19 | The Shame Addiction: What the Body Hides (Part 2 of 3)

 

~18 MINS READ

SEXUAL SHAME, GENERATIONAL TRAUMA, AND PSYCHEDELIC HEALING: WHY THE DESIRE YOU HIDE IS NOT THE PROBLEM, HOW CHILDHOOD RITES OF PASSAGE SHAPE OR SHATTER OUR RELATIONSHIP TO THE BODY, WHAT FAMILY CONSTELLATIONS AND EPIGENETIC RESEARCH REVEAL ABOUT INHERITED SEXUAL WOUNDS, HOW SEXUAL POLARITY AND ATTACHMENT PATTERNS SHAPE THE PARTNERS WE CHOOSE, WHAT TAOIST AND TANTRIC TRADITIONS TEACH ABOUT SEXUAL ENERGY AS SACRED CREATIVE FORCE, AND HOW TO BEGIN RECLAIMING WHAT WAS NEVER WRONG.

In Part 1, I wrote about where shame lives in the body and how it operates like an addiction. We didn’t explore what lies beneath shame.

Desire.

Not just sexual desire, although that is the dimension I want to name in this post. Desire in the broadest sense: the wanting to be seen, to be touched, to be known in the body, to be met in the place where you are most alive and most afraid. If you have ever wondered whether psychedelic therapy can help with sexual shame, whether psilocybin-assisted healing can reach the places talk therapy has not, whether the weight you carry about your body, your desire, or your past is something that can actually change, this post is an honest answer from someone who has walked that path.

Sexual shame is the most hidden thing I encounter in my work as a psychedelic guide and integration coach. More hidden than grief. More hidden than combat trauma. More hidden than the childhood wounds people arrive prepared to name. Those are painful, but they are speakable. Sexual shame is the one that sits behind the other ones, waiting, and when it finally surfaces, which usually happens not in the first session but in the fourth or the sixth, the room changes. The confession is almost always preceded by the same sentence: I've never told anyone this. Usually followed by a nervous laugh and the words, "I can't believe I'm saying this out loud."

If that sentence lives in you, this post is for you.

I'm going to share more of my own story here than I've shared anywhere publicly. I do this because sexual shame survives in silence and begins to dissolve in the presence of someone who does not look away. And because the voice that says this part of you is too much, too broken, too dangerous to be seen is not your voice. It was installed. And what was installed can be uninstalled.

Throughout this post, I want you to hold a single question: What would change if the thing you hide was not evidence of your brokenness, but proof that the life force is still moving through you?

Beneath the shame is something you were never supposed to lose access to: your aliveness. Your passion. Your body's native intelligence for pleasure, connection, and creative power. This post is an invitation to reclaim it.

“The wound is where the Light enters you.”
— rumi

The Missing Rite of Passage: How Sexual Shame Gets Installed

In nearly every traditional culture on earth, the transition from childhood to sexual maturity has been marked by ceremony. Elders offered teachings about the body, about desire, about the responsibility that accompanies the life force moving through you. Anthropologist Arnold van Gennep described the universal structure: separation from the old identity, a liminal period of instruction, and reintegration into the community with new understanding. A 2025 study in Discover Global Society found that two out of three American young adults reported having no meaningful rite of passage. In the absence of guided initiation, young people initiate themselves, often with consequences no one helps them process.

What we offer instead is silence. Or worse: theology dressed as biology. I've written elsewhere about my own religious upbringing's role in organizing shame around the body and belief. Here I want to name the broader cultural failure.

Consider the absurdity we normalize. A child can watch a man's head explode in a video game before breakfast. Athletes inflict concussions on each other and the crowd cheers. But a woman breastfeeding in public still makes people uncomfortable. Two men holding hands still draws stares. A couple expressing affection is treated as something to apologize for.

We have built a culture that can tolerate almost unlimited violence but cannot tolerate pleasure. And then we wonder why people carry shame about the most natural force in their bodies. A bare breast gets an R rating. A beheading gets a PG-13. We might want to revisit our priorities.

Family Constellations and the Wound That Went Back Nine Generations

In Part 1, I named the childhood sexual trauma that became the most formative shame experience of my life. Here I want to go deeper into what that wound did to my sexuality across decades, because this is where shame hid longest and cost the most.

