In this article, I expand on my recent lecture at Oxford University on the distinction between the Spiritual and Soulful Paths to Authentic Sexuality, and ultimately to living an authentic, embodied, empowered life, in all regards.
For much of my life, even as a young boy, I felt I was on a spiritual quest. There was something within me that kept beckoning me to follow a deeper path. I did not understand it, but the feeling was relentlessly compelling.
By 6th grade, in the Catholic parish of St. Cletus in Chicago, I became an altar boy, and had some notion to go on to the seminary to become a priest. This was called “having a vocation” to the priesthood back then in 1960. It took me many decades to decode this inner calling and understand my vocation was soulful, not spiritual.
Interestingly, serving mass was my first unconscious resonance with the profound experience of ritual and ceremony, an integral part of soul work. I now incorporate such practices in my everyday life.
Arriving early for 7am mass, putting on the cassock and surplice, I would proceed down the hall to the Sacristy, where the priest would dress in his garments and prepare for mass. From a cupboard above the sink I got the bottle of wine, and dutifully filled the two cut-glass cruets, one with water, one with wine. I placed them on a silver tray and walked into the quiet Sanctuary to place the tray on a serving table by the altar. The communion railing, where the parishioners would soon kneel to receive communion, separated the Sanctuary and Altar from the parishioners. I did not realize it then, but I was not just an observer like those in the pews beyond the communion rail, I was actively serving as a reverent acolyte, preparing the sacred objects of the ritual ceremony of the mass in this immense, ornate container of the cathedral. It was decades later I began to understand what sacred objects, and ritual space meant, but I did resonate with this profound sense of the sacred when I participated in performing the ritual of the mass.
By 7th grade, my sexual nature was so strong, I knew I could never be a celibate priest! Beneath that angelic visage of the altar boy lurked a wild sex creature. In the schema of good and evil the Catholic doctrine imbued, I recognized deep down I was much closer to hanging with the devil than Jesus! This was another paradox that took decades to decode.
My erotic nature first awakened around 5 years old. I would sit on the floor at family gatherings totally turned by the sea of nylon legs in high heels. My 5 year old had no idea what was happening, but my sexual psyche was fixated on that deep mysterious dark passage briefly revealed when one of our female guests sat on the couch and crossed their legs. I began masturbating around this time. I instinctively understood to keep this potent part of my being, secret. And I desperately did so, unfortunately, over many decades.
I left Catholicism altogether by senior year of high school. But the sense of vocation I had, to something of a deeper nature than myself, continued with explorations of zen, taoism, buddhism and more. Perhaps the biggest catalyst to this stage of my deeper quest was one of the iconic books of my generation, Be Here Now, by Ram Dass.
But I still kept the deeper aspects of my sexuality secret. In the sex negative culture family and religion I was immersed in, I did not know how to integrate who I was sexually into my everyday life. I was not ashamed of my sexuality. I was terrified of being shamed, condemned and ostracized if ever discovered.
By my late 40’s I gave up any further effort on the spiritual path. My conclusion: whatever the divine nature, or enlightenment might be, it was inaccessible to me, even with arduous effort. I guess I was just too lazy to be so arduous. I wholly accepted that the Spiritual life was a profound Mystery to me. I really had no ability to become enlightened and finally, no interest in pursuing that path.
I discovered I was much more interested in experiencing my own life…my pleasure…my Self…my authenticity…particularly my sexual self. I shifted my focus from spiritual matters to my personal mission to become the best man I could, and being in integrity, having my words and actions be in alignment. I chose to enter the path of authentic sexuality. This was my gateway into the soulful path. These steps finally brought clarity to my lifelong sense of vocation which I now understood was to be in service in the world, by supporting others to embrace their own authentic nature, sexual and otherwise.
After getting a divorce from a soul crushing marriage at 49, I stepped into my authentic life 24/7. By 50, I was out to one and all in my community, profession, and family, as a Kink-oriented man. I embraced that I was a consensual Dominant, and an Erotic Sadist, meaning the intention always, is to attain the deepest erotic pleasure and transcendent ecstasy available for myself and my partners through negotiated, consensual, ritual Dominance, submission and BDSM. I think of this form of conscious power-exchange like a fierce tango. The Dominant leads leads, the submissive follows, but they dance as one.
