Healing Sexual Wounding Through Lovemaking
Healing Sexual Wounding Through Right Lovemaking
A remarkably large number of men and women on the planet have experienced some form of sexual abuse or wounding which continues to shape the texture of their sexual lives for most of their adulthood.
The surprising news that I want to offer here today is that the poison can also be the medicine. One of the most potent ways to heal sexual wounds is to turn towards sexual intimacy – not away from it – and to come into right relationship with it. The ‘how to’ I offer here is based on the excerpt below from an interview I did with my teacher Aisha Salem. I will give my summary understanding first, and then encourage you to read her full exposition below.
Here are the principles for right lovemaking – and healing sexual wounds:
- Learn to recognize sexuality that is based on hornyness, wanting and ego. Recognize it when it comes up in you. Recognize it when it comes up in a lover. Remember that it can arise suddenly, in the middle of lovemaking. Sexual wanting is like a viper that comes out of its nest suddenly, and strikes fast – if you allow it.
- When sexuality that if filled with sexual hunger, hornyness or need arises – stop. Pull back. End the intercourse. Say no – not to the person, but to this movement of sexual energy, which is twisted. Realize that if you continue at this point, you allow the seed of wanting-needing sexual energy to perpetuate itself from you.
- Return to yourself. Return to love for yourself, and to self respect. Become still. Connect with yourself with love. And encourage your partner to do the same.
- Only when you have returned to stillness and deep self respect, and your partner has as well, can you come together again.
- Notice anything in you that wants to exploit your body – by for instance allowing needy/hungry sex into you – any movement in you to abandon yourself for the sake of being accepted or being sexy. Catch that impulse with the net of your awareness.
- Say NO to any sex that does not align with your truest love.
- Say YES to sex that opens you into pure passion and innocence. By definition, innocent sex is sex that has been purified of hornyness and sexual wanting and needing.
- Realize that, whereas before you may not have had a choice about which sexual experiences you allow in your body – you now do.
- Remember, and make it clear to your partner, that a NO to hungry sexuality is not a NO to the love and union between you. It is in fact a YES, and a purification deepening and alignment.
Here is the excerpt from the interview with Aisha Salem. For the full interview, click here.
Aisha: I meet a lot of women who have been sexually abused in one way or another. And the fact of the situation is – and this counts both for men and women, because at this point, it’s like, when we are still in that innocence of not being able to – or we haven’t learnt to tell the difference between what’s good for us and what is not good for us – right there we always come to, in some way or another, invite something in – and now I just speak from the woman’s point of view – that we come in some situation which is trouble. We get, somewhere down the line we have all gotten this, like, fist into our system, which happened exactly when we agreed to give in to the sexuality which is based on hornyness, the sexuality which is based on wanting and on ego, where sexuality is twisted. It truly is twisted into something where the destructive side comes into the sexual which is sacred in itself. So right there, there is like, there is a waiting, a purification within the sexual as well, which leads our innocence and our sexuality back together again. And it happens through the healing of these – basically, the moment we had that planted inside of us, that’s when we also start to rise as a sexuality which is no longer healthy. Because the sexuality in itself is completely beautiful. But it is beautiful in terms of pure passion. But the moment that we as women allow that twist within ourselves which starts wanting to exploit our bodies, to get attention, to be sexy, all of this, right there, there is such a wound. There is such a misunderstanding. There is such a disregard of our love and self respect in that, that simply calls us that we need to go completely back to our self respect and our self love. Right there, our sexuality can be healed because right there, the sexual meeting becomes sacred. Because it is no longer based on coming together out of wanting, out of that basic misunderstanding, which was this something looking for love. But actually, it becomes a recognition that we are love. It becomes a complete surrendering to the passion which is our basic nature and our call to let go. So right there, our innocence is restored when we regain that self respect. And this is also in the embrace of that sexuality that we actually become women rather than being girls in women’s bodies. When we take that responsibility for holding that self respect, for embracing our sexuality with a complete NO to moving according to that which does not agree with our love.
Shakti: And so the guide there is to know that we are love and to let love guide our sexuality.
Aisha: Definitely. And in that also, not just in us, like in, if you imagine that a woman is being identified with being a woman, and then she greets a man, but then it becomes all about some kind of defense, or defending herself, but it’s not like that because the monkey, which is jumping on that see, is as well jumping in ourselves. So we have to be willing to allow the complete vulnerability and the complete taking of responsibility in our sexual meetings to be able to return to that innocence.