Starting Now : Conversation on The Intertwined Nature of Sexuality and Spirituality

Having a personality change here. I’ve decided to use some boldness rather than simply writing about it as I have for these last several years. With this change, I mean to follow more faithfully my calling, which I wrote about here this past February in my last post (below) before taking a break.

At this site we’ll now be exploring the subject I persistently write novels about. Whatever intention I begin with, this one topic keeps finding me.

What is it? The intertwined nature of sexuality and spirituality.

How the sensory/sensual experience can trigger religious experience and is part of such seemingly transcendent or otherworldly moments. How the physical and the spiritual inhabit and enhance each other.

Taking on this topic here requires a wee tad of nerve on my part. Despite the extreme raciness of my most recent novel Cobalt Blue, I’m not someone crusading for or (heavens, no!) publicly demonstrating sexual liberation: I’m no Madonna or Miley, no Lady Gaga or even Dr. Ruth, though I’m old enough to play Dr. Ruth’s successor.

I never meant to write about spiritual experience or about sex. But anyone who has written any fiction knows that stories take their own course. My stories inevitably wind their way to this somewhat touchy controversial subject.

Revelation: Troubled minister hears the voice of God, an experience quite different than expected. Minister, without intending to, experiences further grace through his sexual relationship with his wife.

Sister India: After getting into some sex-provoked trouble, an American girl flees to a Hindu holy city, tries to hide her dangerous sexuality in fat and seclusion and the religious mantle of this city on the Ganges.

Cobalt Blue: A single woman in a small conservative town has a spiritual experience that initially tips her into erotic obsession.

Now I mean to explore here in nonfiction what this is all about, which is to say: with the lights on. Speaking directly rather than through an imagined life that holds me in its spell.

I expect that some posts will be more spiritual than sexy, and vice versa. I expect the subject to take me into related topics such as:

• Meditation
• Yoga
• Church-sex scandals
• Temptation and addiction
• Visions
• Mystics
• Dreams
• Desire
• Celibacy
• Ecstatic religion
• Altered states. (My husband, Bob Dick, is a psychologist who often uses clinical hypnosis.)
• Et cetera

I’m hoping that you’ll take part in this discussion, agreeing or disagreeing, approving or disapproving. I’d love for you to contribute fact, opinion, experience, resources, suggestions, emotional reactions.

Plus, I wouldn’t mind a little company in this enterprise.

 

Categories: Blog