The first time I spoke publicly on the topic was in 2009, at a family constellations retreat in Cyprus facilitated by Stephen Victor. In that room, surrounded by strangers who became witnesses, I named what I had never named. And something shifted in the body that no amount of private therapy had been able to reach. The shame didn't disappear. But it stopped being a secret. And a secret that is no longer a secret has lost its primary weapon.

What the field revealed went far deeper than my story. A lineage of sexual trauma stretching back nine generations. That's not a family tree. That's a relay race no one signed up for. The number arrived not through genealogy but through the felt sense of the field, through the bodies of representatives who began to carry weight they couldn't explain, who wept for people they had never met. The constellation showed that I had not simply inherited this wound. At the level of the family soul, I had taken it on. Not as martyrdom. As devotion. To my children. To the generations I will never meet.

In the years since, family members have confirmed what the constellation revealed. My maternal grandmother, a foster child of Lakota ancestry, experienced profound abuse, including sexual abuse. Other relatives have disclosed similar experiences spanning several generations. What was once an intuition held in a room in Cyprus became documented family history. The body knew before the records did.

That experience opened a longer journey of owning my story: therapy, ceremony, relationships brave enough to hold the truth, and community practices where I learned to show up as I actually am, not as the version shame insisted I should be.

“In the realm of hungry ghosts, the weights we carry often belong to someone else.”
— gabor maté [adapted]

How Family Secrecy Perpetuates Generational Sexual Trauma

Sexual shame, like all shame, does not begin with the individual. Rachel Yehuda's epigenetic research shows that trauma alters gene expression across generations. But it also transmits relationally: in what can be spoken and what must remain silent, in what parts of the body are touched with affection and what parts are treated as though they don't exist.

What I have come to understand is that the secrecy itself becomes a second wound. When a family decides the past must never be spoken of, shame doesn't stay contained. It leaks. It distorts. It finds new hosts.

A parent who committed harm in their youth, never given the chance to process it, carries unresolved guilt into middle age. That guilt doesn't produce wisdom. It produces rigidity. When their grandchildren begin to explore, as children do, that exploration triggers the elder's unprocessed material. The grandparent who was once shamed becomes the one who shames. The cycle turns another revolution. Not because anyone intends harm. Because no one ever stopped to face what was underneath.

When trauma goes unprocessed, people who cannot face their own pain will, unconsciously, recreate it. They rewrite history, project the perpetrator role onto others, and build elaborate narratives to avoid the simple admission: I was hurt, and I hurt others, and I don't know how to hold both. Both parties are survivors. Both are carrying wounds they did not choose. And as long as the conversation stays locked in who was wrong, healing cannot enter the room.

This is why I speak publicly. Not to expose anyone. But because when one family breaks the silence, it creates permission for others to begin the conversation they have been avoiding for decades. When you hear someone name what you have been unable to name, something loosens. Not because their story is your story. But because their willingness to be seen reminds you that being seen is survivable.

Sexual Polarity, Attraction, and the Partners We Choose

When two people come together as a couple, they bring the unresolved sexual material of their parents and their parents' parents. Gabor Maté describes this with devastating clarity: we don't choose our partners despite our childhood wounds. We choose them because of them.

This is why the magnet can flip. The very quality that drew you in, their intensity, their unavailability, their capacity to make you feel needed, eventually becomes the thing that repels. This is not dysfunction. It is the oldest pattern in nature.

Look anywhere, and you will find this rhythm. In physics, attraction and repulsion are phases of the same force. The Taoist yin and yang depict one thing in motion, each pole containing the seed of the other. Prairie voles bond through oxytocin surges during mating, and separation from a bonded partner triggers the same neural withdrawal patterns as drug addiction. Even DNA is held together by complementary base pairs that attract precisely because they are different.

David Deida, whose work on sexual polarity has shaped my understanding of this dance, describes the dynamic plainly: when the polarity between masculine and feminine energy diminishes, attraction diminishes. When it disappears, the relationship dies. This is not a prescription for rigid gender roles. It is an observation about energy. Every person contains both poles. The question is whether we are conscious enough of the dance to participate in it, rather than being danced by it. Esther Perel explores this same paradox from the clinical side in Mating in Captivity: desire requires separateness, mystery, and a willingness to risk, while love asks for safety, closeness, and predictability. The tension between these two needs is not a problem to solve. It is a polarity to navigate.

