So here's the scene.

I'm in the mountains of North Carolina.

I'm at a shamanic sexual healing retreat.

And I can't tell you how horrified my younger self would have been even hearing those words.

But here I am in the middle of these wailing and screaming people, some of whom are naked.

We're screaming into our hands and shaking, pounding pillows, humping pillows.

just wailing.

I'm going to tell you a little bit about how and why I got there in this episode.

Welcome to the Loving Best Podcast.

Kiss my.

Music.

Mouth like hallelujah Light me down like hallelujah All my soul sing hallelujah Hallelujah Hallelujah Hallelujah.

My name's Michael Gungor, and I'm so glad you're here.

This is a series on the Lovingness Podcast about my album Magnificat, and today's song is Like Hallelujah.

Every week we've been taking a song and diving deep into its themes, its ideas, and the music, of course.

Now, this week's song, I'm really feeling that I want to focus a little differently than some of the other episodes.

It might be a little less musical than normal on this one, and a little bit even more about the theme and the idea, because I think this idea of sacred sexuality is one of the most needed and necessary conversations in the world right now.

I actually think so much of what's going on in our world with division and war and hate is actually a fruit of how we view life itself, sexuality itself, what it is to be in these bodies, to have desire, to love and be loved and to connect.

All of this stuff goes together and I think the ways that we look at it as a society, as communities, and as individuals really makes a difference.

So let's dive in, shall we?

Oh, let the waters cool.

Music.

Okay so this one has sort of the longest history of anything on the album an earlier version, actually lived in a pentecost liturgy we made for the liturgist years ago and in this version that's playing underneath right now uh it gets sung by my friend israel houghton it's a little bit faster in tempo than i did it on the new album the words are different and it's actually kind of piano focused.

Music.

Let the waters cool you Let the spirit move you Feel the fire on your lips and sing your hallelujah, And this is a song that for a lot of years I've played at shows.

In different arrangements.

There's something really fun about it live because it's really improvisational and we can throw solos around the band.

There's always just been a lot of energy in it.

Here's a little version of me playing this with the Good Shepherd Collective in New York.

Oh, let the waters cool, yeah Let the spirit move, yeah Feel Feel the fire on your lips.

Music.

And sing your hallelujah I got a shout out specifically to the drummer Terrence Clark, who I've played this song with probably hundreds of times around the world.

I love playing it with Terrence.

It might be my only kind of bummer about the new version on the album is that I didn't get to play it with Terrence.

But he's playing with me in this version, so he can listen a little bit.

It's cool.

Music.

In the original version, the chorus just kept saying, oh, my soul, sing hallelujah, which I like, but there was something that I wanted to lean into a little bit more on the new album, which was that kind of sexy aspect of the song.

So I changed the chorus to kiss my mouth like hallelujah, lay me down like hallelujah, oh, my soul, sing hallelujah, just to keep that little sexy edge in there.

Okay, I got to share one little story that is my favorite story, not only for this song, but one of my favorite stories of something that's happened while I'm playing that I've ever heard.

I was in Florida playing this song a few years ago, and there was an elderly couple in the back who apparently the guy has been a pastor for years and years, and his wife was standing next to him.

And I kind of talked about how this is like a sexy worship song, you know?

And so I'm playing it, and during it, apparently she just like reaches over and just grabs his junk.

And he is just so happy about her response that he like just walks to the front and just starts filming me close up so that he can later use this video for whatever purposes he would enjoy, I suppose.

But I felt very happy when I heard that story.

I'll see you next time.

Music.

Okay, so I'd love to get a little bit into why I wanted to lean into that energy that felt kind of sexy to me about the song.

Here's the heart of it.

The same energy that makes babies and trees and moves ocean tides and spins the galaxies and explodes suns and sucks things into black holes.

It's this one energy.

And it's what we are.

It's what the divine is.

And it's what worship is, is the flow of this energy to and from itself.

