Sex & Movement: Airing Out Our Taboos
I love the interwebs for all that sex it constantly parades about. I’m not even talking about bad porn. I mean the openness of discussion that often surfaces. Since sex scandals and other morbid topics of abuse are flying around the news of late, I found this poetic probing (probetic ?) at the downy underbelly of sexual taboo in society and found some compelling, if distant, parallels to life on the Playa.
The writer is Paolo Coelho and the blog I found the excerpt on was Sexoteric:
Why has sex become a taboo? Because it is a process of alchemy: it transforms a vast manifestation of spiritual energy, which is love, into a physical gesture.
It is imposible to understand sex as we see it nowadays – a mere response to a few physical stimuli. In reality, it is far more than that, and carries with it man’s and humanity’s entire cultural burden. Each time we face a new experience, we bring with us all past experiences – both good and bad – as well as those concepts which civilization has made into rules.
This is not right, and we must recondition the brain so that each sexual experience is unique, just as each loving experience is unique.
Very difficult… But one must try, because almost all human beings need to keep this energy in movement. So, the first thing one must understand is that it is made up of two extremes, which walk side-by-side during the entire act: relaxation and tension.
How can one set these opposite states in harmony? There is only one way: through giving oneself completely. How does one give oneself? By forgetting the traumas of the past, and by not forming expectations about the future – in other words, the orgasm. How can one do this? Very simply: by not being afraid to err.
In reality, what usually happens is that we begin a sexual relationship thinking that everything might go wrong. But even if it did, what importance would that have? One must merely be conscious of the fact that one must give one’s best, and any wrongs immediately are put right.
Once the search for pleasure is being carried out by giving oneself, with sincerity, one senses the body becoming tense, like the string of an archer’s bow, while the mind becomes more and more relaxed, like the arrow being made ready to be fired. The brain no longer governs the process, which begins to be guided by the heart. And the heart uses the five senses to show itself to the other… Read more
What struck me about this excerpt is the Playa-ness of its meaning. Notions of freely giving oneself in order to release oneself for sincerity and giving, the idea of transformation and shedding cultural burdens, the opposites are one concept of coupled relaxation and tension simultaneously, forgetting traumas and living now, in short, the grasping of wide and manifold influences and movement into a creative cumulated whole, are these ideas not the Burn encapsulated?
Would that there was more tempered abandon, sexual or otherwise, in our often repressed default world! …Or at least a wish for more drug-addled blow-out parties with E-tards and neked people running about creating things and themselves with dust in all the wrong places.