I have done couples coaching with Kathlyn & Gay Hendricks, and their body-centered approach to what they call "co-commitment" has fundamentally changed how I understand relational honesty. I have also contributed my methodology and learnings from working with couples in psychedelic settings to the MAPS couples therapy practitioner study, which is an important resource I point people toward.

How My Patterns with Intimacy, Substances, and Numbing Played Out

In my case, I kept choosing deeply wounded women who carried unresolved pain toward men, partners whose resentment of the masculine mirrored something I already believed about myself. I don't say this to blame anyone. They were carrying their own generational material. And I chose them because the shape was familiar. I wanted closeness and expected it to wound me, a pattern I now recognize as disorganized attachment, the nervous system that reaches for connection with one hand and braces for impact with the other. They wanted provision and protection, but could only get so close before their own walls went up.

At our best, there were real moments of secure attachment, two nervous systems actually resting in each other's presence. Those moments were real. They just weren't the whole of it. What I've learned is that attachment is not a fixed identity. It shifts with safety, with season, with how much each person is willing to face. Naming my own disorganized pattern was the beginning of changing it. The work is not arriving at a secure permanent address. It is noticing which pattern is running and choosing to move toward honesty instead of away from it.

A pattern emerged: long stretches of monogamy, followed by periods of exploring polyamory and multiple partners. I name this with honesty, not shame. At different seasons, I was trying different things with the same underlying question: Is it safe to be fully known?

I want to challenge something here that I think compounds sexual shame in our culture: the belief that a long-term relationship is the ultimate measure of relational success. I've come to understand that just as clothes no longer fit after a season of growth, some relationships are meant to walk with us for a chapter, not a lifetime. That is not failure. That is honesty. Some of the most meaningful, transformative experiences of my life were fleeting. A connection that lasted days or months taught me more about surrender than a decade of trying to make something work that had already ended in the body. I am grateful for every one of those connections. The radical act is not permanence. It is presence.

I once proposed to a partner on MDMA at a festival. The morning after should have been the first clue. (If you are considering a major life decision while your serotonin is doing a victory lap around your prefrontal cortex, I lovingly suggest… wait!) Research published in Nature confirmed what my body already knew: MDMA reopens critical periods for social bonding. Two people sharing a medicine experience can form attachment bonds that the rational brain did not fully consent to, and the nervous system cannot easily undo.

When intimacy with a partner became unavailable, pornography became the channel for energy that had nowhere else to go. The cycle was predictable: disconnection, resentment, screen, shame, deeper disconnection. Rinse, repeat, delete browser history, wonder why you feel worse. What confused me for years was that neither a partner's acceptance nor their rejection addressed the root. The root was a twelve-year-old boy who was never taught that the energy moving through him was not dangerous. It was life.

Recovery is never linear. Like peeling layers of an onion, each round went deeper.

What changed was not the elimination of desire, but the relationship to it. I learned to notice when the energy was moving, to pause, and to ask: what does this actually need right now?

But I want to be honest about what that pause actually requires. It is the step most people skip, and the critical one before redirection comes recognition. Not recognition as a concept, but as a felt experience: sitting with the energy long enough to stop being afraid of it. To stop bracing against it or immediately reaching for an outlet. This is here. I notice this feeling is alive in me.

That moment of honest acknowledgment, without judgment and without rushing toward resolution, is where the work actually begins. Only once the energy has been met with active unjudgemental awareness can it be redirected.

Sometimes what it needs is movement, creativity, a long walk, something that lets the life force flow without forcing it underground. The practice is not suppression. It is not a distraction either. It is a conscious presence with what is moving. And from that presence, choice becomes possible in a way it simply wasn't before.

That shift, from unconscious reaction to conscious choice, is where the shame loses its grip.

“When eros is denied its sacred context, it does not disappear...it descends into compulsion.”
— John Maxwell Taylor, Eros Ascending: The Life-Transforming Power of Sacred Sexuality

What I See in the People I Serve

In my work as a psychedelic guide and integration coach, sexual shame surfaces in forms that surprise people with their ordinariness. That is the nature of what the body hides: it rarely looks like what we expect. A man carrying thirty years of terror that a childhood experience with another boy means something definitive about his orientation. A woman who has never spoken her deepest fantasy aloud. A father who feels nothing during sex with the partner he loves, and he doesn't understand why. A survivor who dissociates at the moment of closeness, leaving their body precisely when intimacy asks them to stay in it. Each of them walked in carrying something they had never said out loud.

