Each of us is like a radio that can be tuned to different frequencies. Many people in modern society have tuned out all higher and lower frequencies and live within a narrow band of their dulled outer senses. Doing so seems to be required of them to earn a living, and this tuning out is reinforced by the surrounding culture, protecting them from their fear of death. A shaman is someone who has learned to listen to many stations at once, integrating the different music and news broadcasts into a coherent whole. Being a shaman does not, however, protect us from our humanness and the often intensely vulnerable experience of showing up within the so-called normal bands of experience. If anything, it increases the shaman’s sensitivity because the extraordinary is curled up inside the ordinary.
When the channels are open, all experiences ride the edge of the miraculous; all encounters are soaked with possibilities, endlessly dynamic. The joy of true meeting is enhanced, and so is the tragedy of all the missed meetings.
Core recognizes and resonates with core, and we share that essential aliveness, but we also celebrate the real diversity in expression. We all have different keys to the sacred locks of the soul and body.
When we meet as energy beings with a mutual willingness to share with one another what has been harvested in our own deep experience—our soul DNA—then humanity can quickly create better software for integrating its sexuality and its spirituality.
We are both on this incredible blue-green jewel of a planet, whirling through an immense cosmos. The material of our bodies was partly fashioned in supernovas, grown and developed through millions of years of biological evolution, flowing down the bloodlines of our cultures and families.
Our souls are ultimately one with the universal consciousness; the same awareness reading these words permeates all space and time. We are love—impossible, irrepressible, eternal. We are the great dance of matter and spirit, masculine and feminine, light and dark. We delight in all polarities and are the spark between them. We are sex. Eros was the child of Mars and Venus, and to the Greeks, sexual attraction meant being in the presence of a god.
In that state, this is my prayer: “Whatever is in me or of me that is of benefit to this other me and serves the evolution of love, may it be given.”
In this moment, you are the other me that I have the great pleasure of offering myself to in this unconditional way. I don’t just want to write to you, but to well up inside you. I want to be that tingle that starts in your body and turns into the warm honey of arousal. I want to be there in that exhale that is a little fuller and in the sigh of the heart as it opens in the presence of love. I want to celebrate the mutual penetration of souls as we reach through the veils of time and space and begin to touch each other intimately.
I invite you to come inside me and be me. In this way we pierce for each other that sacred hymen of separate identity, which is the source of the deep loneliness present at the core of every human soul. As our souls consent to let each other in, our hearts can’t help but blow open to each other. The intimacy of the heart is not in loving each other as separate selves but in falling through each other’s hearts into the common mystery that resides in each of us.
Introduction How To Begin A Story That Never Ends
I spent most of my early years seeking acceptance, connection, significance, and some way to contribute. Like many people, I longed to fit into a family, school, church, community, and society. I participated in the culturally constructed notion that there is such a thing as normal. Yet I carried the haunting feeling that just underneath the surface of what could be sensed, I somehow belonged to another unseen world. While dreaming at night and sometimes while making love, I’d journey into invisible realms with revelatory significance, but upon returning, in order to participate in consensual reality, I’d make the psychic agreement to leave that world behind. How could I feel so connected yet suffer so much separation? This enigma only grew more puzzling when mixed with the subject of sex, which holds so much social shame.
It seemed easier to dismiss these visitations and “return to sender” rather than to unpack and learn to live with them.
As you might imagine, this question has elicited a wide range of reactions, such as: “It sounds like a New Age hippie starting a cult.” Or “A quack who’s trying to have sex with you to hustle you out of money.” And of course, we’ve heard this: “It’s clearly cultural misappropriation; a real shaman would object to being called a sex shaman.”
Throughout these pages, we use the term shamanism to refer to a way of being, not to any specific religion, culture, or wisdom tradition. A shaman is someone who goes into an ecstatic trance to act as an intermediary between the natural world and nonordinary reality. The term sex shaman is used to describe someone who uses sex as medicine. Eros, kundalini, and orgasmic energy can all induce an altered state and be used for journeying, divination, healing, and/or alchemy. My favorite interpretation of the word shaman is “self-healed madman.”
