I think I was a temple wh*re in a previous life....

Musings from a Feminine perspective

I remember some years ago participating in a ritual at a sexuality-themed festival, where every few minutes I stood in front of another man and offered myself in service to his desires, and the only communication that was allowed was through gestures, no words (don’t worry, I could say ‘no’ at any point!).

There is something profound that can take over in spaces and rituals such as these: an altered, transpersonal state, where through surrendering to the present moment, that which wishes to be met in me and which wishes to be met in you, comes out of the shadows into the light, to play….

Out of countless possibilities, I received the same request over and over again: to dance for the man before me.

As if in a trance state, each time I danced and allowed life to move my body, I felt a sense of home and an extraordinary familiarity and rightness in my bones.

I know this.

I have done this so many times.

Except in this life, I hadn’t.

This and similar experiences have often given me the sense that I have been a temple priestess of the erotic arts in previous lives (or independent of the concept of previous lives, it is an archetype I know mysteriously well!).

There is a specific potential dynamic here, that I find fascinating. I’ve experienced it also in other moments, most often in dancing (not necessarily for someone, but dancing for myself at a party or festival). It’s in those moments of grace where I enter a flow state, the sense of being danced by the divine, where my will has nothing to do with it, and then witnessing how a man can come undone in my presence.

This is a powerful medicine, to see a man allow himself to become so entranced and enraptured by the beauty of the Feminine force that he sees before him, that he cannot help but to lose his cool and become humbly, sometimes clumsily and vulnerably, sent off kilter.

In these moments where a man is willing to go there, there is a silent voice from him that says “there is a beauty and power coming through you that touches me so deeply, I have no category to put it in, and it makes me feel small in the presence of. And I am willing to feel it.”

That daring to go there and feeling the vulnerability and awe - whether inspired through the untamed, primal movement of the body or the unpredictable and ravaging elemental forces of nature - is a potent counter-force and medicine against the desire to control or capture or objectify and feel safe.

My ability to receive that reverence is my medicine in healing the memory of many moments in my history of being objectified. Creating new imprints to replace the memories of a gaze whose silent voice says “I see only your body, not the sacredness behind it, and it exists for my pleasure” or “I will keep you small so that I don’t have to feel small.” A medicine for all the times I have stayed small in the presence of men, in order to not frighten or overwhelm, my life-force staying small and contained, safe, yet slowly stifled.

These moments can also be movements towards the collective healing of men being judged as being less attractive in their vulnerability, and of the times in the past where their vulnerability was exploited.

How often have you experienced this dynamic?

Within this lifetime, my experiences of its medicine are few and far between, and as I write, I’m feeling my sadness around this.

My relationship ending last year triggered an enquiry into the reverence I bring to myself and how this is reflected in the ways I show up in my relating and what’s mirrored back. It’s been an uncomfortable process, feeling the ways I’m not always anchored into my own connection with the beauty and wholeness within me. And from my experience, there are also very few men who are able to see women in this light.

And while there is something necessary about us humans being in reverence for all of humanity regardless of gender, or life in general, or women being touched by the beauty and divinity within men, I want to name and assert the importance of the archetypal dynamic of men being in reverence for women.

There is a dignity and rightness to this flow of energy, a restoration of something that should be at the very foundation of our culture: reverence for woman as source, as life-bearer, her womb synchronised to the cycles of life, to the poetry of creation, a portal to the great mystery. Just like it was known in the times of temples.

But I’m not talking about a hierarchy and reestablishing some kind of matriarchy of the past, but restoring woman’s rightful place as worthy of deep respect.

What would our world look like if we woke up from my friend Nuno calls “the big Forgetting”, and remembered where we come from and through this, reconnect with our reverence for life?

It would transform the soil of the world as we know it, resulting in radically different cultures around the way we treat our bodies, our environment, relationships, birthing practices, education, health, ageing and death. It would create a trajectory out of the dynamic of exploitation and extraction: humans in survival mode through running from our source and thinking of ourselves as being separate, rather than feeling the natural abundance of connection and interdependence.

It won’t be all love and light.

I’m not talking about a utopia, but a better world than the one we’re living in.

And there’s a lot that is required of us: women having a long, hard look at our shadows and the way we have used our power to manipulate and exploit men. Working with the ways in which we are attached to being victims. Men looking at their relationship with their mothers and their vulnerabilities in relation to women.

And as much as the conversations around gender and breaking free from our limiting conditioning is something to celebrate, as much as I want to honour the beauty of diversity of different expressions of humanity, I want us to claim the word WOMAN and not allow it to become invisible. She who has a womb, who is connected to the powers of creation, the pulse of existence, that from which we all come.