One night, I sat alone in my apartment with a heavy heart, surrounded by piles of books about courtesans, priestesses, and goddesses. For months the universe had been sending me messages about the need to explore the mystery and magic found in the realms of beauty and pleasure. I was being drawn again and again back to images and attributes of the goddess Aphrodite, seeing her symbols everywhere, drawing the Empress card repeatedly from my tarot decks. I knew the path I was being pointed towards was both a spiritual and physical journey, and while I wasn’t ready to work as a prostitute, I knew it was something I wanted to do and that it would mean more to me than simply being paid for sex. I needed to learn about the sacredness in beauty and pleasure.

I felt frustrated and confused. I was being called to serve but what did I have to offer? The aspects of life ruled by Venus (beauty, happiness, pleasure, success, luxury, delight) were my weaknesses, not my strengths… I didn’t feel beautiful, or happy, or charming. I was intellectual, good with stories and symbols. The physical world was tough for me. I struggled with feeling closed off and disassociated from my life and I had a hard time giving or receiving love. Yet, I felt desire to be all those things Aphrodite and Venus represented. I felt hungry for it – to feel loved, to feel beautiful, to be sensual and experience life as pleasure, instead of pain.

Tearfully, I gave up trying to find the answer in my texts and finally started talking out-loud to the goddess of love and beauty. I lit a small stick of incense that smelled like roses and closed my eyes.

“I don’t know what I have to offer or how I can serve you, but show me, ask of me and I’ll try my best.”

It wasn’t the most eloquent prayer I’d ever spoken to the divine, but it was a genuine offering of my heart. I dedicated myself to her service.

I’ve changed a lot since that night. My world now revolves around that decision to serve love and beauty, to cultivate and spread it. I kept my promise by trying to find out what the real the meaning of beauty was. I learned that beauty was the quality of something that gave pleasure, which has helped me release limiting beliefs about what is beautiful. I cultivate a sensual environment for myself through colour, texture, and music. I garden and work with plants. I dance every day and hula hoop as ways to enjoy my body and play. I’ve worked hard to heal my relationship with food, by cooking for myself and my roommates, trying different diets and being involved in community groups like The Good Food Club. I express the love I feel for those around me and let myself feel loved in return. I try to make decisions from a place of love instead of fear. When it crosses my mind, I take a moments during my day to simply experience a sense of gratitude.

That promise I made opened my heart and mind to transforming my life into one full of love, pleasure, and beauty. It helped me shift my focus and energy from my perceived lack and build new strengths. All it took was desire and effort.

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Princess Lotus by ~marumiyan on deviantART

I recognize Halloween/Samhain/All Hallow’s Eve as the end of one year and the beginning of a new one and a time to reflect.

Last year saw many changes for me as I sought to align who I was with who I wanted to be. A few months in, I set some goals to help me develop my courage and take more chances. I ended up working as an indoor sex worker, fulfilling a desire I’d been too scared to realize for over a year. I also ended up getting arrested, having to tell my parents about my chosen profession, and learn to navigate through a sea of assumptions, accusations, and stereotypes about the work. I’d been very lucky that my focus on honesty and courage had pushed me to be open about my work to most people I knew.

It’s been four months since the arrest, which literally turned my life upside down. I haven’t taken any clients since, surviving on temporary work in different places while I tried to sort out what I was going to do. I didn’t want to stop; I enjoyed the freedom to work only a few hours a week and having work that I enjoyed and challenged me, but it was obvious I couldn’t continue the way I had been. I’d also been experimenting with a raw and organic food diet for about six weeks before the arrest and unfortunately couldn’t continue without the income from my work.

I crashed, feeling depressed and stuck. I spent about almost two months trying to get myself back together. I felt angry and frustrated, unable to work the job I wanted nor really talk about what had happened for fear of retaliation from the police or attorneys handling the case. Near the end of August, I was blessed to be given the chance to go away for a few days to the mountains to re-center and get a break. During the trip, I had my nose buried in a fantastic book by Starhawk called “The Fifth Sacred Thing”. Feeling very inspired by the co-operative community and soulful living of the characters and Starhawk’s vision on how we can create a society that supports life and beauty, I threw myself back into the volunteering I’d done the year before with food security and community development.

