The Birth of Body Beloved
What happens when you fully love and accept yourself just as you are, no change necessary? I believe it's the birth of real happiness. You begin to fall in love with yourself and open a door to unconditional love for yourself and others.  To really love others without co-dependent need we have to learn to love ourselves unconditionally first.  This doesn't mean you never make healthy changes.  It doesn't mean you don't evolve.  You just love all of you just as you are now, fully accepting your amazing evolving imperfect self.  What has this to do with sex and sensuality?  Everything!

Let me share my own story as the example.  I've gone from defining myself as an overweight, over the hill, lonely divorcee to seeing myself as a large beautiful sexy 63 year old Goddess. Up until 6 years ago I had believed all the social programming that I was too fat to be attractive.  My size 12 body in high school wasn't perfect enough to match Barbie or the 1960's icon Twiggy.  I was surrounded by popular beauty queen/cheer leaders in my family that added to my belief that I and my body were 'not good enough'.  I also believed I was 'nothing without a man' and spent many years desperately and unsuccessfully seeking a partner to fill the 'not enough' emptiness in me.  After my 2nd divorce at the age of 52, I weighed over 270 pounds and believed no one would ever love me or want me again.  Luckily I was wrong, very very wrong!

Had I continued to believe I wasn't good enough and needed a man I'd likely have made that negative belief true.  Happily, that got turned around.  I'd begun a serious healing journey after a deep depression set in the year after both my parents died.  That reignited my spiritual path and led me to the teachings that changed my life.  I learned about Tantra.  Tantra is a spiritual path that sees all of manifestation as the Divine unfolding.  It teaches you to drop shame, let go of right and wrong judgments and accept what is.  It teaches you to question everything and find out for yourself what is truth instead of accepting what you're told.  It's based in the loving heart, the path I've been drawn to all my life.  I found wonderful teachers and healers that helped me love myself, love my own heart and drop the stories that kept me from seeing what a sexy sensual woman I am.  Tantra helped me fully embrace all of me, the light and the dark.  It welcomed my sensual sexual side as natural and taught me it is one doorway into Divine Awakening.   Most religions and governments have made most sex wrong stealing away our most natural form of pleasure and happiness.  Tantra embraces and uses this pleasure to access the Divine that dwells within us.   

So I stopped making myself wrong.  I embraced all of me and this turned my desperate loneliness into enjoyable alone time.   I've drawn amazing, delightful and challenging relationships to me as I allowed my sensuality and sexuality be free to express itself.  I've been told by one young (cougar alert) very sexy Tantric lover that my laughter and lack of pretense makes me a great lover.  It's been such a delight to be able to fully awaken my 'original' loving self; the self that existed before outside judgment imposed stories of limitation.   I've even learned to accept and hold my dark unloving side, my deep and real imperfections. 

Loving and enjoying who you are is one of the sexist things you can do.  It can create a magnetic draw to you.  Once you love yourself and enjoy your own company you turn loneliness into enjoyable aloneness.  When you're no longer desperate for "the other" you start to attract more loving and interesting people into your life.  The amazing thing about becoming desirable to partners was the simplicity of the change.  It only took my dropping the story to change everything.  No matter what age you are you can learn to let go of shame and judgment and begin a journey to open your heart to yourself.  You can choose to embrace and love your body in whatever shape it's in. I even recommend talking to your body as a loving partner, make friends with it!  That open heart and embrace of 'what is' will call in your natural sensual sexual self and, if I am any example, will become a magnet to call in the relationship(s) you long for, the best of which is the one with yourself!

I hope you go ahead and open this door of delight, the delight of being in and accepting your body just as it is.  Sending love to you as you enjoy the journey!

