How I found my way
to this work.
A rosary, a vision, a body remembering itself — and the long path toward ecstasy as inheritance.
A few years ago I began a rosary practice out of curiosity, following the advice of the first ancestral magic course I ever took — to pick up a practice that my ancestors would have done and notice what shifted in my life. Being of white European descent, many of my ancestors were practicing Catholics. My lines resonate with the echoes of “Hail Mary…”
So I started to pray the rosary, and the prayers felt good in my body. Even though I found them quite challenging — calling myself a sinner, saying ‘god’ in a reverential way — I felt good when I did it.
When I had the prayers memorized to the point that they fell out of my mouth in a rhythm that put me into a deeper state, I had a vision of the Blessed Virgin Mary undressing in front of me, wild curly hair coming out from under her veil and a beautiful, seductive, inviting air about her. I sat there praying the rosary fantasizing about having sex with this spirit.
I followed my curiosity further into learning about other Catholic practices and reading other prayers, holding the aliveness, warmth, and erotic energy that I felt in my body when I prayed the rosary and hoping to find more of that. I came up against texts and prayers and language that were full of shame around the erotic or sex or pleasure, not matching up with my own experience.
Denied access to scriptural and philosophical study, these women instead sought direct communion with God through their own bodies — via meditation, prayer, and extreme asceticism. It was clear from their prayers that these saints were feeling what I felt when I prayed the rosary.
Photo by Yona Appletree — photomancer.art
The ecstatic female mystics — and a novena.
This held true until I came across a group of saints referred to as the ecstatic female mystics via a chapbook by Vanessa Irena, “Ecstasy: A Devotional Guide to the Female Mystics”. Denied access to scriptural and philosophical study, these women instead sought direct communion with God through their own bodies. It was clear from their prayers that these saints were feeling what I felt when I prayed the rosary.
I also followed the Catholic practice of a novena — 9 days of prayer toward a specific request — asking to learn more about the history of practices of those who worked with sex in a healing capacity. This led me to enrolling in the Institute for the Study of Somatic Sex Education, where I worked through my own shame, accessed more feeling and pleasure in my body, and was introduced to Mindful Erotic Practice.
In conjunction with the SSE program I took a “Sorcerous Lineage & Magical Fortitude Course” with Reverend Janglebones where I elevated my four ancestral lines with ritual prayer. Taking this course alongside the SSE coursework sparked a connection: my body is my ancestors. I felt the shifts in my life from these prayers because they happened in my body.
my body is my ancestors — the joy, pleasure, strength, and vitality that we cultivate in this lifetime will go on to feed the children of tomorrow.
The saints, the lineage, and the liturgy.
I spent a year co-hosting a monthly journeying group to meet the ecstatic female mystics from Vanessa’s chapbook and a few others. Through this year it became clear to me how important coming into a different relationship with sexuality in the context of Christian theology was for my ancestors and myself — to step into our fullest capacities for pleasure.
I learned from these saints that a religion which deems the body sinful, a prison, an imperfect expression of something else — a religion that was the tool of colonization and Empire, and dammed and degraded so many — was wrong. Not only wrong, but wrong from inside of itself, via the experiences of these women who prayed with their whole bodies to the same god and found themselves met with the force of erotic love that powers the entire universe.
My practice with these saints is why the offering prayer of the ancestral healing ritual has a liturgical feel to it — “bread and wine, flesh and blood, this body that descends from you.”
from Prayers for the AncestorsIf you’d like to read more about this practice, me and my co-host Jesse wrote an essay about our experiences: Fire Of Love.
From this practice with these saints the first draft of the prayer for this ritual came through. I began to open my mindful erotic practices with this prayer — and I noticed a shift in my life similar to the shifts when I elevated my lines during the ancestral healing course.
Photo by Yona Appletree — photomancer.art
Ten years, a body, and a rope.
My own practices with this prayer in Mindful Erotic Practice and with ancestral elevation work brought me through an eating disorder that I had been trying to find my way through for 10 years — to a place of genuine safety, security, and ecstatic joy at being in my body. A true adoration for the beauty of my body. A true enjoyment of touching my own body, of sinking into the moments of pleasure.
This work also led me to the courage to begin a self-suspension rope bondage practice that I’d had a longing curiosity to explore for years. Not only the courage to begin the practice, but the courage to perform self-suspensions for the public once a month for two and a half years. To share moments of my body’s ecstatic bliss not just with myself, not just with close partners or friends, but strangers.
So many moments of surrendering to the pleasure of being alive.
So I figured — if it worked for me…
Maybe it would work for other people too.
That’s the dream — that we all remember how to live in a world of ecstasy together. It is my hope that my work helps bring us there.
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