Release Shame With Vedic Sexuality

Human sexuality must be made less important than it is currently in spiritual circles. By denying it, hiding it, and suppressing it, we have made it far more important in a deviant sort of way.

The Vedic worldview, including Vedic sexuality, sees no contradiction between the spirit’s independent, blissful, and abundant inner nature and its dharmic and spiritual potential.

No teacher or tradition has the right to mess with your sexual impulse or shame you for it. Allow your sexuality to run its normal, biological course as per your age and stage of life. As your body ages, or as and when your awareness ascends from body to mind to soul to super soul, the sex impulse will become modified on its own.

There is no need to forcefully capsize the boat of bodily pleasures. It gently goes down, on its own, as it submerges in an ocean of ever-expanding spiritual pleasure.

There’s a reason that the Vedas, a 5,000-year-old collection of celebrated verses from ancient India (that came prior to every religion from India, including Hinduism), have influenced Western thinkers from Emerson to Ram Dass. They provide us with a uniquely accessible and effective path to sovereignty, including freedom from unnecessary sexual shaming.

The Vedas announce sexual pleasure as a legitimate goal or pursuit of human life through Vedic sexuality. They point out widely held misconceptions about sexuality and offer a framework to understand our natural desires, including our sexual desires.

[Also read: “Mindful Sexuality, Divine Sexuality.”]

How to become spiritually shameless with Vedic sexuality:

• Accept that your true nature is a bit wild, a bit raw, and a bit crazy. It is also completely beautiful and ever divine.

• Learn to perceive reality as it is. Watch out for mind traps that fill you with bodily shame.

• Meditate on this statement: My sexuality is intrinsic and important to my spirituality (not separate from it).

• Practice abstinence and restraint if you want to for your own sake, if that is what serves you and suits your life situation. Do not practice abstinence for the sake of being pure in the eye of God or Guru or Path. You are always pure, even if you are sexually active.

• When your body reveals to you its sexual and other bodily needs, meet them with loving and unapologetic care (age and stage of life appropriate). Set aside shame that has been passed on to you over the millennia.

• Remember, sex is not just to make babies—learn the art of sex to enjoy it. In the Vedas, sexuality is called kama, which means “pleasure for pleasure’s sake.” There is no justification required to be sexually alive and radiant. That is why we find Vedic treatises on out-of-the-box lovemaking like the Kama Sutra.

• Walk away from any teachers, preachers, or pundits who explain your sexuality as a sickness, something to be battled with and won over. Yes, there is room for ethical behavior in every behavior including sexual, but never suppression to the point of morbidity (which is what suppression promotes).

• Watch out for larger than life spiritual rockstars parading monasticism and enforcing celibacy upon their spiritual community as the ultimate path to awakening. This subtly mocks the rest of us, caught up inside families, making love and making babies.

• If you are an adult, and you follow the law of the nation you live in, you have the power or right to make decisions related to your sexual life. You also have the power and right when it is time to let go of internalized judgments toward your own sexual desire.
  

I am grateful that there is at least one wisdom tradition—Vedic sexuality—that has actually shown me the way in embracing my body and soul in one embrace. I am a teacher, and yet I am also a mother to my son and enjoy a sexual life with my chosen partner.

The Vedas preached no hollow morality. Nothing, not even sexual desire or even a sex orgy, described in Vedic texts between consenting adults, was considered sinful. The sages embraced sexuality, sensuality, and wealth acquisition, as much as they recommended a generous level-headedness and concern for ethics through dharma and quest of the divine Self through pursuit of yoga.

Becoming spiritually shameless unites you with a greater truth.

Interested in Vedic sexuality? For more on sexuality, read: “3 Rules of Mindful Sex.”