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.
There’s been a lot of mainstream interest in the practice of meditation due to the growth of meditation and mindfulness apps and ongoing research showing tangible health benefits from meditation.
Meditation affects many areas of life, and it can reshape how we are in relationships.
I've discovered a metaphor that can help you understand the benefits of using meditation and mindfulness practice in your own life.
There’s clearly power in anger. Our bodies are designed to feel it and express it. It is a survival mechanism, a visceral expression of life force. Although few people may admit it, it can make us feel powerful to assert personal authority through anger. It aligns our mind, with our life energy, as it moves through our body.
However, problems arise when we don’t express ourselves, and when we let anger bubble up inside of us, fermenting and rising without release. Unexpressed anger often becomes projected onto an external source such as a group, a person, or an ideology, which leads to the continued perception of problems and bruised feelings. The whole issue that sparked our initial anger can build and fester.
Anger is a natural potent emotion that’s part of who we are, but when we fossilize it into beliefs and thoughts by keeping it hidden beneath the surface, we abandon our power and effectively perpetuate the act of abdicating our freedom.
Reactivity eats up our freedom.
It turns us into easily-manipulated, unconscious anger-balls.
It breaks the flow and continuity of life, of being able to work and experience things jointly with others.
It’s a cry and demand for attention and understanding.
It makes it all about the person who is reacting, which makes sense because, at its root, reactivity is a protective mechanism triggered when someone feels threatened.
One of the ways you can tell a man is susceptible to reactive states is when they’re daydreaming or frequently become lost in thought. The cascade of events that leads to someone becoming lost in thought can be triggered by something that stirs memories of past reactive states.
Coming up with a response to the situation might feel untenable at the moment, so men decide instead to check out of the conversation—or even leave entirely—to do or think about something else. They either check out and get lost within their own thoughts, or they grasp around for a more pleasurable distraction, like checking the sports scores.
The problem is, these reactive states sabotage our autonomy and independence. And for a lot of men, this is a persistent inner form of self-sabotage. When we are reactive, there’s a subsequent loss of freedom that is felt throughout the multiple strands of our lives.
On my business card these are some of the services I offer: Learn how to thrive in intense life and work situations instead of collapsing or retreating, and learn how to confidently navigate major life changes of divorce, death, and disability.
Those who want to achieve real-life mastery must train in all the three realms of consciousness, emotions, and body.
I want to talk specifically about the area of emotional reactivity, and the most challenging and rewarding place to practice developing personal mastery is within your intimate relationship.
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.
If you hold the more masculine energy in your relationship, meaning you identify with consciousness and steadiness while your partner is more energetic, and changing, you’re probably going to have some heated exchanges.
It’s just the way sexual polarity works out.
I used to think this was something you had to suffer through, but I’ve discovered that part of what being in a long term relationship is about is becoming a polished mirror to reflect back when our partner isn’t being loving or when the depth of their consciousness isn’t being fully presented or seen. You can do this without blame or judgment.
My teacher David Deida said to me once, a while ago, “Anything your partner can say to collapse you is what they will say, as long as they can collapse you.” There’s a quality of testing in intimacy, that partners partake in.
Particularly if you have a more feminine partner who wants to wake you up, they instinctively see the potential of you being absolutely free and they want to get you there. Our habitual fights and patterns of tussling with each other come about for a variety of reasons.
I’d like to unpack some of the lessons I’ve learned in my own life that have shifted this, and have led to a lot of fun along the way. I’ve been peeling back layers of closure and limitations that I didn’t even know I was offering or presenting in my intimate relationships.
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.
All men experience major life transitions.
There’s no way to get out of life without experiencing death, disability, or loss of someone we love. Life is a never-ending stream of these transitions and challenges.
It’s natural for humans to experience stress whenever we encounter change—but we make these major changes even more difficult if we feel that our survival is at stake. We see a profound amount of depression and suicidal ideation that men endure alone.
It’s precisely at these times of crisis and overwhelm that the potential for breakthrough and freedom becomes possible—but how?
There’s a pervasive problem we’re facing in the world right now.
As men, we often feel like we have to do it all ourselves, and alone. The whole world sits on our shoulders.
We think we need to push through life with egoic determination, gritting our teeth and pushing through all the obstacles and challenges that arise.
In doing this we are creating more tension and pain in our bodies. We often bear the resulting physical and emotional scars with pride, as a sign of masculine accomplishment.
Unfortunately, this way of approaching matters is unsustainable. You might be able to maverick through when you’re a bit younger and in peak condition, but eventually, it’s no longer possible and it all comes crashing down.
Authenticity is one of those elusive traits that people strive for, but that many seem unable to reach without stress.
This difficulty in achieving authenticity often comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of what authenticity is; in some ways, it’s a too-broad term that encompasses many other ideas, and it’s difficult to grasp how to become more authentic when the practical embodiment of the word comes from who you already are.
So what is authenticity?
Let’s find out.
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?
