conscious intimacy - Making Love with God

Love Spells for Difficult Conversations – Part II

This is part two of an exploration into how elements of spell craft can be woven into the ways we communicate with each other, particularly when discussing tough and tender topics. In my last post, I explored magical approaches to showing up for difficult generative conversations as our best and most present selves. In this sequel musing, I’m going to be exploring how the arc of ritual magic can support us in having discussions that are more generative and connective.

Let’s dive in with a summary of the ritual arc as I usually teach it:

Creating Safe & Sacred Space
Setting Intention
Raising Energy
Release
Surrender & Giving Thanks

For the purposes of today’s musings, I will be unpacking three of these ritual components – Creating Safe & Sacred Space, Setting Intention, and Surrender & Giving Thanks – and how they might support challenging conversations (I’m not unpacking the Raising Energy and Release components in the same way, since within the “ritual” of such conversations, those are essentially represented by the dialogue itself).
…

Love Spells for Difficult Conversations – Part IIRead More »

Love Spells for Difficult Conversations – Part II Read More »

Love Spells for Difficult Conversations

Today’s topic is love spells for difficult generative conversations. Because, as we so often hear, we are living through divisive times. And there is a bracing that I sense is present now in so many of us that it has become a collective experience. We are braced against the next impact, our systems preparing to fight or flee moment to moment. In the face of the forces seeking to enrage and divide us, and the constant bombardment with horrors and urgencies that can feel outside of our control, we are braced, and that bracing can make us feel fragile. Little things become the last straw, and we have little grace for our fellow humans; we are seemingly losing what capacity we had to allow space for their humanity, and for our own.

It can feel harder than ever to have hard conversations, or conversations that we anticipate might be hard. The stakes are too high. We would rather retaliate or retreat in the face of upset – and besides, we’re all hustling. It can feel so much easier to let a conversation, and perhaps a relationship, slide.

And yet. We are also living in times rich in urgency, urgencies of a scale that cannot be faced alone. On a collective level, one of the biggest impacts that forces designed to divide and distract us are having is rendering us incapable of working together to solve collective problems. And on an individual level, we are lonely. We need to be able to talk to each other in ways that allow us not just to connect, but to be interconnected and interdependent, to be co-creative, to collaborate – and to keep doing so when the going gets tough.

To help us keep talking to each other, here is the first in a series of two posts packed with sex-magical tools and tips for tough and tender conversations. This first post will focus on witchy ways to approach any given encounter as your best and most grounded self. The next post will explore how the arc of ritual magic can be used to create generative containers for more intentional communication.

…

Love Spells for Difficult ConversationsRead More »

Love Spells for Difficult Conversations Read More »

Creating Safe and Sacred Space for Intimate Conversations

One of the most common topics I explore with my clients in psychosexual coaching sessions is communication – including the question of how to do it.

“It’s all very well identifying this boundary or need, but how can I communicate it to my partner(s)?”

“How do I tell someone I’m not interested in a romantic connection with them without being an arsehole?”

“How would I even begin to articulate this desire?”

These are all questions that are fairly common in a container that is focused on bringing the seeker into deeper relationship with self – especially when the intention behind that enquiry is often to be in more sustainable, pleasurable, and/or co-creative relationships with others.

…

Creating Safe and Sacred Space for Intimate ConversationsRead More »

Creating Safe and Sacred Space for Intimate Conversations Read More »

Ritualising Intimacy – or, What Does Magic Have to do with Sex Anyway?

Twice this year I have had the exquisite pleasure of training a group of sexuality practitioners in the art of Ritual Fireplay. After the most recent course in Stockholm, a day immersed in ritual, bathed in firelight, and interspersed with sweet sounds of sensation and release, I’ve been thinking a lot about magic.

Specifically, why magic and ritual are woven around and through so much of what I offer in the work that is Making Love with God. …

Ritualising Intimacy – or, What Does Magic Have to do with Sex Anyway?Read More »

Ritualising Intimacy – or, What Does Magic Have to do with Sex Anyway? Read More »

An Ode to Perseverance

Perseverance.

This is the subject of my love letter to you this month dear hearts.

Specifically, perseverance in relationship.

What follows is an ode to those of you pushing through the undergrowth of resentment and the quick sands of fear, in dogged determination to get back to the heartland of connection. A serenade to those sitting up together till 3am, wrestling the built up habits of a lifetime into submission in order to allow trust to blossom. A celebration of those striving to get present enough with the all-too-familiar to make it new*. And an attempt to offer some possibilities to those of you asking yourselves a variation of the following:

How can I nurture our togetherness, and take action on behalf of our love, in order to make this relationship even more sustainable, intimate, and juicy? …

An Ode to PerseveranceRead More »

An Ode to Perseverance Read More »

Why Relate: Some Thoughts on the Vital Necessity of Cultivating our Capacity to Connect

Reconnection is one of the strongest driving forces behind the work that is Making Love with God. That innate and undeniable longing to reconnect – to ourselves, to each other, and perhaps to something more than us. The call, in other words, to relationship.

