The Wholly Holy Body
We Are Wired for Ecstatic Connection
The pathways and keys to everyday ecstatic bliss have been laid out inside of our own bodies. We can move in and out of unification consciousness at will, enjoying both being individuated and a radiant interconnection with the singular field. Sometimes we can hold both of these awarenesses at the same time, and then we feel the body moving as light, with no separation: tasting from the light, touching from the light, smelling from the light, hearing from the light, seeing as the light. We eat, drink, dance, sing, work, play in and as the light, reflecting all of the possibilities of embodiment back to the whole of consciousness. This is the heart of Tantra. The body is wholly holy.
I spend a good amount of time in the Punaverse (that wild socially experimental section of Hawaii Island). There’s a particular local routine called Sunday Funday, which involves an early morning Song Circle, then Ecstatic Dance at Kalani, followed by Kehena Beach, a Drum Circle or a Kirtan, ending with a starlit soak at Sundari.
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For many, the Kalani Ecstatic dance is the social highlight of the week. 300 bodies writhing and sweating on a worn wood floor, with skimps of clothing, often in costume- moving for two hours to some amazing DJ, getting all the emotions out, playing, experimenting with what’s possible in a body- and between bodies. This kind of barefoot expressive free form dance is a kinky, slinky, joyful technology for embodied freedom and communication- and also a hotbox for shadow work, because whatever you’re confronting in your own body and relationships will show up in the dance.
One time at the afternoon Sunday kirtan, I met a young woman who had moved to the Island, who had brought her mother, visiting from the mainland, to the whole Sunday Funday experience. The mother, after seeing the writhing pit of armpit hair and man buns at the Kalani dance, was now handwringing and worried about her daughter- the scene was incomprehensibly out of her frame for what would happen in polite society. Her love and fear were both palpable.
So I tell her what I know: I would wager that half of those people are recovering Mormons, Jehovah’s witnesses, evangelicals of all stripes. The dance field is a place to explore what was previously demonized and denied in the body, and to fully know and approve yourself, and others, as flesh and bone and skin. I tell her that a helpful attitude for me when I went to my first dance was wow, look at the variety in human expression. It might seem odd, but we don’t judge it or make it wrong, we just love, we love it all. If we’re triggered by something, we find the place in us that maybe wants that, or is threatened by that.
In response to getting triggered by someone' elses’s embodiment, we might have a look inside ourselves at the ways the story of any human being, or any human body, being less than wholly holy lives in us. We have been so entrained in policing the body that it might shock you to look inside, and find all the places we have been taught to enforce some third party standard on ourselves or others (consider: facial hair, body hair, scent, fat, sexuality (gender preference, intensity, timing of onset, frequency, partner count, turn ons). I’m sure you can name more.
For much of human history, humanity celebrated the body and its cycles through pagan rituals and indigenous practices. These rites were imbued with a deep reverence for the body as the vessel and abode of the divine. Fertility rites and sacred prostitution in temples, for instance, were not seen as mere physical acts but as profound spiritual engagements. Indigenous traditions, too, honored the physical existence as intertwined with spiritual reverence, recognizing the body as a microcosm of the cosmos.
Across more recent centuries and cultures, the body has been demoted, dismissed, demonized, shamed, pushed away and looked down upon.
The roots of this separation can be traced through religious, philosophical, and social shifts that prioritized the spiritual and the mind over the corporeal (which I won’t go into here, but have covered in these podcasts on religious trauma and the feminine, and blissipline or dogma, as well as this popular episode with Jim Palmer on living as embodied love).
When we demote the body, and forget to listen to it, and dominate it with the mind, we lose so much of this genius. The body encodes the accumulated wisdom of all of our ancestors in our genetic codes, and a profound integrative intelligence. It speaks through sensations, emotions, and intuitive hits, guiding us towards what is healing and away from what is harmful. The separation from the body is an unnecessary split between the material and the spiritual, which has caused a big mess of repression and suffering.
I am inviting a complete restoration of the body to its holiness, and ourselves to wholeness.
My friend and teacher Patrick Connor says it beautifully, “We are called to bring the light of consciousness down into the body, to integrate the material and the spiritual. This alignment is what makes us fully alive, allowing us to be way more alive than we can even imagine, in the midst of the vicissitudes and uncertainties of human life.”
Intimacy with oneself is a cornerstone of this reconnection. This intimacy might involve slowing down, tuning in, and responding with care and respect. It might also involve simply fucking around and finding out: throwing ourselves on the floor to dance a Sunday into utter glory, experiment with appearance, with relationship, with sex stuff. We try stuff. We make mistakes. If we don’t like it, we don’t blame others, we just don’t do it again. As we practice being present with our emotions, understanding our physical needs desires repulsions and regrets, with a lens of compassion and kindness, especially in reclaiming the aspects or parts of the body or psyche that have been ignored or shamed.
Stitching the soul back to the body, making the divine immanent in the flesh in a culture where the dominant religions say we have to go up and out of the body to get to god or heaven- this is radical act. And it has profound implications for the rest of relationships- including to the body of Gaia, the body of the wholly holy Earth and all our co-dwellers.
May you be love, beloved, lover; you in your sexy hungry sass and your tender innocent depth; belonging to god and to god in and as each other; you in your utter devotion, finding the expression which is yours and yours alone.
Our ancient bodies, our ancestral blood, our archetypal code all live in and as us. We remember how to dance.
Pictures below: Happy birthday to my cofounder at Radiant Farms, Billy Beyer! Congratulations to Beth Bell on her new show- and her wisdom on transforming heartbreak. All the fruits of the land and our daily juicing protocol at Sundari on Hawaii in the wilds of the lower Puna district.
