About Gary Joseph
Dear Friend,
Thank you for visiting the Society for Sacred Sexuality.
I want to share the story of how I came to learn sacred sex,
and why it led me to found this organization.
I hope it will spark your own desire for this remarkable, transformative practice.
My spiritual journey began as a teenager when I learned yoga meditation.
Before that time, I had no interest or experience in anything spiritual.
In meditation, I enjoyed deep experiences of timeless, boundless, bliss.
Yoga calls this higher state of consciousness 'samadhi'.
I wanted it all the time, and so began a life-long quest for enlightenment. None of this had anything to do with sex.
After college, I pursued meditation full-time, devoting long hours to it in a celibate environment.
Celibacy was encouraged to conserve life energy for spiritual experience.
But by that time, mine had begun to cloud anyway, a normal part of the awakening process.
You can understand it this way:
In the stream that is our life, we collect sediment — dirt or stress —
that covers our stream bed, limiting our clarity of life.
We become so accustomed to our limited selves that we come to see it as normal.
Meditation releases a flood of energy into the stream of life.
At first, this brings clear, energized experience.
But soon the flood churns up the sediment settled on the stream bed, making for a murky view.
While maybe not what we want, it is normal and natural; a temporary cloud that goes when the flood washes away all the sediment,
leaving a pure bed from which to fully enjoy life — enlightenment.
This was my experience, and understanding, until the day I first glimpsed life from that pure stream bed.
Before that time, I had a rather dim view of life, and a wholly dark view of sex.
My attitude toward life was that I wanted little to do with it, yearning instead to absorb myself in inner bliss.
As for sex, like most religions today, I saw it as an obstacle to spiritual experience, to be overcome.
I was wrong about both.
My awakening came, appropriately enough, outside meditation.
Before that, my daily activity was just a filler, a way to pass the time until I could dive back into bliss.
The moment I awakened in activity, my entire experience and understanding of life changed.
(You can read details of the experience here.)
My awakening dawned while doing something new to me — healing work.
The type of activity is unimportant; what matters is that, for the first time, I found something suited to my personality.
It became immediately clear that awakening doesn't just come in any random activity, but rather in very specific activity —
one for which you are born. It is activity that your DNA is programmed to perform. It is activity that so perfectly suits your nature
that you do it effortlessly and without stress. This allows you to relax into inner bliss while you work.
My awakening deepened my understanding about the stream of life.
I realized that the 'sediment' we collect — and all the problems we face due to it —
stems from activity out of harmony with our nature.
Whether we ignore, deny, repress, or are simply ignorant of our natural life work, we suffer for it as individuals and society.
Life in harmony with your nature is an ever freely flowing stream, that never adds sediment to life, and immediately washes away any brought in from outside.
It leaves you to enjoy life lived from a perfectly pure stream bed.
Though my awakening came over 20 years ago, it is as fresh in my mind as the present moment.
It continues to grow and evolve, and to guide the stream of my life. It has led me to sacred sex and to found the Society for Sacred Sexuality.
And that brings me to the question, "What does all this have to do with sex?!"
Well, in case you missed it, sex is part of human nature.
In fact, together with survival and evolution, it comprises our most essential nature.
What's more, sexual desire is the most powerful force in human nature.
Think about it — what other drive leads to an experience that transcends all others like orgasm?
Sex drive is so powerful because it carries our entire life energy along with it.
It is that freely flowing flood of life energy that induces orgasm.
Sex, more than anything else in life, opens the floodgates of energy coursing through us.
We have only to harness that energy to clear out the stream of life.
Sex has the capacity to clear out blocks that keep our life energy from flowing freely.
It has the potential to awaken our awareness to our true nature, in harmony with the universal stream of life.
Sex can awaken us to higher consciousness. It can awaken us to Spirit within. In short, sex can be sacred.
Sex is an activity so natural to us that, as described above, we can relax into inner bliss while we do it.
This, in fact, is how we orgasm.
We build up so much euphoric life energy that we feel compelled to relax and release it, and so we 'let go' into orgasm. We fall into ecstasy.
We follow the nature for which we are born.
And unlike the life work that is unique to each individual, sex is part of universal human nature.
Everyone wants it and does it. Everyone is passionate about it (or at least is under all those layers of sediment).
Sacred sex is for everyone.
My sacred sex training came with awakening, not from teachers or books.
My nature — my own life experience — was my teacher.
There were two sides to this teaching: understanding sex and making it sacred.
I didn't always see sex in the way I just described.
As I mentioned earlier, sex was at first an obstacle on my spiritual path.
Sex opposed Spirit (so I thought), and I tried to fight it.
In the Yoga tradition, and most other Eastern paths, this is not based on moral judgment as it is in Western religion,
but rather for practical physiological reasons.
For spiritual awakening, your life energy must flow up to expand the conscious mind.
Sex (common sex, anyway) draws your energy down.
