Yogic Bliss and Sexual Healing

Yogic Bliss and Sexual Healing

by

Autumn Needles

SMASHWORDS EDITION

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PUBLISHED BY:

Fanny Press on Smashwords

Yogic Bliss and Sexual Healing

Copyright © 2010 by Autumn Needles

Published by Fanny Press

PO Box 70515

Seattle, WA 98127

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Cover design by Sabrina Sun

Contact: [email protected]

Copyright © 2010 by Autumn Needles

ISBN: 978-1-60381-441-6 (Paper)

ISBN: 978-1-60381-442-3 (ePub)

Smashwords Edition License Notes

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Acknowledgments

I always wanted to write a book but I had no idea until I began how much work it was going to be. Thanks to all the people around me who tolerated my obsession while it was happening and had no doubt at all that I could finish what I started. A particular thanks to my partners just for being the wonderful people they are and supporting my work, but the biggest thanks has to go to my primary partner, Jamie, who had to live with me and put up with the fact that I did basically nothing during this time but sit in front of the computer in between running out to teach classes.

A special thanks to Russell Harmon for coming up with the term cooperative pushing and for allowing me to steal it from him. I expect I’ll pay for it somehow.

And a thank you to all of my teachers along the way who influenced my thinking, in person or through their writing. I don’t blame you for any mistakes I’ve made! Those are my own, and I take full credit for them.

Introduction

Stories

There are the stories we tell ourselves. There are the stories told about us. There are the stories told to us. When we meet, our stories meet as well, intertwining and mating, creating a whole new story. Which stories are true? I will try to tell the truth, but truly this is just another story.

When I was a little girl I was a voracious reader of fairy tales and Greek and Roman mythology. I loved being transported to other worlds through words and emerging at the end of the story wrung out and misty-eyed. I understood that the stories were make-believe, but I also wanted to find truth in them. I read anything I could find. At some point I realized many of the stories were told over and over again, but differently, running the gamut from sanitized happily-ever-after versions to older, crueler ones. I particularly remember when I first read The Little Mermaid, watching her journey onto land for the sake of love, giving up her beautiful voice and her family. She found her prince but received only pity and kindness from him, then watched in silence as he gave his love to a land-based girl. In her grief, she threw herself into the sea to drown, but was transformed into sea foam to ride the waves forever. How I cried! I was devastated to imagine that true love could be returned with pity, a life transformed and ended.

I was more devastated to compare the happy ending version of the story with the one I knew, and to realize that somewhere along the line the story itself had been transformed, sanitized into something easier and blander for the consumption of children. We children had been betrayed, I thought, but at least the betrayal was visible. Now that I knew, I could watch out for it.

My father introduced me to the Greek pantheon, reading me carefully chosen excerpts from the classic tales. I couldn’t resist the stories, so I snuck back to the book and returned to the stories on my own, even though he forbade me to read them by myself. I soon found out why. These were not just the tales of love and valor I knew from his bedtime reading but also tales of rape and fear and murder, despair in the face of tragedy, betrayal of family and friends. Again, the truth beneath the offering was bigger and more complex than I had realized. For my protection, I had been given a lie. Or, at least, a partial truth. Children, I think, have a strongly developed sense of righteous indignation, without an understanding of how fragile they are, or that some truths need to be digested in smaller pieces. As a child all I saw was that I had been misled. Again.

In the fifth grade I sat in sex-ed, watching a movie about menstruation. The girls on the screen talked about how the bleeding only lasted a day or two, how sometimes there was discomfort, but never enough to disrupt their activities. How, despite the annoyance, it was a small price to pay to become a woman with the possibility of child-bearing in the future. I listened in outraged agony, arms clenched across my belly, pale and cramping and miserable, wondering if today would be a day when I overflowed and filled my chair with blood. What had I done to deserve this kind of protection from the truth? Was watching a friendly movie supposed to improve my experience, or was I being encouraged to toe the party line for the sake of the other girls?

One day after school, I remember my mother talking to me after I had been teased for something and was feeling sad and angry and hurt. She told me that sometimes it was better to look strong even when I felt weak, and that I should learn to control my reactions so no one would know how I really felt. She also suggested that it might be better for me to be more circumspect in what I told my friends, and that maybe some things were better left private. She wanted to protect me and give me tools to make my way in a sometimes difficult world. I appreciated her advice and followed it. It has served me well. Social ease makes life a lot more comfortable, and I got pretty good at it.

