire, what evokes your pleasure, what unlocks your fulfillment, or with whom / how / when you fall in love.

You certainly try to choose, to chase, to achieve -- but the ultimate truth is:
You can’t control these states into being. You can only become more or less available to receiving them.

You do this by removing what is blocking their natural, abundant flow. By understanding that everything you desire exists freely and abundantly, but you can only access it once you’ve metabolized each of your defenses against it. This “metabolizing” is the alchemy. It is energetically turning lead into gold, and poison into nectar.

Our task is to seek, find, and dissolve all the barriers we have built against our ecstatic, abundant nature. And sex is by far and away the most direct, most powerful (and sometimes most painful) path to get straight to the heart of what’s standing in the way. So when the practice inevitably gets difficult… when we bump up against our resistances, our fears, our discomfort that screams at us “this is NOT okay!” just know; this is not an interruption of the practice, it is the practice. Welcome to the initiation. Lean in deep, and let go for dear life.

Conscious Sex is the deepest spiritual practice of all.

It’s powerful, surrendered, cataclysmic, ego-obliterating, soul-manifesting, heaven-revealing.

You can do all the breathwork, meditation, fasting, psychedelics, and spiritual study in the world, but there is a particular kind of transformation that can only happen when you go ALL IN in love -- with no escape hatch, no exit strategy, no foot in the door.

The power and speed of spiritual growth you’ll experience from this decision alone is what will spiral you into higher states of consciousness and a closeness with God that you truly can’t reach any other way.

True intimacy -- the kind that comes from remaining, unflinchingly, inside the fiery ring of love with one another through thick and thin -- is what reveals all the deepest most hidden shadows that even the best of spiritual practices only dance around: Your attachment patterns. Your neediness. Your fears. Your triggers. Your need for control. The edges of your capacity to give and receive love.

To be totally and completely committed to one another is the only thing I know of that can create the container necessary for this level of magic. Anything less is an attempt to negotiate with the work -- to justify keeping one foot out the door while wondering why your aliveness, pleasure, creative potency, and fulfillment are leaking out with it.

There is an enormous amount of power in undividedness. And undivididness is, after all, the essence of union.

When erotic energy is not continually being suppressed, redirected, fantasized elsewhere, defended against, or spent maintaining alternate possibilities, it deepens. When it is no longer “beared down upon” in an attempt to get somewhere, it expands exponentially. It generates a measurable electro-magnetic field, which powers your entire life and magnetizes your wildest dreams.

You build this field through ever-expanding pleasure, presence, unconditional love and acceptance, radical honesty, the most profoundly deep surrender, and the willingness to stay. And then you (re)create your entire life from inside that field.

With sexual mastery, life begins to feel a lot less like trying to force reality into submission, and a lot more like seducing reality into existence.

This is one of the most important distinctions we could ever make -- one that has the power to reorient our entire life.

Instead of deciding what life must give us and tightening around that demand, we enter an ecstatic state in which the boundaries between ourselves, our lover, life, and God become permeable. Here, we plant a seed. And then we let it go.

To master the art of sexual magic isn’t to become more skillful at the mechanics of sex. I would venture to claim that it isn’t about a process of addition at all. There is nothing we need that we don’t already have. It’s simply about moving beyond all the hurt, trauma, fear, discomfort, insecurity, and anything else standing as a barrier to our purest, most essential nature -- and relearning how to trust, how to play, how to breathe, how to slow allll the way down, and let allll the way go.

Sexual mastery takes us to the very heart of co-creation with the divine: Desire without grasping. Power without control. Intensity without tension. Surrender without passivity. Union without co-dependence. Love without reservation.

Sex becomes a place where we rehearse a different way of being alive -- entraining it into our nervous system, coding it into our cells, birthing it into our reality.

Only then do we discover that what we were looking for in peak experiences, achievement, spiritual practices, altered states, endless novelty, and all the ways we attempt to “solve” for the ache of separation -- it’s all just a soul-deep longing for Re-Union.
With ourselves. With each other. With life. With God.

And when that reunion comes, the illusion of separation and lack dissolves, and we come to know ourselves as truly whole, as unfathomably holy. We come to know, deeply and irrevocably that there is nothing outside of us that we need to attain.

There is only Love -- and how deeply we are willing to let it take us.