I also felt inspired to become more involved in activism, joining Radical Cheerleaders and helping organize events and rallies on feminist issues. I’ve spent my time going to food security and community development events and networking with different people who have an interest or role in shaping the world into a place that is more fair and nurturing for all.

In my personal life, I’ve been learning what it means to create a nurturing home for myself with a chosen family, as we welcomed another roommate and two more furbabies bringing the total in our house to four humans and three felines. I’ve been trying to keep myself grounded by dancing daily and working through the angry and fearful emotions the events of the summer brought up.

This year brought a lot of new sexual and romantic experience for me, through work, crushes, and short-lived romances, leading me to ask lots of questions about my sexual identity, my female identity, and what inspires desire in me. I also felt the need to re-devoted myself to an earth-based spiritual path, something I haven’t done since I was a teenager. I’ve been working with the archetype of Venus as expressed through Aphrodite for the last couple of years and my focus this autumn shifted to include Ishtar, another divine aspect of Venus, as I felt the desire to learn to access the warrior in me and use that strength.

This autumn marks the end of an important cycle for me. It’s been seven years since my most influential spiritual awakening. I’m grateful for the experiences I’ve had and support I’ve received. The wheel is turning and it’s time to turn my thoughts towards a new year and new beginning.

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{For an introduction to Reiki, please visit the Wikipedia article.}

This past weekend I attended a two day Reiki workshop with Joe of Cosmic Tools. My friend Rae-annon had received her Level I and Level II attunements last November from Joe and ended up developing a friendship with him, often stopping by his shop to visit and have discussions with him.

Recently, she and I were talking about my work and some of the challenges I was noticing. I’ve always been sensitive and empathic and depending on the person, our relationship, compatibility, or strength of emotions my empathy at times would blur the line between what I was feeling and what the other person was feeling. At times, this can be a wonderful gift, leading to deeper understanding and connection with those I care about. Other times, it can be very distracting and even harmful to me, since I end up confusing where I’m really at with things I’ve picked up from other people. Since I would be seeing clients in a very intimate setting, with little to no knowledge as to what emotional and psychological baggage they’d be bringing into the space, we both felt it would be important for me to start taking steps to build boundaries between myself and who I was seeing and cleanse my spirit. Luckily, Joe was having a class the next week and I emailed him to sign up.

Joe became a Usui Reiki Master in 2005, a Karuna Reiki Master in 2006, and a Lightarian Reiki Master in 2007. He has participated in vision quests, sundance, Buddhist and Shamanic healing workshops, drumming circles, Reiki Shares, native sweats, motivational workshops and various forms of energy workshops. He’s currently studying shamanism.

The class started at ten Saturday morning, at the Natural Essentials space in Osborne Village on River Avenue. I arrived early and spent a few moments enjoying the sunshine on my face before heading to the class. I was the first student there, but the others weren’t far behind. There were three students in total: myself, a young man who we’ll refer to as A, and another young woman we’ll refer to as S. S and A had already met Joe, drawn to him by an advertisement for his class in a health magazine and having visited him a couple of times at his shop. We introduced ourselves to each other and Joe started the class.

His first step was to establish that he was a facilitator, not a guru. He invited us to chime in with our thoughts and experiences while he was sharing the course material with us, which set the tone for more round table discussion throughout the next two days which was very inviting. He asked us to share what had brought us there. We all spoke our individual stories on what had brought us there and what we were hoping to learn. The next few hours were spent learning the basic theory of reiki, a bit of history, but most of the teaching was shared through Joe’s personal experiences and stories of healing. We often found ourselves breaking away from the outline to share our experiences and discuss the ideas we were learning. It was a very stimulating class and I found myself quickly warming up to Joe and the other students.

