Bluetruth - The Work of David Deida

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LianaG — Sat, 03 May 2008 17:56:00 -0400

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Complete Recordings of David Deida on MP3
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A New Era

LianaG — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 23:58:00 -0400

My Dangerous Beauty

Your Attraction to the Feminine Is Inevitable

LianaG — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 17:03:00 -0500

Masculine men are attracted to forms of feminine energy: radiant women, beer, music, nature, etc. If a man tries to hide his attraction, it reveals some degree of shame with respect to his own sexual core.

If you are like most men, you probably hide the amount of sexual attraction you feel toward women every day. At work, on the street, and in the grocery store, you see women that turn you on. Sometimes you might want to have sex with them. But many times the feeling is more of a wave of refreshment washing through you. Seeing an especially radiant woman can fill your whole day with delight. A woman's exquisite scent can transport you to an enchanted paradise. A woman's smile can melt the moment into sheer beatitude.

There are two ways to deal with your daily "ahhh" of attraction to the feminine: wisely and foolishly. To respond wisely, you must understand why you are attracted to whom. Your sexual essence is always attracted to its energetic reciprocal. Masculine men are attracted to feminine women. Feminine men are attracted to masculine women. Balanced men are attracted to balanced women.

About 80% of all men have a more masculine sexual essence. These men, of which you are probably one, are attracted to all things feminine. Not just feminine women, but anything with feminine energy, anything which is radiant, alive, enlivening, relaxing, and moving. Feminine energy gets you out of your head and into your body. Music, beer, nature, women, they are all forms of feminine energy.

It is not just a visually gorgeous woman who attracts you. If a woman is free and radiant in her feminine energy, you are probably attracted; sometimes more attracted, sometimes less attracted, but always attracted, at least enough to steal a glance at her form. This attraction is not only natural, but healthy. It is a sign of polarity, the same kind of natural flow of polarization by which electricity flows between the positive and negative poles of a battery. It's nothing to be ashamed of. It's why there are men and women. The nature of nature is polarity, from the magnetism that flows between the north and south poles of the earth, to the attraction that flows between your masculine core and the feminine radiance of a woman.

If you feel uncomfortable with your attraction to women, you are probably uncomfortable with your own masculine essence. If you feel it is demeaning for a woman to be the "object" of your polar attraction, then you have probably disowned your masculine core. You have energetically emasculated yourself by condemning and suppressing your native desires. You are negating your sexual essence, rather than being at home with it.

Any negative attitude you have about your attraction to women is a sign of fear; somewhere along the line you learned that such attraction was "bad" or "evil." Your attraction to women, all kinds of women, is natural, normal, and beautiful. In fact, it is an aspect of the same desire that will ultimately lead you toward spiritual freedom.

Your desire for a woman is an aspect of your desire for pleasurable oneness. Your confession of desire is a confession of your desire to embrace life. To embrace life, to relax into oneness so that all opposites, including masculine and feminine, find their unity in love, is to be spiritually free. Eventually you will recognize that all desire is an aspect of your native impulse to give love. From beginning to end, your attraction to women can be seen as the essential gesture of your heart, your desire for love and unity.

If you are a man with a masculine sexual essence, you will always feel sexual polarity with anyone who animates feminine energy. You may feel this attraction many times a day, with many women. Enjoy it. Women are a blessing! The feminine, even in the non-human forms of a lush tropical island, a cold beer, or your favorite tune, could make the difference between dreariness and ahhh-ing in ecstasy. Our acceptance of sexual attraction, even with music and places, is at the root of our capacity to experience bodily pleasure.

Sexual attraction, however, is very different from having sex. There is a big difference between choosing to be intimate with a woman and simply being attracted to her energy and radiance. Intimacy is a choice between people who want to commit to loving and serving one another. Whereas the zing of attraction is a choiceless natural flow of energy between your masculine core and feminine energy, wherever it is found. When a woman is relaxed in her feminine radiance, she is like beautiful music or a warm ocean breeze. You don't need to have sex with her to savor inexpressible joy.

If you are like most men, a radiant woman can inspire you for hours or days. Remember, the desire she arouses in you is a blessing in itself. Acting on that desire and pursuing her is another matter entirely, dependent on whether such an action would truly serve both of you or not. But the mere inspiration felt while beholding a radiant woman is one of nature's gifts to you: the gift of feminine blessing.

