Welcome to my Annual Birthday Sermon
albeit a day late
Recently I’ve been more immersed in the land of my own sex, fantasy, and fiction than uh… whatever social media is offering, so my annual birthday sermon is coming a day late.
33. Good number.
This year has been a trip, to say the least. And honestly, I feel like I only began really leaning into the threads of my life in January. Of course, that’s not true. I was leaning into a hell of a lot in a cycle that seems to have begun in January of 2022… so much that I was perhaps (absolutely definitely) a bit overwhelmed by it all.
I had trouble drawing connections between all the things, so I surrendered myself to the sea of chaos. Not that that’s out of the ordinary for me in any way. In fact, it’s where I prefer to spend much of my time.
Recently, though, I realized I had spent enough time swimming around, collecting seashells, becoming a jack of all trades and master of none.
I do love being a jack of all trades. It’s served me quite well.. However; I’ve learned mastery is where my satisfaction lies. So for the latter half of my 32nd year, I leaned into explorations of intense, single-pointed focus.
The focus that has emerged most poignantly? Lover as the Beloved - as God. Ah, yes. The very subject I (now realize) I’ve been investigating my entire life, without realizing how absolutely crucial it was to my becoming.
For a long time I *thought* I was bound to be a movement teacher. That dream began when I was 16 and first discovered yoga. I held on tight, but I never realized it. It was confusing. It still is sometimes. I still think about it, wondering at what point I closed the door to that dream. The mental threads have taken a while to dissipate, but through my own actions, I’ve witnessed myself not directing my energy toward bringing it to life.
“It must be a big desire.”
I hold the feeling.
“A big desire attached to a big fear of fucking up.”
“Is letting go fucking up?”
That is how the story seemed to go, every time.
I wonder when I will embrace a dream and realize its fruition. I wonder when the desire + my confidence + a willingness to be completely humiliated and also utterly destroyed by the love I allow to move through my body will create the perfectly imperfect storm for my next iteration.
I see this process has happened countless times over the past year, often in connection with the man some of you know as C. Sometimes to feel like the dream is real, you need a witness. That’s one thing I’ve learned. To really feel what’s blocking me from realizing a dream, I often need a relational catalyst. Because sure, I can trust myself in private. I can be many things in private, but what about when blasted with the illumination of a trusted lover & confidant? How much can I really trust that my own expression is welcome and cherished and also that it totally is safe to “fuck up,” and not be the perfect expression I imagine or desire to be. And further, how does it feel to be seen? Do I want more of the sometimes harsh reality of what it really means to love unconditionally?
Yes. A resounding yes.
When I was 26, by my own hand, my whole world shifted dramatically and my perception of my life and my role in it began to expand far beyond what I ever dreamed was possible. I wanted to share this with the world. “I’ll be a coach!” I thought. I invested so much of my money and attention in this dream, yet somehow it also left me wanting. I was still searching for something. Permission?
In both instances, I was afraid to fill the role with me, actually. Everything felt shallow. Parts of me were too scared to speak up. The exact parts that held the wisdom the rest of me desperately needed. My awareness was wrapped up in fear and avoiding the discomfort of being too much.
I shared these parts with C and my therapist. I practiced giving them voices. I practiced being seen. I practiced being too much, and then a little more, for everyone to want more of. Or not - that was the thing. I just had to want myself more than I gave a fuck about what anyone thought. Something I’ve been working to integrate for as long as I’ve known integration was a thing. As long as I’ve understood that intellect and experience were not the same.
Before 26, I was in self-imposed solitary confinement. Today I spend a lot of time alone so I can show up with relative clarity; less confused by how others feel (cause woah, y’all… I feel you more than I feel myself sometimes), and more integrated in my own experience.
All of the seemingly random yet intimately connected esoteric education I’ve given myself has offered me a context through which to understand why it is I have felt overpowered and swept away by others.
It is not because I am powerless, as I once told myself. It lies in my openness. My sensitivity. Gifts, now that I’m aware of their role in my perception.
I’ve been studying human design since I was 28, and I remember being both excited and overwhelmed with the abyss of information there was to chew through.
