The road to poly-amory.....

It had been 7 years since I left my train wreck of a marriage, battered, buried and bruised I had set out to find myself - my true self - that whisper of a soul behind all of the adptations and disguises that marriage had required of me. This journey conjured a long arduous whirlwhind of healing, de-construction, re-construction, sorting and sifting of layers and trying different things on. Once my soul and I had gotten to know eachother, old layers of being ripped off and discarded for someone else to adorn should they require them in their own journey of uncovering - what was left was an angst about how relationships, love and sex fit into my repetoire. The thing about transformations of the soul - is not a single part of who you are or the life you are living is immune from meeting it's fate in the firey - the alchemical elixir that will turn ashes into gold. If your worldview changes significantly - so too does every other aspect of what you call truth come called to the couch and quite possibly the chopping block. I knew leaving my marriage, that as a serial monogamous relationalist I would need to commit to staying single until I could find center and balance on two feet instead of four. But celibate nunnery was not what I was going for. I was a woman with a firey sexuality - a history of exploration and experimentation and a hunger for the transparency in union that sex had always shown me. Not dissimilar to the parts of me that spurred me into studying therapy otherwise known as the discipline that examines every aspect of human experience - sex had always been a pandora's box filled with mystery, wonder and individuality that often lay laden with shame, secrets and unnamed truths. It didnt matter how well you knew someone in ordinary reality - for me you didnt really know them until you were given access to the world that opened up inside of them when they agreed to meet you on the genital-heart highway. My experience has been that when two people begin engaging acts of sexual stimulation they are transported from operating within the place of their minds - their reasoning and intellectual knowing and land deeply within their bodies. As they become lost within the movements that touching and foreplay call out - so too does their souls and hearts begin to speak, their walls and boundaries, adaptations and disguises retreat in their ecstacy and for the first time you enter a portal where all of their mysteries are on display. Depending on the person in question, thier history, narrative, their wounds and their gifts you can learn a lot simply by being open to entering this experience with them - sometimes what you learn is that their safety has never been there and therefore the walls that generally melt are too embedded to retreat. No matter what you find - I have found you will find the truth..because within that great act of intimate bonding there is no disguising what story the body tells as it enters into it's own performance. In my own unfolding - i had continued my acts of sexual bonding and learned much about the truths of my own intimate nature. My early sexual trauma's prevented me from moving into a pure authentic acceptance of my needs and desires as a sexual being. Instead, i submissively moved into a passive recipient of male penetration. My desire for women emerged in short and shameful outbursts where here i sought out the woundings in other women that i felt strong enough to hold space for but my own sense of internalized homophobia ensured that I was under the influence when participating and running for the hills after the event was done. I also discovered that my wounded sexuality came from a place of stuffing, filling the emptiness inside and distracting myself from my pain in a sea full of pleasure. If my pain was consuming enough..any willing man would do no matter how much they objectified me, how little they cared for the person inside the body in front of them, or how dis-connected they may be from any aspect of intimacy. If i operated from this place I wounded myself unneccessarily and would spiral into a cycle of self loathing and self depreciation. My five year sexual bonding with the dude had taught me the sanctity of the divine feminine in her most open form. The dude was a reverant servant of the divine female, opening each aspect of her with extreme grace, pained by the abomination of her image and extremly selective and reserved in his pairing. He was three years older then me and I was only his third partner. Perhaps the most passionate and skilled lover I had ever known I would tease him about his reservations..."how on earth could you keep this beautiful gift from the women of the world?" I would say. He always gave a strong reaction to this statement speaking about the sacred nature of this union that demanded a sharing between two people of all that lived inside of them. He explained that there was no way to keep the bonding of genitals apart from the merging of every aspect of the human forms involved and laid claim that this level and degree of intimacy required a strong level of discernment of who and why you were allowing someone into this space. For better or worse their beauty or baggage would become united with yours and you would be left to deal with the consequences. It would be another 3 years for my being to really catch up with the wisdom imparted in this relationship. What i did know was that maintaining a sexual relationship with this man - changed for me what sex was. His touch was soo reverent, that i learned the sanctity of my own body from the movements of his fingertips. Never before had i felt like such a beautiful and delicate creature in the hands of a male admirer. During intercourse, my body seemed to always evaporate where i no longer knew the lines between the visible and the invisible instead there was a merging and dancing of two energetic masses meeting in the middle of a utopian oblivion. While i road the seas of ecstatic sexual bliss i had no idea what small and subtle changes were implemented in my psyche, manifested in my body and what the fruits of this alchemical elixir would produce some years later. What i did know was that somehow in those quiet moments of togetherness and in the fireworks of mutual fluid bonding, i was somehow beginning to heal. It was these experiences that paved the way for the emergence of Cosmic. Cosmic confessed to being in love with me at a time in this process where my genitals were open but my heart was closed. I tried hard as I might to deflect her confessions and continued to fantasize about how i might be able to penetrate this pear shaped red haired goddess. I would fuck her - of course- but love? ummm nope, notta, no way...she missed one key critical ingreidient in erica's relationship memo - she had a vagina. I had sex with women, but I loved men. That is at least what i thought until i found myself spinning within the heart of a cosmic hurricane. Cosmic was married to a man, in an open marriage, meaning of course that she could fuck others just not love them. She was working through her own realms of sexual healing - having trouble maximizing her orgasms and opening herself entirely to the process leading her to question her identity as a sexual being within the context of her marriage. She had known she was bi-sexual since the age of 22, although here at 32 had never yet popped her lesbian cherry. Sex for cosmic was deeply intimate, not something to be casually entered into and strongly connected to her emotional spaces. If she found herself emotionally involved with someone she may consider initiating a sexual relationship with them but not before. We had long conversations about