BRAD AMBERHEART

How many people living on Earth today have actually experienced cathartic, whole-body ecstatic pleasure?  Who can even say what that means?

We're talking about a pleasure which spreads through the whole body...to every limb and extremity, outward, from the core.  The first stories I heard about this phenomenon--the phenomenon of ENRAPTURED JOY that shakes the whole body and causes a person to completely lose control--were in church.  

Yes, that's right. In the rural South of the United States, they used to call this phenomenon--of the entire body going into cathartic shaking and shouting Hallelujah-- "Old Time Religion".  My Aunt Laura Mae called it "the Anointing".  She talked about that sensation you get when the preacher's talking and you KNOW that what he's saying is so TRUE that you can't hold back from laughing, crying, and doing everything you can to "let the spirit in" and LET OUT your true feelings and emotions...

For most of us, stories of people enraptured with a joy so big they jump up and down and SING like nobody's watching have become a myth, fiction...maybe a story that we heard somebody's Grandma tell.  But we're still here, looking everywhere for that place where we can finally give up and let our tears shake our body until we can start to laugh again.

God, how we long for a world where we can "let the spirit move us"!  A lot of us are just trying to remain calm and get through it, it seems...

Sometime, perhaps long ago, it seems our Spirit was separated from our body.  Church became a place to be silent and reverent...and "reverent" meant anything but shoutin' hallelujah!  Our bodies became numb, as we sat, bored out of our minds...wishing it would all be over with soon so we could go eat fried chicken...

Where is our church?  Tracy Chapman, one of my favorite singers from the 1980's, said, "The World is our temple, the World is our Church."  I take Tracy Chapman's words just a step further, by reminding us that our body is a temple we were given to live in for a whole lifetime.  Our body is our vehicle, which is here to carry us Home...through this life we've been so graciously given.

What are we doing?  What does it look like, to enjoy this body, in the way it was designed, for the grace of God and heaven...for the benefit of all of life on this planet, all who have come before, and all who are yet to come here, to live, on this Earth?

I've worked with people for the past 15 years to help bring pleasure back as a core human experience, and helping to teach people everywhere how to re-claim this precious gift of PLEASURE and let it transform, heal, and revitalize our life's existence.  Every day, I watch people experience levels of ecstatic pleasure than they may never have known before.  I watch past traumas lift and transform.  I even watch physical illness dissolve in the presence of sheer euphoric erotic pleasure.  This profound healing work is made possible by creating a SAFE SPACE where we can feel SAFE to make as much noise as we want, and to explore authentic ecstatic expression in all of its forms, in the company of a willing, caring, compassionate person (me!) who's here to help us fully CELEBRATE our ecstatic erotic body and be at HOME in it!

Amen.