How To Unlearn Harmful Purity Culture Beliefs

This is about Purity Culture and sex, and about the conflict religion creates between spirit and body.

I never did this literally but I did figuratively. I prioritized spiritual concerns over bodily ones.Now, I’ve come to realize that I am not a body with a spirit or a spirit with a body, but that the two are one and inseparable. Like consciousness… that mysterious thing that is both cellular and transcends the cellular. You can’t be conscious without brain cells!

I believe we can’t be body without spirit, nor spirit without body but religion pounded into me that I was either one or the other, or that I should put one above the other.

We were encouraged to deny the flesh.
To punish the body.
To quench passion.
To question pleasure.
To resist desire.
To reject the flesh.
To crucify myself.

In this cartoon, this man is being offered a good time but he can’t even see it, never mind enjoy it, because he is stuck in his head. He is absorbed in the bible and theology and spiritual matters. He thinks he is living above the flesh and its carnal inclinations and on a higher plane of spiritual priorities and sacred concerns.

When in fact he is dis-integrating himself, causing a neurosis… a loss of vital contact with reality.

I’ve learned that getting out of my head and into my body, being present in the moment, here now, with the woman I love, being into our bodies and senses and passions and all of it, is a spiritual and sacred as worship.

Because that union of body and spirit is the highest integration there is.

The thing is, this integration doesn’t need to be created.

It just needs to be recognized.

And enjoyed!

Resources on Purity Culture

5 Ways Puriture Culture Can Affect Your Sex Life
What Is Purity Culture and Why Is It Harmful?