Next we prepared ourselves for our attunements. We started with a guided sacred space meditation. Joe put on a cd and lead us through the meditation to establish a sacred space that we could return to during the course of our path. I hadn’t done a sacred space meditation since I was about seventeen and had some trouble at first silencing my mental chatter, but relaxed into it after a few moments.

By nature of what it is, a sacred space in your mind’s eye isn’t meant to be shared with others, so by necessity my description will be vague. My sacred space started off as a very earthy place, dark and deep in a forest. After a couple of moments, another completely different image filled my mind and I was torn between the two. I decided to relax and follow the second image, opening myself to the images and senses of it. It was a beautiful space, near the elements of sky and water, with a twilight light falling around it. It was filled with images and symbols that I’d often related to the Moon and I thought back to a day prior when I had been dancing and felt the desire to pray. I had been a bit perplexed at first, unsure whether I wanted to offer prayers to the Moon, who I’ve always felt a connection to, or Venus who I have been establishing a connection with. On reflection, my distress was a bit silly – you simply offer prayers where you feel drawn to – but at the time, I seemed to be very stuck on that question. During the meditation, I remembered those feelings and began to realize that the symbols I was seeing were symbols that could mean equally the Moon and Venus. I smiled a bit at that.

Joe finished the meditation and we kept our eyes closed while he walked around us, giving each of us our Level I attunement in turn. An attunement is a way of opening a new Reiki practitioner to the energy they will be working with. I focused on the different sensations I was feeling. I felt a heaviness around my forehead and crown, almost like a half-mask that felt tense and anxious. I also became aware of a heaviness around my shoulders and back that I’ve always equated with the idea of etheric wings.

After our attunment, Joe shared with us what he had felt and learned during the experience and we responded in kind. When my turn came, he spoke of a past life, which I’ve never had done before, where I had been a healer in South America and other talents. He told me something that I would find trouble with would be belief in my talents and blockages buried deep that didn’t necessarily come from me, but from certain people I’d spent a lot of time with. I found a lot of comfort from his words and the things that he had vocalized that I was struggling with. After that, we broke for lunch and I enjoyed a very good meal with my classmates at a nearby sushi restaurant. We continued our discussions and shared the different experiences and sensations we’d been feeling during the class. It was a lovely lunch.

After we returned, Joe asked us to pick out a quartz crystal to take home and it was time for us to practice and I volunteered to lay down on the table first. S had to excuse herself, so it was mostly Joe and A working on me. I don’t remember too much of my experiences on the table, except deep sense of relaxation and peace and the uncanny way Joe was able to identifying a blockage that has been veyr influential in my life within a few moments of me laying down. A shared some of what he had felt during the experience and different images he had picked up while working on me. We had gone way past the workshop schedule at that point, ending at seven thirty instead of five and I walked home feeling lighter and more like myself since I had before I moved.

The second day we started a bit later, at eleven instead of ten. We started off by finishing with the written notes, getting some background on spirit guides, symbols, and long distance reiki. Joe directed us to continue our practice and S laid down on the table to receive reiki from both A and myself. We closed our eyes, asked for protection from our respective deities, the attendance of good natured spirits, and invited healing for S’s highest good. We asked to become clear channels for spirit.

It’s hard to relate what I felt during my first experience giving someone reiki. I’ve always been aware of the sensation of energy across my palms and finger tips and the almost electric buzz. I started exploring with that sensation to see what I could pick up and learn. One of the points that Joe stressed during our class is that everyone’s experience is unique and that we should value our own intuition and instinct more than any written work or direction from a teacher. I soon became aware of the fact that I was feeling different aches in my body that I hadn’t felt a moment before. I asked Joe about it and he encouraged me to go to those areas and work there. The strongest sensation I felt during those moments was a deep sadness and a heaviness of heart. Tears gathered at the corners of my eyes and I relaxed into the work, feeling a compassion that was… serene. I followed my feelings, moving to different spots and whispering a few words to S when I felt moved to. I had a few flashes of intuition based on the nature of S’s role in her family life, similar to the sensations I pick up in my daily life but it was clearer and a little more concrete than what I normally feel. After the session, we shared with each other, delighted by the images and feelings we had shared and learning about the different ways our abilities complimented each other. We had had too many synchonicities during the class to really feel surprised by how our experiences were lining up.

