By Sharon Gonsalves
Spirituality and religion have been very fluid in my life. So has my sexuality. The two have intersected at several points.
I was raised Jewish by parents who were not of the same faith. Dad was raised Catholic and as an adult called himself a humanist. Mom was raised without religious training by Jews who had escaped persecution in Europe and immigrated to the US from Russia and Poland. Mom went to adult ed Hebrew school to learn how to observe Jewish holidays at home. I had a bat mitzvah at age 13 and was declared an adult in the reform temple. I promptly stopped attending services. At about this time I became sexually active and considered myself heterosexual. I didn’t know I could be anything else.
My next religion was feminism, more specifically lesbian separatist feminism, and I was a devout practitioner for about four years in my early 20s. I considered this a religion, or at least a replacement for organized religion which I thought held nothing for me. Patriarchy was the enemy and organized religion was inherently patriarchal. My feminist philosophy colored my entire life and worldview. I was mostly angry with men over sexual abuse, and feminism was saving my life. The tenderness of women’s arms was a welcome relief from my pain.
As I healed over time, I came out as bisexual, which opened the door to meaningful, consensual, caring explorations with men while maintaining my feminist beliefs and strong connections to women. The Boston bi community was at the center of my social life and my identity. I liked having models for relating that were different from traditional marriage and family scenarios. I liked the freedom to relate to whomever I was attracted to. I liked the discourse and political activism, and I especially liked the sense of community.
Next came a move to Hawaii, and with it a profound spiritual awakening. I was introduced to Kashmir Shaivism, a chanting and meditation practice that offered me a female lineage head – Gurumayi Chidvilasananda. Many lesbians were seekers on this path, most notably Meg Christian, a well-known women’s music artist. Siddha Yoga opened my heart and mind to other worlds I could never have imagined on my own. I found absolute bliss and more inner peace than I knew was possible. Halleluyah! Jai Gurumayi! Same sex coupling wasn’t exactly condoned on this path, but it didn’t matter to me. As a bhakti yogini I just loved everyone, and sex had nothing to do with it. I became an embodiment of love itself – pure unadulterated love. I also broadened my perspective of life on earth in a body, and came to believe in one soul having many lifetimes with karmic consequences. My soul had been both male and female, had lived in many places, cultures, and centuries and kept repeating lessons over and over with the same other souls until we resolved our earthly issues and graduated to eternity.
During this time I was involved in monogamous relationships with women. I lived in a rural area with no bi community, ran a womencentered business and was assumed to be a lesbian. I didn’t say much about my sexual orientation one way or another. I was much more focused on my spiritual awakening than on my sexual identity.
My next path was hula as a spiritual practice. This had many similarities to Kashmir Shaivism in that I gave permission for a teacher to guide me on my path through participation in group practices. The dancing brought me back into my body after so much meditation. During this time I began dating men again. Some people who saw me as a lesbian may have been confused by this. I was not. I had been serially monogamous with women for seven years. Now I was interested in exploring the male-female dynamic.
After three years on the hula path I moved on to other spiritual dance practices – the Mandala Dance of the 21 Praises of Tara and the Dances of Universal Peace (aka Sufi dancing). Through the Tibetan Buddhist based Tara practice, I transformed myself into the goddess of wisdom and compassion herself along with my many sisters. The Dances of Universal Peace fed my desire to be an embodiment of love as the sufi path is the mystical home of lovers of “the oneness.” During this time I continued dating men while maintaining strong connections to women. However, spirituality trumped sexual orientation and political activism. I wondered if I might be heterosexual after doing so much healing work on myself. Without a bi community it was hard to tell.
All of my spiritual training prepared me well for the task of caring for my dying father and returning to the mainland to participate once again with my family of origin. Now that I’m back among my bisexual friends, I know that feels like home.
Through my many twists and turns of spiritual and religious participation and beliefs, here’s where the rubber meets the road, where my bisexuality and spirituality intersect. I do believe that my soul has had many lifetimes, and that I’ve joined in love with other souls in different configurations. For example, a woman I partnered with for five years in this lifetime, I also was heterosexually married to in a frontier lifetime here in the US. How do I know? I can see it. She was familiar to me when I met her and I used a regression technique to discover our earlier connections. It just feels true to me that we’ve returned to each other to revisit and try to resolve some earlier issues. Same with my father, who I believe I was partnered with in one lifetime, his daughter again in another lifetime and his mother in yet another.
Because of the fluidity of my soul’s gender from lifetime to lifetime, and because I’m attracted to the same souls over and over again are also gender fluid, bisexuality just makes sense. I love another soul, not their body or their gender.
At this point in time, I hope I’ve evolved into just being love, a compassionate, loving being. I don’t feel a real need or desire to couple sexually in my current post-menopausal “wise woman” state. I feel somehow beyond all that, all the drama and manipulations of relationship dynamics whereby we twist and turn ourselves into an image of what we think our partner wants in order to be loved. I’d rather just love everyone and be loved in return with my clothes, and my head, on. I realize I’m only 55 years old, and all of this could change in the blink of an eye. Ah, fluidity.
And then there’s lovemaking as a vehicle to bring us closer to our own divinity. I wish I could say I had lots of experience with this, but so far it’s been reading and hearing other people’s stories. I believe that through our attunement to the flow of energy through the chakras we can bring ourselves and our partners to an experience of oneness with all that is. Certainly our ability to create new human beings with our bodies is pretty heady stuff – about as close to God as one can get. But that’s an article for someone else to write.
Sharon Gonsalves used to be a raging feminist, but now she’s just an aging feminist struggling with whether or not to dye her hair.