Embodied Spirituality

So, what is embodied spirituality? And do we still have sex once awakened?

If you search the internet embodied spirituality tends to have three aspects. First, where the Divine is right here, right now. Jim Finley, psychologist and mystic, says the Divine is the “intimate immediacy of Love, manifesting itself in every moment.” Second, where the Divine is experiential. If we are mindful, we can come to recognise our own divinity and the sacred nature of everything. Third, that the Divine works through us. So, as Saint Teresa of Ávila says, “we will have no choice but to walk more compassionately and more mindfully in the world.”

All this, of course, sits in the recognition that any experience, including that of the Divine, comes through the body. Specifically, the five senses, the physical Tattvas of “the relative world” as Christopher Wallis puts it in Tantra Illuminated, “the tattva system is a kind of map of the conscious being’s experience of the world.” So, our lived experience grounded in the body, out of the mind. This is why, Wallis says, “Tantra stresses sensual meditations – meditative savoring of food and music, as well as slowed down and ritualised acts of refined awareness like the Japanese tea ceremony.” Intended or not, there is a definite flavour here of an ‘us’ that this is happening to.

Adyashanti, in The Impact of Awakening, tells us that “the process of embodiment is a continual stripping away of every remnant of attachment and ego.” It is a process of complexity and danger, self-deception and misunderstanding. For Adyashanti spiritual embodiment only begins once you have awoken (realised that everything and no-thing constitutes your true body). Anything prior to that would come out of attachment to the ‘I’.

It is only when we come to a recognition that there is no distinction between consciousness and its objects (ie, everything that is manifested, matter, us, ‘I’) that the tantric practitioner goes inwards, connecting to the source or essence (ie, infinite love and happiness) rather than fall into the repetitive cycle of enactment and attachment.

Bringing it all Together

So, from my reading, it seems there are two processes. There is what we call embodying spiritual practices as part of the initial stages of dis-attachment and discernment. And then there is actual spiritual embodiment which happens once the ‘I’ has been let go of.

To reiterate Wallis’s point, for me, we should stress the slowed down ritualised act during our initial practices. Slow ritualised sex that takes us to a deeper level of awareness.

Once awakened? You’d have to check with someone who is. But it would seem to me, as sex is simply an experience, once we let go of the I there is awareness, consciousness in which all experiences take place, but we, the ‘I’, is no longer attached to this personal experience.

So, there would be no reason for sex not to take place, as any other experience takes place in our day to day life, but it would be from an impersonal and more expansive place of love (not what we commonly take to be sacred or conscious sex, which occurs as part of the initial stage of dis-attachment and discernment to an ‘I’). This would be a love that comes with the end of all separateness, the end of us as individual selves.

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Email me direct if you are interested in mindful, embodied, trauma-informed, or spiritually-informed coaching, or if you would like to join my new Pink Tantra Towards Awakening group for chat rooms, video channels and in-person workshops around tantra and intimacy practices robert.pinktantra@gmail.com

See my personal development / personality profiling book DISCover the Power of You published through John Hunt Publishing Ltd, 2017. ISBN: 978-1-78535-591-2

And for a bit of light reading, see my first historical fictional novel Fermented Spirits published through Austin Macauley Publishers, 2022. ISBN-13: ‎978-1398437159