This may be the most difficult and challenging post for me so far. Finally, I finished reading this thread and “Seven Night’s in a Rouge’s Bed”, which I began last August. It has taken me so long to accomplish this due to selling my house, packing, moving, and unpacking, plus I am a slower reader. However, what made this so challenging for me is the fact that I never would have dreamed of reading such a “woman’s” novel due to me not just being a man, but also being a gay man. But after reading the reactions/comments of Laura and other readers, I decided to take the risk of exploring unknown territory and began listening to the audio version of “Seven Nights”.
During the same time, I was also reading other books: “Accessing the Healing Power of the Vagus Nerve”, “The Narcissistic Family”, and Gabor Mate’s “In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts”. I then started reading a book referenced by Mate, “Healing the Shame that Binds You” by John Bradshaw. All these books are helping me, intellectually, to realize how my personality was wounded and how the resulting self-defense mechanism of the false self was created.
After hearing Laura’s recommendation in the FOTCM Winter Solstice meeting to really participate in the romance novel project, I felt I had to finish reading “Seven Nights”. So, on Christmas day, I started reading and began relating more to Jonas as being a wounded child hiding behind a non-emotional personality which Sidone could see:
“Even more as she knew that the boy’s generous, affectionate spirit still lived inside him, much as he struggled against acknowledging its existence.”
I certainly identified with Jonas here:
“Shame lay at the basis of so many of Jonas’s actions. Shame made him stand alone against the world. Shame made him reject any hand of friendship. He’d interpret kindness or goodwill as a sign of condescension. However logical it was, she understood why he considered his scars relics of humiliating defeat at his cousin’s hands. Jonas’s pride had helped him survive in a hostile world but it hadn’t made life easier for him. “Even your father abandoned you.”
I also felt anger at Jonas for how he turned Sidone away from his jail cell then forced her to marry him in her weakened state.
After finishing, I too, could see and relate to the process of both characters hiding, discovering, and living from their true selves.
But this raises a question which I hesitate to ask to due my programs of shame and fear of rejection. Since the purpose of the sex scenes is to stir up the energies of the sexual center and bring them upward to help release forgotten or buried emotions, it seems to be an important part of this process.
My sexuality has always been a sensitive issue for me due to events in my early childhood imprinting period and expectations from family, society, religion, and even my career. While other readers felt a “stirring” or arousal during the sex scenes, I at first felt an aversion, but then I decided to just read through them with a kind of distancing while focusing more on the character development and psychological dynamics in the novel.
So with that background context, my question is: “In order to stir up the energies of my sexual center, would it be helpful for me to read gay romance novels?” I did some researching and there are several historical, even regency, themed gay romance novels. But like some of the traditional romance novels, I am sure some are verbal porn and not in alignment with the process we are discovering here.
However, I can also imagine that this process of uncovering the wounded false self and living from a true self would have been even more challenging in historical times such as the regency. There must have been some honest homosexual relationships but certainly not in public. Which leads to my concern about falling into false imagination/dreams that these gay novels are just re-written to please today’s post-modern standards, whereas the romance novels in our list are more reality-based.
I hope I am not tainting what is the natural and traditional idea of romance, especially historical. The idea of love is universal and higher than physicality which is the ideal we all strive for and are learning about through this project. If, as it seems, sexual energies play a part in this discovery and process, I feel like my physical machine because of its wiring due to imprinting is an extra challenge in this area. I know my sexual orientation does not make me special and I do not consider it my primary identity but like all of us, a part of our humanity in this lifetime.
Humbly and courageously requesting feedback from the network mirror.
I hope it helpes. Also: 
I haven't read your comments before I posted.
