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We have a problem in the world right now, and it’s not getting any better. We have a strong spiritual and religious bias against nudity, porn and masturbation. A friend forwarded a blog by a popular yoga teacher about the “dark side” of masturbation.

“Spiritually, when you are being selfish — in other words, about “me” — you are in a state of fear, contraction, reaction, shrinkage (no pun), and judgment. Let’s call this state “Darkness.” One well-known way to leave this state of Darkness is to shift your attention to giving, sharing, and pro-action, and to be for and about others. Let’s call this “Light.””

I say let’s call this state “idioitic.” As I have mentioned many times in blogs past, we have all been infected by an incorrect idea: that life is a battle of good over evil, light over dark.

Let me explain. Our ancestors, the professional shaman, witch doctors and priests living in pre-electric times, literally believed that life was a battle of light versus dark. To them, daylight fought nighttime everyday. This daily physical reality of our ancestors eventually translated into a metaphor: the fight of good over evil. Daylight became God, The Light, The Son, and night became Evil, The Darkness, The Devil. For hundreds of thousands of years, night (symbolically described as evil and darkness) brought bad to our ancestors’ lives.

Here’s the point: the whole idea of the battle of good over evil is just a metaphor for day and night. Yet this frame has stuck in this modern day of electricity and night light. So here comes this spiritual yoga teacher (I’m purposely NOT linking to the original blog) claiming masturbation is darkness. Is this any different than the Catholic church who has been saying the exact same thing for thousands of years?

It’s our belief that solo sex is “dark” that is creating guilt, shame, and suffering around solo pleasure. Whereas, yoga is a relatively new fad, Catholicism is not. Making solo sex “evil” hasn’t been working for the Pope nor his priests. In case and point, last week Milwaukee’s Archdiocese confirmed that they paid-off pedophile priests to leave the church because suppression and denial wasn’t working.

Yep, that’s the church’s brilliant solution: pay pedophiles and put them back on the streets!

I don’t know about you, but I will happily take porn pleasuring priests over sexually repressed pedophile ex-priests walking around my neighborhood anyday. In fact, please let priests jerk off to porn.

Both church and yogi make the mistake of thinking that porn is the problem - like blaming rats for causing trash. Porn exists because we want porn–and that has to do with the deliciousness of sex and our desire to see the beauty of naked people. Seeing new nakedness releases dopamine – and dopamine feels great!

Honestly, if we weren’t so sexually repressed to begin with, if we weren’t so moralized about nakedness, sex, and self pleasure, if everybody could freely walk naked down the street anytime, anywhere, the need for “porn” would diminish because nakedness would be normal, natural and right–which it actually is.

The people who have a problem with porn, like the yogi, are the people who have a problem being open and vulnerable about their own impulses and inner “dark” desires when it comes to what they really want and desire.

Suppression and repression are what make self pleasure “feel” dark, not self pleasure itself. If anything, we need to self pleasure even more. How else are we going to learn how to feel orgasmically good? Through downward dog? Meditation? Prayer?

If you are going to meditate on anything at the end of yoga class, try meditating on self pleasure; that will surely send a message to sexually repressed yoga teachers everywhere to stop trying to control our genitals and our pleasure. The Catholic Church has already proven unequivocally that suppression doesn’t work.