We are collectively malnourished in the areas of touch, awareness of our bodies and pleasure.  We live in an anti-ecstatic, consumerist culture and we are conditioned very early to mistrust our bodies and pleasure. The path that I advocate offers a way out.

By bringing awareness and reverence to the experience of pleasure, compassionately offering ourselves optimum nourishment and studying  what allows us to feel the life inside us and around us; we create conditions that allow us to function with more autonomy. We may never completely free ourselves from the cultural constructs that help make us who we are, but if we bring compassionate awareness to our sensations, recognize those constructs as nothing more than constructs and commit ourselves to life, deliberately and consciously, we begin to find ways to get off that silly little mouse wheel with no cheese.

There is a deep relationship between creativity, joie de vivre and sensuality; our creative life force. Ecstatic states feed our creativity, creating new neural pathways that allow us more flexibility in our thinking and being. I have found that artists, for example, who are experiencing blocks are often stuck in their creative center and by activating their sexual energy in new ways they are able to reawaken their creative process.

There is incredible power in the cultivation and refinement of creative energy. All the magic we need is right here in our own sweet, living, intelligent bodies.