Holy Fuck: On Vulnerable, Erotic, Soul-Centered Loving and Caring for Our Planet.
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There is an inextricable link between intimate, erotic relationship and our human-to-planet relationship.
In his 1995 book, Therapy for a Dying Planet, author and psychotherapist Terrence O’Connor writes: “The status quo is that the hole in the ozone layer is as big as the United States… Some scientists are predicting that by the middle of the next century global warming will result in most… [U.S.] coastal cities… being below sea-level… that acid rain, besides destroying lakes and forests, is now considered to be the leading cause of lung cancer after cigarette smoke… Also, every day two or more species become extinct, not due to natural selection, but due to deforestation and pollution… This is expected to accelerate to one hundred species a day… mass extinction. What does this say to you? To me, it says that the status quo is that the planet is dying!
The planet is dying because we are satisfied with our limited relationships in which control, denial, and abuse are tolerated. The status quo is that we have these petty relationships with [ourselves and] each other, between nations, with ourselves and the natural world. Why should we bother?
Because healthy [erotic] relationships are not an esoteric goal. It is a matter of our very survival and the survival of most of the life upon this Earth.”
Love, vulnerable erotic love, romantic, sexual loving is good for the planet. The fields of ecopsychology, sacred sexuality, depth psychology, mythological studies and sacred activism point to this.
We’re talking about the tender and fiery, psyche-rending, ego-destroying stuff of the gods and goddesses, come to life in ours, as in the mythic story of Eros and Psyche, to name just one, divine, and rather complicated couple.
When our heart is broken wide open, there is an invitation to nearly unimaginable receptivity and fantastical courage to inhabit this sort of loving. With our audacious presence.
Not a safe and secure sort of loving. No nets. No guarantees. No faking it, no making yourself small to make your lover comfortable.
But the soft and open heart, the warm, alive body, the critical-thinking, adult intellect, the instincts afire, the higher soul in each one of us showing the way of the natural beauty, the inherent danger on this sacred path. One we walk. Wildly. Meaning, authentically. With reverence. For the other. As other. And as two, inextricably woven as one force of life and co-creative power.
This way is a sort of loving, wrapped in fiercely radical, dangerous intimacy, and one of the most generative, life-upending, soul-expansive invitations to humans. It is numinous in character and feel, downright awe-inspiring and scary for most to open up so wide, so vulnerably. So creatively. After being here for so long. And still, willingly step right over the edge of comfort.
To accept the invitation wholeheartedly — to embody deliciously alive. Genuinely free. Electric and alert, as if we are in the deep wilderness or down an alley on a dark night in the inner city, jazz rising from the wet street.
Alert, awake even as and because vulnerable, erotic love insists on risking all that the ego has attempted to protect from breakage. From reflection on who we are and how we have become. On what we are for. And yet, without the risk, we leave our souls and the planet urgently awaiting our wholehearted, embodied presence.
Time to get it on. Sexual love is a path of individuation — on the individual, collective, transpersonal and planetary levels.
This kind of love asks everything of us. It is edgy. Shakes us down, tears us open, dripping with life’s juices, and returns far beyond that which we can imagine before we accepted erotic love’s invitation.
Like every numinously terrifying encounter, if we just let romantic love happen to us, Mystery shows the way. Trouble is, our culture teaches us to resist most numinous, sacred, mysterious encounters. Until we learn not to. Until we finally lean in, let the loving have us to unleash the forces that come to break open our heart to a deliciously alive place.
The raw place that is the fertile ground from which life-force rises to infuse our work in the world with ancient energies designed to serve the planet, the earth mother — the embodied, physical manifestation of the convergence of the archetypal Feminine and Masculine — what we find so refreshing and delightful in springtime’s all-out-fucking effulgence and summer’s afterglow.
Sexual, romantic love is, when approached consciously from a soul-centered, spirit-guided place, a solid and electrifying reflection of what the planet is asking of us.
And the thing is, it only seems like it’s about you or me. But we are the vessels, the channels. The rivers. We’re being used. By everything. Used by love and the earth mother. By Mystery and Soul.
We’re being used by the great force of life, the cosmic winds, by all things natural and other-than the everyday. We’ve been invited to inhabit the Delicious. The Alive. The On-Purpose. Hot, bothered, ready. Awake. To serve.
A commitment to wild loving (meaning natural-born, conscious, adult, sexual loving) and fierce intimacy is vital to turn the corner that beckons us from the edge.