the different places we situated ourselves sexually - we were two different faces of the same coin - I the excited but ulimately dismembered casual sexual explorer, her the hesitant emotional and sexual voyeur.It would take 7 months of our open discussions about our internal worlds, the ways in which we felt and the honest admonition of our different positions - oh and some permission from her husband for our sexual exploration to ever enter the arena of reality. The thing was though, by the time this period of time came to pass, I knew a lot about her -the inner tunnels of her pain and shame, the magnificence and beauty of her gifts, traits and personhood and had a heightened awareness of her vulnerability. Although still not allowing myself to admit the emotional truths of that kind of care and concern, what i did know is that with this woman i would need to tread very carefully - to keep things on the honorable scale. Each time i would attempt to advance to her, despite her repetitive permission, her nervousness and subsequent constant quivering would prevent me from bridging the divide...it always felt as if passing through this nervousness would result in what would feel like a violation. It took her making the first move of gently kissing the back of my neck and running her fingertips along my skin for me to finally emerge and cross the threshold. That first night of wild and passionate mind altering love making, left me whirling in a truth that i was not allowing myself to see but in the openness that sexuality unveils came unsuspectingly and quite literally head to head with. I was massively in love with this woman. She ripped and tore through every fibre of my being. There were still two pretty large problems. One, she was a woman, secondly, my heart was still closed. The fact that she was a woman meant that she had no space in the future i had anticipated for myself. I was still chasing the dream of living long and soulfully with a long haired, warrior hippy musician man - having at least another baby and travelling our soulular landscape together in the world. These events of course were just my preparation to his emergence. And my heart being closed - well obviously it wasn't cemented shut because of the strong emotions this woman conjured in my being, but my capacity to hold this emotions or even to enact them safely, naturally and fluidily were still severly crippled and compromised. Every time cosmic coaxed me into deep intimacy - i followed her into it for a few hours only to come out afraid, unsettled, exposed and ultimately distancing until the vulnerability of it faded out for just long enough for me to re-emerge. Cosmic had taught me about intimacy. A woman, perhaps the only one i know with a history of solid and healthy romantic relational patterns mirrored for me what relationship looked like in the spirit of full acceptance, support of indidivual passions and goals, the freedom to be and be with and perhaps most importantly showed me where all my tears, walls and blocks to engaging any of these remained as obstacles to the depths of union. Fast forward to 2012 and the landscape of my sexuality had changed rapidly.The experiences between divorce and now had equipped me with the understanding that my fiery sexuality now came from two places. One place was the unhealed distracted, distanced, filling the emptiness mode which seethed and shadowed and sought out all the kinds of objectifying monsters of self depreciation to fulfill its enshadowed hunger. The other place was the healed, reverent and deeply intimate place of seeking connection for mutual beauty, bonding, intimacy and fulfillment. I began to observe, reflect and discern these two places of platforms for sexual exploration in my history and society and termed the different spaces as the former being termed a place of "enshadowed sexuality" where repressed desires and unconcious pain seeped into any and all forms of sexual exploration and ultimately led to a place of objectification and pain. The sharing of this state stood to infect rather then fulfill and left me feeling nasea in my stomach when i found myself in it's energy. The latter a blessed and beautiful place of sexual union and bonding born of deep respect and reverance for the other, a space i termed "concious sexuality" and the only kind i was now interested in exploring. I would need to rectify how to discern the differences in this energy in my body, as the structure or rules around how these spaces are manifested in ordinary reality are tricky and not neccessarily recognized at the surface especially in a society where most of us are so dissassociated from anything real, raw and truthful our examples of this wihtout being cast into the religious right of serial monogamous celibacy are to say the very least minimal. The other thing that happened was that my heart had officially entered the game. I had healed the shreds and bruising of it's demise enough to be ready to welcome the deep, authentic love and affection of another but I still had so many questions about how these experiences, specifically in a monogamous way would fit into my soul driven life. Living a life born of following the whispers of the soul demands a fluidity in all things and a knowing that the mystery of the universe embodies a wisdom much stronger then we will ever know and the path of least resistance requires a strong trust in it's ability to lead you blindly into the dark. The fires of transformation could take everything in it's path - careers, housing, partners, relationships whatever it needed to clear the way for your next emergence to re-birth. My commitment to this path, meant that i journeyed quickly and intensely - burning through the lessons each partner brought me and setting them free to experience what they or i or both of us needed next. Yet my commitment to truth, honesty and integrity demanded that i attempted to explain to each new potential partner this more then possible occurence on the path of walking with me - often sending them running as quickly as possible in the farthest opposite direction. As cosmic stated in the final stages of our relationships "I couldn't live comfortably and safely knowing that i would never know where you would be the next morning - would you be called elsewhere, would that man you were searching for suddenly arrive?". I had walked as a lone wolf trying to find the voice of my soul, courageoulsy confronting any and all obstacles in my path. But as i met and faced down my dragons, my healing began to take root and i began to crave the simplicity of love, affection, sex and relationship. But how could i explore it with all the limitations that my souls walk and the medicine I carried afforded. How could I find individuals that came from the same foundation, understood the impermanent nature of the universe and dared to dive fully anyway? I had been searching for an understanding, or the language to describe these complexities to a mainstream world that was built completely opposite of everything i had arrived at. Until from somewhere out of the mystery, spurred on by my accidental wandering into an unsuspecting swingers party, in the text of a book handed unsuspectingly by a wife of a man i was dating...there was a pocket of people in the world that although arriving from very different places and spaces in time, coming to terms with there own questions and set ups for maximal growth had come to some similar conclusions about the world of love, sex, growth and relationship and formed a small cauldron of shared possibility. Their way of life and love was called polyamory and somewhere on the road from here to there i had stopped there, population undetermined.