At some point in your sexual practice, you will experience a dissolution of your body. What remains is a fullness without boundaries. Let go into this fullness. Don’t cling to control and self and body. Be openness itself. If you are holding back, if you are resisting being love, then simply notice what you are doing and relax. Take your time. Be compassionate with your own fears. When you are ready, even though you may be afraid, practice letting go a little bit into the endless opening of love. Practice trusting love itself.
Allow yourself to free-fall into the vast open of love, at first for just a moment, and then for longer and longer periods of time. Anything less than this free-fall into love is only fear, and it should be released, over time, bit by bit, in the practice of loving surrender.
For Him
Navigate While Surrendering
Suppose you are making love with your woman, front to front, in sexual embrace. Feel her body and emotions as if they were dough that you were kneading with your breath and love. If you feel her belly become tight, then breathe your soft belly against hers, smoothing out her tension, “kneading” her lumps and knots into one fine consistency with your breath. If the muscles of her face tighten, kiss her gently on the lips or cheeks, reminding her to ease into relaxation. If you feel fear or resistance in her heart, breathe her emotional closure—actually inhale her tension—and then relax more deeply into her while you exhale. Continue kneading the texture of her body and heart with your loving breath.
As you open her physically and emotionally in this way, now and then she may suddenly contract. But when she does let go, she may often surrender more fully than you. You will feel your own tension against her openness, your guardedness against her vulnerable trust.
Allow her depth of love to draw you beyond your own fears. Let go more than you ever have before, moment by moment. Surrender yourself utterly in a free-fall of love, holding onto nothing, giving yourself completely. Do this practice over and over. It is not always easy. Sometimes you won’t be able to let go—too much is on your mind. Or perhaps tensions in your intimacy need to be worked out by other means before you and your lover can practice this kind of surrender together. Letting go doesn’t mean being passive or lazy.
Practice letting go while also skillfully working with the real challenges of your relationship, like a snow skier surrendering to gravity while also navigating the vagaries of the slope. In your everyday life as well as in bed, practice opening yourself, leaning gently through your fears, and giving your deepest gifts in the midst of moment-to-moment challenges. In any moment when you are giving yourself without holding back—in your work, with your children, or with your woman—then you are practicing surrender. You have ceased curling inward in doubt or fear.
Who You Are Never Changes
Eventually, your practice reaches a point of sudden realization: nothing has ever made any real difference and never will. Who you are at depth is always who you have been, as a little boy, as a youth, as an adult, throughout all your challenges, successes, and failures.
With practice, you may recognize that you are this depth, this blissful openness, even during sleep. You may intuitively sense that the birth of your body was not the beginning of this one. The depth of who you are stands larger than time and space. This openness of being includes all the events of your life but is unchanged by them. All experiences come and go, appear and dissolve, in the openness who you are. To do sex from this depth—to commingle with your woman in fully embodied love while rested as eternity—is a practice of incomparable joy.
For Her
You Want Fulfillment, Your Man Wants Release
Men prefer nothing to something. To them, zoning out in the “nothing” of TV is often more refreshing than intimate conversation and sharing. Men are usually more at home in the empty peace of post-orgasmic slumber than on the emotional roller coaster of daily relational life.
They seek the moment when everything else disappears while they are absorbed—in a sporting event, a fishing trip, or a vagina. Men are more naturally inclined toward approximating the absorptive “nothing” of consciousness than the fluctuating “everything” of life, although a really good man embraces both fully.
Women prefer something to nothing. They prefer a shelf full of trinkets—dried flowers, collectibles, photos, seashells—to one that is empty. They want to be filled by sexual love more than emptied of desire. Feeling stressed, a woman is more likely to fill herself with something—chocolate, ice cream, conversation—than release herself into TV or post-orgasmic depletion.
Women seek to fill the empty spaces in their closets and hearts because they are more naturally inclined toward approximating the “everything” of life than the “nothing” of consciousness.
As a woman, therefore, you are particularly attracted to the sensuality of sex—not only to the sex act itself, but to the fullness of the whole experience. Candlelight. Music. Scents. Touching. Tasting. A rose petal drawn gently across your body from breast to thigh.
Luxuriating in warm water together, lips to lips, hot breath on moist neck. Most women don’t have any trouble merging with sensual delight.
Many men do. That’s why men often need exaggerated sensual experiences—direct stimulation of the penis, ten naked ladies touching each other in a sex show—to reach the place that women approach through more subtle, rainbow-like enticement.
Women are at home in their senses; men often need to be seduced or enchanted into remembering that they have a body—and then they let go of it as soon as they can, drifting off into sleep after hurriedly consummating the sex act. Therefore, the road toward sexual depth is very different for men and women.
Men first need to learn to get into their bodies, then to feel their partner deeply, then to remain fully present while enjoying extreme pleasure, then to merge into openness with their partner in love.
Women need to learn to receive pleasure deeply into their bodies and to open their hearts in love, but this is relatively easy for most women. They enjoy caresses, flavors, fragrances, and tingles. They want to exchange deep love with their partners. The problem for most women is that they take it too personally.
