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Edie,
It’s been a while since I’ve checked your web site but I took time off over the holidays to catch up a bit.  I read the letter from Believer and your comments and Mark’s reply to you and now I feel compelled to forego my post holiday housecleaning chores in order to add some comments of my own.  Rather than addressing the things that were said point by point I would like to offer some more thoughts for my Sisters and Brothers in the Salsa world should they care to consider them.  It won’t be a short reply and it will take me a while to get to make the connections between sex, spirituality and Salsa but I will do my best to be concise. 

I belong to no organized religion and I’m afraid I have a bit of a hard time understanding such things.  I believe there is a big difference between religion and spirituality.  To put it very simply, I regard ‘religion’ as a set of fixed ideas which focus on getting people to think and act in a certain way (which way depends on the flavor of the religion) and it is run by a set of individuals who have some vested interest (usually political and economic) in building large masses of followers.  In contrast to that, I regard spirituality as the connection that we can have with the deepest and most sacred parts of ourselves and with the universal ‘God Force’ (to use Stuart Wilde’s term). 

Personally, I don’t give two figs for ‘religion’ because for me the price for buying into an approved set of dogmatic ideas is to lead me away from, not closer to, my inner connection with the God Force.  That is my perspective and I recognize that many people do not have this difficulty and are perfectly happy with finding that connection through their religion.  Unless we’re in the business of power building by forcing others (through ideological and/or physical threats) into accepting dogmatic authority, I would think it’s safe to say that spiritual growth, that inner connection with the God Force, is a strictly personal matter.  We are each ultimately responsible for our progress or failure in that regard.  We sometimes have to ask big questions about who we are and why we do things and then we make our own decisions based on what we feel is right.  In that sense Edie, I believe that your advice to change churches makes a lot of sense because, from what I gather, Believer feels that Salsa dancing is right for him/her and cannot understand why their church authorities are so fearful of it. 

But I want to go beyond this and put in a good word for sex.  This may come as a bit of a surprise to some but we live in a sex negative society.  Yes, it certainly would appear that sex is all over the place (after all it’s even used for selling everything from cars to carpets) and so some might think that we’re anything but a sex negative society.  But I believe that the exploitative and careless treatment of sex can only occur when we don’t have guilt free access to exploring our own sexuality.  We are generally not allowed to look at it simply for what it is and find out the depths of its beauty and the ways in which it can actually enhance our connection with the God Force. Certain religious and political authorities make a habit of using people’s fear and confusion about sex as a means of gaining ideological control over them.  (Of course sex is not their only weapon - throughout history they have found violence and lies to be of great benefit also.)  My point is that much of the ‘problems’ around sex come from the influence of outside powers which prevent us from making genuine, inner connections with it. 

And the religious basis for our society - i.e. patriarchal religion - provides the means to confuse people about sex because their ideologies are built on the separation of the body and the spirit, of the physical and the divine.  We are told that these two fundamental aspects of ourselves are irreconcilably at odds with each other and this causes no end of problems for us.  There are other spiritual traditions, such as Taoism and Tantra which do not have such a dualism and instead regard sex as a sacrament - an act of worship.  These traditions are tremendously articulate in their sexual understanding and in their ability to harness this incredible loving energy to make the connection with the God Force.  Sex is seen as joyful, creative, respectful, and loving play.  It is  an exchange and a generation of life energy that can be directed towards contacting the higher self - the God Force.  These approaches to sexual articulation and self-realization are also based on a strong focus of pleasure for the woman because the woman is seen as a major connection to the divine.  Granting a woman access to her own sexuality without calling her nasty names or burning her at the stake or flogging her 180 times (check the news from Nigeria today) is quite the reverse of what we are told to believe in our society because this is a sex positive perspective. 

It’s sad that there are so many ways in which we can become injured emotionally in life - especially in relationships with loved ones.  The power of sex is very easy to abuse and many people carry deep scars as a result.  In general, I don’t think that we have the right scripts in our heads for making the connection between sexuality and spirituality.  Men are told over and over again that it is a form of power.  Women are told over and over again that they must yield to this power.  In my opinion this is bullshit!  It leads to a profound degree of damage through both aggression and self-denial and it all too frequently finds an outlet in violent behavior such as rape, war and many other forms of intense, reverse intimacy. 

I grew up as an atheist because at an early age I came to the conclusion that what I heard in church did not make sense to me.  But now I find that I feel compelled to pray to that universal God Force on a daily basis.  At some point in my life I found that it made sense to me to see the God Force as female in essence.  I know that certain religious leaders and their followers will choke on this and will end up saying something like ‘God is not a woman.  He isn’t anything.  He’s just God.’  But my point is this - we’ve had 5000 years of patriarchal rule built on a solid base of patriarchal religion in which the God Force is always referred to as ‘He’ and is always represented as a male.  I don’t think that much of this representation is about the God Force at all.  I think it’s about the dogma and the values that the powers that be would like us to subscribe to -  that man is in control and woman is not.   We are not supposed to know is that for 300,000 to 500,000 years before this (i.e. pre-His-Story) the God Force was seen as female.  It has taken a lot of coercion and even the systematic murder of millions to uproot our ancient foundation of matriarchal spirituality and yet it still shows up (to the horror of certain religious leaders) in activities such as Salsa dancing! 

When I dance Salsa I see the Goddess dancing with me.  I see Her in the joyful celebration of physicality that elates the women and even the men around me at the clubs.  It is entirely sinful.  ‘Sin’ comes from the word ‘sense’.  When we were told that we could only find God by separating our spirits from our bodies, we were also told that any physical, sensory pleasure was somehow ‘evil’ and so the concept of sin became synonymous to that of evil.  Salsa for me is joyful, creative, respectful, and loving play with members of the opposite sex.  As a follower of Tantra I see Salsa as a gift from heaven.  When I dance with a woman, I honor her spirit and I am honored to have that opportunity.  We all know that the Salsero’s prime responsibility on the dance floor is to make the woman look beautiful and, if possible, to maximize her state of ecstasy.  The connection from Salsa to both Goddess worship and Tantra is glaringly obvious to me.  This is how we can dance for God or the Goddess or the God Force or whatever you might call it.  When we approach it from this angle - when we dance to celebrate the beauty of being alive on this earth without yielding to the temptation of ego trips - it is not about vanity or lust or power or all those things that certain ignorant people judge it to be.  It is about bringing badly needed love into our world. 

The God Force is bigger than any church.  It is our integrity that allows us to connect with it. Edie as you say, ‘The most important thing you have is your integrity.’  I agree. 

I wish you all the best for 2001 Edie! 

Lots of luv, 

Micha B