Women of the Light: The New Sacred Prostitute. The cover copy of this book describes it as follows: “Eight women who exchange sex for money share their lives and insights. Without a continuing lineage, without a temple, the contemporary sexual healer has many faces. Today she is a sex surrogate, sexual meditation teacher, call girl, porn star, or even a shaman.”
and he already owned the domain www.SexShamans.com.
Except for a handful, they are mostly teachers, orators, and even performance artists, but not necessarily wordsmiths. I wanted to preserve their unique voices in hopes that you, dear reader, can get a sense of their energetic transmission.
Although practitioners were intimate with the local landscape, they lacked education, and many of their teachings and practices operated from prerational consciousness.
Inherent in the practice of shamanism are dynamics of power and vulnerability. Great responsibility, trust, and discernment are required of anyone in the position of a spiritual adviser, guide, or seer. In every session, ceremony, or ritual, it is up to the shamanic practitioner to uphold the highest good. We do not condone the misuse of power for any kind of gain whether it be personal, financial, sexual, professional, social status, or otherwise.
Tantra is an esoteric path to enlightenment that involves the integration of opposites (such as the sacred and profane, light and dark, partial and whole, male and female.)
Sacred Sexual Healing: The SHAMAN Method of Sex Magic. It contains details for dozens of embodiment exercises. Unlike most how-to books, which only point at the moon, this book is an invaluable resource for anyone thirsty for a real transmission. Nevertheless, we maintain that books can never capture the fullness of these embodied arts.
Our planning meetings were held between swimming naked on the private beach and dancing around the community fire. I enthusiastically pitched my new book project to a few colleagues whom I had preselected as prospective coauthors and quickly learned how the ISTA culture deals with new ideas.
There is a key distinction between “birds” and “dragons.” An idea is like a bird. Bird medicine is about flying between higher and lower worlds. Birds represent freedom. There are lots of ideas flying around. While birds are common, dragons are rare and harder to train. A dragon is like a dharmic calling; riding a dragon takes dedication. You must be passionate, fearless, and willing to face dangerous obstacles. This book is my dragon. Over the past two years, I have dedicated myself to long hours of spearheading, managing, coordinating, editing, and cheerleading this project.
But I insisted on hearing their personal stories, not their transpersonal teachings. The more vulnerable the stories, the more universal the book. Further, I believe that recounting one’s personal history is a rite of passage. By shining a light on where we come from, we can release attachments to our old identities.
All the Way Up, All the Way Down Spiritual practices tend to fall into two basic approaches. The majority of spiritual schools that teach contemplative practices, such as meditation and yoga, are ascending in their ideology. An ascending path emphasizes transcendence of the physical world, wherein spirituality is independent of the material universe. In contrast, the descending path emphasizes immanence or the embodiment of the Divine into physical form. Examples of descending paths include animistic, druid, pagan and some occult schools. Both of these spiritual approaches offer potent gifts; however, in our view, both of them offer only partial truths.
The ascending path leads to ecstatic communion with expansive nonphysical energies, but if you disconnect with the body and Earth, the disconnection can result in health issues, repression of bodily pleasure, and desecration of the planet. On the other hand, the descending path may ground us in our earthly experience, allow us to savor the richness of the material world, and enjoy bodily pleasure in the present moment, but when practiced without sufficient spiritual awareness or consciousness, it can also lead to hedonism and lethargy and can stunt the practitioner’s spiritual evolution. The path of the sex shaman is nondual. This means that it’s both ascending and descending, light and dark, masculine and feminine.
Underlying all these exercises is the belief that the body is a temple that we open with pleasurable worship so that spirit may dwell more fully within. As you practice, you’ll begin to realize that you are not only the body, but you are also transcendental consciousness entering into your felt experience. A sex shaman brings the infinite to the finite, boundlessness into boundaries, formlessness into form, and heaven to earth.
Now imagine your body as a holy temple. How can you cleanse, decorate, and activate your form in ways that invite more devotion, passion, and ecstasy? You’ll find that the exercises offered in the book are designed to progressively deepen your experience of embodiment, connecting you to both spirit and matter.
