The Hunger for Ecstasy: Fulfilling the Soul's Need for Passion and Intimacy

By Jalaja Bonheim

"In a world that is starving for ecstasy, this book offers powerful healing medicine. A passionate and wise invitation to open our lives and our souls to ecstasy, recognizing it for what it really is — the experience of our own divinity." – Deepak Chopra, author of How to Know God

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Do you believe ecstasy is a rarefied state enjoyed only now and then by exceptional people? Do you yearn for more intimacy and passion in your life? In this book, Jalaja Bonheim makes clear that ecstasy (both physical and spiritual) is neither a luxury nor an aberration. It is your birthright, an essential form of nourishment that the soul requires for its well-being.

Join Jalaja on a journey with poets, mystics, lovers, and monks to learn how to infuse passion into all aspects of your life. Drawing from many religious and cultural traditions and with anecdotes from the lives of the thousands whom Jalaja has counseled, she provides inspiring ways to feed your spiritual hunger through greater intimacy with yourself, others, and Spirit. With illuminating chapters on sexuality and marriage, Jalaja brings all aspects of life into the ecstasy equation.

Jalaja also discusses fear, self-consciousness, and the other common emotions that pose roadblocks to our fulfillment, along with the repercussions we face when we starve ourselves of soul nourishment.

The Hunger for Ecstasy is about cultivating the joy and passion that will pull your spiritual life together.

Originally published in 2001 with Rodale Books.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jalaja Bonheim
• Release date: Jun 14, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476277752

Jalaja Bonheim

Jalaja Bonheim, Ph.D. (www.jalajabonheim.com) is an inspiring teacher, public speaker, counselor, author and circle leader. Fresh, clear, and compassionate, her message is heart-centered and hopeful yet also down-to-earth and practical. Raised in Austria and Germany, Jalaja studied classical temple dance in India before coming to the United States in 1982. She is the author of four books, which were inspired by her passion for integrating sexuality and spirituality, empowering women, and celebrating the feminine spirit.

Book preview

The Hunger for Ecstasy

Fulfilling the Soul's Need for Passion and Intimacy

Jalaja Bonheim, Ph.D.

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Copyright © 2001, 2012 Jalaja Bonheim

Smashwords Edition

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

All names in the case studies recounted in this book have been changed to protect the privacy of those involved.

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Contents

Introduction

1 Meeting God the Lover

2 The Dance of Great Hunger

3 Banishing the Demon of Shame

4 Longing for Paradise

5 Grappling with Addiction

6 The Ecstatic's Discipline

7 The Practice of Presence

8 Beauty

9 Sexual Ecstasy

10 The Sacred Marriage

11 The Power of Community

12 Go See for Yourself

Notes

Credits

About the Author

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Introduction

Ecstasy is what everyone craves – not love or sex, but a hot-blooded, soaring intensity, in which being alive is a joy and thrill. That enravishment doesn't give meaning to life, and yet without it life seems meaningless.

– Diane Ackerman

If you think of ecstasy as an exceptional state enjoyed now and then by exceptional people, I hope this book will inspire you to think again. Ecstasy is neither a luxury nor an aberration. It is our birthright.

We all need ecstasy in our lives. That state of rapture, of bliss, of feeling totally in love with life is an essential nutrient without which we cannot thrive. Yet if ecstasy is spiritual food, we are a nation of starving people. Children of a culture that ignores the hunger for ecstasy, we know no other way of life and therefore assume that our ecstasy-deprived state is normal. In fact, it is terribly unhealthy and has a disastrous effect on our communities.

What does it all mean? a deeply depressed client recently asked me. I don't know, I told her. I don't think life has a meaning that can fit into words. Yet when we allow ourselves to experience the ecstasy that blossoms in a life lived fully, passionately, and with integrity, life feels profoundly meaningful. When life seems barren and meaningless, take notice. Your soul is telling you that it has gone hungry for too long.

All around us we see the symptoms of our disconnection from Spirit and of our unacknowledged hunger for ecstasy – anorexia and bulimia, depression, violence, drug addiction, and broken marriages. Too many people push aside their unspoken yearnings, never articulating their hunger for ecstasy. Ultimately, they give up hope of ever satisfying it. Is it any wonder that we are such consumers of painkillers and antidepressants? Is it any wonder that we are the most overweight people in the world? If we want to create a healthy, peaceful society, we must face the fact that we need joy, rapture, and ecstasy in our lives as much as we need physical food.

