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.
People envision spiritual awakening as some profound experience afforded to only very unique individuals after much work or divine providence. We largely miss the incredible opportunity our intimate relationship provides to awaken within this lifetime, not for the sake of self but because of our profound love for others.
If you’re feeling stifled and stuck in your relationship, that cramp might be an invitation to look deeper. Treat it like a mirror reflecting back your unconsciousness.
There are limits we place on love, and we don’t really own or investigate those. Relationships, particularly when they are edgy and volatile, can be a portal to your awakening.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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