Because many of our experiences go beyond reason and run counter to mainstream thinking, you may be called to question some of your own spiritual cosmology. We are not trying to convert or recruit. We simply invite you to release any limiting beliefs that no longer serve you and to open your heart to new possibilities.
Try turning the judgment around: What is it about myself that I admire in this one? What is it about myself that I judge in that one? Our reactions provide valuable information about how we can become more whole.
Sexual shamanism is a vast terrain, and our various voices are here to inspire your journey, with both timeless truths and timely answers.
ISTA recognizes that the deep self is already free, inherently loving, and dynamically creative.
We allow ourselves to be informed by the empty center or void.
We share a vision of a world in which humans have a peaceful, guilt-free, shameless, fearless, and loving relationship with their own bodies, sexuality, emotions, hearts, minds, and spirit as well as the ability to harmonize with other sentient people, animals, and dimensions.
1 Initiation Into The Art Of Love
Ängsbacka was one of my favorite places on Earth, a center for spiritual growth in the middle of Sweden, and this week we had an Easter gathering with dance, yoga, and bhajan (devotional singing).
He was so relaxed, his eyes were so soft, and his energy worked as a magnet to my core. I dropped my bags on the floor to receive his welcoming embrace, and I couldn’t leave. His warmth was so comforting, and I could feel his heartbeat in his chest. I was mesmerized by his fragrance, and as he held me close, I could feel him all the way down in my pussy.
He told us about polarities, the attraction between the masculine and the feminine energy, and how the dance of polarities merges in the heart as love.
He saw God. When I realized that he saw God in me, I suddenly felt God looking out of my eyes as well, and I saw God in him and God everywhere.
He lifted me up on his lap and started to arouse me, looking me straight in my eyes. He started to touch my spine in a way that I had never felt before. He knocked his knuckles on my breastbone and made my spine move in waves.
As soon as he felt that I lost presence, he snapped his fingers in front of my face and commanded me to look him in his eyes. Waves of pleasure and joy broke my patterns of control and confusion, and he took command of me and kept me present. After a while, we rested together in silence, gazing at the stars in each other’s eyes.
together. I realized that I was used to putting love in a small box with walls that represent certain projections and demands, a secret contract of love.
Suddenly I felt as if I had been struck by lightning. My whole body opened, and through my nose I could smell the most exquisite fragrance from the opening flowers in the garden. I heard bees humming in the morning sun, and the birds sang as loud as an orchestra with hundreds of voices.
From that day on, I promised myself to heal my relationships to life, to myself, and to my child and to follow my heart’s truth no matter what. Starting that day, my life turned around, and I have lived a life of joy and freedom ever since. I devoted myself to giving back to life all the gifts that life had given me. I started to walk the path of a dakini and began to support the kundalini awakening process in other people.
9 FROM FROZEN TO FLOWING By Sean O’Faolain
Something in me would still like to present this life as a hero’s journey, a natural progression resulting from the determined and victorious application of a loving heart and a courageous will. A more accurate metaphor, however, might be tears rolling down the cheeks of night, a lost wrestling match with the unknown, or an often-reluctant and sometimes sulky surrender to the inevitable and undeniable.
Language was the first strange initiation for me. As a child, I recall the wonder of realizing people were not able to sense each other. They had this thing called “words,” which I needed to master in order to communicate what I was already saying as loudly as I could with my whole being, such as “I love you.”
I became a word wizard creating spells to break the great spell of separation. I want to break through the words, scatter the letters, reach straight out through the page or computer screen, and whisper with my whole being into your heart. To touch you directly, to be with you, to be you.
So, I climbed on a ship to Europe. I tried living in a kibbutz in Israel. I lurked around the pyramids, the Parthenon, and the cathedrals, soaking up wisdom from the stones, the statues, and the frescoes. I meditated and read Hermann Hesse. I lived on the beach at Crete, got drunk, and danced like Zorba. I made love to exotic women and spent time alone in the mountains and the deserts. I wrote a lot. Looking back through the veils of time, I have such love for that young man. He did not know where he was wandering and what he was seeking, but he expected to find it anyway. One day, just before my nineteenth birthday, I woke up from a rough sleep in a Paris cemetery to find a black dog pissing on me.