I like thinking of it, calling it Eros, this life force, this spirit, that when experienced without constriction can become a form of prayer.

When we just let it open rather than clamping down or aiming it at some sort of finish line.

But this perspective of what sexuality is and can be is largely missing from religious and spiritual discourse in my experience.

In my years in traveling around the world, performing in different types of venues, One of the things I noticed was when I play in churches, people.

Move differently.

They hold their bodies differently.

It can be the same person.

Like I've had people that have seen me in lots of different kinds of venues and like, you literally take the same person that you see them in a club and they're moving a certain way.

And then you see them in a church.

We just have all these conditioned responses when you come into a church.

And what it basically comes down to, I think, is like anything below the waist is just no-go.

It's like we enter church and we just, let's pretend we don't have genitals.

So if you see somebody like moving in church at all, if you're kind of a wild church and there's maybe dancing or something, it's very like bouncy pogo stick dancing or like maybe kicking the legs, like just the shins.

But you're not going to see a lot of gyrating hips.

You're not going to see a lot of thrusting, because, you know, that's the devil's playground down there.

Music.

But why?

Why is this?

Sex is how life gets made.

The universe is sex.

It's the dance of the polarities.

It's yin and yang.

It's in and out, light and dark.

The whole thing is like making love with itself.

It's this tension, this desire, this movement.

It's erotic, and it's what life uses to create itself.

Jesus said, I am the way, the truth, the life.

Capital L, life.

God is life.

Why would life be opposed to sex when that's what life uses to make itself?

Yet in our religions, our spiritualities, and this is pretty broad-brushed, like almost all of them are really anti-life, anti-sex.

How does that make any sense whatsoever?

Well, I have a few ideas about that.

So, again, sexuality is life force.

It's Eros, the energy that brings us here, that animates us, keeps the species going.

So if a culture or religion would want to order and control life, well, sexuality is always going to be part of the toolbox.

And this is not actually all negative to me.

Think of a garden.

Imagine you've got a hose pouring water into the soil.

Water here representing life force.

And if you just let the hose run wild, the garden floods.

Some plants will drown, others will get ignored.

And in the same way, I think that if our society just had raw indulgent sexuality as the norm, without any limits to it, it would cause a lot of destruction.

It would be really hard to form cohesive groups and community.

I mean, I'm sure most of us probably know somebody at least whose life has been destroyed from overindulgence sexually or where it's run out of its healthy boundaries.

So what we've often resorted to in response to the potential danger of this unbridled indulgence is to use repression.

We try to put a kink in the hose or shut it off completely.

And this is the strategy that so many purity cultures lean on.

Cut off desire, shame it, make it taboo, keep it from flowing.

Because even, you know, if the garden is withering and life is like suffering and we're kind of shutting ourselves off from life, it feels safer than the chaos of a flood.

But there is another way.

Instead of flooding the garden or shutting the water off, we could build an irrigation system where the water is guided intentionally, circulating at the right pace, nourishing the whole garden.

Or think of a hydroponic growing bed where the water flows through these channels, recirculating back to its source, nourishing every root.

In that kind of system, the water doesn't just disappear and it doesn't drown anything.

It's guided.

It's integrated.

And to me, that's what sacred sexuality is all about.

Desire isn't repressed.

And it's not indulged in.

And narrowed and compressed.

Instead, it's channeled, it's directed, it's alchemized, it's offered back to Source in a way that allows it to become prayer, in a way that nourishes, life rather than drowning it out or drying it up.

So maybe the problem isn't sexuality itself, but that we've mostly only been offered two choices repression or indulgence, sacred eros is a third way it's an irrigation system where our life force can flow completely freely but with intention devotion and love.

Music.

I'm getting a little ahead of myself scoring with this song that's going to be coming in a few weeks, but I just wanted to pull in the garden metaphor here.

I think there's something about sacred sexuality and tending to it like a garden, tending to it with care and devotion as opposed to repression or indulgence that is so important.