For claiming my authentic sexuality and right to be who I am, I lost many friends, associates and a few family. They could not accept who I was. I have no regrets in shedding anyone of such intolerance and projections. Some were quite out of their minds about it and made great efforts to ruin me through slander and sabotage. They did a lot of damage, but did not destroy me I am happy to say, nor deter my path.
This has been a profound personal and professional journey for me. I’ve gotten to experience the depths of my own sexuality and live in my truth 24/7 for over 25 years now. I have been able to build a professional life, researching, writing, teaching and helping others experience the depths of their own sexuality, while shedding shame, fear and trauma. As Jung says, “the privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.”
After about 4 years of hanging in the Kink communities, I met a woman who started as my submissive, but within a year she ventured into the Neo-Tantra or the sacred sexuality scene. She trained with a well known practitioner of these erotic arts who taught her the trade of being a professional Tantrika.
We modified our relationship to accommodate our individual paths, mine remained firmly embedded in Kink, hers in Sacred Sexuality. For the next 7 years, I would join her in going to various conferences and workshops. I found some of the sexual healing concepts and practices taught, such as being aware of your breath, embodiment, presence, conscious gaze and movement, were very useful and practical. My soulful, primal nature found nothing compelling about the esoteric practices, and “lineage” teachings, for using sexual energy for spiritual purposes. Personally, I loved nothing better than descending deeper into my lower chakras!
From these experiences in both the Kink and Sacred Sexuality realms, I began to develop a more clear understanding of distinctions that could be made between a soulful and a spiritual approach to life.
This culminated in creating the model shown in the Spirit/Soul graphic, contrasting significant polarities in these respective paths. My intention in creating this model initially, was for sorting out how to make sense of my own soulful path. As a sex researcher I am more a theorist than a scientist. I conceive of non-pathologizing models of how our sexual psyche operates, that can be put to practical use to help people better understand their personal sexuality. My peer-reviewed research article on Sexual Integration Therapy is a prime example.
This contrasting theoretical model of soul and spirit is a similar attempt to create a useful generalized model, and in particular to bring the concept of the soulful path to authentic sexuality into view. Having been weaving in and out of many consciously focused professional communities from kink, sacred sexuality, transpersonal psychology, mens work, sex therapy and more over the last 25 years, I feel the awareness of the soulful versus the spiritual approach to life or sexuality is little understood nor even considered.
Within those who take the spiritual approach, in my personal observation, key elements of the soulful path are evidently missing. One has been called spiritual bypassing, holding up a spiritual facade without doing the inner work on one’s shadows and wounds, taken on in our developmental years. In soul work, resolving these disruptive and destructive inner dynamics are a core element. I like how Ram Dass put it. “You think you’re enlightened? Go spend a week with your family!”
I would point out as well, what I call sexual by-passing – not owning the depths of one’s authentic sexual desires and living them honestly. Not doing so can lead to a range of debilitating behaviors that range from harsh shame-driven repression, to operating secretly and compulsively, or psychologically manipulating others for sexual advantage. For example, it is not hard to find credible reports of sacred sexuality practitioners using their spiritual sexuality facade to gain trust, break down resistance, and violate someone’s boundaries, to get their own pleasure met.
I am not going to dwell much on the spiritual path here. That has already been popularized and there are tons of books, courses, workshops and such that are readily available to learn from. So I will focus briefly on the soulful elements in contrast to their spiritual counterpart.
While these concepts developed from considering paths of sexual exploration, I find the soulful path readily applies to a life path as well.
Let’s start with the idea of a descent. The spiritual path has an intention to ascend, to rise to heaven, to transcend the worldly existence, and ultimately the experience of self.
The soulful path is a descent, deeper into the unique authentic self. Deeper into the body, grounded on the earth. Deeper into one’s personal sexuality and sensual pleasure. Deeper into the chaos of our inner conflicts and harsh emotional and psychological wounding that must be addressed to live an empowered life.
The concept of a descent, into the dangerous unknown of the underworld, was also a core principle of many ancestral traditions of ritual initiation, such as one’s designed to move from adolescence into mature adulthood. Maladoma Some, in his book, Time and the River, gives a wonderful description of his initiation into his African tribe. The intent, he said, was for each adolescent to go on a solo quest into the wilderness to find their gift, their own unique, personal magic, and once discovered and fought for through an arduous ordeal, bring their gift back in service to the whole community.
