Believe it or not, I’m sitting at an outdoor bar, mocktail at hand, overlooking a beach fringed with palm trees in Vietnam. It’s pretty special.  Last week I attended a Spiritual Retreat here. While it wasn’t specifically sexual in nature, you can’t separate sex and spirituality.

A key element of spiritual work, and of the Retreat, is raising your energy. You do this through meditation and mindfulness. But it’s not what we often consider meditation, which is a slowing of energy, a deep relaxation. That’s wonderful and good, but it’s different to raising the energy. When you go into meditation with the intent to raise your energy, you go places. You feel lighter, spin faster. You get messages and have visions. It is an altered consciousness.

This is why conscious sex is so good for spiritual development, because sex raises your energy. Even if you have the most basic, unconnected sex, sparks of light will still fly. So if you approach sex with presence, intent and release of self, you really do get taken to extraordinary places of exceptional ecstatic pleasure.

In these realms the genitals barely matter, they’re just a means to feel with the whole of your body and beyond your body. 

This applies to partnered sex, to solo sex, and to your relationship with life. Because life is is sex. As Paulo Coelho says “…the language of the soul is sex.” Life energy is sexual energy. We try and compartmentalise it in our society, but it’s part of everything. Living mindfully, consciously, with presence, is about raising your energy. That in itself is having a sexual relationship with life, with the universe. 

Then in the microcosm of your sexual union with another, or with yourself, you hone and enhance your ability to raise the energy, to go to ecstatic places. Then that energy is taken back into the rest of your life, you emanate it, and life itself becomes ecstatic.

Easy to say perhaps, sitting on a tropical beach with mocktail in hand! But how do you think I got here…?

Raise your energies: live mindfully, love consciously.