A took his turn next and Joe asked us to pay special attention to his kundalini and develop our sense of that. I felt a little less nervous this time around and was able to enter the space a little more quickly than last time. The first thing I noticed with A and how working with him differed from working with S was that I felt flushed almost immediately, while with S my hands had felt quite cold. S experienced the same and actually had to stop at a certain point. Again, I had vague senses about A’s role in life and began identifying what a blockage felt like versus energy flowing freely. We were able to sense a change in vibration and heat when we actively sought to allow his kundalini to flow. At one point, Joe directed us to look at A’s face, which was unlined and seemed very young and peaceful. We finished the class by practicing long distance reiki on each other in pairs, with Joe participating due to the uneven number of students.

There’s no way for me to really express how wonderful my experience was. I took the class almost as a whim, thinking it would be a good skill to have in my line of work and with where I want to be in the future. I’m so grateful that I was able to experience this and learn the stories of Joe, S, and A. There’s so much that can’t be shared yet, but my understanding of what I experienced will unfold as I practice with my new skill.

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I was born in Germany to a Caribbean mother and Canadian father. My father served in the Canadian army, which is why they were there. I spent most of my life growing up in Canada, but between my mother’s tendency to move around, my father relocating because of job and family, their divorce, and my own nomadic nature – I can count twenty different places I’ve lived since we moved back to Canada when I was three.

Last weekend, I moved for the fifth time in a year. I spent the last five days recovering from all the changes and the draining situations I allowed myself to get emotionally caught up in. I spent a lot of time thinking about the rise and fall in my energy and how I was responding to the new direction my life was taking.

I’m very good at living out of a suitcase. Sometimes I think I’m a little too good at it. I never really developed the habit of settling into a place, always thinking I’d wait until I was in a place I knew I’d be in for long. I’ve known this to be a weakness of mine for quite a while, but I don’t think I ever really felt the strain of it as accutely as this recent move.

I don’t think I’ll stop moving around – there’s so many things I want to see and explore – but there’s a better way to do it than leaving myself drained and exhausted. There’s an imbalance because of my poor skills at grounding myself. Even in nomadic people, there’s a way of choosing and setting up your campsite so that for the time you are there, it is home.

By nature, I’m very giving. This is a both a skill and a failing, because I give to others before giving to myself. I focus on others and give away my time, my power, and my energy – I don’t stay centered on my path or my pleasure. I think of what I can do to serve others in almost every venture and ignore how I can serve myself. This isn’t sustainable and when I become too drained, I fold in on myself and want nothing to do with the outside world. It’s like a pendulum swinging and causes more stress than growth.

This morning I took a look around my room and thought about what I wanted to create there. I thought about the people I am living with and how wonderful it is to share their home. I think of Pandora and how strange it is how much having an animal share your space makes it so much more special. I wanted to create sacred space, not just for a passing moment of connection or safety – but as a root connection that I can draw nourishment from as I grow into my dreams and learn to share myself with the world around me.

Even if I can feel the pull of places yet explored and dreams not yet realized, I have to learn how to be where I am and love it wholly. For all my awkwardness, my weakness, my uncertainty, my struggle to create something beautiful. The present is all I really have.

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Cherry Blossom
Originally uploaded by conner395

“There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
- Anais Nin

When I first decided I wanted to be a companion, I approached it like I approach every new task – with massive amounts of research. I read a mountain of books and visited countless escort websites and blogs on the internet. I searched the websites like I would search had I been looking for a companion myself. I soon learned that while each website had the basics of physical statistics and promises of a romantic fantasy with a charming and beautiful woman, what stood out me were the websites that gave me more than just a carbon copy of a generic fantasy. I was drawn to the women and men who had a unique spark, cultivated it and expressed it through their web presence.