The earth needs this way of conscious loving and being from us. Now. And we will flourish in the midst of this sort of lovemaking, in the way of the creatrix. It’s what we’re for. To thrive. If only we let it happen to us. That’s what the poets, the mystics, the mad ones say.
How about you?
Will you risk your name? Are you willing to let go of the so-called, ego-defense protections you’ve put in place to keep your heart from breaking?
Are you willing to unearth what your archetypally-rooted Shadow protections look like, feel like, smell like to you, so that you can own them and don’t unconsciously target your lover or the world with them?
Will you go out beyond the encounter with, and yet, right through the soul-center of vulnerable, romantic love — of authentic, sacred sexual loving? Yep. Grown-ups’ table, here. Take a seat.
Will you enter into romantic love’s demanding encounter? Into every warp and weave of love — a polyvalent look through the kaleidoscopic eyes of love?
Will you draw on a way of loving that asks us, one and many, together, to drop down into our depths and simultaneously out into loving every thing, every one, rapturously?
Rapturously, in a way that lets us come together to carry infinite potential to heal the soul of the world. From this place, self and Self-love are essential. Falling head over heels in love with your self/Self — the whole of you — is, well, seminal. Unquestionably. So, ravish on! It’s good for the world.
To be unabashedly in love with your Self/self is essential to the depth of power you have, to heal and transform your Self, an other, others, the world-soul, the earth. This life asks that of us. We find, once in it, there is always more love from this core/coeur, the open heart-center within our body, soul, infused with the life-force energy of Spirit. It’s the balm.
Wild and holy. Scared sacred. Reverent for life. And like that: you’re getting it on.
In Prayer to the Mothers, Beat poet Diane di Prima animates the dark archetypal Feminine, badassery- consciousness alive in men and women. Not just women. And we glimpse Goddess consciousness here, feel the warmth, love, Her breath, Her rage and grief when we attune to the archetypal images and the consciousness-shifting metaphor in poetry like this.
When we pause to relate with the images that soul delivers to consciousness, we become more connected, more available to love each other and the earth mother. Tenderly. Strongly. Giving away our love as The Gift — to love everything, no-holds-barred, messy, juicy, terribly, beautifully ecstatic like any natural birth or transcendental fuck:
“They say you lurk here still, perhaps
in the depths of the earth or on
some sacred mountain, they say
you walk (still) among men, writing signs
in the air, in the sand, warning, warning weaving
the crooked shape of our deliverance, anxious
not hasty. Careful. You step among cups, step out of
crystal, heal with the holy glow of your
dark eyes, they say you unveil
a green face in the jungle, wear blue
in the snows, attend on
births, dance on our dead, croon, fuck, embrace
our weariness, you lurk here still, mutter
in caves, warn, warn and weave
warp of our hope, link hands against
the evil in the stars, o rain
poison upon us, acid which eats clean
wake us like children from a nightmare, give the slip
to the devourers whom I cannot name
the metal men who walk
on all our substance, crushing flesh
to swamp.”
Remember, the earth needs us to unfasten from culture-bound, ego-defended ways — ways that happen to show up in the realm of sacred, sexual love. We are being used. Beckoned by love. And so, with a commitment to unfastened, natural, romantic, sexual loving, grounded in fierce erotic intimacy, we just may turn the corner that beckons us from the edge. To discover the soul of the world is ready for you.
So what have you come to give Her? How will you wholly come alive in the potentiality of your erotic loving? Get real enough and adult enough to nurture and romance the earth, like you tenderly ravish a lover?
The earth is writhing, screaming for us to brave up and go down. Be vulnerable. Real. Undefended. Deliciously receptive. Dive deep. Get it on and love ’em up. Work it strong, on a path of individuation, on relational and planetary levels.
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Melissa La Flamme is a visionary artisan of cultural evolution. As an author, poet, Jungian & shamanic psychotherapist and troublemaker, she kindles soul’s smoldering longing for everything real. She helps hack and track the smell of our longing to fully inhabit our life. She shows us how to enact our own prison break, from the inner and outer lockdowns we have unknowingly built. Melissa teaches the soul’s clandestine trade. The trade of the code-breaker of our one authentic life. The way of the Holy Hacker of our soul. The one writhing alive in our glistening, raving heart, vulnerable, ravished, undone and messy in a world where anything but is the safe way to belong. Visit her at her website, and on Facebook.
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