We all learn to do a certain amount of re-writing reality for the sake of … something. Some of it is absolutely necessary. Think about how we learn things, layering information over time until we are able to think in more complex ways. For example, I think about learning about neurons, the cells of the brain and nervous system: In grade school it’s enough to know that they act like little messengers, carrying around our thoughts and feelings. Later, we learn about the cells themselves, the parts that receive messages and the parts that send them on to the next cells. Much later, we learn about the specific chemistry and physics that make it possible for the membrane of the cell to transfer chemical and electrical information. It’s not that we were lied to in grade school; we simply did not have the tools available to access and understand the whole picture.

Other kinds of re-writing can feel the same way, as though there are social tools we need in order to access particular personal information, but now we have other motives as well. We edit for the sake of ease, of clearing the way, of not making waves, of protecting people we care about, of protecting people we don’t know, of fitting in with the crowd. I have participated in this type of re-writing my whole life, trying to protect myself, my family, my friends, the sensibilities of some faceless crowd. As a yogi (someone who studies and practices yoga), I try to follow the guidelines of the philosophy of yoga. One of those is satya, or truthfulness. However, I confess I have practiced evasion and misdirection when faced with simple questions in a public or work-related forum that required more complicated answers than were expected or looked for. People often use this type of evasion to connect in ways that feel easy and familiar, to avoid hurting one another; there is no scary ulterior motive. When someone at work asks me if I am married or what my husband does for a living, they certainly don’t mean any harm, and, in fact, what they want to do is connect with me. But when I know my answer isn’t the correct answer, I freeze. I know what people will be comfortable hearing—what they want to hear—and it isn’t what I’m going to tell them. Then the truth feels awfully slippery to me. I am caught between the desire for connection and the desire for complete honesty. Frequently we believe that the truth needs to be rearranged for some greater good. We have a sense of what the truth is supposed to be, and we try to rearrange ourselves around that. I know I feel just a little twitchy, because I don’t quite fit what ought to be. I am afraid everyone else does fit, so we play a little game of pretend.

I am pretty good at sliding under the radar and fitting in, so my incentive to massage the truth in order to live comfortably and easily is strong. This urge in myself to magically transform my story is both frustrating and fascinating, and I keep picking away at it like a scab that hurts in a very interesting way yet requires healing. I am drawn especially to an area of particular taboo—sex, how we have it, how we want it, how it works and how it doesn’t. That’s because I know that how I have sex, how I have always wanted to have sex, does not fit the accepted mold. But that just makes me curious—how many more of us are there who don’t fit the mold, but pass? Is there anyone really in that mold at all?

We learn specific things about what we are supposed to want and how we are supposed to communicate that want. We are supposed to fall in love before we have sex, the assumption being both that we will want to have sex before we fall in love but will choose not to, and that when we fall in love we will want to have sex with that person—and only that person—forever. Sex never needs to be defined because, in theory, we are all talking about the same thing when we speak of it. And we all want to do generally the same things when we have sex, right? We all want it to be special and meaningful, to take place with The One and to culminate in orgasm. We ought to have well-defined genders and desire the opposite gender from our own. If we are enlightened, we might understand that we could want someone of the same gender, but we are still supposed to do all of the other things the same way. We are supposed to communicate our desires romantically, but clearly. When we finally go to bed together, we are supposed to either just know what to do or communicate clearly and verbally what we really enjoy. We are not supposed to want sex before we reach a certain age. (Although it is understood that we are at the whim of our hormones, we are supposed to resist them!) We are supposed to communicate in a particular way, but we also learn a hidden language of sorts. If he does this, it means that. If she says that, it means this. There are books written about how to get a man, how to make a woman happy, how to keep a mate, how to spice things up … but they never seem to involve much contemplation, either of our own reality or of the other person’s. Societal values are assumed to equal the values of the individual, so we only get certain boxes to check off as options.

Climbing Out of the Box

I have a blog where I write about getting lost and finding my way, both literally and allegorically. I wrote in my blog one day about a time when I got together with two dear friends and celebrated Beltane, or May Day, with them. We were a little low energy (and it was raining), so we changed our original plans. Indoors instead of outdoors, short and sweet. Because we were all so low in energy we decided it would be a nice addition to give each other the May Day gift of sharing what we appreciate about each other. We are very different women who came together by chance, but over the years we have formed one of those bonds that you always hope will be a part of your life—a friendship where anything goes, where we can always speak the truth to one another. They each let me know that what they appreciate most about me is my direct communication, my willingness to be open about my life and my feelings (come what may), and that by so doing, I have let them in on a perspective they did not realize existed.

Years ago, when I attended my yoga teacher training, I heard the same thing from several of my fellow students there. One of the items I packed for my month at this training in Costa Rica was my vibrator. When my partner realized I was