Intention:
My intention is to be able to remain at peace when this difficult emotion/vibration comes up. To simply no longer take it personally, but rather welcome it and give it permission to be in my body without reacting to it or identifying with it. To be able to remain present as presence: holding it in impersonal awareness that remains now – while feelingly in embodied contact with the sensation of it in the present – and holding it in unconditional love. To purify personal identification with this information and all the patterns of feeling, thought, and behavior. The end goal is to be able to simply be with; to sit with it and allow it in the body without holding on to it, resisting it, or identifying with it.
Having been disassociated for a long time and only recently able to feel my emotions and my body, I simply don’t have the tools yet to be able to observe it from a distance without getting sucked into it. I also didn’t grow up with healthy models of how to self-regulate or socially express this energy in healthy ways – so with all these difficult feelings and areas I am undertaking a conscious exploration of them to ease my way into these scary places and find a way to stabilize in peace with them.
Where I am now:
Sex is personal for me. I am not free in it. When I look with sexually hungry eyes at women with large breasts it is not simply a natural impulse from life in an egoless vessel. It is the habit of a conditioned personal self.
This is my exploration of sex in order to find freedom and impersonal awareness in it. It is also an exploration and healing of fear and control. Also an exploration of how I connect, serious relationships, and my conditioning towards woman.
This is still difficult to write. Coming out of a decades-long living-coma of deep disassociation, I can look back and see how not being embodied has given me a twisted relationship with sex and sexual relating.
Growing up I lost respect for my mother and that has really conditioned how I approach women. I haven’t had any serious relationships because I never took the women, nor my relationship with them seriously. A large part of that is not being able to form emotional attachments, which is another topic to address. Having not experienced being seen, acknowledged, or mattering to an other, it’s not something I even expect anymore, certainly not something I am able to give.
Watching my weak-willed mother allow herself and her son to be beaten up and verbally degraded by her boyfriend and not do anything about it – I lost respect for her. I can see now her need to re-experience her own childhood project of soliciting love from an emotionally unavailable dominant man/father-figure was neurotically more important to her wounded-child self than her conscious-adult self’s responsibility to herself and her child. The psychological causality in it makes it impersonal – gives me the compassionate distance to let it slide. Even so I still don’t respect her as a person and I need to make sure I don’t project that on other women in my life simply because they share the same gender as her.
Conscious Re-education:
http://www.uazone.org/friends/selfdev/tantralove/tantra_com_shaw.html
Some excerpts:
WIE: Transforming into deity-what does that mean exactly?
MS: Embodying the presence of deity on every level of your being: body, speech and mind. Not only mentally seeing the world as a deity would see it-as harmonious and pure and perfect as it is, as a realm of aesthetic splendor-but also speaking as a deity would speak: with words of insight, liberation and compassion. What I find very exciting about the tantric vision is the practice of realizing the presence of deities within your own body and manifesting divinity through your physical actions. But it is not only manifesting the presence of a deity so that the deity can receive worship, or to heal or to perform other activities, but to manifest the presence of full enlightenment, of Buddhahood, in the world.
WIE: How was sexuality or the practice of sexual yoga seen to be of benefit on the path to enlightenment?
MS: Sexuality is an extremely powerful, primal and irreducible aspect of human nature. One of the contributions of the tantric paradigm was the insight that sexual energies were being wasted in some forms of meditative practice. Some of the tantric pioneers felt that a celibate lifestyle did not, in fact, represent a mastery of one’s sexuality, but rather a repression of and even a flight in fear from one’s sexuality. One was in fact postponing for future lives work which must be done to integrate every aspect of one’s being and to master every form of energy at one’s command.
MS: That’s right. Because, interestingly, they believe that in order to attain full enlightenment you have to contact and release the energy of your heart, which for them is the center, the core of your being, of your consciousness, at the deepest level. That is where you are storing the fears, hatreds and angers of many lifetimes. They felt that only the energy that is generated through the practice of union with a consort could have the power to blast through the residue of centuries of egoic behavior and immersion in illusion and negativity, and to dissolve the layers of hatred and fear within the heart.
