“The Spirit is Willing, but the Flesh is Wise”
– Bert Hellinger
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I was born into a Latin American household, where the Virgin Mary watched over our beds and the crucifix was the son of God. My mother’s whispered prayers wove through every moment of our lives. Sundays were sacred, and I even became an alter boy at church services. And yet—just beneath the surface, humming like a second pulse—was something far less spoken but deeply alive: sexuality.
Unlike the shame-driven undertones often found in more conservative Western cultures, our Spanish culture held a paradox. We were devout, yes—but also flirtatious, sensual, and celebratory of the body. Music, movement, skin, laughter, and affection pulsed through family gatherings, weekend club parties, where the beers and wines were drunk like water. I grew up surrounded by aunts who wore their curves with pride, men who danced with their hips, and dressed and looked like movie stars, and cousins who I’d meet at secret hiding places in the home for kissing lessons. Desire was always present, not always named, and never hidden.
As I grew older into my 12 year to be exact, the contradiction between my family’s celebration of sexuality, and a religion that suppressed sexual desires, where pleasure was a sin, and that spirit and flesh could not walk the same path, I proclaimed to my mother on a Sunday morning that I would no longer be attending Sunday church service. She said that I would most certainly go to hell. But I was ahead of her. I told her “Yes, and if and when I do go to hell, I will tell God himself, what a ridiculous rule he created.” But it was my next outburst that stunned my mother and one she immediately went into silence with. “If there really were a God, it would be a woman and not a man.” She never from that point forward forced me to go to church.
Eventually, I walked away from religion—not from a place of rebellion, but from a hunger for truth. I certainly didn’t want to deny my sexuality in order to be spiritual nor did I want to cut my life in half to be whole. As fate would have it the Sexual Revolution emerged in America. I was turning18, beginning my 1st year in college, and I, like many in my generation, did not hesitate to embrace a profound emancipation of our sexuality, as well as a conscious awakening that was most certainly a strong undercurrent of the Sexual Revolution. I didn’t know back then, but the organic union of sexuality and spirituality that took place in my life during that period created the seed that would lead to the realization of who and what I was as an Infinite Being and the eventual creation, 25 years later, of Sexy Spirits