The next time you come upon a woman who sends a thrill through your body, relax into the thrill. Let her waves of feminine energy move through your body like a deep massage. Breathe fully, without resisting the joy her sighting affords you. Breathe the joy all through your body, down to your toes. Don't stare at her, don't even interact with her. But when you see her, and you experience your attraction, fully allow the energy of attraction to move freely through your body. Learn to magnify and sustain your desire, so your whole body and breath open and deepen by its force. As you behold her, receive her vision as a blessing.

excerpt from Way of the Superior Man

Know Your Real Edge and Don't Fake it

LianaG — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 17:26:00 -0500

It is honorable for a man to admit his fears, resistance, and edge of practice. It is simply true that each man has his limit, his capacity for growth, and his destiny. But it is dishonorable for him to lie to himself or others about his real place. He shouldn't pretend he is more enlightened than he is--nor should he stop short of his actual edge. The more a man is playing his real edge, the more valuable he is as good company for other men, the more he can be trusted to be authentic and fully present. Where a man's edge is located is less important than whether he is actually living his edge in truth, rather than being lazy or deluded.

Pick an area of your life, perhaps your intimate relationship, your career, your relationship with your children, or your spiritual practice. For instance, you are currently doing something to earn a living. Where do your fears stop you from making a larger contribution to mankind, from earning a higher income, or from earning money in a more creative and enjoyable way? If you were absolutely fearless, would you be earning a living in exactly the same way as you are now? Your edge is where you stop short, or where you compromise your fullest gift, and, instead, cater to your fears.

Have you lost touch with the fears that are limiting and shaping your income and style of livelihood? If you have deluded yourself and feel that you are not afraid, then you are lying to yourself. All men are afraid, unless they are perfectly free. If you cannot admit this, you are pretending to yourself, and to others. Your friends will feel your fear, even if you do not. Thus, they will lose trust in you, knowing you are deluding yourself, lying to yourself, and are therefore likely to lie to them, consciously or unconsciously.

Or, perhaps you are very aware of your fears: your fear to take risks, your fear of failing, or your fear of succeeding. Perhaps you are comfortable with your life, and you fear the lifestyle change that might accompany a change in career, even though the new career will be closer to what you really want to do with your life. Some men fear the feeling of fear and therefore don't even approach their edge. They choose a job they know they can do well and easily, and don't even approach the fullest giving of their gift. Their lives are relatively secure and comfortable, but dead. They lack the aliveness, the depth, and the inspirational energy that is the sign of a man living at his edge. If you are this kind of man who is hanging back, working hard perhaps, but not at your real edge, other men will not be able to trust that you can and will help them live at their edge and give their fullest gift.

As an experiment, describe your edge with respect to your career out loud to yourself. Say something like, "I know I could be earning more money, but I am too lazy to put in the extra hours it would take. I know that I could give more of my true gift, but I am afraid that I may not succeed, and then I will be a penniless failure. I've spent 15 years developing my career, and I'm afraid to let go of it and start fresh, even though I know that I spend most of my life doing things I have no real interest in doing. I could be making money in more creative ways, but I spend too much time watching tv rather than being creative."

Honor your edge. Honor your choices. Be honest with yourself about them. Be honest with your friends about them. A fearful man who knows he is fearful is far more trustable than a fearful man who isn't aware of his fear. And a fearful man who still leans into his fear, living at his edge and putting his gift out from there, is more trustworthy and more inspirational than a fearful man who hangs back in the comfort zone, unwilling to even experience his fear on a day to day level. A free man is free to acknowledge his fears, without hiding them, or hiding from them. Live with your lips pressed against your fears, kissing your fears, neither pulling back nor aggressively violating them.

excerpt from Way of the Superior Man

Swear

LianaG — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 17:30:00 -0500

What is the dirtiest word you know? Whatever word is the filthiest for you, say it out loud when you are alone.

Say it several times. Then say, “I love you,” imagining that you are with someone you love. Say, “I love you,” several times, with real feeling.

Alternate between saying your dirtiest word and “I love you,” until you can say the dirty word with as much love, heart openness, and soft benediction as, “I love you.”

Then, with a trusted friend or lover, alternate saying your chosen bad word and “I love you” out loud, until he or she feels your love equally transmitted through both expressions.

