This past weekend, I was able to present a infant workshop to a small and very supportive group of pagans. I'm grateful for the opportunity as presenting it really helped it to take form. This is by no means a transcript, but sums up what was discussed.
Much of it was drawn from personal experience and in wanting to offer an alternative to Tantra. There is much to be gained from a study of Tantra, and much of it is ignored here in the West, and it's too focused on the sexual part. That, and I've just never felt called to Tantra the way I've felt called to paganism and other paths of magick. I was inspired by the ancient priestesses of Ishtar and Innana, who would lay with men as a way to experience the Goddess--a direct experience of the divine.
That's what I wanted to bring to my clients: the knowledge and the option to experience their own divinity, and the divinity in another person. And I wanted to do it in a way that didn't matter your religious upbringing or your spiritual background.
So when I began escorting, I was forging my own path of sacred sex work. The first year of it was mostly a self healing. I was healing early wounds gained in childhood...really, the wounds many women are given: that we can never look good enough, that we must be absolutely perfect to be beautiful and as a woman we will forever be caught in the tease/slut trap: you are either a tease or a slut, so no matter what a man can shame you. (This is shit I don't want to dig into right now though, save it for another post.)
Once I began to claim my sexuality and love myself, I saw how shame was a wound that holds us back from our power. I saw how there are so many ways trying to keep us in shame, so that we cannot realize our divine nature. I realized how important it it to be true to yourself--and this includes holding your boundaries, as well as living your desires. When we give into something we don't really want, it wounds us and we can perpetually keep wounding ourselves. For myself, the better I hold my own boundaries, the better I am to open as a priestess to help others in this. There is a difference between letting a boundary be crossed, and allowing them to open for a time. The biggest thing is the second is rooted in love for the self, and wanting to share a divine sort of love with another. It comes through finding that divine spark in another and inviting those godselves to connect for a time.
I've learned a lot about love as a force in the universe. It's much more that the fluffy romantic stuff they toss about in movies. That is mostly an illusion. At its base, love is the force that attracts, plain and simple. It has many different flavors, from sweet to fierce. You can deeply love a person for a time and still not really want a close relationship with them.
Because when we can love another person, in any way, we start to see the best in that person, the divine. And the more it is practiced, the more we recognize that we all are divine, the harder it is to play the us vs. them game that keeps us fighting over bullshit.
My path is my way of spreading peace and trying to bring a wider understanding to any who will listen. I'm grateful for the gift that makes it easy to share intimacy with another, and easy to find the divine in a person.