We like to bring the best part of ourselves to our intimate relationship, partly because we’re still performing or seeking love and approval. But once we have a foundation of trust and commitment, it's healthy to relinquish trying to be a good boy or girl and instead explore some of the shadow sides that we probably haven't shared or expressed, even with our therapists or spiritual advisors.
In a long-term relationship, it’s a grand experiment to discover how deep your capacity for relating can go and how much of that capacity can be accessed with another person.
Intimate attraction isn’t rational; the desires of our bodies are formed over thousands of years, extending back to our most distant ancestors.
Experiencing light vs. dark energies
A balance of light and dark is happening right now in the world, a push and pull that pervades all aspects of life – political, spiritual, physical, and emotional.
This darkness doesn’t always make sense to the mind, but the body has experienced it for millennia. The body knows that a vital battle is always going on between life and death. This primal level is where the force of unbridled sexuality arises from.
The best and the worst of our species are known within the vast dynamic range of the heart, and the body is attracted to experiencing the energy behind all that. This is why we must stay connected to that visceral part of us still seeking safety, to be loved, to be ravished. This animal part of us is often the very source of the energy we most need to get through tough days, and it’s that energy that enables us to work through challenges in our relationships.
Tapping into the instinctual power of both light and dark makes for incredibly deep intimacy.
To do this lovingly and with perfect command requires deep trust and the ability to lean in past boundaries that may exist in the mind. The heart wants to feel whether these limits are true or not. The places where we’ve held ourselves back in the past are the places we can explore more in our long-term, trusted, intimate relationships.
Bringing an awareness of darkness into your intimate relationship
The pull of this darker energy can be extremely helpful in deepening your intimacy with a long-term partner.
You don’t have to force yourself to be nice; you can instead draw upon some of your more visceral reactions to whatever you’re seeing and attracted to around you in the world.
Notice the aspects of entertainment that are dark, full of dilemmas, that you can’t look away from or you keep finding yourself coming back to. What is it about that particular brand of darkness that you are attracted to? What makes it alluring; what stops you from turning it off?
I’ve found that dramas and movies with darker edges can be educational, cathartic, and profoundly sexy. And this applies not just for you, but for your relationship – if you watch how your intimate partner reacts to shows, you can learn a lot about what their deeper desires and interests are.
Sometimes the dark imagery will show up in our dreams, or we may be unable to turn away from the news stream, where we find simultaneous disgust and attraction to the tragedies we’ve imagined now unfolding before us.
Harnessing dark energy from your surroundings for your own emotional and physical benefit
I want to share an interesting practice you can do to work with these dark energies for your own sake, rather than the advertiser’s or producer’s sake.
We don’t choose our areas of discomfort – they’re part of our character makeup. They don’t define us, but they can make us more interesting and complex, which is what keeps the fire burning in long-term relationships.
Many people experience their shows, movies, and entertainment solo; but if you’re in an intimate relationship, wouldn’t you like to explore that spectrum a little bit more with a partner? There’s a lot of excitement hidden within taboos and kink, and there’s a lot of creative artistic potential to play with there.
Emotionally, you can run all these dark energies through your body in a healthy manner with a trusted intimate partner. And the way to do this is to first find the emotional charge within you that responds to darker themes in the media. Notice when you feel shock, aversion, or attraction to what you’re seeing on a screen.
Our visceral responses are wired so deeply that we forget that most of this power and potential is below the level of mind. You can’t talk yourself out of these things. So stay with the initial emotional charge and notice any fantasies or taboos that touch that secret location within you.
As you watch, record your emotional reactions. Write it down if you want – “in this scene, I felt something strong”. Feel the vulnerability, or any shame that comes up, and write that down as well.
Imagine what could happen if you took these feelings and made them even more intense by sharing them with someone else in a fantasy. Instead of running them through the mind and emotions only, there’s deep healing that can happen when you run them through your body with another person and play-acting it out.
Remember the nervousness you may have felt, perhaps the first time you met your intimate partner. Expand upon how you felt that in your body. Where was it located? Imagine how it could be even more intense if you brought more of the texture from that memory back into the present.
The result of this skillful kind of play can be a deepening of trust, and an intense amount of healing around our shame or feelings of inadequacy, which are often linked to our reaction to these darker energies. They can of course be brought back into play with a partner, but that is a much deeper and complex conversation.
The first part of this work – and the part you can begin today – is simply noticing how powerful these energies are, and how they affect you day-to-day.
If you’d like to learn how to evoke and share these experiences with a partner, I invite you to check out my upcoming workshop, Awakening into Intimacy. It runs from September 26th – October 2nd.
Learn more and apply here: https://sunyata.info/awakening-into-intimacy