Sexual Sovereignty & Reclaiming My Sexuality

Transcribing My Soul

Reflecting on my own journey is an interesting experience ‘to do’. To give words to it. To articulate my own felt experience with the written language. I often feel words cannot provide the gravity or depth the soul requires. 

My work isn’t about the giving of instructions or knowledge with an expectation or outcome of doing. At the core, my work is about being with, opening to, inviting in, feeling, integrating and sharing. How this lands and who with, isn’t my responsibility. My responsibility is about showing up to my soul’s yearning and leaning into the mystery, without intellectualising it or understanding why. It’s about knowing when things are ‘hard’ or where I come up against challenges – it’s at this place, where my work lies. 

Then again, it’s human nature to try and understand why my path differs from another sister or brother’s path. Why has sexuality with all its shadowy sides, its sacred sides, its cyclical nature of yearning and resistance – always been a foundation for growth, evolution and purpose for me? 

Sometimes I lean into the activist archetype, being a voice or the call for my sister’s and the collective reclamation of our sexuality. Wanting to scream from rooftops or social media feeds. 

Sometimes I lean into the healing of my female ancestors and lineage. Wanting to take responsibility as the ‘chain breaker’, the game changer.

However, when I do lean into this way of trying to understand this I notice in some form it loses potency. Firstly, because I disconnect from my inner self, and find I am operating from my mind. Our souls don’t operate like this. Therefore my language changes. I akin this to experiences I have had in foreign countries. I have sat in situations where I had to converse in another language I did not know and the person I was conversing with didn’t know English. There was a force or a push to understand each other and it winded up being quite a frustrating experience. 

However, in another situation, I had been dancing on the dance floor – dripping in sweat from dancing under the Venetian afternoon sun. I was in my body and open. I started talking to a man from Argentina. Who too had been dancing. At this time my Spanish was limited. However, we managed to talk for hours with our limited understanding of each other. That’s because it crossed the barrier of the mind and became a felt experience. The more we could feel into each other, the more we understood each other and the connection ripened. I feel this is utilising the same language our souls communicate in. Vibration. Sensory. Felt. 

The reason I share this is because I wish to share my personal reflection from my soul’s story but using the mind’s language. So I will never be able to find the depth of expression. However, I shall try. 

A Process of a Life-Time

As I spoke to in the beginning, reclamation is the process of a lifetime. There are of course many layers I am still currently unfolding and I will unfold in the future. Initiation by initiation. Integration by integration. 

When I feel into the strongest feeling that is still alive for me (regardless of all the work) and has found its way woven through my story time and time again, it is that of shame. Shame around my body, shame around my sexuality, shame around my expression, shame around my desires and my yearnings. Shame when I ask for what I want. And also shame around when I don’t want to show up or acknowledge my sexuality. When I want to block it out. 

Creation is birthed from sexual energy. It is what drives creativity, vitality and life. And there is reason it has been so deeply shamed, and repressed for thousands of years. 

There is no denying we have all been imprinted by this in some sense. How it is expressed will differ from person to person, experience to experience. We can look at anything happening in the world or anything that has happened and the understanding as I see it, is the more something is shamed and buried the more power it holds. To warrant the need to hide it. 

Sexual sovereignty calls for us to be more connected with our bodies, with our essence, liberated. There is nothing more powerful than humanity living and expressing our innate truth. 

We are all conditioned, regardless of how awake we may perceive ourselves to be. You cannot undo thousands of years, or lifetimes of conditioning. Some of it is learned. Some of it runs through our blood and bones.

Embodying Shame

I feel my journey of reclamation and sexual sovereignty began and needed to begin with really understanding what shame felt like within my body.

From the first time, I felt sexual energy build up in my body. The first time I experienced the juiciness of life. Inside and then escape my body. We don’t have the tools in our earlier years to understand certain feelings or sensations. This is an innocent and deeply pure expression of this energy. Even with the current sex-positive movement, I do not feel we still as a society know how to handle or hold this for our youth. Because purity can so easily be clouded in shadow. So there is protection of our youth – and rightfully so. I guess what I am trying to say is we still don’t know the answer to how to teach or guide when it comes to this. 

Moving through my teenage years there is also the weight that is put onto ‘losing your virginity’ I found this a really confusing time because I could not grasp the concept of losing or giving away in essence, our purity. I held back, perhaps partly because of shame. But also because it was something I really couldn’t resonate with. I don’t feel it was driven by fear. I at this time knew my expression outside of an experience with a man. In fact I was comfortable and excited about stepping into this. Still to this day, I am not comfortable with the pressure circulating virginity and the gravity imposed on it. 

The next decade saw multiple dynamics for experimenting with my sexuality; committed relationships, dating, some casual experiences with aligned intentions, others not. As I moved through varying connections and dynamics there was a yearning for more, for more depth. To open more to life. To expand.

And at this time I believed it could only be externally sourced. So it became a game of seeking outside of myself. Asking, what will this unlock, where will this take me, how much will I open here… At this particular and vital period in my unfolding, it was both valuable and necessary. I think if we know all that what we seek comes from within, from the day we are born, would we need to or want to venture out and explore? The external seeking was vital to my evolution. 

This is not everyone’s story. While I have attracted ill intentions, had my shame triggered, lost myself and walked away more times than once with regret in that very moment, I have not experienced violence or violation at the depth some sisters have. I want to take this opportunity to say, I see you and I hear you. We all have varying paths and some are more difficult to traverse than others. May your path to sovereignty be one of love and liberation.

