Journal 3: Connecting to Spirit, Red Session
by Joy
June 24th, 2008
This session is the continuation practice for the first gateway, Connecting to Spirit. It is red, which focuses on the experience of our sexuality as a part of our spiritual selves. It’s fiery, powerful and creatively intense. And me…I’m feeling small and vulnerable, on the edge of my fear and I can sense something inside me is trying to free itself. An energetic leech is attached to my second chakra, for starters, and it’s the week before my period is due to start. All systems and senses are heightened. What better time to do a ritual?
Intention
When I arrive at Caer Nwyrve, the front door is slightly ajar and Steven Jay is meditating on a nest of pillows at the huge southeast-facing window. He greets me and we sit facing each other on the couch to check in. I realized as I arrived and extracted myself from my truck, that I was nervous. I wasn’t quite sure why, but nevertheless I shared that in my check-in. I also shared some fears and thoughts about what might be keeping me from expressing myself wholly and completely. All in all, I was feeling unsettled.
Steven talked a little about the session itself, awakening the breasts, a ritual I have experienced before. This session would look and feel different, as every session does. He asked if I was ready to move into the bedroom, and I said yes. When we actually walked into the sacred room my nerves instantly calmed. I felt much safer there than I did in the living room. I shared this with Steven. “That,” he said, “is a good sign that you have chosen the right healing path.”
The intention today is to clear blocks that keep me from feeling my yoni, feeling my passion and my sexuality. I still have some layers of shame and guilt associated with sex from years of a Southern Baptist upbringing laced with several sexual abuse instances. This odd mix has manifested in my life as promiscuity in my teens and years of giving my power away to men in one way or the other—whether they wanted it or not! I have always felt a disconnection to my sexuality, but I have also always felt a longing to express it fully. I know I am a sexual woman. I feel most powerful when I allow positive expression of my sexuality. Those expressions, however, have been few and far between.
Plugging in
We start the session as always, by connecting to self first and honoring the polarities of divine feminine and masculine. I feel the grounded contact between my yoni and the earth. I open my crown to great sky father and ask him to help contain me. After we clear and check the chakras, we connect energetically to one another, intertwining our roots and branches. We then come into contact physically, in yabyum position, and practice doing a heart circuit. All I have to do is feel love, that’s my only job.
The breathing and the circuit feel like passion in its purest form. I am already feeling tranced out as my body begins to release its armor and open up to divine energy. Steven Jay checks in with me to see how I am feeling, which makes me feel so safe and so honored, and then he holds me from behind and calls in the God to protect me. “I love you,” he says. “Spirit loves you. I’ve gotcha.” I feel as if I have imbibed some sort of fairy tale liquid in a bottle that transports you to a parallel universe inside your own bedroom. I actually start to have a bit of a flashback.
I am 11 or 12 years old, one year into puberty. I have just discovered masturbation and sexually I am waking up. Secretly, I masturbate as often as I can and I am addicted to it. I am fascinated by the magical orgasm I have discovered, but I also live in constant fear and shame about it. I started puberty a good 1-3 years before any of the other girls in junior high school and we don’t talk about the changes that are going on in my family. I am scared and I do not know what to do with all this energy. It is also during this time that my step grandfather molested me, short-circuiting my tender sexual pathways.
The flashback itself contains memories of me fantasizing at night with my pillow. I used to practice kissing the pillow. I spent countless hours thinking about what it would feel like to be touched by a boy in a “special way.” I longed for the kind of touch that made me feel so loved and so wanted that I never had to feel fat and awkward. Before the molestation, I felt as though I could connect to that idealized male love. Afterwards, it morphed into something far different.
As Steven Jay channels divine masculine energy, I feel and remember the male sexual purity I used to dream about as an adolescent, before things went so wrong. I am reconnected to that aliveness, strength and safety. His hands caress each body part and there is a struggle between my mind and my body. My body wants to let in all the love that is pouring from his hands as he says “I love your face, I love your breasts, I love this heart.” But my head is putting up a fight. “I’m fat. Please don’t look at my body.”
We are in the process of making a new connection.
“A” for Receiving
Steven Jay keeps reminding me my only job is to stay connected to spirit, breathe and receive (I am happy to report that, according to my friend and daka, I got an “A” in receiving). This is not as easy as it sounds, but I did it. Part of my healing lies in allowing myself to open up and receive not just in my heart, but in my yoni. So I focused on breathing love in through my root and crown and diffued it into my entire body. The trance and sedative effect on my muscles intensify and I feel like an electric eel. Random and automatic thoughts pop into my head as I disassociate from the experience. Things are getting hot and heavy. I ask the divine masculine for help and he appears as a golden man and holds my head. Any time a thought tries to keep me from being in my body, he simply handles it for me.
The energy builds and builds. The fire is burning brighter and brighter. The breath moves inside my skin, muscles, organs—my entire system–and I am waking up. I am passion. I am love. I am present … and then…fear. I feel trapped and lost inside my own body. I don’t who I am. I don’t know where I am. I can “see” that I am a perforated outline of myself. I am almost hyperventilating. Steven Jay holds space for me while I find my way back. I know it sounds esoteric, but the experience was otherworldly. The edges of my body became atmospheric. My ego did not like that. Steven encourages me to love myself in this lost place and I do.
After a few moments the energy builds again as we breathe in love and move it up and down and through our bodies. This feels raw and very sexual and I struggle to stay in the moment. I shut down completely. My second chakra had had enough for the day. I feel disappointed in myself, frustrated and sad. Steven Jay reminds me that this wall is there for a reason. It served me years ago when I was molested and raped. I must love it for its service and let it deconstruct as it feels safe to do so.
Something in my belly wants to be released. Who knows what is there? A new world of creativity, passion, balance?
Right before the wall went up, I remember a voice inside my head. “Please don’t give up on me, please don’t give up.” I have heard this voice before while making love with partners, usually as my senses are heightened and I approach orgasm. I thought it was me asking the man to keep going…and that may be true. But today as I got a glimpse of the lost self, I realized it was ME asking ME not to give up. There is something—someone—inside me who wants to live. And with help from spirit I intend to find her, love her and release her.