Choose another filthy word, and repeat this process. Bad word, I love you, bad word, I love you… until the felt offering of your love is carried equally by both expressions.

After turning bad words into carriers of your love, practice saying every word that you utter, from now until you die, in a way that feels like “I love you” to whoever hears you.

When you notice yourself speaking lovelessly, return to this exercise, starting with the filthiest word you can, until you can speak every word, once again, as a felt carrier of love. This may take minutes or decades of practice.

except from Instant Enlightenment

Stop Hoping for Your Woman to get Easier

LianaG — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 17:34:00 -0500

A woman often seems to test her man's capacity to remain unperturbed in his truth and purpose. She tests him to feel his freedom and depth of love, to know that he is trustable. Her tests may come in the form of complaining, challenging him, changing her mind, doubting him, distracting him, or even undermining his purpose in a subtle or not so subtle way. A man should never think his woman's testing is going to end and his life will get easier. Rather, he should appreciate that she does these things to feel his strength, integrity, and openness. Her desire is for his deepest truth and love. As he grows, so will her testing.

Every moment of your life is either a test or a celebration. The same is true about every moment with your woman, only doubly so. Not only is her simple existence a test for you, but one of her deepest pleasures in intimacy is testing you, and then feeling you are not moved off course by her challenge.

The most erotic moment for a woman is feeling that you are Shiva, the divine masculine: unperturbable, totally loving, fully present, and all‑pervading. She cannot move you, because you already are what you are, with or without her. She cannot scare you away, because you already penetrate her in fearless love, pervading her heart and body. She cannot distract you, because your one‑pointed commitment to truth will not bend to her wiles. Feeling this hugeness of love and freedom in you, she can trust you, utterly, and surrender her testing in celebration of love.

Until she wants to feel you as Shiva again. And then the testing will begin anew. In fact, it is precisely when you are most Shiva‑like that she will most test you.

Perhaps you have been working toward some financial goal, and finally you have succeeded. After months or years of effort, you have creatively earned a large amount of money. You feel happy, full, successful. You feel great. You come home to your woman and want to share the news with her.

"I just made a million dollars today."

"That's nice."

"That's nice!!?? You know how hard I've been working for this."

"I know. It feels like I haven't seen you in months. Did you remember to pick up the milk on the way home?"

"Oh, sorry. I forgot. But who cares? We could buy a dairy farm now!"

"I asked you to pick up the milk three times this morning, and I put a note on your briefcase. How could you forget?"

"I said I'm sorry. Look, I'll go get the damn milk...."

Why is she being this way? Because she simply wants to deflate your success? No. She is challenging you because your success doesn't mean shit to her, unless you are free and loving. And if you are free and loving, nothing she says can collapse you. She wants to feel you are uncollapsable, so she pokes you in your weak spot.

Of course she knows how much this moment of success means to you. This is precisely why she is negating it. Not because she wants to hurt you. But because she wants to feel Shiva. She wants to feel your strength. She wants to feel that your happiness is not dependent on her response, nor on you making a million dollars. She wants to feel you are a superior man.

It's a tall order to be this free, and in your more mediocre moments you will wish your woman would settle for less. But if you are a man who is living his fullest, willing to play his edge and grow through difficulties, then you will want her to test you. You may not like it. But you don't want her to settle for some bozo who depends on his woman's response to be happy. If you are aligned with your mission, you are essentially happy, even though times cycle between difficult and easy. You don't need your woman's strokes to fulfill your mission. It still feels good when she strokes you, but you don't need mommy anymore, telling you what a good boy you are. And your woman doesn't want you to need mommy. In fact, it sickens her.

If your woman is weak, she may settle for a weak man, and therefore play into your need to feel like a good boy. But if she is a good woman, a strong woman, she won't tolerate your childish needs for a pat on the head, collecting bigger toys, and being king of the mountain. A good woman will love the childlike part of you, but she wants your life to be guided by your deepest truths, not your untended childhood wounds. She wants to feel that at your core you have grown beyond the need for kudos and million‑dollar toys. She wants to feel your self‑generated strength of truth.

So she will test you. She might not be fully conscious of why she is doing it, but she will poke your weak spots, especially in moments of your superficial success, in order to feel your strength. If you collapse, you've flunked the test. You have let your woman deflate you. You have demonstrated your dependence on her for external validation. Even if you just made a million dollars, you are a weak man. Your woman cannot trust you fully.