Relationship being a very particular thing to dedicate one’s life to, I do a fair amount of reflecting on the driving force behind what I do. With this year’s Initiation Training beginning in under two weeks, a training with reconnection beating at its very heart, I wanted to share three reasons* why I believe that creatively cultivating our capacity to connect is so very, vitally, relevant – now, and always. …

Why Relate: Some Thoughts on the Vital Necessity of Cultivating our Capacity to ConnectRead More »

Why Relate: Some Thoughts on the Vital Necessity of Cultivating our Capacity to Connect Read More »

The Side Effects of Conscious Sex

In last month’s post, I attempted to create a working definition for Conscious Sexuality. This is how far I got:

To engage in Conscious Sex is to engage and commit your whole self to the erotic experience – to endeavour to become as fully present as you can to what is moving in you in each moment, and to what is moving in anyone else engaging in the experience with you. It is to be present enough to what is moving in the erotic body, or the space between erotic bodies, to allow an infinite number of possibilities to unfold there – including what might be described as miracles.

In this month’s post, I’m going to talk about some of the side effects I see unfolding as a result of practicing Conscious Sex. These are drawn from experiences reported by my clients, workshop participants, and colleagues, as well as my own. The side effects I’ll be exploring here are:

Integration – Intimacy – Ecstasy – An Expanded Definition of Sex …

The Side Effects of Conscious SexRead More »

The Side Effects of Conscious Sex Read More »

A Definition of Conscious Sex

Recently, I found myself sitting in on a conversation about sex and spirituality, noticing I was feeling increasingly uncomfortable. As it was the end of a long day, I didn’t pin down what was making me so restless until much later, when I was back in my own space. It was then I realised what I felt had been missing from the discussion:

The term “sex” was being used as though everyone knew what it meant – and, despite the fact that it was being discussed within a spiritual context, no distinction had been made between the physical act of intercourse, and what I might term Conscious Sexuality. …

A Definition of Conscious SexRead More »

A Definition of Conscious Sex Read More »

Air, Water, Fire, Earth

When we first began, it seemed appropriate that an event based on the four elements should begin with their invocation. Or at least, it did to me, with my pagan witchy roots, and the same could be said of the core members of the team who were helping me make this new vision manifest.
Two years on, the circle has to be two people deep in order to fit into the venue, but still we turn together to the East, West, South, and North, and invite the elements of each quarter into the space. The participants are encouraged to notice each element as it manifests outside of them, and also as it manifests within. Later, they will find their way to the spaces inspired by and infused with each element; they’ll dip strawberries in the chocolate melting in Earth, join a cuddle puddle in Water, boogie down into their bodies on the dance floor in Air, and frolic and make love in Fire.
And this is just one of the rituals I hold of which the four elements form a core ingredient. In the last few years, I’ve found myself blessing and binding couples with them in handfastings; calling upon them to cleanse the recipient of a rite of passage as they stepped through a ritual portal into their new identity; and, as my second and final year of Interfaith Ministry training gets underway, I find them making a seemingly inevitable appearance in my every ceremony assignment.
But what I’m reflecting on today are the ways in which I’ve noticed Air, Water, Fire, Earth entering into my personal practice again; how they support and sustain me, the gifts they offer when I seek to be cleansed, healed, and nourished. And so I wanted to close this loose triptych of posts about finding spiritual and sexual healing in the face of this mad year with something of an ode to those elements, and a reminder to lean back, to breathe, drink, surrender, and ground yourselves in them. …

Air, Water, Fire, EarthRead More »

Air, Water, Fire, Earth Read More »

Tantra for Geeks

A couple of weeks ago, I found myself enthusing with a regular client over a new analogy we had come up with for self care – one that utilised mathematical parabola to demonstrate the necessity of rest and reflection for expansion and well-being.

This got me thinking again on a topic that has been floating around in the old cerebrum for some time. I recalled what my teacher often says about how our “biases” – our personal and particular bugbears, passions, and rants – influence and shape our work.

For me, some biases have been there since I first started out in my field, and have grown increasingly stronger with time – such as a need to work towards inclusivity for all genders, bodies, and orientations. Some I have discovered and nurtured along the way – like a talent for supporting clients in sitting with what I call the “difficult questions”, and making peace with extremes of emotion.

And some… Some have just sort of appeared out of the corner of my eye, and come along for the ride whether I planned it or not.

One of these, which I have become more aware of in the last year, is the fact that I, apparently, teach tantra for geeks. …

Tantra for GeeksRead More »

Tantra for Geeks Read More »