Sexuality is a powerful human force. Maybe that is why religions have devoted so much energy attempting to control it, demonize it, urge abstinence from it and otherwise obsess over it. This may be why so many negative things like repression and abuse have resulted from the confluence of religion and sexuality.
There is also, undoubtedly, a correlation between the decline in religious observance and the increase in overt sexual expression in the culture. Some of these liberalizations have been good for individuals and society, others not.
“We sort of have this Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde sexual persona that exists in the culture,” says Jenny Ferry, who leads what she calls a social movement known as Soul Sex.
On the one hand, we still have some puritanical strains that seek to repress sexuality — these manifest in abstinence-only sex education and the assertion that sex should be saved for marriage.
“And then the trapeze swings directly to the opposite side with the sex-positive folk,” she says. “It’s very flamboyant. There’s a lot of feather boas and latex and leather and shiny things — and that’s great, too.”
But society has become hyper-sexualized, with human sexuality becoming a commodity and a dominant advertising vehicle.
“It’s oozing out of our screens and dripping off the glossy pages of magazines and billboards,” she says. “We become normalized to it, similar to violence in this culture as well.”
Ferry, who lives in Portland, Oregon, but is frequently in Vancouver introducing people to Soul Sex, says she advocates a third leg to the stool of sex-positive and sex-negative polarities, a means “to enter into the conversation around sexuality in a mindful, heart-centred and embodied way.”
She is leery of pop psychology and Cosmo-style approaches to sex — “What are the 10 easy steps for me to have a happy, abundant, orgasmic life?” — but she acknowledges that a lot of people have plenty of issues they need to work through to find happiness and satisfaction in this vital aspect of their lives.
“I liken it to nutrition,” Ferry says. “How are we nourishing ourselves? What feeds you relationally? What feeds you sexually? It’s like starving yourself to not allow that nourishment to enter your life.”
People’s traumatic experiences could be abuse or repression or simply a bad relationship, she says. In fact, that is one reason she does what she does. Having spent years as a college business and management teacher and a consultant to major companies, Ferry underwent a life-changing reassessment of priorities when her daughter was born in 2005. Shortly thereafter she was literally jolted out of her routine when a car accident left her with a head injury, ending her academic path. Soon after, she packed up her daughter and fled an abusive, sexless marriage. She also left behind her 80-hour work weeks.
Through her trauma and crisis, she looked at the world with new eyes. Her sexuality revived and she began exploring that side of herself again.
As she reinvented her life, she integrated her new, mindful approach to the world with her reinvigorated interest in sex and developed the concepts that make up her forthcoming book Soul Sex: A Field Guide to Redeeming Our Primal Desire to Connect.
She has become a sort of sexual consultant combined with a life coach. She offers three-hour group sessions for 10 to 30 people or full-day private meetings where students learn to communicate better with their partners and to increase their “capacity for sensation.” Through lessons, mentoring and coaching, her website says she “can intuitively uncover your patterns of relating, and many times those of your family lineage, and/or your partner that can be causing you to feel blocked or stuck, plus support you in creating new and life-affirming ways of being moving forward.”
She quotes someone who said “how you show up in bed is how you show up in life” and the idea of Soul Sex is about integrating mindfulness and consciousness in every aspect of life.
Her work is more educational than therapeutic, she says, “but there’s an alchemy to it, a magic to it.” While she does not align herself with those who practice what is called “sacred sexuality,” the end point of her efforts is for people to gain a level of happiness, fulfillment and satisfaction from life. As I’ve said in earlier columns in this series, different people are finding means beyond conventional religion to obtain much the same outcomes.
For people from a religious upbringing that instilled negative concepts of sex, or who for other societal or personal reasons got screwed up around the topic, Soul Sex is designed to reboot the narrative.
“What I’m really doing with Soul Sex is creating a way for people to enter into that conversation around the stories they’ve created by taking a look, opening up the door to the basement a little bit, being willing to explore the underbelly of their sexuality,” she says. “We all have things in the closet. We all have ways in which we hide the truth from ourselves and our loved ones. What is it that you’re hiding that’s true for you?”
@Pat604Johnson