If you remain full and strong, humorous and happy, your truth unperturbed by her testing, then you pass the test.

"Honey, I'll get you some milk, all right," you say as you sweep her off the ground and lay her on the couch, laughing, kissing, looking deeply into her eyes, and "milking" her happiness with the confident loving of your caresses.

She can relax and trust your Shiva core. She can surrender the tensions around her heart. You are trustable. You don't need her validation in order for you to be loving. You simply are loving. The truth of you is love. Your fullness is independent of mommy. You are not only a man, you are a superior man: a man who does his best to live as love in the world and in his intimacy, a man whose heart remains open and whose truth remains strong even when his woman criticizes him, a man who can find the humor in forgetting to pick up the milk on a day he made a million dollars.

This is the kind of man your woman can trust. Now, the moment is a moment of celebration. Now, she can relax and truly join in your jubilation, knowing you are not dependent on her praise for your happiness. It will last, perhaps, ten minutes. And then she will test you again.

It never ends. A woman will always test her man for the pleasure of feeling his strength in loving, his capacity to transcend nuisance, his persistence in his own truth, and his capacity to share that truth in love with her, even when she is complaining‑‑especially when she is complaining. Her complaint is the beginning of her pleasure. It is not true criticism, but a test of your Shiva‑hood. The criticism is entirely dissolved in love as soon as she feels your humor and happiness in the midst of the poke.

It never ends. This is the secret. You can't get out of it. Finding a different woman won't get you out of it. Therapy won't get you out of it. Financial or sexual mastery won't get you out of it. Your woman is testing you because she loves you. She wants to feel your truth. She wants to feel your love. And she wants to feel that your truth and love are stronger than the barbs she can throw at you. Then she can relax and surrender into the polarity of man and woman. Then she can trust you.

The most loving women are the women who will test you the most. She wants you to be your fullest, most magnificent self. She won't settle for anything less. She knows it is true of you. She knows in your deepest heart that you are free, you are Shiva. Anything less than that she will torment. And, as you know, she's quite good at it.

Yet, if your purpose is to be free, you wouldn't have it any other way.

excerpt from Way of the Superior Man

An interview with David Deida by Vijay Rana of The Watkins Review in London

LianaG — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 17:01:00 -0400

David Deida is best known for “bringing sexy back” to contemporary spirituality, and now in his latest offering he’s bringing real life back. Instant Enlightenment contains a vast array of subjects that other ‘spiritual’ teachings fear to touch - oral sex, swearing, car crashes, death, masturbation, to name a few. These taboo areas get the much-needed shot in the arm they deserve. Each chapter is poetically precise, humorous, and challenges the reader to bring their awareness to life experiences that would ordinarily make us contract and shut down. It is in these moments that our separation to ‘what is’ gets easily forgotten. Can you remember to stay open and loving in the midst of extreme suffering - and banality? This is the core of Deida’s teaching: feel open to what you resist, deny and recoil from. What could simply look like a throwaway, aphoristic pocket book turns out to be a whole lot deeper. The way to read this book is by randomly dipping into any chapter, reading it slowly and contemplating its content. Deida’s words and enlightenment will undo you--instantly.

-Vijay Rana, The Watkins Review

The Watkins Review: What’s the inspiration behind writing the new book, can you say a bit about the genesis of the project?

David Deida: Things are changing so quickly today with the Internet and our bite-size, fast food kind of culture All of us collectively - including me as a specific agent - can find new ways to touch people and transmit something that has more humour and depth, but is also light, quick and easy to digest. I wanted each chapter in Instant Enlightenment to be really tiny and I wanted the book very portable. I also wanted to make the chapters cover a wide range of subjects that you can't find in most places: How do you transform oral sex into openness for all beings? How to deal with jealousy? What spiritual practices can you do while you are shopping? How can you transform the energy of swear words? I wanted to present spiritual practices that were unavailable anywhere else, but in a physical form that was easily portable and in a writing-style that was bite-size and quick to metabolize.

I really liked the format; I liked the short chapters with the exercises that challenge the reader to look at certain issues in a new way. I just wondered how you would encourage the reader to use the book?

