Erotic Ritual.

I’ve facilitated a few transition rituals recently - and am feeling grief about living in a world where ritual has been sanitized and removed from the winding path of our soul’s journey.

Throughout our history we’ve cultivated ritual for many reasons - from connecting with the seasons to communing with our past or future lineages to deepening into the milestones of our journeys and relationships. And, of course, so much more. Perhaps we have used food, sacred objects, rites of challenge, the erotic, or art, dance, storytelling, and creative practices within ritual.

For me, one of the most powerful affirmations and healing ingredients that I experience in ritual process is how the messy, unknowing, emotional, liminal and chaotic is acknowledged and often centred as revered qualities the human experience. What a far cry that is from the sanitized rituals we still observe in secular culture - birthdays, holidays, graduations, etc - these hollow rituals often enforcing the systemic oppressions of capitalism and white supremacy: tendrils of perfectionism, wealth, power, and hyper individualism wrapped around birthday cakes, fancy clothing, and ‘certificates of achievement’.

Within erotic rituals, a very different story is welcome to unfold. Liminal not-knowings. Occupying non-ordinary states of consciousness. Following the winding rivers of pleasure, grief, rage, and eros. Casting a container of time away from time within which unwinding, unlearning, and unbecoming can happen. Being a body that drips, smells, bleeds, moans, wails, and shakes. 

And! Sometimes erotic rituals are pedestrian - which is also it’s own magic! Not everything has to be an extra-ordinary experience. Not everything has to be perfectly on-brand, on-point, blog-able, 14/10-would-do-again.

That said, I feel erotic rituals always touch something real. Pedestrian or ecstatic, connecting with erotic energy is connecting with life force energy, and leaning into the experience of being alive will always give the gift of wisdom.