Tuesday 21 June 2016

The difference between sexual energy and "being sexualized" - Part 1

The difference between sexual energy and "being sexualized" is a significant one, and one that I am still very much a student about. This distinction is important, because the former defines the role sexual energy can have in the cultivation of health and spirituality, while the latter highlights how sexual energy can be twisted detrimentally through "being sexualized". 

It is easier to define "being sexualized", because that is our common perception of sex in the modern world. From the mildest sexual innuendos in speech to sophisticated (or plainly blatant) ones in advertisements, the pornographic industry in print or film, race car queens, handsome salesmen etc, sex sells because sex just works. The taboos and moral codes that have developed around sex have only added to the confusion and mystique surrounding it. The closed loop of guilt-forbidden fruit-desire inflames the human mind to seemingly no end. These societal structures keep us trapped in a superficial understanding (and experience) of sexual energy, and bind us to the self-enclosed loop of desire, framing it in an unsatisfactory choice between simply perpetuating the desire, or fully stamping it out (which is often simply repression and does not actually resolve the underlying dynamics). "Being sexualized" is a very narrow band of expression of sexual energy in our modern world, rooted in our fears and confusion surrounding the nature of sexual energy.



Sexual energy creates life. Sexual energy is life. The refinement of nutrition through digestion in Ayurveda (traditional Indian medicine), takes place in stages throughout various tissues, till it ends in the precious Ojas (reproductive fluid, semen), which can be further refined into Tejas, the most precious of all bodily energies, supposedly stored in the heart. Tejas and Ojas are the fundamental energies that keep us alive, their depletion certainly resulting in ill health and eventual death. In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), the jing is quintessential sexual energy (and is also the literal Chinese term for semen), stored in the kidney and the heart. Again its depletion means certain ill health and death. There are examples in many other traditional cultures that puts sexual energy at a fundamental and sacred level, for its ability to create and preserve life. The prolific sexual reproduction seen in nature, in particular the plant and microbial kingdoms, is a testament to the raw power of sexual energy. 

Reading ancient texts of medicine about sexual energy and the sacred awe it invokes, is a far cry from the base levels that sex has seemingly sunk to today. I believe that societal/political/religious control has resulted in the "dumbed-down" sex we see expressed in the media of our modern world, reduced to mere physical pleasure, or at best a necessary evil for the propagation of our species (with a three second reward of an orgasm that quickly fades to mere fatigue, at least for the male half of our species). 

Worse still, such twisted perceptions that keep human beings from the depths of their sexuality, often contributes to all kinds of sexual repression and sexual abuse. I argue that a human being really in touch with their sexuality, is much more likely to be a happy and healthy person, and less likely to be a perpetrator of sexual abuse.

Sex has been forced to wear the garment of guilty dirty pleasure for far too long, when really we should be stripping these superficial and twisted perceptions away, to reveal the beautiful naked nature of human sexual energy just as it is, which is a natural accessible right to all of us as human beings. 

In Part 2, I will be relating some of my personal experiences of sexual energy, that helped me differentiate it from "being sexualized".


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