It has been 8 months since I last updated my personal blog. And there have been several reasons for this: I have been so busy promoting my business - Spiritual Eros, most of my writing has been as educator and promoter of Spiritual Eros, yet the biggest reason I haven't written is fear.
The truth is hard to tell sometimes. It's exposing. It's vulnerable. And It might create an atmosphere that might be rife with judgment, cynicism, and ridicule. But I have always believed that the truth sets us free. It moves us onward and out of the darkness, out of the shadows, out into the light. It freshens the air and, for a while, gives us a new perspective on life.
Fear ...
A little over a year ago I started a business. It was my hope and my sincerest dream that through the work I would be doing, that people would find a new sense of freedom within their sexuality - a sexuality that was free of fear, free of judgment, free of shame, and free of guilt. People deserve not to be constricted or deprived of a healthy sexuality, a healthy self-image, a healthy union between their sex and their spirit.
However, they say that you best teach what you need to learn, and that has proven true in my life. I didn't expect that doing this work would trigger my own issues with sexual shame. I didn't anticipate that I would be riddled with the fear of others potentially casting wayward glances or passing insensitive comments about the work I was doing. (Although no one has, projections can be just as real!) The more I dug deeper into the challenges of my clients the more I realized how, to do this work, I truly need to address the issues within me.
But I was so afraid. Afraid of what others would think. Afraid of what my family would think. Afraid of what my friends would think. But mostly afraid of what my past would think. Yes, the past and those folks who, I imagined, still thought and remembered me as the bible quoting religious zealot I was so many years ago. Again, though, most of it has probably been in my own head - the image "I" still had of myself. The image that, in order to move on and do this work, must finally and unequivocally die - be laid to rest.
I have been afraid to come out, again.
"Leap of Faith" by Michael Breyette
As Within, So Without ...
I'm coming out all over again.
This time it's not about my sexuality - who I'm attracted to, love, and have sex with. I did that 15 years ago.
It's about WHAT I do with my sexuality that I'm coming out about.
I'm crossing bridges and opening doors forbidden. I'm speaking language and saying words taboo. I'm writing passages and expressing thoughts unconventional. And nothing could have prepared me for the internal backlash of my own psyche and conditioning. THIS is not how I was raised, teaching and celebrating masturbation. This was not how I was taught, to explore your body and sex even void of a committed heterosexual monogamous relationship. (Even writing those words suddenly feels so stifling and constrictively narrow-minded. I HAVE come a long way.)
“Forget the former things;
do not dwell on the past.
See, I am doing a new thing!
Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?
I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.”
No, I was taught Puritanically. I was taught and imbued with Calvanistic tenets. I was taught that the straight and narrow path did NOT involve this. It could not. It mustn't. I was lied to and because I swallowed these lies hook, line and sinker, fear was born when I attempted to tread another path. So much was integrated into the person I was. I was so "good," proper, professional - "right" acting. I can no longer be that "good" boy anymore. Yes I still love, more now than ever. I'm far more compassionate, objective, accepting, and spiritual than I've even been. But I'm also a man who enjoys his body and the sensations of it. I enjoy sex with my partner and my lovers. I enjoy masturbation and pornography. I have fetishes and kinks that I explore and that turn my crank. I am a Dominate and a submissive. I am a top and a bottom. I have boys and Daddies. And it's ALL of these things that are interwoven into the tapestry that makes me the man I am today.
With this business I took a leap of faith that there was more. And that I was being lead to more and that maybe, just maybe, God had a different idea in mind. If the Creator is love and and all about restoration, then why should that be confined to everything save sexuality?
The New Normal ...
So I'm coming out again, not just as a gay man, but as a sexually active gay man with several levels of sexual explorations. And although this concept seems to be no grave revelation, for me, these confessions are akin to unlocking my own prison. This is, I'm finding, the only way to help my clients find freedom, to first free myself. Tantrically speaking, for too long I've denied that part of me that desires play without rules, freedom without legalism, and expression without modesty - my feminine, the Divine Feminine within me. This is where true power lies. I have stifled myself in some areas and almost bankrupted myself in others all because of who I thought, felt, and believed I should've been in this world. I subscribed to a fairly ascetic morality when it came to sex and its expression. Denial, denial, denial. At all costs, denial. It has costs me dearly.
I was wrong! I've been wrong for quite some time now!
My work is deeply personal as well as deeply political. I'm helping to change the story of sex in our country, in our world, in our lives - deeply! We deserve expression without ridicule and without judgment. And it must start with us - individually. For me it starts with confessing to myself my desires and my sexual passions. And it requires I love those parts of myself - the parts I have feared ever seeing the light of day - the sub side, the kinky side, the fetishy side or, as a hypnotherapist buddy of mine stated, the inner me.
Granted, not everything is for public consumption, but what I have here is a start. And that's better than nothing, and better than most! I am not the boy I used to be.
I'm becoming more the man that I need to be. And it starts with telling the truth! No more hiding. no more masquerading. no more pretending.