And it's something that I think is missing from the religious discourse that I see in our country in the West.

It certainly was missing from the discourse that I grew up in.

I grew up in a way that was like sexuality is bad outside of marriage and good inside of marriage.

And that's about what we got.

And then, of course, what we defined as marriage was one man, one woman through the church, by the way.

Like, you got to go through the powers that be, so they sign your paper for you and they give you the permission.

But there's no equivalent of Tantra in mainstream Christianity.

There's no, you know, Kama Sutra book that's one of the books of the catechism or something.

I think there could, and perhaps even should be, Christian ways of talking about this.

and I could see that being something that I'm really passionate about as like a long-term mission of mine.

But in India, they have explored this for thousands of years.

There is a path of devotion that includes sexuality at its heart.

In Tantra mythology, the entire universe is a result of basically God making love to itself.

You have the masculine form of God that is Shiva, that is just pure emptiness, that is void.

And then you have the feminine aspect of God, which is Shakti, and that's like the movement, the power of the universe.

And together, these forces come together.

And in making love, form meets void, and it is everything.

Everything is God making love to itself.

And this keeps echoing itself, even within our own bodies.

They talk about how the right side of our bodies is the Shiva, is the masculine, the left side is the feminine, the Shakti.

And together, even within our own bodies, there is this Eros that can be felt, that can be experienced in a way that God comes back to God.

I remember when I first started looking into Tantra, I thought it would just be like, how to have great sex sort of thing.

You know, give me some cool moves.

And that's not really what it is.

It includes sexual practices.

And, you know, maybe some of you have heard of like the Kama Sutra.

There's lots of different positions and practices that different practitioners of Tantra have used and taught.

But it's not actually about sex.

It's about God and God remembering itself, making love to itself in you, as you.

And I think this is part of why we don't have a developed Tantra equivalent in the West within Christianity because it's heresy to cross that line where God fully sees itself as us.

The closest we get is in the mystics.

The mystics talk really sexy, like Teresa of Avila who wrote, The soul remains all the time in its center with its God.

He gives it to drink of the wine of his love until it is so inebriated that it knows not what it desires is like one who swoons with excess of pleasure or in her famous transverberation vision the pain was so great that it made me moan and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain that i could not wish to be rid of it the soul is satisfied now with nothing less than god i mean come on theresa there's john of cross who in his spiritual canticle is modeled on the Song of Songs full of erotic imagery like there he gave me his breast there he taught me the science of sweetness and I gave myself to him keeping nothing back there I promised.

To be his bride or of course there is the Song of Songs itself in the Bible let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth for your love is better than wine.

So there is like this kind of starting point, but it's the mystics who tend to cross that line, at least experientially, of God just loving God, and what I think of as me sort of disappears within that love.

In tantric mythology, they don't have to be so careful with that theology or belief that I am actually separate from God.

So what I am and what my sexuality is with my beloved is God loving itself.

And this is more than just like, I'm just imagining like somebody excusing their debauchery and lecherous lifestyle with like, you know, I just, I just know this is just God loving itself.

It's not an idea.

It's not just a metaphor here.

It's an invitation to actually allow that life force within you to not get constricted to an object, to not objectify people, to not use sexuality as just a way to get off, but actually to allow that increase of energy, of love, of pleasure to sort of dissipate, like to let it go up, up, up, rather than holding it down in the genitals, like allowing it to rise up through the heart, through the throat, the head, up the top, out into the heavens, like to become this vessel where heaven meets earth.

It's very mystical.

Music.

But for me, getting to that place where my sexuality was just a part of my heart or is just a part of spirit within me has taken a long journey of first having to get deprogrammed, get out of the matrix that I grew up in where sexuality just felt bad or my body felt like this thing that needed to be managed rather than a vessel for divine love.

And then, even after I saw that, even after I saw through the lies of purity culture, it took time to work some of that stuff out of my body.

