your body is a doorway
It was 6 years ago. One of those moments that you can’t prepare for, that you have no idea is coming, and that as soon as it’s over, you know that you’ll never be the same. The details of where I was and what was happening are as fresh and alive as if they were yesterday: I was making love with a partner. On the floor. Nothing fancy. Pretty much our usual way of going about lovemaking with each other.
But this time, for reasons I’ll never know, when I came, the day-world melted away, fading into a vision.
Black at first. Dark. Darker than I’d ever known. And then slowly, bright points of light with lines connecting them began to appear. I instantly knew, in the way that we know in these types of experiences, that each point was a moment in time, however long or short, marking the connection between two or more people. Some of the points were incredibly bright, with lines intersecting at all angles. Some of the lines were full of bright points of light, with many lines intersecting at different points. Others were dimmer, or had less intersections, but were no less significant.
The transmission in this instant was one of the impossibility of people coming together. The chances of meeting and knowing anyone is all but impossible, and yet it happens, over and over again in our lives. We treat it as mundane and ordinary, and in that instant, I was hit with the overwhelming extraordinariness of knowing any single person. This is something to be held as sacred, honored with reverence and celebration.
I watched the lines and dots for a time. They were not static, connections were beginning and ending all the time. The lines were lengthening, almost like they were reaching out to one another. And then the vision began to melt back into the day world, and I found myself gently crying in my partner’s arms.
I shared with him where I’d been and what I’d seen. I didn’t know what had happened, and at the time, it didn’t actually matter. I knew that a door had opened, I had walked through, and that was enough.
This experience continued on and off for a number of years before I found myself with some answers. I stumbled into some women teaching in the lineage of the Animas Valley Institute and the School of Lost Borders, and as I deepened in soul-centric work, I began to realize that that moment and subsequent ones were soul encounters – those moments that occur in ceremony, on the land, in vision quests, while dancing, on medicine journeys, in our dreams, and many other ways I’m sure, in which we are dropped out of the day-world and into another world that is just as real, but altogether different.
The ways of knowing in this other world are different. Logic and reason have no place, but here there are things that suddenly make sense. This is the world of magic, paradox, and synchronicity. It is the world that resides just beneath the day-world, permeating through if you know where to look and how to listen.
One such way is through your body. Your body is a doorway, a threshold into these other ways of knowing. Your erotic pleasure can lead you into encounters with your soul. No one ever told me this; I stumbled upon it accidentally in the way that I so often do. The possibility that my pleasure and orgasm could be about more than connection with another human being, that it could connect me with the depths of soul and belonging that I so desperately longed for rang a bell in me that has not stopped since.
