Experiential Healing

We each have a divinely created innocent and pure inner self.  Playful, passionate, unashamed, unafraid, eager to learn and grow; this part of us somehow gets lost.  Dysfunctional family systems, unresolved trauma, lack of nurturing, addictions, and/or like events somehow sever our connection with our inner self.  We find ourselves feeling lonely, in pain, tired, scared, confused, not knowing what to do.

Experiential healing allows individuals the opportunity to reconnect with their inner selves, to reawaken and rediscover our innate abilities to sort through and express our true feelings, face and accept the truth about ourselves and others, heal our shame, take responsibility for ourselves and heal and grow and live.

Reuniting: Healing with Sexual Relationships

Were We Once Whole?

In Taoist, Hindu and Buddhist art, deities often are shown as part male, part female — or androgynous. There are also curious traditions maintaining that humankind itself once consisted of androgynous beings. Most insist that sexual desire is directly linked both to the split into genders and — with careful cultivation - to our potential for re-experiencing our native androgyny.

Does this rich and diverse tradition, hinting at an experience of completion or unity, encompass a mystery that requires control and rechanneling of the earthy aspects of sexuality? And if it does, how does one go about achieving it?

Taoist teacher Michael Winn believes the solution will be found in a new spiritual science with Taoist (water) and Tantric (fire) principles at its core. He says we may have to integrate our sexual desire into a subtle body experience he calls 'spiritual orgasm,' in order to heal the cosmological splitting of our original non-dual being (first into an etheric androgyne and then into physical male and female sexed bodies). In Winn's view this vast collective wound drives the human incarnational process, and can only be healed by achieving what the Taoists call immortality, the alchemical re-fusion of spirit and body-matter into its original essence. This, for him, is the crucial focus of subtle body sexual cultivation.

What did earlier sources have to say about the concept of divine androgyny?

Tibetan Buddhists

The Tibetan Buddhists teach that both the cosmos and primordial man were born of the Light and fundamentally consist of Light. Asexual and without sexual desire, they once radiated light. The sexual instinct was satisfied by sight alone. androgynous light beingThe transition to actual human beings took place when sexual desire awoke. That's when the sexual organs appeared and the Light was extinguished. Humans degenerated and began to touch one another with their hands, finally discovering sexual union.

Sex therefore holds the key to regaining the Light. As the late scholar Mircea Eliade explains:

So long as man practices the sexual act in instinctual blindness, that is to say like any other animal, the light remains hidden. But…by checking the seminal ejaculation one defeats the biological purpose of the sexual act.

'Controlled indulgence' is thus a means to move toward our divine state. But the ultimate goal is somewhat vague. According to Eliade, some tantrics seek an experience of gnosis, or nirvanic consciousness, while some speak of yogis who realized immortality in the body. They do not die; they disappear into heaven clothed in 'spirit-bodies,' 'divine bodies,' or 'bodies of Pure Light.'

Ancient Greeks

In the Symposium, Plato described primordial man as a bisexual being, spherical in shape. Souls were once winged and circled the heavens with the gods until - getting too close to earth they became enamored with its sights and sounds and lost their wings, crash-landing to earth. But once in a while, upon encountering the face of the beloved, souls become amorously and strangely agitated, and growing wings again, long to take flight to the heavens from which they came.

Like Philo of Alexandria (a Jewish contemporary of Jesus), Plato imagined human perfection as unity, a reflection of divine perfection. He also noted that love founded on lust will cease, and that man must transcend the erotic to experience divine love.

Another ancient Greek, Aristophanes, claimed that lovers wish for something other than sexual gratification. They seek a permanent union that they cannot fully describe and to which they can only obscurely aspire. He said that the paradox of romantic love is that it is a yearning for primordial wholeness, which is constantly frustrated by separation

The ancient Greeks were also fascinated with the androgyne (sometimes depicted as a hermaphrodite) as a symbol of wholeness uniting the powers of both sexes. They apparently did not stumble upon the solution of controlled intercourse as a key for achieving unity, but they did understand that the body is the cause of separation. According to Hellenic scholar Edward Spence, the ancient Greek position was that,

Romantic love is essentially mediated by the body, the cause of our separation rather than of our union. We are creatures of a longing that in principle and in practice cannot be fulfilled. We crave for wholeness through union of our souls, which the physical separation of our bodies hinders us from ever achieving.

Christian Mystics

The ancient scrolls found at Nag Hammadi suggest that the earliest Christians were far more mystical than the Church would have us believe. The so-called gnostic Christians emphasized the androgynous nature of the Divine and record that Adam was immortal and whole - until he separated from Eve by 'begetting beasts' (physical children) instead of engaging in sacred union. 3 These Christian texts record that Jesus overcame the separation between the sexes, reversing Adam's error, in the Sacrament of the Bridal Chamber — an "act of will, not of impulse."

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