Ecstasy is a grand word, perhaps too grandiose for your taste – too dramatic, too intense, too outrageous. Ecstasy is intense and outrageous. It blows our minds open to a reality that is wild, beautiful, loving, abundant beyond our wildest dreams.

Of course, not everyone is eager to have his or her mind blown wide open. Most of us live quite comfortably within the familiar, if somewhat cramped, confines of our normal mind-set. Like orgasm, ecstasy is a peak experience, and most people don't want to live in constant ecstasy any more than they want to have never-ending orgasms. On the other hand, those who have never experienced orgasm at all sense that they are missing out on one of life's sweetest gifts. You don't need to reach orgasm every time you make love, but if you don't know what orgasm feels like, you haven't connected with the essence of sex. Just as orgasm is the essence of sex, so ecstasy is the essence of life.

• • •

We inherited the word ecstasy from the ancient Greeks. To them, ecstasy was far more than just a state of heightened pleasure; it was a sacred portal into the realm of the gods. As they saw it, ordinary consciousness could not sustain itself when the majesty, beauty, and sheer force of the Divine struck the fragile human ego like lightening. To survive such an encounter, one had to step out of one's ordinary, small sense of self into a vast, cosmic awareness. They called this process of temporary ego-death ek-stasis, which literally means to cause to stand outside. Ecstasy, they believed, signaled one's entry into the spiritual dimension.

The Greeks were well aware that ecstasy has its price. In the presence of the Divine, the ego-self must die, temporarily if not permanently. We 21st-century Americans, who worship at the altar of the ego and love feeling in control, do not surrender easily to the higher forces. We hunger for spiritual communion but also flee it.

Sanskrit, the language of ancient India, conveys an understanding of ecstasy that complements and expands the Greek. Where the Greek language reflects the curiosity of a youthfully brilliant, intellectually vigorous people, Sanskrit expresses the oceanic consciousness of a very old and holy culture. In Sanskrit, ecstasy is known as ananda. Ananda is a state of consciousness, but it is also one of the names of God. To enter into ecstasy is to enter into the mind of God.

God is the source of ecstasy, the Hindu scriptures declare. Who could live and breathe, were not the universe permeated by God's ecstasy?

The Hindu scripture known as the Taittiriya Upanishad reads, God is joy. From joy all beings are born, by joy they are sustained, and unto joy they shall return. Where joy is present, God is present. In this view, ecstasy involves not so much a leave-taking as a home-coming. The sacred realm is our true home, and ecstasy is the joy we feel upon returning home.

In many Hindu scriptures, God is called simply the Self. Similarly, we shall refer to the Divine within each individual as the true Self, as opposed to the ego-based self that believes in the illusion of separation and has yet to realize its true nature. No matter who you are or how you feel, the source of ecstasy lies within you because ecstasy is the experience of your true Self. Your hunger for ecstasy is sacred because it is the hunger for God, which is also the hunger to know and fully become your Self.

Mystics from around the world call us to awaken to the joy that they have discovered at the core of being. Here is Tukaram, a 17th-century Indian ecstatic, trying to tell us where he has been.

In the pool of bliss,

Bliss is all ripples.

Bliss is the body

Of bliss.

How can I describe it?

It's too embarrassing.

There's no will left.¹

You too can dive into the pool of bliss of which Tukaram speaks. It is available to anyone because at its core, reality is ecstatic. Ecstasy is not something we create but something we make room for. Clear the obstructions and ecstasy will shine forth. Although suffering is an inevitable ingredient of life, it is contained in a greater field of joy.

There are many varieties of ecstasy, just as there are many varieties of love. When the Hindu scriptures say that God is ecstasy, they aren't talking about the kind of ecstasy that people feel when they hear that they just won the lottery. If good fortune makes us ecstatic, bad fortune will make us miserable. This kind of ecstasy is relative; it contains the seeds of suffering, just as day contains the seeds of night and life contains the seeds of death. Conditional ecstasy is a blessing, but it is only a faint echo of the boundless joy of which the Hindu scriptures speak.

Just as there is a love that transcends both love and hate, and a peace that transcends both peace and war – the peace that passeth all understanding – so there is an ecstasy that transcends loss and gain. This greater ecstasy does not depend on things going our way, but on our going God's way.

When I speak of Spirit or of God, I'm not referring to something distant or disembodied. Spirit is the very essence of life – vibrant, sensuous, and delighted to be alive. Moreover, spirituality is a very practical matter. A person may go to church or temple or synagogue every day, but if her religious practice has no effect on her daily life, she is not leading a spiritual life. True spirituality has a tangible impact on the world. It transforms the way we get up in the morning, the way we pay our bills, and the way we speak to our neighbors. The kind of spiritual communion this book explores does not split us into two parts – body and spirit – but rather includes the body as an organ of spiritual expression.