At first, I thought surely, there, I’d find the answer to “how to be the right kind of person.” Still my mind had a firm grip on what “correct” meant, and it is what drove me. Mind as ruler rather than servant.
Mind as servant is the ultimate switch. Consciousness becomes witness. Keen observer. Body becomes temple. You are a channel of Self awareness. Thoughts emerge. Art emerges. It’s all emerging in the consciousness that you are that I am. No separation - the ability to see through the illusion of the senses.
After many years of my human design experiment I started to appreciate the teachings differently. I saw passages from the I Ching as contemplations - pathways to mental freedom and rearrangement. Pattern interruption. The switch. Mind became servant thread by thread.
Pattern interruption is a key in actively becoming, evolving, learning. The other key is that purely intellectual learning is not complete; experience is the necessary step to integration. Otherwise… the mind rules tyrannically. Experience is a knowing that is more difficult to question than belief based on intellect alone.
Sex is probably the best demonstration of this. In what other realm are we so highly focused on sensation that we get the heightened experience of the transformation of pain into pleasure? Perhaps not even the transformation, but the marriage of the two? Where is the line? Does it exist? Slap me hard while you’re pounding me harder. Cut off the bloodflow to my brain as I turn to gold in your hands. Enter the exit. Realize God in my ass. Take my power. Kill me with it.
As Alan Watts would tell you, you can’t have a front without a back. You can’t have black without white. Within one lies the seed of the other. All this to say: enter forbidden territories. Treasure lies there.
Useful change tends to be catalyzed through the acquisition of experiential wisdom, rather than relying on arbitrarily approved of mental constructs to make decisions. There is a lot of fragility in those constructs. A lot of misinformation repeated and clung to as fact.
We must suspend old beliefs to make space for new experiences.
Yet, the mind does need something to grip. So why not give it a slew of ancient wisdom to try to wrap itself around?
Soon enough, one finds there is no real “figuring out,” or wrapping oneself around.
Figuring out is temporary. An illusion. The point is not to wrap the awareness around something, but to be open, and to deepen into the moment. To experience. To know.
Maybe the caterpillar, at some point, thinks it has things figured out. But then it turns into goo. It forms a chrysalis and dissolves. Is it figuring things out? I don’t believe so. It is following its process. And through its process it emerges as something entirely different. Its DNA rearranges as if by magic (it is) and the caterpillar can’t do anything about it. Metamorphosis happens. It is beautiful.
“Emerge, butterfly,” C said to me one day as I felt on the brink, for the millionth time, of having my body of knowledge emerge as something teachable.
And then, the anxiety. Another part of the emergence process. I was so caught up in the arrangement of ideas, fixating on the notion that they weren’t arranged correctly, that I could hardly see the brilliance of what I’d learned and desired to share.
In the midst of this creative meltdown, he said to me, “You are safe. Build something, maybe only to destroy it. Sometimes we need control over what we decide we don’t want before accepting what we do.”
I remember reading the message, softening a bit. I am safe I am safe I am safe. I didn’t realize how not safe I’d been feeling in this emergence. Pushing up against wave after wave of old horror stories, beliefs about what was appropriate, acceptable, possible.
I discarded a lot. Gained a great deal of control through many experiences informing me of what I did not want.
What I didn’t want was to suffer at my own hand. What I did want was to transmute my emotional experiences into a position of power. More than anything else this past year, my expansive self pleasure practice has been the magic that supported my freedom and nourished my soul’s evolution.
It’s taken a lot of work to truly embrace my sexual nature. My pleasure. My Desire.
That’s what all of this searching has been about anyway. It was not, as I imagined, about figuring it out in the traditional sense of “defining” myself.
Rather, the search itself - the investigation of infinite aspects of myself, my interests, talents, creative genius - has been about seeing this: I need not define who I am to embrace my evolution.
This has felt challenging in many dimensions. To be in this place beyond definition.
To follow a thread of Desire often entails a very murky beginning. There is difficulty here, in the void, before any pattern seems to have emerged. What is there to cling to but random lines of poetry that flow out from the blackness and through my fingertips, or images that illustrate themselves through my paintbrush, or the wet of my lover’s tongue across my skin?