Two in particular (Gillette and Livvy) really shaped how I approached the profession. Both were informative and made me ask some really hard questions about myself and why I wanted to do this. I realized that while I was attractive and good company, with a compassionate heart, what would be the most value to my clients was my view of the world and ability to see the beauty in it. One of my most important tasks as a companion would be to nourish beauty. As my purpose grew in depth over the following year, I began to understand that my work would extend beyond one-on-one companionship to helping others begin to see and nourish their own beauty.

Heavily inspired by one of Livvy’s first posts about becoming a courtesan, I created a curriculum of education to help me refine my natural talents and identify my weaknesses. It was patterned after the esoteric elements as a nod to the esoteric teachings that continue to be so much a part of my understanding of the world. I named the work “The Elements of Enchantment”.

The first section was named “Flora”. Flora is considered a fifth, harmonizing element in esoteric literature. While the fifth element is more commonly called “spirit” or “aether”, I’m very fond of flowers and “flora” appeals to me because of the sense of earthly life that the abstract nature of “aether” doesn’t hold for me. When I think of my heart, I think of it as a deep sunset pink flower opening, giving of itself and receiving from the earth. Flora calls to mind many things that I want to cultivate within myself. Gentleness, harmony with nature, a simple joy in being exactly what I am. Flora invokes the the cycles of life and growth that we must all move through and the strength it takes to blossom and be what you are in the world.

Each individual seeks out companions for different reasons and each companion brings something different to her clients. The women I was inspired by found a way to nurture their natural talents and found patrons who were in turn nourished by their gifts. Flora represents unique qualities that I bring to my companion role. I want to celebrate my natural beauty, allow it to blossom, and share it. Luckily, I’ve always been fascinated by my personal symbols and attributes and pursued them as part of my spiritual path. I also want to share what I learn during that exploration of myself with others so they can learn new ways of nurturing themselves. By exploring what makes me happiest, I learn what I’m meant to cultivate.

I am a spiritual and sensual person. These two aspects of me, which are often considered to be separate by our society, are entwined in my nature. There’s no divide between what I experience in my daily life and what is sacred, because our very existence is sacred, the expression of life. It’s a very freeing way to live.

I find my devotion to the divine in what brings me pleasure, in what I feel and experience. By enjoying the taste of something, I’m thanking the source of it. By finding pleasure in the sound or sight of something, I am expressing my gratitude for it. I believe that the universe wants my pleasure and happiness and that it wants yours too. This is something I carry with me in my social life and companionship work. I interact with the world from this belief and encourage it in others.

We are playful creatures and without games and time to play, we become closed off to pleasure. We can’t receive nourishment if we don’t know how to relax and enjoy ourselves and games teach us not to take ourselves too seriously. Our lives are adventures for us to explore, a way of challenging ourselves to new heights, and we are meant to take pleasure from the journey. We enjoy the excitement of mystery and love to fulfill our natural curiosity when something delights us or captures our attention. I like to make space for the unknown in my life, for the spontaneous opportunities that only show themselves when you relax into what will be and let the universe bring you things you didn’t expect.

I strive for greater harmony in my life, where all aspects of my life support the others. This is always a work in progress as I get better and better at expressing myself. I try to live consciously and congruently, with reverence and respect to life. I serve my community through volunteering, sharing resources, building this website, caring for plants and animals that share my space, and sharing knowledge that has been shared with me. This sense of duty to the larger whole also expresses itself through my work with healing. To truly build community, we have to share what we’ve been given.

These things and more are the essence of what I am and what I bring to the world, because these are the lessons that the world continually brings to me. By exploring my strengths as an individual, I explore my strengths as a companion and what I can best bring to those who choose to spend time with me. As I devote myself to celebrating my strengths and nourishing myself, I am better able to serve and give of myself.