Patriarchal religions, including the Judeo-Christian tradition, have, unfortunately, split the physical, everyday world from the spiritual world. They have set up a false dichotomy, severing matter and spirit, body and soul. When you separate things that are meant to be united, such as the physical and the spiritual realms, both suffer. Our everyday lives have suffered because they are no longer suffused with awareness of the sacred. Simultaneously, our spirituality has been drained of its juice and its sensuality. What is left is a specter too thin and too pale to feed the hungry soul.

On the one hand, there is a growing interest in bringing spirituality back into the body and into everyday life. Meditative forms of physical exercise such as yoga and tai chi have entered the mainstream. People are discussing how to approach work as a spiritual practice, how to have an enlightened relationship with money, and how to bring a sense of sacredness into their sexuality, into their relationships, and ultimately into every aspect of their lives.

On the other hand, surprisingly little has been written about the fact that our forms of spiritual practice are in crisis because they have become less and less sensuous over the past few centuries. Eros, once a regular guest wherever people gathered to worship, has, with few exceptions, been banished from our churches, temples, and mosques. Eros is joy, life, and vitality; without the erotic juice, our spirituality dries out and shrivels. As much as this book invites you to open your bedroom to the ecstasy of spiritual communion, it is equally concerned with the question of how we might reclaim the sensuous side of our spiritual practice.

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My own journey as an ecstatic began when I went to India to study Indian temple dance, an experience I wrote of extensively in my previous book Aphrodite's Daughters. Indian temple dance, an ancient spiritual practice that has been traced back more than a thousand years, combines prayer, worship, and storytelling. The stories the dancer tells are the sacred myths of Hindu mythology.

Indian temple dance belongs to the Tantric branch of Hinduism. According to the Tantric creation myth, the root cause of creation is desire – more specifically, God's desire to make love. The universe came into being because the ecstasy that was God's very essence wanted to be shared. Yet as the primordial Being looked around for a lover, It realized It was all alone. And so the One split Itself into two. One half became the universe, and is called matter, energy, or the goddess Shakti. The other half remained formless and transcendent, and is worshipped as the god Shiva. These two embraced with great joy. Out of their ecstatic love-play, the world was born and is sustained, moment by moment.

Like all creation myths, this is more than a story about the beginning of the world. It reveals how the people of ancient India related to the creative energy of the cosmos and to their own creative energy. It is the myth of a people who held sacred their desire and their sexuality. Believing themselves to be made in the image of the Divine, they found ecstasy in the act of creation and in the giving and receiving of love.

Shiva and Shakti, god and goddess, are not separate from us. Their myths describe the dance of the creative male and female forces within each of us. We are all parts of the Divine, participants in the eternal cosmic love affair between the physical and the invisible dimensions, between god and goddess, matter and spirit. Everything we see, feel, touch, smell, and taste is Spirit incarnate. In fact, our main purpose in life is to make love with the world and with the Spirit that illuminates it from within.

As you might expect, a tradition based on such a myth held love, desire, and sexuality in high esteem. Like Catholic nuns, temple priestesses in ancient India refrained from marrying because they considered themselves married to God. Unlike Catholic nuns, however, the ancient priestesses did not renounce sex. Not only did they take lovers, they were renowned for their proficiency in the erotic arts. One of the most important roles of a temple priestess was to embody the goddess and, in union with God, to re-enact creation, thereby refreshing and rejuvenating the world. This she might do in either of two ways. First, she might take a human lover, who would become the god to her, while he would worship her as the goddess. Second, she might experience union with God in her meditations and especially in her dancing, which was held to be an ecstatic ritual of erotic communion between herself and her divine lover. Ultimately, all their skills – including meditation, ritual, storytelling, dancing, and the erotic arts – were merely instrumental to their primary calling, which was to make love with God.

Immortalized by masterful sculptors, the stone likenesses of these ancient priestesses still grace the walls of ancient Hindu temples. Some appear alone, others stand wrapped in their lovers' embrace. Many are nude, dressed only in jewels, in their radiant smiles, and in their sinuous, seductive beauty. Their tradition introduced me to the idea that human beings can actually make love with Spirit, and that this kind of lovemaking can yield the most intense ecstasy life has to offer. As my fascination with these mysterious ancestor figures grew, I yearned to feel the same ecstasy that radiated through their bodies and faces. I too wanted to make love with Spirit, with life, with reality.