On many occasions I’ve come to this contemplation of myself as an artist.
Here’s what I’ve noticed. Ever since I can remember, I’ve been immersed in a world of men, books, writing and music. I’ve found my peace in the realm of love, imagination and fantasy. I’ve found my life there.
For nine years, smack dab in the middle of when most people my age were going off to college, making lifelong friends, getting married, having babies… I was venturing to the underworld. The occult saying, “as above, so below,” demonstrates itself beautifully here. I was investigating everything that horrified (and intrigued!) me. Torture. Manipulation. Starvation. Existential dread. Abuse. Disconnection. Slavery. Horror. I stayed there, holding my breath, honing my strength, developing a keen awareness of power dynamics. An unconventional way of learning, sure - staying in an abusive relationship, milking it for every last drop of wisdom that might be gleaned. Highly effective, though.
I suppose many people never actually move through that place. Instead they stay, they subdue themselves, they live a life of sublimated desire. They resign to the way they think things are “supposed” to be. That’s how most of the world is, it seems. But what do I know?
I think maybe everyone is always doing this sort of investigation but they don’t make it through, to the light. Which is to say, they don’t gain awareness through their experience, rather they walk around it on eggshells, afraid of rocking the boat.
Whereas new awareness requires only new experience, which can be a sidestep, depth of awareness requires depth of experience. You can only experience a breath as deeply as you take it into your body. To emerge from the dark requires that one feel their way through the horrors they once believed they were victim to.
So, yes. I chose torture. I chose abuse. I chose suffering. I chose to feel all those things.
In feeling all that so deeply, so young, I tend to think I was being clever, simply saving the best for last. Equipping myself with underworld tools that would then create more ease in my experience of the light.
I believe in a creation story where there was first just one thing - pure awareness. That awareness eventually had a desire to experience more than just… floating in a sea of its own blissful consciousness. So it split into two (yin/yang, masculine/feminine, shiva/shakti) forming a sort of cosmic mind. Then, desiring yet more, the cosmic mind gave rise to the powers to will, to know, and to do. Of course, the purely etheric experience of the cosmic mind wasn’t enough either, so it created the Maya - the universal force of concealment - that which gives rise to the illusion of the physical and separate reality we appear to be living within.
If, like me, you believe in a creation story like this, maybe you can see how we are simply consciousness experiencing itself through a human lens. Consciousness - the goddess herself! wanted to know abuse, depression, terror, so she created me, and you, and everyone we think of as separate humans, simply as vessels through which to see herself. Mirrors.
What if this is all a game of hide and seek? This grand drama, a game the goddess is playing with herself. Through us. Ha!
What if you never looked in a mirror? How would you see the world then, not knowing you had a face? Not having any of the associations of “self” that come with having a face?
Everything might not be so much about you as a fragile ego driven individual. It might be more about serving the Self - the cosmic mind. It might be more innately about becoming a vessel for the divine, without all the conditioning we’ve imposed upon ourselves as a society. It might be a big ravenous orgy of witches and sorcerers.
All I’m really saying is, Desire - Eros - the force of life itself - is always animating you, no matter what you think. There is no division between the sinful and the sacred, no matter what you think.
Sure, it’s hard to explain lots of things - but that doesn’t make them any less crucial to the divine play. Egoic consciousness doesn’t want pain or suffering. It’s dangerous, uncomfortable, confronting. Yet it’s part of life, and the cosmic mind knows that.
Fulfillment is a matter of experience and perception. Where are you looking? Can you hold the nuance of your own life in your hands and gaze upon it with love and acceptance? The heartbreak giving way to bigger loves. The pain giving way to deeper bliss. The confusion giving way to illumination.
From the darkness emerges the light. This life is a dance of embracing duality. Desire and fear walk hand in hand. I am most alive when I am slightly terrified of what lies just around the bend.
The truth is, I feel what’s around the bend and it is a crazy beautiful terrifyingly powerful monster full of deep hot sex and fantasy. And yes, this is foreshadowing.
Game on, I say! And happy birthday to me.