The pursuit of one’s soulful Self implies having an awareness and embodied, empathetic connection to the rhythms and cycles of the seasons, of the plant and animal realms, of the interconnections of all life on earth. I believe we carry an ancestral instinct, inherited from thousands of generations back, for being part of this web of life on earth. When we can quiet all the heady stimuli of the modern world and our distracting inner chaos, we can feel how right at home we are on the earth, in harmony with the natural rhythm of the seasons, the moon, the sun, and the journey from life to death.
I also want to highlight the personal nature of the soulful path. It is perhaps its keystone, as it is the source of our experience of the sacred dimensions of life. What is sacred is always and only personal, unique to each person. Coming in touch with the sacred is a profound experience that provides a stunning revelation of the depths in our souls, available beyond the mundane.
My experience of the sacred happens in moments of deep connection with family, friends or community, exploring nature, a work or art, certain pivotal life moments, the inspiration and toil of creating art, and more. The sacred is not accessed through the intellect or a rational heady process. A sacred experience is not derived from any dogma or external teaching. It is derived solely through what is personally meaningful and emotionally potent to an individual. The soulful path is somewhat like the mystical path. All the great religions contain a mystical core that is barely noted in their grand institutional forms. This mystical core is revealed in such teachings as, “I and the father are one…the Kingdom is within…The Way is not in the sky; the Way is in the heart.” The ancient sages seem to be telling us our relationship to the great mystery, whatever that may be, is personal. It is not found in following any teaching, or tradition, other than one’s own.
I believe the next big consciousness wave will be a shift away from the dogmas of institutional religion, or any spiritual tradition, to the concept of the personal sacred. You get to cultivate your own way of relating to the divine mystery. Joseph Campbell put it this way, “People are not so much seeking the meaning of life as in having a meaningful experience of life.”
The concept of an altar, one of the most ancient ritual tools conceived by our ancestors, can be a good foundation for developing your sense of the personal sacred. Connecting to the sacred dimensions of human experience puts us in touch with the tangible, profound, magical, heart and soul opening moments of our lives. These can include the birth of our children, death of a loved one or friend, an inspiring experience within an intimate community, creative achievements of artistic expression, people that are important to us, artifacts preserved from a meaningful event in our life. All of these can become represented by meaningful totems or mementos placed on our personal altar. My own altar of 20 plus years has over a hundred artifacts that represent the people, experiences, values, accomplishments, special gifts received from special people and more, that symbolize what is sacred to me. Nothing goes on my altar that is not meaningful and sacred to me. I think of an altar like a battery charger for the soul. It is an externalization of the sacred already embedded in my being. When I gaze at my altar, the symbolic artifacts reflect back to me what is meaningful in my life and resonates with my deepest authentic expression and intention.
The Physical aspect of the soulful path relates to the capacity to be fully embodied and at home on the earth. It encompasses our natural connection to our ancestors through their development of drumming and rhythm. Dance was an integral part of everyday life for them. They danced for celebrations of birth or marriage, at planting and harvest time, warrior dances, grief dances when a loved one departed. This has been an integral part of human life in community, for thousands of years.
We are born with a natural ability and inherent capacity to dance our own dance. The one we know from within. Having a deep and intimate connection to your body, to movement, to breath is the gateway to presence, to being in this moment, the only moment we can experience, rather than in our heads in stories of regret about the past or anxiety about the future.
The Primal aspect calls for us to embrace our capacity for fierceness, our erotic wildness, our relentless determination to survive when threatened, to protect and defend those we care for. When I lose this connection, when I am disempowered in life, I cannot set and hold boundaries, cannot say a clear Yes or No. If I cannot defend and protect myself, I will have little capacity to protect and defend others. Nor can I get to the depths of my primal sexual nature, which is most welcomed by my partners in negotiated consensual engagements. Being present and embodied opens the gateway to ecstatic erotic passions and the visceral raw power of being ravaged or ravishing, of devouring or being devoured.
The Dark, Inward and Unconscious aspects represent the part of the human psyche I call the Imaginal mind. It contains the archetypal, symbolic, mythic realms of our psyche, in contrast to the cognitive, rational, analytical mind. The imaginal mind contains the symbolic elements and hyper real experiences of our dreams when asleep. This is where our innate sexual mythos resides that contains the archetypal figures, symbolic dialogue, attire, props and intensities engaging sexually in our fantasies when awake.
