The following excerpt is from Heart & Soul: Living The Joy, Truth & Beauty Of Your Intimate Relationship, by Daphne Rose Kingma.

Integrate The Divine Erotic

Your erotic life, the expression of your sensuality in every dimension, is the mysteriously lovely vehicle for the integration of all that you are as a personality and a spirit. It is the sacred playground of physical passion, the point in our experience more than any other at which the material and spiritual intersect. Here the physical body becomes a temple of joy, of deeply rooted connections, of solace, of coming home.

Through sensuality, emotions are expressed in physical form. The body knows, feels, and teaches, eloquently and directly. When we are touched in exactly the right way, when making love is graceful and ecstatic, we are moved without words to a level of integration of body, mind, and spirit that can be instantly healing.

Because of the power of sexuality to heal the rift between our bodies and our souls, we all have a yearning toward it that is far stronger than what we can attribute to the physical sex drive alone. That is because deep inside we know that the erotic life can lead us to integration. And it is only people who are healed physically, emotionally, and sexually from the great raft of wounds we have all endured (if in no other form than our culture’s repression and perverted exaggeration of the erotic) who can be true vessels of compassion and approach the whole world with generosity.

Unfortunately, many of us have been unable to welcome our bodies, our innate sensuality, and the power of the erotic itself into the ken of the spiritual. We’re not even sure that we should, and yet like our sense of the spirit inside us, we do somehow vaguely understand that our erotic life, too, is divine.

If sexual energy and the joy it creates weren’t so awesome a power, no one would bother with it. Instead of being so focused on it, in so many forms, good and awful, we would have gone off to live quite comfortably without it. The truth is that sexuality is a light of such incredible brilliance that it draws the moths of darkness to it; and for this reason, if for no other, it is a spiritual responsibility that we integrate the divine and erotic in our lives.

In your grand quest for love, therefore, for the finest and most beautifully integrated becoming that your heart can entertain, do not overlook — indeed consciously seek — the sexual healing that will bring your personality and spirit into alignment with your body. For when we integrate our sexuality, claim it as the amazing gift it is, we not only heal ourselves and our partners, we help to restore the divine erotic to the entire world.