Yes, you can pursue both spiritual practice and sexual prowess.
Sometimes it seems like I exist in two contradictory communities. First is the spiritual community that believes in a higher power and seeks to establish a relationship to that power beyond the dogma of religion. On the other hand is the gay community that tends to idolize something more tangible: the pure carnal pleasure of sex in all its fleshy, delicious glory. But for the most part, spiritual junkies don’t give much credence to carnal pleasure and the sex enthusiasts shun spirituality as a repressive delusion. I say they’re both missing out.
I consider myself a spiritual person who also happens to love the pure ecstasy of a sensuous fuck session.
Some will shun me as being too concerned with matters of the flesh. The others will say that spiritual beliefs are sexually inhibitive. But I have managed to straddle that line like a champ.
The case for sexuality
My upbringing as a good Catholic Italian boy caused me to feel ashamed and guilty for any sexual thought, never mind my raging love of dick and everything attached to it. It was hard enough to come out of the closet, let alone embrace that salacious part of myself. But embrace it I did, with both arms and both legs. Even in a notoriously promiscuous community, words like whore, slut, and perv are thrown my way and I used to wonder if on some level there was something wrong with me.
Thankfully I shook off those chains of self-doubt, and owned that “slut” tag with pride. Do you know what helped get me there? My spiritual practice. As far as I’m concerned, it is a divine blessing that my spirit animates a complex physical body complete with all the sensory receptors and mechanisms in place to produce mind-blowing orgasms. Why not embrace that and enjoy it while we got it?
The case for spirituality
Let’s start off by saying that spirituality is not the same as religion. The way I see it, religion is a dogmatic set of rules and beliefs that attempt to control and indoctrinate us in the name of a higher being. On the other hand, spirituality is the belief in the existence of a higher power and spiritual practice is the personal journey to connect to that power. I believe that power is benevolent at best and neutral at worst; it has no judgment about our human actions. Judgment, after all, is the product of ego and the ego is looking to hijack control of our inner voice from its natural connection to spirit.
The ego seeks to divide and separate. The spirit seeks to unify and heal.
Pema Chodron
Bringing it all together
Spiritual practice is my both my anchor and guiding light that connects me to something beyond the physical world. That said, I am living in a physical body experiencing a physical world. So while I’m here, I have no qualms about enjoying the blessings that it has to offer: the taste of a fresh baked apple pie, the smell of lilacs in the spring, and the feeling of a man’s hard sweaty body against mine.
People shy away from spirituality for numerous reasons including its hazy definition and its centuries-long entanglement in traditional religion. While I agree these are valid points to work through, don’t let your love of sex prevent you from exploring a spiritual practice. In fact, if my journey is anything to go by, you will see that when you do, your relationship with sex and sexuality will be one of the greatest beneficiaries.