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{inspired by gala darling}

Magical Sunset
Originally uploaded by San*
“There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in the proportion.”
- Edgar Allan Poe

As a child, I’d never consider myself beautiful. I thought I was too odd to be anything lovely. Now at twenty-two, I’ve come to accept all the ways that I am unique as expressions of my inherent beauty and sacred self. Beauty is so much more than a shape, a size, a colour, or an image. We find beauty in those things, but beauty itself goes beyond that. What we understand as beautiful is what we find pleasing, whether it be physical, emotional, spiritual, or intellectual. We nourish all the ways we are unique and beautiful by accepting that we are expressions of the love that surrounds us and accepting ourselves as sacred.

Accepting the self as sacred is a choice to acknowledge that all you do and all that you are is beautiful and loved. We are the physical manifestation of a divine dream and we are meant to celebrate this, through our actions and our words. The world wants us to live beautifully, with soulful pleasure at what we are creating.

We carry with us an inner guide that directs us and helps us follow our path. Something special that is born when we enter into a physical form, something that wouldn’t have existed without this union of body and spirit. You can call it the soul, the essence, the imagination, it doesn’t matter. I’m fond of the term “inscape”. For spiritual discussions, I tend to refer to it as our “dreaming”. It is unique and the soul of what we are, the child of our physical and spiritual selves coming together for this moment in time.

The inscape is the distinctive and inherent quality of something. It is dynamic and ever changing, like our personalities. It’s what we carry with us, what we create from. Inscapes can be similar, but no two can ever be exactly alike. Our inscape holds the keys to unraveling the mysteries of our gifts and can help guide us in our journey through life. Our purpose is to flourish and it tells us what we want and need. Like dreams, it communicates with the waking mind through symbols and affinity. Affinity is the feeling of being connected to something and our affinity for certain symbols are sign posts drawing our attention to objects and moments. Anyone who
follows a spiritual path or has ever been attracted to another person understands this feeling instinctively. How we listen to these feelings decide the path our lives will take. The world gives us what we bring to it. If we follow our path with delight, our path will bring us delight.

We can begin to unravel our inscapes through paying attention to the symbols that call to us. Symbols are often used by our subconscious to get messages to us, like while we’re dreaming. By actively working with these symbols and affinities, we gain skill in decoding the messages around us and which ones we want to respond to. Explore your start chart, birth signs, or personal associations. What do you feel drawn to? What does it represent symbolically? Believe nothing, entertain every possibility. Read favourite stories for inspiration and watch your emotional self for responses to different characters, objects, or settings. Use those feelings as a guide.

The other side of living beautifully, with deep soulful pleasure, is by actively expressing and celebrating the mysteries you uncover while delving into yourself. Celebrating the inscape manifests for me as a spiritual and artistic process. I take the things that attract me in my daily life, research them, deconstruct them, explore different sides, then put it all back together in a way that I find pleasing. Express yourself through what you fill our days with. Any aspect of your life is an opportunity to celebrate your unique spark. Rework your wardrobe to include only the colours, styles, and pieces that make you feel incredible. Make your personal space a sacred space, filled with things that inspire and delight you. Celebrate your body by indulging your senses. Surround yourself with food, music, activities, and company that nourish your soul and inspire you to be your best and brightest.

Let your inner voice be the final word on the beautiful life you’re building for yourself. Your life is meant to nourish and express the essence of who you are and what you contribute as a co-creator of the world. embrace it, love it, let it shine. Define for yourself what is beautiful to you. Be courageous and loving with yourself, humbled by and generous with your gifts. Love yourself fiercely and dedicate yourself to your beautiful life.