It's one thing to consciously know that God doesn't hate you for your sexuality, and it's another to actually feel so surrendered to your sexuality and to God within it that it becomes this sort of sacred prayer that I'm talking about.

And that brings me back to that first story that I started the podcast with, where I was on this retreat.

This was several years ago.

And again, by this point, I had long let go of any beliefs around sexuality needing to be a very specific way for it to potentially be beautiful and sacred.

But there were just little remnants of it, even the anger that I had around it.

Because what I saw while I was grieving, while I was sitting there weeping with all these people and pounding on pillows and stuff, is...

I found my own kink in it.

I found the place up till this point.

I was a victim.

I was angry.

I was, why was this like this?

And then I saw what I liked about it.

I saw how by making sex, this like taboo, shameful thing, there was something that was a little bit hot about that.

something a little bit like, Ooh, you naughty boy.

Why are you looking?

Why are you touching?

And it was, it was a little bit of a kink, this purity culture thing, or a lot of a kink.

And as soon as I saw it, it was interesting because I'm in this environment where it's like very emotional and there's all this release happening.

But as soon as I saw it, it just turned to laughter all that energy that was weeping and anguishing and victim stuff suddenly just became this deep belly laugh where I just doubled over on the floor laughing so hard that basically the joke that I had played on myself that I had lost my own kink in it that I had wandered so far out that I forgot what I was doing.

And from that moment that I saw it, it never came back.

It can't come back.

I can't unsee it.

I can't see that trying to control sexuality out of shame isn't just my own kinky sexual thing.

And I could do that if I wanted to, but I don't have to.

And so I tell you that story not to say, okay, see it, see it like I saw it.

It's just to notice that there had to be this long, weird process for me before I was able to find deep, embodied healing around this.

But it happened.

And now my sexuality, I trust it.

It's part of the life force that divinity is embodying here.

And that feels so good.

It feels so good to just trust life force and what it wants to do.

And whatever journey you would need to take to get to that point where sex is no longer dirty, not something to avoid or repress, but also it's not something that owns you, something that you just get lost in indulging your every whim, whatever it would take for you to get to that place of freedom, it's worth it.

Music.

I can't find out Night, hallelujah Night, day, day, night Hallelujah Oh my soul Say, hallelujah Hallelujah Hallelujah, Hallelujah Musically, there's not that much to talk about with this song.

It's two sections, the verse and the chorus.

It's all improvised on the guitar.

And the only elements that I wanted production-wise for this version of the song was just guitar and vocal and then a tambourine and then the choir and the choir are my friends from the Mystic Hymnal Retreat all right I'm gonna play the whole song here for you in a minute.

But I just wanted to extend an invitation to anyone who's processing old religious baggage, who you feel yourself coming into a new paradigm.

Maybe you've had moments of feeling like you're awake to oneness or that you realize that God must be more than this weird judgmental guy in the sky who's trying to get used to not have sex.

But you could use support talking through that.

And more than just talking through it, actually diving into some of those energetic places in your body that need love.

I do these sessions with people that are sort of like spiritual direction or coaching, but finding the language for it's been a little tricky for me because it's not, it's not therapy.

It's not like traditional coaching, but it is very much about finding those hidden places in us, bringing them into the light and into love.

It's very somatic.

I use a lot of different sort of modalities and techniques and technologies that I've learned through the years.

Internal family systems and existential kink, different meditation practices.

And basically, we're just inviting spirit to remember itself.

And honestly, that's just all of my work.

That's the music.

That's this podcast.

That's the sessions, the retreats that I do.

All of it really the end of the funnel is this presence with and as god as this so if you'd like to go deeper with all of this go ahead and hit me up i can schedule a free call with you we can chat about it okay with that said thanks everybody thanks to the patrons thanks for being part of this journey.

Love you all so much.

Feel your bodies.

Make your bedrooms an altar.

Make your sexuality, make your genitals instruments of praise.

Can we get that added to the Psalm.

Music.