You Yearn for More Love
As sexual love expands, it includes the personal relationship but goes far beyond it. The special way your lover looks at you, his smell, all the ups and downs you’ve gone through together with your children, your house, your health—the sharing of these experiences make personal love rich and rewarding.
However, they have nothing to do with the love that will open your heart beyond suffering.
You have probably enjoyed many moments of fulfilling personal love. Your man surprises you with a special gift. Or, he ravishes you on vacation in the tropics. Perhaps he puts aside his own preferences to nurse you to health because he loves you.
In many ways, he shows you over and over, year after year, that he is devoted to you and truly committed to your family together. Then he meets another woman and leaves you.
Or perhaps he is still with you, but something feels like it is missing. You can’t complain; you know he loves you. But you begin searching for deeper meaning, greater fulfillment.
Sooner or later, no matter how satisfying your personal life is, you long for something more, something deeper, something that fills your heart in a way that your current life does not. It doesn’t matter how much money you have or how good your relationship is—we all know of wealthy movie stars or close friends with “ideal” relationships who end up depressed or divorced.
We all know—or will know—what it feels like to have everything we want and still feel unfulfilled, incomplete, yearning. No matter how much your man loves you, no matter how often he goes down on you or brings you flowers, at some point you will realize it is not enough.
You still yearn for a deeper kind of love. You may even feel guilty about this yearning. Are You
Self-Surrendered or Self-Concerned?
Men and women both feel this need for more than they are getting in their lives. Men want to feel more release, more freedom, more relief from burdens. Women want to feel more fulfillment, more love, a deeper joy in their body and heart. Although seeking through different routes, men and women actually want the same boundless happiness, the same bliss without dilemma.
Great sex is the place where many people taste this bliss, to one degree or another. You can taste it any time—during meditation, dance, prayer, sports, picnics, childbirth, death—anytime you are willing to be totally present and relax all hold on yourself while surrendering open as unlimited feeling.
If you are like most women, however, the sexual occasion becomes wrought with personal concerns. “Does he like the way I look? Do I smell OK? Does he feel distant because he doesn’t love me? Am I a good lover?” Although these concerns are real—every woman and man feels them—they are to be practiced through rather than indulged.
Two Opportunities for Practice
Your man whisks you off to a romantic hideaway with an antique bed and a roaring fireplace, unbuttons your blouse with his teeth, rubs you with warm oil from head to toe, and leads you to a huge bathtub filled with scented water surrounded by flowers and candles. A few weeks later, he forgets your birthday and goes out with his friends instead.
One situation makes you feel loved, one makes you feel unloved. Neither has anything to do with the deeper love for which everyone yearns. Both of these situations can be starting points for the practice of deep love.
In the midst of flowers and romance, can you open your heart so wide that the personal aspects of your relationship are consumed in the radiance of your love? Do you even want to?
Or, would you rather luxuriate in the warmth of the bath and your man’s affection without bothering to open wider in love (just as your man might prefer to luxuriate in the warmth of your vagina without bothering to connect more deeply in love)? Likewise, in the midst of feeling forgotten or betrayed by your man, can you open and be the love who you are deep in your heart? Or, do you act like a little girl, pouting, angry, waiting to punish your man with your bad mood when he returns from his selfish outing?
The real practice of love goes beyond satisfaction and dissatisfaction. Wallowing in pleasure can be just as limiting as wallowing in pain if you don’t open your heart beyond the satisfaction of your personal emotional needs.
Love Beyond Romance and Rejection
The fullness you seek as a woman is only approximated by filling your body with sweets, children, and a good man. Unless you also practice opening directly as love, you will oblige sweets, children, and your man to give you something they cannot give you. Even shopping cannot fill your heart’s emptiness—at least not for very long!
Don’t submit merely to your man’s love or your children’s love or the love you feel when you eat your favorite foods, although these wonderful experiences are not to be avoided, either. To find true and lasting fulfillment, submit to the deep love of which these are only approximations that come and go.
No matter how adored you feel by your man, surrender open. No matter how hurt your heart feels, surrender open. Open your heart, relax your body, breathe down to your toes. Feel the force of life move through your body and open your kinks and closures. Sexually, allow yourself to surrender so fully that you receive love into your deepest parts, physically and emotionally.
Allow your heart to be ravished by a force of love much larger than the penis of your man or the details of your relationship. When both you and your man let go completely during sex—while he practices invading you with consciousness and you practice receiving him, opening your body to flow wild with love-energy—the true union you both want is consummated.
Emptiness and fullness fuse as love, the open radiance of being.
No want is left to suffer. And when yearning returns, in daily life or in sex, appreciate it. Enjoy it. Yearning is a reminder to relax, open, and surrender as love. Again and again, through pleasure and pain, practice living as bright love, radiating love, breathing love, until romance and rejection are but ornaments you wear to suit your mood.
excerpt from Finding God through Sex