This unconscious dimension is also where the protective/destructive shadows and the wounds, and the traumas that created them reside. These are the embedded, unresolved traumas from our developmental years, that until resolved, have the power to override our conscious intention and desires when they are triggered. This means they will surreptitiously determine what we approach and avoid in our everyday life. Their power is emotional. When activated, the shame, fear, rage, trauma responses they biochemically generate in the body and psyche, can readily override our rational views and intentions, and wreak destructive havoc to ourselves and relationships. These types of embedded complexes typically contain a dyad of 2 personas, a disempowered child aspect and an all powerful parent or other authority figure that severely shamed, terrorized, violated, harshly judged, or traumatized the child. This complex can be activated or “triggered” by numerous situations as an adult.
When activated, the “protector” shadow persona that was formed as an unconscious means to protect the child part from re-experiencing the wounding, comes online. This persona’s response can range from a sudden eruption of anger, to crying, to fleeing, to shutting down or isolating. Anything to avoid or scare away the threatening, terrifying feeling of the original wound. From my experience, to resolve this shadow/wound complex requires a depth psychology, or ritual type process, allowing someone to consciously take power back from the shaming or terrorizing part that has kept one disempowered in their current life. I will be writing in more depth about these types of processes in a new book I am working on called “Secret Sex Lives.”
I believe the mission in life is as Jung states, “to become who you truly are.” That means to be fully authentic, true to yourself, words and actions in alignment. This requires addressing the wounds and shadows that often mask or have even disempowered our authentic self, as well as claiming the stunning depths and nuances of soulful experience that being true to yourself offers.
To be honest, the effort to be true to yourself is a most complex task that requires tremendous courage, persistence and likely personalized lifelong practices you may develop to help you stay centered and present in your true depths. The soulful path includes reclaiming your ability to love and forgive yourself, from all the harsh, harmful, internalized critics that say you are not worthy, desirable or loveable.
If you feel called to bring more love to the world, you must first know, heal and love yourself.
I want to note that much of what I am describing as a soulful path may be what others would describe as a spiritual path. There is likely much semantic overlap in these musings. What is important in my view, is that you make the path your own, however you want to define it.
Joseph Campbell described this individual quest as the hero’s journey. He spoke of two adjacent wheels, one the left hand path, and one the right hand path of living one’s life. It is the individual’s choice to choose their path, left or right.
The right hand path is the path for those who want to and do fit in within the existing social beliefs, rules and customs of their culture. They aspire to be solid citizens, they want to be welcomed, included, accepted and celebrated for fitting in well, and dutifully obeying to codes the culture expects.
The left hand path is the classical hero’s journey. This is the path for those individuals who feel the right hand path is oppressive, toxic, or stifling, and rejects or threatens their authentic nature, sexual or otherwise. The hero’s journey typically starts with a call to adventure or a catastrophic upheaval that has become a turning point in that person’s life. It is the call to take one’s power back, to stop hiding in fear, to rise up and claim your birthright to be true to yourself, even at great risk. The hero’s journey requires one to step into the unknown, into one’s greatest fear, taking a descent into one’s personal internal hell, into the dark underworld of the psyche to face one’s demons, to fight and die to the old life, to surrender to and trust something greater than the self, and finally emerge reborn with the hard won prize of being your empowered self.
I want to emphasize, I am in no way casting judgment on the validity or benefit of the spiritual path. It is all about you and your personal way. But for those for whom this idea of a soulful path resonates in some way, I encourage you to explore fully what living a soulful, personally meaningful and authentic life would be for you.
What might be the elements and focus of your own soulful path to your authentic sexuality and Self?
Special Offer!
Is NOW a good time to learn more about the ecstatic pleasures your sexuality offers and become honest, confident and shame-free?
Sign up for 5 sessions – 50 minutes each at only $79/session, $395 total before 11/20/24. You can also choose to pay each session one at a time for $90/session.
You can schedule each session weekly or at whatever pace you feel is best for you. Limited offer based on availability.
If you prefer to pay for each session individually of this 5 session program, for $100 per session instead of the 5 session package use this link – https://galenfous.steven-lacey.com/product/session-fee-option-2/
