Sexuality and Sensuality, the power of touch and human physical contact is mired in deep conditioning and taboos. Here is a great potential to heal humanity and each of us… should we be willing to simply look at our conditioning and create safe spaces for conversation and exploration as have always been there in ancient and conscious tribes.

I came across a beautiful book, ‘Sex at Dawn’ which looks at this whole domain of human sexuality.
My one-liner about the book is:
How might we live healthier & wiser lives… and create vibrant relationships and access true love… by appreciating the truth about human Sexuality, currently lost in heavy societal conditioning.

I found some beautiful and even fun quotes from the book which will speak to many of us who are willing to look at the whole subject.

Sex was an expression of friendship: in Africa it was like holding hands… It was friendly and fun. There was no coercion. It was offered willingly.
– Paul Theroux

Man has imagined a heaven, and has left entirely out of it the supremest of his delights, the one ecstasy that stands foremost in the heart of every individual of his race… sex! It is as if a lost and perishing person in a roasting desert should be told by a rescuer he might choose and have all longed-for things but one, and he should elect to leave out water!
– Mark Twain, Letters from the Earth

I sometimes try to imagine what would have happened if we’d known the bonobo first and the chimpanzee later or not at all. The discussion about human evolution might not revolve as much around violence, warfare, and male dominance, but rather around empathy, sexuality, caring, and cooperation. What a different intellectual landscape we would occupy!
– Frans de Waal, Our Inner Ape

Understanding is a lot like sex; it’s got a practical purpose, but that’s not why people do it normally.
– Frank Oppenheimer

Love is an ideal thing, marriage is a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The prerequisite for a good marriage, it seems to me, is the license to be unfaithful.
– Carl Jung, in a letter to Freud dated Jan 30, 1910

Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. That is just ‘being in love’ which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left when being in love is burned away…
– Louis de Berniers, Corelli’s Mandolin

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While on the subject of Sexuality, I also came across a beautiful insight from the the Tao about ‘ejaculation’ in this realm which is captured below:

Tsai Nu (one of Huang Ti’s three female advisors) : ‘It is generally supposed that a man derives great pleasure from ejaculation. But when he learns the Tao he will emit less and less, will not his pleasure diminish?’

‘On the other hand, if a man reduces and regulates his ejaculation to an absolute minimum, his body will be strengthened, his mind at ease and his vision and hearing improved. Although the man seems to have denied himself an ejaculatory sensation at times, his love for his woman will greatly increase, It is as if he could never have enough of her. And this is the true lasting pleasure, is it not?’

There was an interesting conversation on facebook around this. I posted this on March 21st on my Timeline. Wish I could have provided a link!

And then there is the whole question of sexual abuse.. as I see it, it has a direct correlation with the fact that this whole conversation has not yet emerged from the bedroom to the living room.

I just saw a courageous Tedx talk by Harrish Iyer (www.hiyer.net)

What if we had a culture of speaking about Sex? (safely and truthfully)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lO9BbFo3Qg

Essentially, the purpose of this particular blog is to share something that touched me and invite us to create healthy and safe spaces for conversations with ourselves and others – those dialogues which are generally taboo. That we learn to be in touch with our urges and surges. That we see that human sexuality and sensuality is not dirty or bad. That it can be healing.

And above all, our understanding of love and truth, of life and beauty can deepen if we make it safe to share things that we are scared to talk about.