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).
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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.

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A Daily Dose of Pleasure for February

Let’s talk about January. Based on my conversations with clients and loved ones, it seems that for a lot of us in this rainy corner of the northern hemisphere it has been a month of pervasive tiredness, of foggy minds and landscapes, of lingering colds and sudden losses. Good riddance, right? Now let’s talk about what comes after January. Because when I think of February, I think of cold snaps, grey skies, and most of all, the existential dread that accompanies the dark before the dawn of spring. In January, with all the promise, the mythos of a new year, I can dream. In February, it feels as if my body loses all memory of being warm, free, unfettered by all these layers of clothes and low clouds… and those dreams can falter.

I’ve been inspired over the years by friends who proactively prepare for the month in question, reaching for micro joys and cultivating new interests to keep the February blues at bay. So I thought I’d get creative this year – and I’m inviting you to join me.

I am proposing a daily dose of pleasure – at least 5 minutes of being fully present to something that feels good, sparks joy, and/or causes the sap to rise in our bodies.

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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.

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Sex Magic for Making Change

Change. I’m used to being surrounded by folks who want it in one form or another – from my coaching clients, to my close people who are creatives, activists, and/or magicians. But in this last year, that clarion call for change seems to have become universal, even as the changes each of us desire can appear vastly diverse. From global movements calling for long overdue shifts in how we treat our planet and each other, to the folks who just really want a hug Right Now, it seems so many of us want to be living through different stories, personally and collectively – and we’re struggling to know how to begin to tell them.

I’ll be honest: in the midst of all these “urgencies” (as Donna Haraway names them) it feels like a strange time to be talking about sex magic. In her introduction to my book, Igniting Intimacy: Sex Magic Rituals for Radical Living and Loving, Barbara Carrellas wrote: “[Sex] Magic is the art of transformation. It’s the ability to imagine an alternative existence and then create and sustain that existence.” But what does that mean at a time like this? How can we draw on sex magical practices in ways that feel like they have meaning in the face of personal and collective exhaustion, frustration, and grief – not to mention the sheer size and volume of change that is calling to be brought forth? …

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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. …

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