Sometimes what's hidden arrives as the opposite of what people expect. Not shutdown, but compulsion, a driven quality to sexual behavior that has nothing to do with pleasure and everything to do with regulating an unbearable internal state. Sometimes it shows up as rigid control, because spontaneity feels too close to the chaos of the original wound. And sometimes it surfaces as quiet, persistent numbness, the person who has simply stopped wanting and mistaken that absence for peace. The body hides what the mind cannot face, and it hides it well, until something, a ceremony, a relationship, a crisis, finally shakes it loose.

I hold particular respect for anyone who chooses to explore the wide spectrum of ways of relating, whether that means coming out as gay, bisexual, or trans, opening a marriage to ethical non-monogamy, practicing polyamory, exploring kinks or BDSM as a conscious practice, choosing celibacy as a devotional path, or simply refusing to perform a version of desire that doesn't belong to them. These are the sexual innovators. While the rest of the culture debates who is allowed to love whom, they are already living the answer.

When bisexual expression emerges in my work, for example, it often carries a particular quality of relief, as though the client is finally allowed to exist on a spectrum rather than at a pole. Rigidity is shame's architecture. Flexibility is the architecture of healing. The people willing to be honest about how they actually desire, not how they were told to desire, are not the ones with the problem. They are the ones showing the rest of us what freedom costs and what it looks like when someone decides to pay it.

I see how unresolved sexual trauma shapes honesty in every direction. The partner who cannot ask for what they want because the last time they were truthful about desire, it was used against them. Clients who project their shadow onto public figures, the politician they despise with unusual intensity, because the traits they cannot own in themselves must be annihilated in someone else. This connects to the deeper process I wrote about in Stop Trying to Forgive: real forgiveness is less about excusing and more about releasing what the body has been gripping for years.

Underneath every variation is the same longing: to be seen without being made wrong. To be honest without losing belonging. The body hides what it does not trust the world to hold. The work is building a world, starting with one room, where the body can finally stop hiding.

Sexual Energy as Sacred Force: Taoism, Tantra, and What the Traditions Teach

I want to speak directly to what sexuality actually is, beneath the shame, because I think we have forgotten.

Sexuality is the creative force. The same energy that drives the seed to break through soil, the same impulse that moves a painter's hand. In 2010, I began training with Mantak Chia in London, a Taoist master who has spent decades teaching what the ancient lineages always knew: that sexual energy, jing, is the foundational life force. When cultivated rather than squandered, it transforms into chi (vital energy) and shen (spiritual energy), becoming fuel for creativity, vitality, and awakening. His bestselling works, “Taoist Secrets of Love” and “The Multi-Orgasmic Man,” were among the first to bring these practices to Western audiences. Training with Chia was the beginning of understanding that the energy I had spent decades shaming was not a problem to manage. It was a resource to cultivate.

Deida's Finding God Through Sex extended this into the relational dimension: the erotic encounter, fully entered, is not separate from the spiritual encounter. It is the spiritual encounter in its most embodied form. John Maxwell Taylor's Eros Ascending explores this same territory, analyzing how sexual dysfunction arises when the sacred context of eros is stripped away, and teaching how to convert sexual energy into spiritual development through Taoist techniques.

The experience of connecting with another person in full presence, of dissolving the boundary between self and other, is one of the most beautiful things available in the human experience. The thrill of the dance. The belonging. The coming home in another's body. Or actually creating little humans, which has been the most meaningful experience of my life.

Shame tries to make sexuality small. Sexuality is not small. It is enormous. It is the force that creates life itself. I invite you to consider: what if your pleasure is not a distraction from your spiritual life but a doorway into it? What if the desire you have been managing, hiding, controlling, apologizing for, is the very energy that connects you most deeply to yourself and to the world?

Some of my most impactful ceremony experiences have involved intensely erotic visions mixed with death, images of simultaneous creation and destruction. My guide suggested that what I was experiencing was creative energy attempting to move through me, and that the distortion arose from years of that energy being blocked by shame. When the dam breaks, the water doesn't come out clean. It comes out with everything trapped behind it. He was right. The creative energy I carried back became the seed of a new venture. The erotic force, freed from shame, became generative in the broadest sense.

