Accumulated stress makes your physical body vulnerable to bacteria, viruses, and infections. It also makes us susceptible to mental health issues. To get back into the body and reconnect your energy circuitry, you need to learn pragmatic practices of relaxing and allowing the energy in the situation to move you emotionally or physically.
In long-term relationships, we tend to focus on our partner’s limitations or the restrictions they impose on us rather than helping them heal or break free from them.
Intimate attraction isn’t rational; the desires of our bodies are formed over thousands of years, extending back to our most distant ancestors.
How can you navigate divorce gracefully and with compassion – for yourself and all those affected – so that you’re free from regret and self-recrimination?
There’s a tricky relationship with time that we experience when we are lost in thought or the swirling hyperlinked pages within cyberspace. Time can race, it can slow, and it can stop altogether. But curiously, this experience collapses into the present moment as soon as we experience touch.
Accumulated stress makes your physical body vulnerable to bacteria, viruses, and infections. It also makes us susceptible to mental health issues. To get back into the body and reconnect your energy circuitry, you need to learn pragmatic practices of relaxing and allowing the energy in the situation to move you emotionally or physically.
There’s a profoundly subtle distortion produced when we bring the past into the present moment, or when we project into the future from our past experiences.
This is something normal that all humans do, but as soon as we do it, we’ve disconnected from the present moment which is always unknown. We’ve lulled ourselves into believing we understand something mentally—which we do not. It’s in this act of disconnection and retreat into thinking that we cause our greatest heart suffering.
Look into a mirror, or look within. How do you see yourself?
Most of us feel a sense of disappointment when we notice the imperfections in our bodies and the quirks of our psyche. We often feel as though we are secondary characters in others’ worlds, that we are not good enough to be the heroes and heroines we yearn for in the world around us.
We are living our lives cautiously from the sidelines.
Most of us compare ourselves to fictional ideas of what great relationships look like. For example, reality shows portray elements of relationships that can stimulate FOMO. Once this anxiety is stirred, and we base relationship goals on fears of missing out on something we believe others are getting, we can become like an addict perpetually chasing a high.
This is not a conscious decision; it stems from a lack of strong role models or healthy communities from which we can learn our true untapped potential within intimacy.
When we make comparisons, our inner motivation for intimacy arises – primarily out of FOMO. This fear of missing out is a disconnection and a sense of moving away from our center.
It's a wonderful thing to have a high libido. The best way to stay active your whole life is to appreciate and keep adding fuel to this erotic fire within you.
The problem is, we are only feeding it kindling continually instead of putting a big hefty oak log on it and allowing the massive coals and embers to build so you can stay up all night, warm with the lingering heat.
We’re missing out on something in our sexual lives–we don’t realize what that fire can be fanned into if we nourish it properly.
It can go places much deeper and longer-lasting than we’ve ever experienced before.
When your mind thinks you understand something, you skip over the details and jump to the next thing in awareness.
Around people that we have spent a lot of time with, we like to think that we know them. However, you never fully know your intimate partner.
Keeping a relationship connection alive requires a moment-to-moment practice of seeing them like it was your first date. If you actually think you fully understand them and know who they are, then you are limiting them to the past and who they were before.
The consequences of this are particularly evident in the realm of intimacy.
Spirituality and sexuality are vital elements of our human experience - and each can illustrate the highs and lows of our species.
Spirituality spans human history and highlights our search for meaning and understanding of our connection to the universe. It also has led to war, persecution, and discrimination.
Sexuality can be one of the most profound and meaningful experiences people have, or it can be a source of suffering, abuse, and power.
I honor the potential of the human heart, enchanted by sex and spirit, calling us to live with integrity that witnesses the sacred in all aspects of life.
Bodies cannot forget the deepest intimate experience they have had. Peak experiences leave a deep neurological memory in mind, heart, and body.
Within immersive sexual experiences there is a sense of being out of control that allows us to lose our judgemental, socially-normative public persona. What we want in intimacy is radically more than what we have every day - we yearn for something that is real, that shocks us and rips us open.
Core to all sexual yoga work is that there is a bit of sexual karma that we want to experience and unwind－there's a hunger and a craving that each of us has that is unique.
For women, in particular, they hold intrinsic knowledge that their bodies have a hell of a lot of pleasure capacity if they could just find the key to get it open and fan this glowing spark into a flame. Once they have had a peak pleasure experience, they find it hard to not compare future experiences to their deepest body memories.
So, with this all in mind, I’d like to touch on some ways how you can become the person your partner fantasizes about.
When we think about mismatched desires in intimacy, we usually jump to thinking about different desires around the frequency of sex.
But in the work I do with couples and individuals, what I find to be the deepest part of mismatch is a question around what intimacy even means.
The more emotionally responsive partner normally needs a connection with the heart that feels authentically deep and genuine. They need to feel their heart being dilated open. There are not clear objective physical steps one can take that will do this. It has to be navigated, moment to moment, within the dreamy realm of sensation and perception.
The typically more masculine partner is engaged with the flow of what they are doing in the world, the momentum of life priorities, and conceptual thinking — what’s going on in their mind. They have a ton of mental energy and psychic force that requires a jolt of overt sexual energy to distract them from their inner mental momentum.
So one partner is wanting to feel a timeless connection and sensitive penetrating consciousness in order to surrender, and the other partner may just want to physically get it on, to find relief and some sliver of freedom, then let go into the bliss of sleep.
This obviously creates a conflict.
So how do we overcome these mismatched desires?