Meeting God

In the depth of experimentation – yearning to feel more I can’t remember the exact time it shifted from seeking to turning inwards, to opening more. It was like my spirituality and sexuality had been operating parallel alongside each other, but completely separate. I envision railway tracks side by side. At some point, they both came to the same junction and began to merge. 

Now this was difficult to digest at that very moment. It was hard to take in the connection, I had understood they were almost polarising. One omitting the other essentially. What I didn’t understand at that very moment was that I was referring to constructed religion, not spirituality and not the same thing. 

I first started to experiment with words. From memory, the two words I really started to lean into and decondition were devotion and holy. 

The path of devotion I felt was also deeply tied to religion. I also felt devotion meant giving up something, giving over to – similar to my view on virginity. Again I was turning my thinking outwards not inwards. 

My next initiation, and one of the most profound and most influential for where I walk now created the opportunity to really lean into this word and understand it. My heart cracked open as I witnessed others who truly lived and embodied a devoted life. Devoted to their soul path. I was immersed in a container for 6 days for this initiation and I remember distinctly as we neared the end saying to a friend ‘This is what devotion feels like in my body’. It is no surprise that only 6 months later the lineage of the work I am stepping into is named ‘devotional tantric bodywork’. 

I have seen many ways to describe devotion. To me in its greater sense, it is the act of kneeling to love and all it encompasses and then beyond. It is the releasing of constraint and any holding back from love, god, soul and the body – and feeling the emergence of all four. This may sound trivial and in some eyes perhaps not how many others see it but as I have spoken to numerous times throughout this reflection, I don’t feel words can encapsulate the very essence and depth of the feeling. 

I feel holy can almost be represented in the same way. It’s taking the individual distinction away from love, god, soul and body and feeling into the unification of all four. 

Sometimes I feel devotion is turning or channeling the feeling and expression outwards towards greater consciousness and holy is turning the feeling and expression inwards to self. Same desirable outcome but a different place for it to land. 

For example when I look at my work and if I show up for others or offer a transmission it comes through a channel of devotion. When I am doing my own practices and I am channelling inward, it follows the holy path – devotion; I see god in you. Holy; I see god in me. I know this doesn’t translate when we use the words holy and sacred as mutually exclusive – but as I promised, my words and reflection were not going to make sense against what the mind ‘knows’.

Exploring the Concept of Sacred Sexuality

This offers a great segway into exploring the definition of sacred sexuality. And an opportunity for me to explore what it means to me. And where I currently sit with it on my journey.

I am conscious about words or meanings indicating good or bad. I’ve had people reflect to me their expression of sacred sexuality as a way of doing. That it is a way you express the act of doing, primarily with a partner. And the only way. The resistance I have to this is it doesn’t create space for flow and moving beyond, or away. This is what I meant about making concepts or principles black and white. Sacredness has many ways of expression, and sacredness hinders on the fact it is connected to god, this is all. It’s not something that is enshrined with a golden halo – yes it’s pure because it is birthed from purity, and its intentions are pure, however, it doesn’t need to ‘look’ pure in the way we are conditioned to understand the meaning of pure. 

To others, it’s a realm where sexuality and spirituality intertwine and dance together. Moving away from an expression or act but a container as to where there is space for interplay between the two. To meet god through sex. I like this. It leaves room for expansion and self-discovery of its meaning. It anchors in a feeling and intention but leaves room for varying expression. 

I have also observed the black and white principle come into play in various corners of the realm. Almost in a lineage vs lineage, ideology way. I am unsure of the justification. Actually, if I take this out of the realm of sexuality and look at any other space, identity is ingrained in life. I do something this way, I am committed to this way, your way must be wrong. I also don’t necessarily believe this is a bad thing. It’s required for human evolution. 

I just don’t see life this way. I adore views and varying experiences, jumping across rivers to other paths, my practices changing, my soul growing and this is how I see the realm. One big playground where I can sit anchored and open to god through, to the erotic current and honour every truthful sexual expression of myself. To me that is sexuality, it doesn’t require an adjective. 

When I was speaking to polarisation I was talking about inside the realm. A place where polarisation is useful in this context is sexuality in general. And our modern, conditioned definition of sexuality vs sacred sexuality. I feel modern sexuality is largely driven by self-gain and fulfilment. It can be said sacred sexuality transcends self. 

The disconnection from the greater and focus on self-fulfilment is driven by the availability of tools and resources that feed this. Free porn sites are at our fingertips, literally and catalogues of available people to swipe through. I feel the toxic feminism movement and the escalation of hyper-independence of women have been a huge factor in the emasculation of men and disconnection from themselves and embodied masculinity. This is not pointing fingers at men at all. Quite the opposite.

Coming Back to Intention

Sacred sexuality isn’t subscribing to any one way of being. It is a choice, knowing we are humans who ebb and flow between different experiences, carrying different traumas that can be triggered by varying circumstances and certain times in our lives. I feel it just comes back to intention. If the intention is to connect with another human being you are deeply attracted to and have that experience contained to a certain period to explore bodies and connection and feeling – this IS sacred. If you wish to unite with a person ‘forever’ – this IS sacred. If you want to sit only with god and ride the erotic current – this IS sacred. All experiences are sacred if the intention is of purity. 

In love & devotion,

Jacinta