“Sexual energy is the creative energy of the universe. When you learn to cultivate it, it becomes the power that heals and transforms you.”
— Mantak Chia

The Body Reclaimed: What ISTA and Somatic Practice Taught Me

I attended the Spiritual Sexual Shamanic Experience with the International School of Temple Arts (ISTA) in Nicaragua. ISTA is an imperfect institution. Like many organizations working at the intersection of sexuality and power, it has faced legitimate criticism about boundary violations. I name it because it was one of the most transformative weeks of my life, and honest reckoning with imperfect containers is part of the work.

Imagine standing in a room with thirty strangers. No clothes. No script. Someone asks you to speak, out loud, the desire you have never admitted to another person. Then the fear underneath it. Then the shame underneath that. And the room does not flinch.

Over seven days we danced for hours, not choreography but raw emotive release, letting the body shake loose whatever it had been gripping. We screamed. We wept in strangers' arms. We practiced speaking desire and hearing it received without judgment. We sat in pairs and truly listened, without fixing, just witnessing another person be real. We explored the masculine and feminine polarities within ourselves as felt experience, discovering that the parts we had exiled were not enemies but lost members of the family, waiting to be invited home.

I remember standing before the group, exposed in every sense. And then a quieter voice: Why am I ashamed of this body? This body that has carried me through combat, through ceremony, through the birth of my children. Something cracked open. I began to love the unique belly I'd been holding in. The scars I'd been narrating as failures. The hunger I'd been editing to make presentable.

I felt particular reverence for the embodied leadership of Niten Dhyan and Usha Rose, two core faculty whose polarity as facilitators held the container with a rare balance of fierce clarity and tender permission. Watching them work together was itself a teaching in how masculine and feminine energy can serve a room without collapsing into each other. The training describes itself as providing the education we should have received as children around our bodies, emotions, and relationships. That landed as true. It was the rite of passage I never had, arriving thirty years late and exactly on time. I intend to return and continue deepening into what that week opened.

Guide-Client Boundaries: Protecting Sacred Space in Psychedelic Ceremony

The territory of sexuality and ceremony is where the most harm has been done in this field, so I need to speak about boundaries clearly. If you're evaluating who to trust with this work, I've written a comprehensive guide in Choosing a Psychedelic Guide.

In my practice, the conversation about sexuality happens before a single milligram of psilocybin is consumed, because naming it in advance changes the entire container. When erotic energy surfaces, the guide's role is to normalize it and return ownership to the client: This is your aliveness. We are working on your healing. If you want to understand what that looks like in practice, my Ceremony Readiness Guide covers it in full.

I name all of this because guides who have crossed lines with vulnerable clients have violated it, causing deep harm and damaging trust in the broader community. The safety of this work depends on the integrity of the people doing it.

“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
— Carl Jung

Where I Am Now: Conscious Abstinence, Integration, and What Was Built

I am in a season of conscious abstinence. After a painful separation, I chose to go inward. Not as punishment. As conservation. I have learned that I take on the energy of those I engage with sexually, and I don't wish to carry energy that isn't mine right now. My body is learning a different language: You are enough without someone else's body confirming it.

I want to be clear: this story is not about what went wrong. It is about owning the full story and what was built. The capacity to sit with another person's deepest shame without flinching did not come from reading about it. It came from living it. The relationships that ended still gave me things I carry forward: how to love without conditions, how to stay present in conflict, how to tell the truth even when it costs everything. Healing is not only about metabolizing pain. It is about recognizing the strength that grew in the same soil.

I exercise. I dance. I walk in nature. I meditate, sometimes pulling energy up my spine through the microcosmic orbit I first learned from Mantak Chia, channeling jing into chi. I commune with something I can only call God, not the punishing God of my childhood, but the presence I see in all things. I remain open to future partnership, from a different place. Not the hungry ghost who needs another body to feel real. Though the hungry ghost still has opinions. I just don't let him make dinner reservations anymore.

What I'm learning, slowly, is to ask a different question, not who will confirm I am enough, but what is the life force in me trying to move toward? That question doesn't have an answer yet. That's what Part 3 is for.

How to Begin Healing Sexual Shame

  1. Name the specific thing. Not "I have some shame around sex." The actual memory, desire, or pattern. To one person you trust. Specificity shrinks the territory shame controls.

  2. Feel it in the body. Sexual shame almost always lives in the belly, the throat, or the pelvic floor. The bracing is not weakness. It is information.

  3. Question the origin. Whose voice is this? Most sexual shame is inherited. When you can see the installation, it loosens its grip.