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My most relaxed moments are when I’m in the bath. It’s a space where I can be completely open and receptive, allowing the water to rejuvenate me. The first few minutes of being completely open is a shock to my system. To help it along, I normally make the water a little too hot, just enough to jolt me into my sensual self, relaxing into the warmth. By soothing my senses, I relax and naturally begin to let go. I am receptive and open in a way that goes beyond my normal daily awareness. I feel a connection that extends beyond my body and the water surrounding me. I work through memories of the recent days in a dreamlike state and notice that creative ideas and pieces of stories come to me, as I let myself be nurtured by time alone.

As creative creatures, one of our greatest gifts is that which exists between the space of the mind and heart, the essence that we call our spirit or soul. It is unique and what gives passion to our work. Like a well, this vessel for our emotions and creativity can be drained and even depleted if not cared for. When a plant goes too long without water, it takes some time for the roots to open up and be able to absorb it again. Too long without pleasure or freedom and we are a bit unsure how to handle it. Like water, we must allow this essence to flow by becoming receptive and embracing. Like water, it cannot be held tight by a fist, only cupped in an open palm.

This isn’t easy at first. Strong emotions, unbidden, can come boiling to the surface. Anger, sadness, fear from old wounds… as quick and hot and powerful as the first times we felt them. They are what lay beneath a daily calm, the fears and hurts that we’ve ignored to silence, a storm we’ve never truly weathered. Part of what makes this re-emergence so painful is the place we have to sit in when we revisit them. Every time we revisit an old trauma, we respond to it as strongly as the first time. If we aren’t strong enough, we end up not only re-experiencing the hurt but also adding pain on top of it. We compound it. Even if we are strong enough, we have to sit with ourselves as we were then, an emotional ghost called by the old pain.

At first, we seem to carry none of the strength or grace we may have built since the experience. We sit with something we may never have accepted in ourselves, certainly never loved. But this ghost is as undeniable as anything about our current existence. Fear and anger and hurt feed on inner denial. We wrestle with it, struggling to beat it into a more pleasing shape. We are compelled to look away, when we should in fact be facing it head on.

We are as unique in our pain as our beauty. It’s rather ingenious. Our pain normally originates from dancing with a demon of fear and is specifically tailored to make each of us squirm. It becomes an intrinsic part of our identity and growth. We can become very attached to it if we’re not careful. We like to think of pain in terms of levels and this comparative understanding tends to put us at odds with ourselves and each other. A friend recently expressed to me that no one’s pain is greater or lesser, only different. We discussed different ways individuals tried to show each other their pain (her using funny voices, me laughing). I’d been spending some time with my own little fear demon that brought me back to a very uncomfortable place of pain. Pain that made me want to close off and at the same time shout “Look how I’ve been hurt! See my pain!” This little fear demon thinking comes from a childlike tendency to want to get rid of pain by passing it on to others or by trying to having them soothe it. Instead, we must understand that we are the only ones who can heal our pain. We must allow ourselves to open become open, receptive, and embracing, or wither away from lack of nourishment. Our greatest ally in this is something that neither turns away nor holds any judgment. We can call on a spirit of compassion, a spirit of love to hold us. This compassion asks nothing more of us than to sit with our pain, as uncomfortable as that first moment may be. After all, our pain defines us as much as our beauty.

Pain isn’t the only the only feeling we try to control by closing off. Pleasure can be as strong as pain, and if we’re not used to it, we can draw back from it just as violently. We aren’t sure what we’re feeling, only that it’s intense, and that intense feeling makes us want to draw away from it. Like pain, the only way through it is to relax, to enjoy, and to let ourselves become receptive to what we’re feeling. This is also how we learn to have pleasurable sex.

In becoming receptive and embracing, we learn to let the tide ebb and flow, let the water carry away what no longer suits us and bring new curiosities and discoveries. We invite the new and mysterious into our lives and relax into the world opening before us. We learn to cultivate, instead of dominate, and work with our own cycles of pleasure, pain, and other emotions to create an adventure that challenges and nourishes us.