Shamans have this kind of vision. I learned by trial and error, sharing what I should have kept to myself and keeping to myself what wanted to be shared. I found the heart to be the organ of discernment. The heart knows when the bird of the soul needs to sing.
All of the spiritual experiences my soul had tasted over many years seemed to land in and through the body. I came home in a profound way. Who knew that a finger inside the one place that my soul had never thought to look could bring me back to Earth and the experience of belonging here.
In my inner worlds, I began to be accompanied by feminine teachers. They were not conveying perception and direction as my earlier shamanic training had, but instead what I might term energetic penetration.
It took a period of seven years for this relationship to move from an energetic kiss to making love in a kinesthetic experience that made me understand what a dakini really
I began to understand that only so much can be conveyed through consciousness and that touch in both the physical and metaphysical sense is required for the direct transmission of awakening. When I first established a mystery school, my rule was “No sexual interaction between teachers and students,” for obvious reasons: the power differential, the potential for trauma, transference, shadow desire, exploitation projections, and so on.
one has all the answers in this repressed and powerful part of human experience and no one is immune to his or her own shadow drives. At least here we are a group of people who were willing to risk getting it wrong for the sake of love, willing to challenge each other and grow practices together so that future generations can have a healthier relationship with their bodies and their life force. My own touchstone when I became part of the governance of ISTA was that I wanted to feel that these were programs that our children and grandchildren could attend and be treated with the care and respect that every human being deserves.
She pressed the issue and was very clear what she wanted, not to be treated as a therapeutic case but met authentically as a human being on her journey who was being brave enough to follow and explore her desire to be met in that way by me.
When I checked inside, I found that this was also my authentic truth, not just in my desire and in my heart but also my soul intuition that included my sense of care for her in the role I was in. This was a crisis. Do I follow my own deep truth or do I follow collective wisdom? The risk is great, both to me and her, if I am misguided. Surely it is better to follow the path of caution.
restored the trust between my soul and my sexuality that modern society has done its best to interfere with in such painful ways. It was not enough to simply offer my soul and heart to love. All of my subtle bodies wanted to be in on the gig, surrendering all those energies locked up in the lower chakras: sex, possessiveness, money, survival, belonging, self-worth—all of the ancient traumas and fears from growing up in a world where love was exiled from so-called material reality.
Ultimately, the role of a sex shaman, as I see it, is to touch you in the deepest, most intimate part of your being, to get you to confess and surrender to the most profound longings of the body and soul alike. It is to be known, penetrated, and called forth into expression in the world so that we cannot help but stand up and become visible as the love we are. This is an erection of the human spirit. This is soul arousal. We are not just at the “great turning” on Earth but the “great turn-on.” We are the erectile tissue of the planet, able to first feel the rush as the loving life blood of the human spirit returns. We are not just the universe becoming self-aware or self-realized, but the universe enjoying itself, reaching out and touching itself intimately under the veils of space and time, exploring what feels good, beginning to tremble, breathe heavily, and cry out together. Then it will not be the note of suffering that this planet sends out into the universe, it will be the irrepressible sound of life liberated and love being consummated. It will be a shameless, orgasmic cry of freedom.
others on
So tired of the arguments on how to worship, lessons on how to pray, how to cleanse and repent and all that good and evil nonsense! That got us all kicked out of the paradise of THIS EARTH as IT IS…
The might of his Revolution will be felt ON YOUR KNEES.
When the true majesty of my being open to a higher consciousness is present, all I can do is weep, grasp the ground, and shake and destroy all that is NOT in alignment with LOVE This God created us, the world, everything, and so he will take it away.
Behind the visions is the VOID. A place of no-time, extending across dimensions, dark matter, complete stillness, penetrating through all matter, like the eye of the creator