Smack in the middle of COVID, the year 2020, my best friend Charles and “the president of my fan club” as I entitle him, lovingly designed and gifted me a red t-shirt with a flaming heart. On the back, it says “Spiritual, Sexy, and Shameless”.
He said the shirt declares everything I’m endeavoring. After my deer in headlights moment, it felt like a lightning bolt of truth. At the time I had no idea Charles was actually creating the first draft to my personal brand. Let me explain.
Most religious traditions have held spirituality and sensuality as separate. Teresa D’Avila – a Spanish nun and mystic in the 15th century – begged to differ and proclaimed that “the Lord gave her the gift of raptures and visions”. Condemned as a heretic, she defended her sensual, mystical communion with God as her passageway to the celestial realm. She loved his humanity as much as she loved his divinity.
Teresa, you were speaking my language woman!
I consciously and actively believe that an integral part of ascending into our highest spiritual selves requires the magnificent and total embodiment of our incarnated selves. In other words, the higher we soar spiritually, the deeper we fall in love with the experience of feeling, seeing, hearing, tasting, touching this human experience on the earth plane.
We are meant to adore this instrument – the body – because it is the vehicle through which we sensually experience this life.
As the Brazilian author and poet, Rubem Alves, says about the body:
“But could there be anything more important? Could there be anything more beautiful?
It is like a garden, where flowers and fruits grow.
The smile grows there,
Generosity,
Compassion,
The will to struggle,
Hope,
The desire to plant gradens,
To bear children,
To hold hands and stroll.
To know…”
He continues, “In this body, so small, so ephemeral, a whole universe lives, and if it could, it would surely give its life for the whole of the world. God’s desire is revealed in our body.”
Sensuality – living intentionally into our senses – existentially underpins this life journey and crafts the very core of the Renaissance, our Renaissance, to be born again. This is the ethos from which the romantics, poets, artists, musicians, actors, and revolutionaries chant on the mountain tops. Sensuality is the gorgeous caressing of the life experience.
Shameless, or rather, less the shame. Shamelessness must logically and organically follow suit. Psychologically, not only must we remove all shame from the memories that our body has frozen into trauma, we must love our embodiment shamelessly as it is the very touch point for this divine mortaility. Once we truly live life without shame, we love it, we love us, and WE LIVE SHAMELESSLY IN LOVE.
Hmmm, yes.
Then, of course, there’s the heart surrounded by flames. The heart is at the center of it all. THE IN-LOVE HEART. The alignment of mind, body, spirit in a sweet rendezvous inside the heart. What else is the human renaissance but this?
Busted: I am the eternal and committed romantic — with life — and yes, I am spiritual, sensual, and shameless.