Yet I had no idea how to go about this. Now and then I touched upon ecstatic states in my dancing, but that wasn't enough – I wanted more. Unfortunately, there are no manuals or guidebooks that teach you how to make love with God. So the question How do I make love with Spirit? became my constant companion. In this book, I share with you some of the discoveries I made over the years as I explored the question of what making love with life might mean. I invite you, too, to cultivate a love affair with Spirit. Like any love, this one requires time and attention, but the rewards are great. Spirit is an infinitely creative, potent, generous, patient, and humorous lover.

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Each chapter of this book will address an important facet of how we can cultivate intimacy with life. If we are to live our lives as a great love affair, we'll need to learn how to relate wisely to the power of desire. Without desire, we cannot make love – but our desires often get us into trouble. We'll consider how we can become shameless, so that the demon of shame no longer undermines our love-making, whether sexual or spiritual. We'll delve into our longing for paradise, and we'll examine the shadow side of ecstasy – the suffering that our hunger for ecstasy can cause, and the painful addictions we sometimes develop in our attempts to satisfy that hunger.

Making love with life is a spiritual practice. Beginning with chapter 6, we'll explore the relationship between discipline and ecstasy, and look at some of the disciplines that can support our journey, especially the practice of presence. From presence is born beauty, which is nothing less than love made manifest – love reflected back to our hungry eyes and hearts.

The spiritual path is not one we are meant to walk alone. We'll talk about ecstatic sexuality – what it is and how to practice it – about the ways our spiritual commitment can enrich and transform our human marriages, and, finally, about the importance of having a community with which to share our journey.

One of my clients refers to himself as a recovering Catholic. His memories of growing up Catholic are of being shamed, guilt-tripped, and disempowered. He emerged from his childhood believing that suffering was good and virtuous and that his hunger for ecstasy was selfish and bad. This may not have been the lesson his teachers intended to teach him, but he learned it nonetheless.

I believe that, like my Catholic client, we are all on a journey of recovery. No matter what religious tradition we come from, we have all been affected by the anti-ecstatic stance of Western civilization and have absorbed its mistrust of nature, of the body, and of pleasure. We have tried to ignore our hunger for ecstasy, and we have tried to placate it with everything money can buy – to no avail. The soul knows what it wants, and it won't settle for less. It knows it came to this world in service and in search of joy.

Every infant is born with a visceral, instinctual knowledge of his connection to Spirit and hence to life. This knowledge need never emerge into conscious awareness. It need never be articulated or conceptualized. Nonetheless, this thread of connection is the foundation of our happiness. If it should weaken or break, we will fall into depression and despair. On the other hand, if we trace the thread of our happiness back to its source, and if we succeed in making intimate, direct, personal contact with Spirit, then we will know the true meaning of ecstasy.

Some people are content knowing Spirit from a distance, like a child who is happy knowing that her mother is around somewhere in the house. Others live only for the joy of ecstatic communion. The 19th-century Indian mystic Ramakrishna, for example, moved in and out of ecstasy on an hourly basis. No matter how great or small our appetite for ecstatic experience is, it is essential that we not lose sight of the fragile thread that connects our daily lives to that ineffable reality we call God or Spirit. It is essential that we understand where the source of our happiness lies. Spirituality should not glorify suffering and self-deprivation but reveal a path to ever-greater joy.

Joy, says the spiritual teacher Emmanuel, is the God within you standing up, shaking himself off, and beginning to smile.² Consider this book, then, a letter of welcome to the God within you.

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CHAPTER ONE

Meeting God the Lover

Who is it that we spend our entire life loving?

– Kabir

When, on your deathbed, you look back over your life, what will matter most to you? According to the meditation teacher Jack Kornfield, the question people most often ask themselves at the end of their lives is, How well have I loved?¹ Loving well doesn't just mean loving individual people or things. It means loving life itself.

Of course, life isn't always easy to love. It is hard to love life when you just got fired or when you're in the midst of a bitter divorce. The kind of love that lets us embrace any situation, no matter how difficult or upsetting, cannot be sentimental or mushy. This kind of love needs a backbone of fierce commitment. How well have I loved? ultimately means How fully did I engage with life? Did I wholeheartedly grapple with the challenges I faced? Was I honest with myself and others? Did I give life all I had, without holding back? Did I bring to my life the passion of a great lover? As the Vietnamese Buddhist teacher

Reviews for The Hunger for Ecstasy

[Gumay van Burick · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Great, insightful book, also very relaxing and calming in a sense.