Life Force - We are Its Transmitters

May 09, 2016

Life Force - We are Its Transmitters

Category | Pleasure & Sexuality, Pleasure & Spirituality,

As we live, we are transmitters of life.
And when we fail to transmit life, life fails to flow through us.

That is part of the mystery of sex, it is a flow onwards.
Sexless people transmit nothing.

And if, as we work, we can transmit life into our work,
life, still more life, rushes into us to compensate, to be ready and we ripple with life through the days.

Even if it is a woman making an apple dumpling, or a man a stool,
if life goes into the pudding, good is the pudding
good is the stool,
content is the woman, with fresh life rippling in to her,
content is the man.

Give, and it shall be given unto you
is still the truth about life.
But giving life is not so easy.
It doesn’t mean handing it out to some mean fool, or letting the living dead eat you up.
It means kindling the life-quality where it was not,
even if it’s only in the whiteness of a washed pocket-handkerchief.

– David Herbert (DH) Lawrence

I love this poem, We Are Transmitters, by D.H. Lawrence. A few phrases particularly strike me: That is part of the mystery of sex, it is a flow onwards.  Sexless people transmit nothing.

Maybe you’ve met people who have an asexual vibe. For me, there’s an odd feeling of ‘something missing’ and off-putting when I encounter that energy because I feel deprived of the whole story of who the person is. At the other end, there’s the highly sexual person who blows me out the door with their energy!

I’m aware of sexual energy in virtually every interaction with people, not always consciously, but certainly subconsciously. I think most of us are. That sense of a person’s sexuality tells me something essential about them in an instant. 

It’s hard to separate how I feel about myself as a person from how I carry my sexuality. You can try to put sexuality in a box, cutting it off from the rest of you, but it doesn’t work. Sexuality is so many things – how ‘in your body’ you feel, how you relate to your body, how you relate to your masculine and feminine energies whether you’re male or female. Sexuality informs your liveliness, creativity and sensuality, and your relational capacity. How you feel about touch and connection. How you express yourself. It’s impossible to box this is one neat container. 

Sexuality involves your capacity to open to the life force energy – the creative pulse that makes life. Lawrence says: Even if it is a woman making an apple dumpling, or a man a stool, if life goes into the pudding, good is the pudding, good is the stool.

So here’s a good question to ask yourself – what am I transmitting? Is it joy, exuberance, pleasure, aliveness… or, heaviness, distraction, discouragement?  When I allow myself pleasure, I feel how its higher purpose feeds my spirit. I feel the indwelling life force energy.

I like the metaphor of making love to life. This too is contained in Lawrence’s line: Even if it is a woman making an apple dumpling, or a man a stool, if life goes into the pudding, good is the pudding, good is the stool. He is instructing us to approach each aspect of life as a precious beloved.

When we do so, we can discern the true expression of sexuality and get it outside the box and into every bit of life. In other words… It means kindling the life-quality where it was not, even if it’s only in the whiteness of a washed pocket-handkerchief.

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“I had signed up for the workshop with a vague idea of validating whether or not beekeeping was something I wanted to get back into, so wanted the real experience and ‘instruction’ around hive life.  But I also wanted to spend time in the imaginative life of beekeeping – so the poetry, and your story of bees as a significant part of your healing journey was really important.  Sensing into your relationship with them - the calm, the respect, the love – was an important part of witnessing how a relationship with bees teaches those very things.  I loved how the different activities dove-tailed so well into one another.  The ‘energy meditation’ of approaching the hive taught me well about respect for boundaries, and the deep purposefulness of their lives.  We can co-exist beautifully as long as I ‘let them bee.’ “

Jean Ogilvie Leadership Development Facilitator and Coach