God and Sex: the two most powerful and misunderstood words in the English language. New book from Mark Whitwell, with Rosalind Atkinson and Andrew Raba.
Listen to the ‘God and Sex: Now We Get Both’ playlist on Apple Music or Spotify
The presumed separation between God and Sex has vulgarized both and made them painful, anxiety-inducing, and useless to our lives.
Lucid, radical, and gentle, this long-awaited book clarifies the old cultural division of the sacred and the profane and how it has affected all of our lives, whether we are religious or no, and charts a way through the mess.
At gatherings around the world, Mark breaks down these inherited divisions with great humour, kindness and depth of presence, opening tens of thousands of hearts to the beauty that they already are.
What if I were to tell you that you can fully participate in both God and Sex? By bringing them together into clear association, each purifies the other, and both can be made profoundly useful to your life. Life is Sex. The pollen in the air is the Sex of plants. The flowers and the sounds of animals are the Sex of nature. No matter how convoluted the human mind becomes, we are still this condition. We do not need to ‘become’ anything in order to have a free and healthy life. There is nothing to be liberated from.
This book is for any sincere religious person conflicted about Sex, and any secular modern person trying to find a positive and enriched sexuality. It’s for anyone who thinks they have to give up Sex to get to God, and anyone who thinks they have to give up God in order to enjoy Sex. It is for both men and women, for those in same-sex or opposite-sex partnerships, for those looking for partnership, and for those happily by themselves. It is for anyone wondering "What is intimacy?" and wanting a framework to understand the damage done to our lives by the belief systems that suggested God was above and Sex was below. It’s for anyone dissatisfied or bored by relationship drama and the normal definitions of God and Sex—God as ‘other,’ Sex as something sleazy, effortful, hard to get, or fundamentally disappointing. It is for those who wish to turn their sexual life into the heart’s activity, participation in God, and for those who wish to turn their religious life into the heart’s activity, participation in profound intimacy with their breath, their body, and relationship of every kind.
We have all been affected by the dysfunctional separation of sacred and profane. This writing is transmission that will dismiss the absurd idea that you can have God or Sex, but not both, and enable you to realise that you are, in fact, the power of the cosmos, arising as pure intelligence and utter beauty.
Chapters include, 'The Hoax of Enlightenment,' 'The Heart's Embrace of Ordinary Conditions,' and 'Regenerative Sexuality.'
picture by Dean raphael
The Story of the Book:
Mark has been wanting to write this book for years — the title had become a kind of joke in classes around the world, eliciting a laugh from some and shocked silence from a few others. A joke, but a serious joke, as the division of sacred and profane that the book addresses IS what has led so many people to scorn and disregard themselves and other people. It is THE question of yoga—our natural state of union, and what culture has done to the mind that causes it to deny this and imagine separation.
Mark met co-author Rosalind, who was working as a freelance editor at the time, after she read ‘Yoga of Heart’ and contacted him in order to express her enjoyment of it and desire to work on a new project. People had wanted to help over the years, but been unable to do anything without a draft to work with. Progress really began only when writer and activist Andrew Raba came on board—Rosalind and Andrew met while she completed a Master’s in English Literature in William Blake, while he was focused on post-graduate research into 20th-century science fiction author Phillip K. Dick and the radical situationist movements of Paris in the 1960s. Andrew had recognised that the practice Mark was sharing helped people actualise their activist ideals, and he and Rosalind went back through Mark’s writings over the years and grouped the text into loose chapters. From here, a bare bones of the book was born. Mark worked back into this skeleton while travelling and teaching, weaving in the pressing concerns of universal relevance from China to California, Slovenia to Switzerland, Fiji to Frankfurt. The text was percolated back and forth between all three until it felt complete. Andy and Rosalind lent their literary and editorial backgrounds to Mark’s timeless message, in a collaboration of friends.
They are now collaborating on a new book, due in 2022.