Featured Artist of the Month: February 2019
You'd think I had written that poem about sex. Instead, I was inspired by a painting.
I remember being 13 years old at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, one of my favorite places in the world.
Strolling through Ancient Egypt, Greece and Mesopotamia kept me interested, but it was the European Impressionism section that called me.
I sat on a bench in front of Kees Van Dongen's The Corn Poppy and felt so much passion, joy, fire, inspiration and sadness. I wondered what the artist was feeling when he painted her. With her exaggerated charcoal eyes and red hat. Did he feel this way too?
You see, at that time, I didn't feel safe to express my emotions at home. As a child, I had experienced sexual abuse along with the dogma of religion, both of which taught me that sex and pleasure were unclean and sinful. My pleasure became trapped by my guilt, and my self-expression was caught up in shame.
As an adult, this turned into my over-analyzing relationships and clenching my way through sexual encounters. I ended up finding my way to tantra because I wanted to enjoy sex again after a passionless relationship had left me with a lack of self-confidence. What I thought was a practice of how to be good at sex turned out to be a practice of how to become more myself and feel good in all parts of my life.
But even as someone who proudly teaches Sacred Sexuality as a healing modality, it took years of practice for me not to try to explain away the benefits through science. I wanted to prove how it heals us. I wanted to track it so it appeared valid and acceptable.
Except the fact is that I fell in love with Tantra and Sacred Sexuality as an art. Something that ignites my senses and changes the way I see the world. A conduit of emotion and release.
Just as sex can add a richness to our life through connection, engaging our senses and releasing tension, emotions, electricity and hormones through our body, art can do the same.
Sitting at that museum looking at the Van Dongen so many years ago was a pivotal moment in my life. I felt something shift in me, I was moved. I felt fire and passion. These things which so many women are looking for in life can be easily unlocked by engaging our senses.
Creative energy is sexual energy. The same spark that creates a child is also what creates a painting, a poem, a new idea.
Art has helped me to see the world differently. To notice more beauty. To see the fine in the dark. Sometimes instead of science and formulas, what we really need is art.
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