Lissa and Michael are on a mission to change the world, one orgy at a time. And their plan just might work. Michael is a modern day priest of Dionysus, the mythological Greek god of wine, who is most notorious as the inspirer of ritual madness and ecstasy. The ancient Romans called him Bacchus, and made him the patron deity of agriculture and the theater. He was also known as the Liberator – the god who helps free the human spirit through ecstasy, or wine. Of course that was back in the days when Jesus could turn water into wine without anyone suggesting that he should go to an AA meeting. Even today many Christians sip a bit of wine, portraying it as the symbolic blood of Christ. One can’t help but think that the dynamic duo of Bacchus and Jesus might have been a lot of fun at parties. “Wine, women, and salvation” has a rather nice ring to it.

A lot has changed over the past 2000 years, but the human thirst for spiritual enlightenment and liberation is still a powerful force in all cultures of the world. And, as the internet and other forms of modern media prove on a daily basis, we still have an insatiable interest in sex. Wouldn’t it be nice if our spiritual lives and our sexual lives could team up and provide a whole new meaning to the idea of a “church social”? Indeed, this is roughly the sort of vision that Michael, Lissa, and other Pagans wish to share with the world. Sex, they would say, is sacred and should be celebrated as an integral part of our social and spiritual lives. Read more

Sexual energy is the life force moving through the whole body and when it flows easily, it energizes all energy centers. However, sexual energy can get stuck, particularly if the heart center is afflicted. When someone relates to sex addictively, it is often because of significant blocks or leaks in one or more of the energy centers.

For the next few blogs, I will explore dilemmas associated with each energy center, progressing from the base of the spine to the crown of the head. These areas are:

1. Permission: Healing the Cultural Wounding Read more

People blame philosopher René Descartes for the modern idea that spirit and body are two separate and antagonistic entities. I don’t. I think making this division is an age-old trap. It takes work to see clearly that you need your physical senses to be a spiritual person, and that you need a spiritual acceptance of life’s goodness to be profoundly sensual and sexual.

When you finally get body and spirit together—Renaissance writers said you need to be a person of soul to do this—you will discover greater joy in lovemaking. It makes sense: If you are a whole person made up of body, soul, and spirit, when you make love with only your body, you’re getting only one third of the sex. Spirit and soul like sex, too, and they add immensely to the pleasure. Read more

Why is New Age spirituality so prevalent in the sex- positive community?

A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece on this blog about my skeptical, materialist, atheist, entire non- spiritual view of sexual transcendence, and why you don’t need to see sex as metaphysical to see it as magnificent and meaningful.

I deliberately didn’t make the piece critical of spirituality and religion. Partly, that simply wasn’t the point of the piece: the point wasn’t to tear down the spiritual view of sex, but to offer an alternative to it. And partly, I’ll admit, it was because many of my friends and allies in the sex community have spiritual beliefs about sex, in some cases deeply held spiritual beliefs, and I was gun-shy about alienating them.

But I recently gave an interview to Greg Fish of the Weird Things blog, who read the piece and wanted to talk with me about it. And what Greg mostly wanted to know was the very question I’d been deliberately avoiding. He wanted to know why, in my opinion, so many people in the sex- positive community are so heavily invested in associating sex with spirituality and religion.

This is an attempt to answer that question. Read more