  4. Find a container. A therapist, a group, a community where the body is welcome. Sexual shame cannot heal in isolation. It needs witnesses who do not look away.

Remember the question I asked at the beginning: What would change if the thing you hide was not evidence of your brokenness, but proof that the life force is still moving through you? Sit with that. Let your body answer. And when shame loosens its grip, notice what's underneath. Not emptiness. Not danger. Passion. Aliveness. The body's own intelligence reaching toward connection. That was always there. Shame just convinced you it wasn't safe to feel it. Choose your pleasure. It was never the problem. It is the pathway home.

If this post may support someone you know, I'll be grateful if you share it. Because somewhere, right now, a family is sitting around a table with a silence between them that everyone can feel and no one will name. And sometimes all it takes to break that silence is the knowledge that someone else went first.

My deepest wish for this writing is not that you agree with it. It is that something in it opens a door you have been standing in front of for a long time. A door to more honesty in your life. More realness in your family. More willingness to face what has been hidden, not with judgment, but with the kind of fierce, humble care that says: We deserve better than secrecy. Our children deserve better to flourish. And we can start now.

In Part 3, I'll share what I've learned about how shame actually heals. Not through insight. Not through understanding why. Through something the nervous system has to experience to believe. If this post named the wound, the next one maps the way through. And it starts in a place most people don't expect.

From my Heart to yours,

Yeshua Adonai

Psychedelic Guide

aboutyeshua.com

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Yeshua is a traveling psychedelic guide currently based in Phoenix, Arizona. USMC combat veteran, former diplomat, and serial social entrepreneur devoted to mental health innovation, he has spent decades exploring contemplative traditions worldwide and learning to trust his own experience along the way.

Frequently Asked Questions

  • Because it is culturally manufactured. Most societies treat the body as suspect and desire as something to manage. Add the near-total absence of meaningful rites of passage, correction rather than education about sexuality, and epigenetic evidence that trauma transmits across generations, and you have a population of adults carrying shame about the most natural energy in their bodies.

  • They can create conditions where the body experiences itself without judgment. But the psychedelic experience alone is not the healing. Integration is. Without a skilled guide, a clear container, and explicit conversations about boundaries beforehand, psychedelic work with sexual material can retraumatize rather than heal. Part 3 of this series will explore this in depth.

  • It often installs a core belief that the child's nature is fundamentally wrong, organizing the nervous system around shame and shaping partner selection and intimacy patterns for decades. Gabor Maté's work on partner selection illuminates how we unconsciously choose relationships that confirm the original wound.

  • Someone who names sexuality directly in preparation, discusses touch boundaries before any substance is consumed, normalizes the possibility that erotic energy may arise, and maintains absolute boundaries. Ask about trauma-informed training and ongoing supervision.

  • Yes. Sexual energy is life force energy. When defenses soften, the full spectrum of human energy surfaces. A prepared guide normalizes this beforehand, holds clear boundaries during, and supports integration afterward.

  • Profoundly. MDMA triggers oxytocin release, the same system governing mother-infant bonding. Research in Nature showed MDMA reopens critical-period learning for social bonding. You can form attachment-level bonds your conscious mind did not fully choose. My recommendation: wait at least a year of committed relationship before shared ceremony. If you are interested in exploring MDMA-assisted couples therapy with trained clinicians, the MAPS couples therapy practitioner study is an important resource.

  • The cycle of disconnection, numbing, shame, and deeper disconnection is one of the most common patterns I encounter. What breaks it is not willpower but understanding: the behavior was the body's best available answer to a pain it had no other language for. Recovery is rarely linear. It spirals, each round confronting an older layer of the wound. The practice is developing a compassionate observer who can witness the pattern without collapsing into the belief that the pattern is the whole of who you are.

  • I recommend: Mantak Chia'sTaoist Secrets of Love for sexual energy cultivation, David Deida'sThe Way of the Superior Man and Finding God Through Sex for polarity and sacred sexuality, Esther Perel's Mating in Captivity for the paradox of desire in committed relationships, Gay and Kathlyn Hendricks' Conscious Loving for body-centered relationship transformation, John Maxwell Taylor's Eros Ascending for converting sexual energy into spiritual development, and Gabor Maté's In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts for understanding compulsion and the wounds underneath it. For those interested in couples work with psychedelics, the MAPS practitioner study is actively exploring this frontier.

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