Last week I shared a simple yet powerful practice for embodying ecstasy. This week, I want to be clear about something (that maybe you already know).
Embodied ecstasy isn’t about prancing around with a perma-smile plastered inauthentically across your face. It’s not about denying the very real heartbreak, terror, and calamity being human sometimes is. It’s not about transcendence and rising above.
Embodied ecstasy is deeper than good/bad, pain/pleasure, heaven/earth. It’s about the ancient current of beauty that holds us. It’s training the nervous system not to cling to a certain experience, to loop in old patterns. It’s about choice, reclaiming pleasure that’s been robbed or repressed. It’s about using the medicine of pleasure to soften, open and create new realities.
Embodied ecstasy is about remembering our innate forces of healing, our natural impulse towards wholeness. Given the right conditions, every body moves towards its original state of ecstasy. This is about creating those right conditions.
I’m so tired of the word “healing”. It often implies there is something innately WRONG with us, that we’re in need of fixing. When we approach our practices with this lens, we’re always at arms length from the wholeness we desire. It’s always almost here.
When we invite presence, breath, sound into being, “healing” naturally arises. The innate impulse towards wholeness awakens. We don’t need to think our way into it. We don’t need to DO anything. We just BE ecstasy.
To build on last week’s practice, I invite you to try this:
- Bring loving presence to some place in your body. Cradle this part of you in love. Feel that deep source of unconditional love and acceptance in your heart center. Feel love pouring through your arms, into your hands, and into this body part. Let it know it’s safe to feel and be it all. Everything is welcome here. No part is broken. No part needs fixing.
- Begin a slow and gentle open mouth breath. No pauses if it’s comfortable. Send the breath consciously into this body part. Attention and energy follow breath. So feel your awareness and energy flow into this space, shining radiant light into it. Illuminating what’s here. Again, not with the goal of fixing, just illuminating and witnessing what’s here.
- Feel the sensations and emotions that arise. Tension, pain, pleasure, tingling. Sadness, anger, joy, numbness. Welcome it all. Begin to sound these sensations and emotions. Breathe into the sensation, exhale to make its sound. Let it move around. Take up space. Trust. Your. Body. Trust its wisdom and innate impulse towards healing and wholeness. This might take some time. The sounds might scare you. Your neighbors might think you’re possessed and call the police. The thing will come to completion, with enough attention and care.
This is a very basic outline of some of the practices we’ll be exploring in Embodied Ecstasy. These are the foundational tools to make ecstasy a true, deep, embodied experience in your life.
When we truly allow the healing impulse to arise and move through our bodies, it can look scary. Many times, I’ve found myself deep in a breath work process, tongue out, eyes bugging, and gurgle growling, looking like a scene out of the Exorcist (pea soup not included).
This healing forces is a force of the feminine and its been demonized for centuries. For centuries, we’ve been taught to fear what will heal us. We’ve been taught to fear our full emotional range, full expression, voice, power, and magic. We’ve been called crazy witches. This is an effective way of controlling people. Cut them off from their true, free sources of healing.
Deep in the full feeling and expression of something painful, is its medicine. It’s not enough for me to say these words to you. You must know it in your bones.
That’s what Embodied Ecstasy is for. Steady, sweet, slow reclamation of your ancient mundanely magical powers. Alchemical transmutation of dense emotional energy into ecstatic joy. It’s not in any healer’s hands. It’s a power within that’s waiting for you to claim it. Are you ready?
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