Worse, for men, you lose your life energy when you ejaculate, leaving you drained, literally.
Celibacy saves your life energy for spiritual awakening.
And all this is true, for conventional sex.
But my awakening brought a whole new perspective to sex.
I had thought that when awakening came, I would finally "vanquish" my sexual desire.
I thought that Spirit would win out and my sexual desire would go.
To my surprise though, my sexual desire and energy increased — a lot.
More surprising, I learned that sex not only didn't interfere with my awakening, it was an intimate part of it.
My sexual experiences contributed to my spiritual ones, and vice versa.
I began to see sex for what it was: a simple, natural, yet powerful way to open the floodgates of life energy.
This was my introduction to sacred sex.
In the following months and years, I learned to practice sacred sex, spontaneously and naturally.
I received no outside training, relying instead on my own desire and experience.
Through this, I learned that sacred sex is inborn to who we are; we need only come home to our nature.
My initiation into sacred sex went something like this:
My first few encounters with sex after awakening were, out of habit, conventional ones, leaving me drained as described above
(an experience all the more contrasting due to many years of meditation). I didn't like the feeling.
Almost reflexively, I began to squeeze my pelvic muscles as a way to block the outflow of energy, like closing the gates of a dam.
I saw that this not only held my energy longer, but also intensified my orgasms. With less energy going down & out, more went in & up.
Climax was deeper and lasted longer.
In time, as my pelvic muscles strengthened, I gained an amazing ability to "pump" up my sexual energy at will, inducing orgasm whenever I chose.
This became the basis for Sacred Sex Lesson 4 on this site.
I also learned that simple massage of the body triggers spontaneous orgasm when you're highly aroused,
without the release of conventional orgasm. Massage also induces full body orgasm by stimulating energy flow throughout the body.
With a little massage, orgasm becomes a deeply relaxing, timeless ecstasy that you melt into and bask in for long periods.
This lets your life energy do its clearing work, while you bathe in bliss.
I teach these few, well-placed massage tricks in Lesson 5.
Last, I noticed during sex that my breathing shifted in ways that helped my energy flow up instead of down.
This too increased the frequency, duration, and depth of my orgasms.
Breath is integral to life — with every inhale, your life energy rises; with every exhale it falls.
Conscious breathing, combined with sex, powerfully raises your energy.
My breathing also fell into distinct patterns that let me see how my energy was flowing.
This helps to navigate the sexual waves that come and go, and to ride them in & out of orgasm, over and over.
Rather than wiping out on a single wave, you go with the flow in an endless wash, wave after rising wave.
In the end, it becomes a tsunami.
I explain this sacred sex 'surfing' in Lesson 2,
and teach breathing tips to strengthen your sexual waves, in Lesson 6.
All this came spontaneously — either my body did it reflexively (squeezing & breathing) or I felt the natural urge to do it (massage).
Nature was my guide, experience was my teacher, and my body was the vessel for awakening.
Sacred sex is in your nature, and doing it is as natural as life.
Later, as my interest grew, I did read books and learn from others, but in doing so I found little new.
Mostly it only verified what came naturally before.
But I did learn that I was not alone in this experience.
Sacred sex has a long and rich tradition of scripture,
art,
and culture, throughout the world.
Sacred sex is not new; it is as old as life itself.
There is one last thing my awakening taught me, maybe the most important.
It is that sex powerfully draws Spirit into the world.
I mentioned earlier that when I first learned meditation, I had beautiful experiences of Pure Spirit.
I was enamored with the transcendental Bliss of my own Inner Self.
But outside of meditation, that bliss faded — not entirely, but mostly.
The path of Yoga progresses by alternating meditation & activity.
In this way, activity — especially natural activity as described above — brings Spirit into the world to be enjoyed permanently in daily life.
Sex is the most powerful, natural activity of all.
And that is why sacred sex has such power to pour Spirit into your life.
When Spirit is ever-present in worldly life, then the ecstasy of it, which you glimpse during orgasm, becomes permanent.
You live a life of 24/7 orgasm. This is Sexual Enlightenment.
Sacred sex, by giving you long & repeated orgasms without loss of life energy, trains your body to hold this state.
Sexual Enlightenment is your birthright, ingrained in the very nature of your being.
For many, 'sacred sex' is a contradiction in terms.
The sacred is Pure Spirit; sex is pure physicality.
Yet Spirit creates the physical world by flowing into it.
The flow of Spirit is the life energy that creates and sustains the world.
Sex draws that vast power of Spirit into the world,
and through sacred sex, lifts worldly awareness back up to Spirit.
In this, it is the perfect spiritual path.
Did I mention you'll want to practice with passion?!
For me, sacred sex has been personally transformative.
Beyond that though, I see the potential to transform society.
That has led me to share this teaching and found the Society for Sacred Sexuality.
I invite you to learn sacred sex and rise to Sexual Enlightenment yourself,
and to join in this global awakening.
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