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Cyprus Aphrodite Birthplace Sunrise
Originally uploaded by springtide9

“What is a teacher? I’ll tell you: it isn’t someone who teaches something, but someone who inspires the student to give of her best in order to discover what she already knows.” ~ Paulo Coelho (The Witch of Portobello)

A temple is a sacred space dedicated to sharing the teachings of a specific deity. It can also be a place of public worship, though I’m not much for distancing aspect of worship. To carry a temple means to carry a sacred space where teachings you’ve been given can be shared with others. It expresses acceptance of the teacher in all of us and a willingness to return the generosity shown to us by the divine.

There are many ways to carry a temple. A temple can be as elaborate or simple as you like. You can have an urban temple, an outdoor temple, you can have both. For some people, the altar makes the temple. For others, their body is their temple. My teachings reflect a temple dedicated to sensuality, pleasure and creativity, but also delight, enchantment, and adventure. Anywhere those energies exist can be viewed as sacred and I try to express them daily, through my thoughts, actions, and celebrations. Because I walk with a spirit that celebrates the inner divine, most of my personal temple practices don’t seem to need much more than my loving attention. I believe that my senses are meant to celebrate my physical universe and find the pleasure in daily things. My life is my dedication.

Even so, I feel like to grow further I’ll need to create a temple space for my companion work. It’s important because I’ll learn to create a physical space that will nourish the inner space to flourish. It will need to be a nourishing space where we can find harmony between the physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual selves. It needs to be easily accessible from both my home and gardens, as well as reasonably accessible to any travel routes. My city celebrates a lot of festivals and cultural events that I would love to explore more. We have winters that can turn harsh so I’ll need to be close to both food and drink and any other supplies I or a guest might need. There will also have to be plenty of plants. Celebrating what I want to explore will probably be the most fun about creating this space. It’ll have to be a space where art, creativity, pleasure, sensuality, and a fair amount of plants come together. It not only has to have space for everything I like to do, but space for what guests like as well. It needs privacy, warmth, and lots of opportunity for play.

Creating a temple space opens me to a more interactive experience with the spirits I feel affinity with. It is place for them to draw strength from. Like a home, a sacred space fills us with warmth and love. It feeds the little golden flame we carry inside, warming us wherever we go.

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Sacred spaces are spaces dedicated to the divine, spaces where we let our love shine. In sacred spaces, we gather and hold rituals of celebration, living and loving and giving of ourselves. We part, taking a piece of that sacred space with us, only richer and never poorer.

The most obvious examples we have of sacred space are temples and churches. Given my history, and how I view the divine, I’m more inclined to temples and natural spaces, but a sacred space in really anywhere where we invite ourselves to be touched by wonder, mystery, and enchantment.

One of the ways I’m learning to invite sacred space into my daily life is to accept that they can be any place at any time. My city is full of parks, doorways, gates, different types of energy centers. There are many churches, social clubs, and meeting places. All of these places can be sacred. My body is a sacred space, my room is a sacred space, my mind is a sacred space. This website can be a sacred space. It’s where I take what I’m being given by the world around me and pass it along. Like all energy centers, sacred spaces can flow in a creative, harmonizing way, or get blocked. They can work as part of a harmonious whole or drawn in power from a source and suck it up, drawing it in and letting it sit stagnant. Inviting love and creation into this space allows me to be sure I’m aligning it correctly. It can become an energy center for good, for communication, for sharing ideas. My hand shapes how this website affects the people it comes across. A website itself is a neutral tool until the creator directs it to suit their will and purpose.

Part of understanding sacred spaces is opening myself to the responsibility of them. When I go out into the world, my energy spreads to everything I encounter. When I chose consciously to share love, beauty, and wonder – that spreads to the people I encounter and colours the energy they feel from me. Love and beauty spread and I have to acknowledge my spiritual, sacred self in my daily life. As I allow that energy to flow, I in essence become a sacred space, one where I am saying yes to my role as both a teacher and student, a channel for divine energy, for love.

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