Published in September/October On the Path Magazine
http://www.pathways-belair.com/On-The-Path-Magazine.html

Sharing my Matt Kahn Retreat experience here as I posted on the True Divine Nature Community Facebook page:

My Beloved True Divine Nature Community,
I have a confession, Beloveds.  I had a very hard time at the retreat.  Wednesday night, the first night, I was livid after the "no experience" teaching.  As I drove back to the Hotel with 3 others, who were raving about the teaching, I said from the back seat that if they wanted to hear a dissenting voice I was a F*ck No!  What I heard Matt say again and again was "I felt nothing".  I was furious.  I come into body to feel and to experience.  I have eternities to be dead and out of body.  I feel my place there and have been there so many times.  I remember it and connect with it when I get lost here in the pain and confusion.  Here I want my cake and eat it too.  I want my 'no experience' and I want my wild passionate painful and confusing experience.  I want it all!
 Then the next day Matt taught about feeling more deeply and embracing it all.  He was singing my song.  I was frustrated and confused.  I was also a bit angry that he called 'no experience' a new teaching. This is a comment he made to me before the evening began. It's ancient.  Maybe he was referring to something else but this is how it all went for me.  I wanted to have a knock down drag out fight with Matt. LOL!!!   Beloveds!  This is the last thing I expected!!!  I actually found it all funny as I watched my anger.  I've been raving about Matt for months and months and have felt the precious transmissions of energy and awakening he delivers.  I have felt the immediate elimination of obstacles and penetrating love during personal sessions.  He truly has Ganesha energy!   Oddly when I was near Matt and interacting with him directly I felt great distance, "Emptiness" but no love.  There was certainly an impact from his emptiness but I so wanted to feel and experience the love. 
I hear you in my projections of you( from this 'universe' /My Story)referring to my ego or feeling sorry for me and my little angry girl.  Oh yes, Beloveds.  The ego judging mind serves and hinders me.  It also is of God...all creation is. I liked when Matt said, watch what people do, not what they say.  This is the good judging mind.  I watched Matt be so playful and seemingly intimate with some and so distant with others. This ego sees an ego alive and well in Matt as well as a deep penetrating connection with empty consciousness.   HW Poonjaji, another favorite teacher of mine from the Ramana Maharshi lineage, said he had an ego and she served him well. Being a Tantrica I wish to embrace it all, the dual and non dual.  So curious. I'm sure one of the challenges for me is the hierarchy I saw encouraged in the class.  I have always been uncomfortable with the 'raised above us/ more advanced than us' space but I also understand that hierarchy exists in our world. I understand needing a teacher and a way shower. I struggle with this having seem so many powerful empty beings fall into disgrace from what appear ego antics and abuses.  And yet I know I would fall on my knees before Ramana Maharshi and be enslaved by his love and awakened state. Go figure.
So I am struggling and at rest at the same time.  A few of you know this but I wanted to come clean to this amazing community of souls. In doing so I hope love prevails and there is room to embrace my crazy and amazing experience.
So here is the good news.  Even with my anger, my illness that happily gave me a break on Thursday from what I felt was an uncomfortable workshop,  I have returned with a deeper silence and much more access to dropping the crazy monkey mind.  What a ride!  Thank you Matt and Julie for this amazing uncomfortable and life changing experience.  Thank you for reading this post.  Please forgive me if I misjudged or misunderstood as I stumble on rejoicing and/or bitching as the case may be.  Again, what a ride!
I love you!  I love you!  I love you!  Truly I do!

This morning...

Thank you for this moment, Beloved...with the sounds of change breaking the morning quiet, a warm little (Spike) dog on my lap and the tinge of fear hiding deep in my belly.  I love you!  I love this one that smells the lavender brought back from Italy by my Beloved June.

Lavender, crashing sounds of construction, sweet chants to awaken by, the door open to the sun and slight breeze on this perfect late late summer, almost fall, day.  My hands tingle from carpal tunnel or shoulder issues as I write.

This moment is precious...fear and all.  I am more accepting of the changes.  They are, so why fight?  The crashing construction can be sacred drummers - the tingling numbness in my hands - kisses and sparks from God.  I am here now.  These things are mine to feel, see, hear.  Sweet Spike keeps me company as I muse.  Thanks you for this richness!
                                                                      September 16, 2014