Laughter.
"Laughter is a hidden side of women's sexuality; it is physical, elemental, passionate, vitalizing, and therefore, arousing. It is a kind of sexuality that does not have a goal, as does genital arousal. It is a sexuality of joy, just for the moment, a true sensual love that flies free and lives and dies and lives again on its own energy. It is sacred because it is so healing. It is sensual for it awakens the body and the emotions. It is sexual because it is exciting and causes waves of pleasure. It is not one-dimensional, for laughter is something one shares with oneself as well as with many others. It is a woman's wildest sexuality.
In that sense, sexuality can be fashioned as a medicine for the spirit and is therefore sacred. When sexual laughter is un remedio, medicine, it is sacred laughter. And whatever causes healing laughter is sacred as well. When laughter helps without doing harm, when laughter lightens, realigns, reorders, reasserts power and strength, this is the laughter that causes health. When the laughter makes people glad they are alive, happy to be here, more conscious of love, heightened with eros, when it lifts their sadness and severs them from anger, that is sacred. When they are made bigger, made better, more generous, more sensitive, that is sacred.
In the wild nature, the sacred and the irreverent, the sacred and the sexual, are not separate from one another, but live together like, I suspect, a group of old, old women just waiting down the road for us to drop by. They are there in your psyche, waiting for you to show up, trying out their stories on one another, and laughing like dogs."
-excerpt taken from Women Who Run With the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Kari,
What beautiful pieces you are sharing! Thank you for creating; and also for the excerpts…especially the laughing piece…I will start today much more inspired than before I found these little gems 🙂
Beautifully written. You have such a way with words, it moves me.
Thank Mandi, I didn’t write this laughter piece though. I came from one of my favorite books called Women Who Run With the Wolves. This book changed my life. It should be a required read for every women’s right of passage. I highly recommend it.