WIE: How does this “blasting through” occur? In your book, you state that “practice with a [tantric] partner is believed to make it possible to open the heart fully at the most profound level, freeing it from all knots, constrictions and obscurations created by false views and self-cherishing emotions.”
MS: One of the purposes of the sexual yogas is to concentrate the energies in the abdominal area of the body, which is the seat of inner fire that the tantrics seek to kindle and fan into flame. Through the practice of sexual union, the attention is concentrated in that area, which is several inches below the navel, in the region where the sexual sensations would be arising. However, unlike ordinary sexuality, where the partners would simply allow the pleasure to take its course, tantrics would concentrate their energy and their thought at this one point and use it to arouse that inner fire. When that fire is kindled and starts to burn very brightly, there are several meditations that can be done to refine the energies at the heart. One of them is to direct the energy upward into the heart and, because of the quantity of energy involved, as it goes through the heart, it naturally unties a knot, as they say, and bursts through these residues. However, as the residues are being released, one will sometimes have an experiential sensation of the emotion that is being released as it floats up into conscious awareness. Sometimes if it’s a hatred, for example, or a fear that’s floating up, one will actively experience the emotion as it’s being released. It takes a great deal of awareness to be able to process the emotions that are coming up from the past and release them as they arise, rather than project them onto the present situation.
WIE: It sounds as though the practice requires a lot more than just the generation of intense energy. It must also demand a cultivation of certain qualities, and of one’s character, in order for the practitioner to be able to bear everything that such an intensity of energy is going to stir up.
MS: The potential for reattachment is there because as these emotions and powerful mind-states are being generated, if you are not really poised to detach from them, you can become reinvolved in these past neuroses. They demand at that time to be dealt with in one way or another, and that’s why practicing tantra is said to be like walking along the edge of a sword. It’s not without its danger. The intensity of energies you’re working with and the level of psyche that you are excavating is potentially dangerous to your peace of mind.
WIE: What is it like to be working so closely and intimately with another person when dealing with such powerful energies and emotions? Tantric relationships must be unusually intense.
MS: The relationship provides an opportunity to observe ourselves, to mirror one another and to work with these energies as they arise in an ongoing way. When that direct involvement is combined with the power of the yoga, the entire relationship becomes a crucible of inner combustion and total transformation.
WIE: It would seem, then, that the spiritual involvement between two partners goes far beyond just doing the energetic practice together. Does it also confront the challenge of living together and finding a way to become decent human beings?
MS: It goes vastly beyond becoming decent human beings. It has to do with how we are going to support one another in attaining enlightenment, which is another level of interaction altogether. It might involve things that in an ordinary way don’t look decent. That’s why it’s very important in choosing a tantric partner to find someone who has a comparable level of emotional, intellectual and spiritual sophistication. Because the processes involved require not only a high degree of emotional detachment, but also the possession of certain intellectual skills, such as the capacity to deconstruct the contents and interpretations of one’s experience in a precise way.
WIE: So my question is: If even a man like that, who has attained such a high level of practice, in a tradition where there is such an elaborate teaching around sexuality, is unable to live with integrity and decency in the face of the sexual impulse, then how wise is it for anyone to recommend that people take up sexual practice as a path to enlightenment?
MS: These abuses and distortions actually justify the original insight and intent of tantra, which was that if you do not work directly with your sexuality, if you simply repress it or try to ignore it without mastering it, then you cannot become fully enlightened. It’s not going to take care of itself. And it’s not going to go away by itself if you have a lifetime of celibacy. What we see happening, even in the case of the great master, is that if sexuality is neglected, and at the same time, other sides of the personality, such as lust for power or accumulation, are also developing, then the sexual energies are simply going to be there to be claimed by the uncultivated and even possibly corrupt dimensions of the personality. This is the entire point of tantra: Enlighten your sexuality along with everything else!