Just started reading your Quodoushka book
Subject: Re: just started reading your Quodoushka book
On Jan 9, 2013, at 10:07 PM, Jim Slavsky wrote:
Amara,
I just started the read, and I am already thankful. I too was pretty much left in limbo regarding sexual relations when I was growing up. I got the Catholic doctrine on the matter: don’t do it…you’ll get someone pregnant…it’s a sin to even think about it…oh, and it is also a sin to explore your own body through masturbation. No one was there to guide me through the emotional or physical reactions as I experimented on my own and occasionally with a partner. Emotional and physical sexual development for me was done in the dark with the twisted notion that your sex partner had to be someone you intended to marry. Some sort of mentoring process would have been very beneficial. Actually, I am sure it would still be beneficial since I feel as though I have just barely scratched the surface of my sexual potential. I guess that is why I searched and found Quodoushka.
The first chapter of your book also made me keenly aware of the source of the feelings I have started having of being an insufficient parent for my young teenage children. I would really like to give my kids some guidance other than the rhetoric and limbo I was given at that age, but I haven’t known how to even begin. At the same time I am also realizing from your text that I have already started my children on a solid path through my introducing them to nature and showing them the value of being observant and a good steward.
I am looking forward to learning much more about my sexual and parental potentials.
Thank you,
–jim
Hi Jim,
Thank you very much for sharing this with me.
What you say is so touching, and well written and I think a lot of people would relate to what you are saying.
I meet so may people who like you who not only survive a poor introduction to their sexuality,
they manage to do much better with their own children.
Bravo on you! Our children need parents who accept their sexuality as natural and good. It all begins with us.
In beauty
Amara
The Tenacity of Hope: Quodoushka Meets Massai
Two Massai Women from a small village in Kenya attend a Quodoushka, Spiritual Sexuality Workshop in Phoenix, Arizona
Quodoushka Meets Massai
While every Quodoushka that I have taught has been a remarkably healing experience, once every twenty years or so, something truly extraordinary happens…
I’ll start by explaining how two Massai women from a rural village in Kenya managed to attend a Quodoushka in Phoenix Arizona. In 2007, Annetta Luce, a friend I met during an Australian “Q,” volunteered to go to Africa to work and live with a local family. After returning to the U.S., she was later contacted by Jane, a woman from the same Kenyan village who was now in Philadelphia, seeking asylum to remain in the USA.
Jane is the mother of three children, including a 12-year old daughter, Esther. Like all women in the Massai tribe, Jane was “cut” as a child, near the same age as her own daughter and soon thereafter pledged by her father into an arranged marriage.
I must admit, I had heard about the “cut,” a primitive form of female genital mutilation. I read that it is done by women who, to this day, physically hold down the young girls, cut off their clitorises with a knife and then pour cow’s urine over the open wound. Yes, I knew of this gory insanity, but it seemed like yet another God-awful, far-away, unsolvable problem – that is, until Jane came into my living room.