A reader might be on the toilet when they open the book for a quick jolt of smiling depth. Or, they're at the airport and they open it for a refreshing reminder. When they have a few seconds and they want a fast and deep dose, they would just open it. It's not the kind of book that one would necessarily sit down and read cover to cover. Each chapter takes only a few minutes at most to read, so it’s the kind of book to pick up throughout the day for a delicious morsel, a fast and humorous chapter or two.

Sure. I've got some favourite chapters: 'Hate' and 'Age' particularly struck a chord with me. I just wondered if there were any chapters that you particularly enjoyed writing and, if so, why?

We can say that each of our egoic structures is somewhat stuck or locked, so we need different keys for those different kinds of locks that keep our heart closed. In each of Instant Enlightenment’s short chapters, I tried to write quite diverse approaches. Certain chapters might really touch your heart and provide a key to open your lock, but they'd be different chapters than those that would touch and open your neighbour’s heart.

And what about the title 'Instant Enlightenment'; is that just a catchy title that you want people to respond to quickly, so they would think ‘I could really get that’?

One of the reasons for the title is that it's humorous to the people for whom this book was written. Anyone who’s too uptight or rigid about their spirituality probably wouldn't even open the book because they'll likely think it's a schlock book or glib and superficial. But, you know, enlightenment is instant in a certain way, as an always accessible yet often brief state rather than as a more or less permanent stage, to use Ken Wilber's language. In general, significant spiritual stages often require decades, some might even say lifetimes, to mature into stability. But as a 'peek', as a profound relaxation in love and truth, that moment of kensho - or whatever you want to call the overwhelming insight or relaxation in love, of 'aha' - that's always instant in the ever-present moment, and then it has to be practiced to become stable. You might need a well-designed set of practices to engage year after year, as well as relationships with friends and teachers and everything else that goes with true maturity blooming throughout a lifetime. I titled this book Instant Enlightenment because, on the one hand, the state of enlightenment as opposed to the stage of enlightenment is instant, but also as a kind of tongue-in-cheek, humorous, tipping of my hat to today’s microwave, plug and play, or short-attention-span cultural style.

The thing is you're including real, gritty things. The chapter ‘Mangle’ is to do with being in a car crash, and there are chapters on swearing and oral sex, so it's really bringing spirituality into the here and now, but in a very real way and sometimes even shocking...

The point was to address very real issues that are not usually engaged in more traditional spiritual practices. You're driving down the street and you see a car accident - everyone does a rubber-neck, everyone doesn't want to look but they look, and in that moment of dreadful fascination most people lose their heart openness. Their awareness becomes narrowed by seeing and feeling this disgusting, shocking wreck - why? Here’s a moment we could work with spiritually. How do you deal with this moment of horrific vision? These days all you have to do is turn on the TV to see people mangled, just like in that chapter, lying in puddles of blood. I’d be sitting with my family and friends, they'd watch this on TV and it would darken their mood, naturally, it's a horrible thing. It would actually close their heart rather than open it. And it became obvious to me that this is the world we live in. We are all subject to mangled bodies on TV, on a daily basis, so how do we work compassionately with our daily experience, both pleasurable and horrific? How do we convert each real moment of our daily experience into a moment of practice and enlightenment? This was my approach, to take some of the more difficult aspects of our daily life that aren’t usually engaged spiritually, and really try to address them directly so people have a sense of how to practice with them.

Could you tell us a bit about that practice, because that's really fascinating. Taking those extreme moments, or just normal moments even, because they are, like you're saying, they are a part of our lives. How would you do that, how would you stay open?

The first step, of course, is to feel your current experience without pulling away or closing down. Just feel entirely. Feel without guarding your heart. So when you're seeing a mangled body in real life or on TV, the first thing is to feel how you feel without adding even more closure. What happens to your breath? What happens to your belly? Do you tighten, do your eyes squint, does your jaw grind? What goes on in your head? Become acutely intimate with your response as well as anyone else’s you happen to be with, staying in touch with the whole situation. To remain intimate with textures of this present moment and feel everything completely, rather than wall yourself off from it, is a major step toward true spiritual practice in any moment. And when you stay with what you are really feeling in body, heart, and mind, then there are a number of ways to go with it, and each chapter presents different ways. You could internally circulate your energy so it doesn't get caught in tight parts of your body. You could breathe more deeply because your breath is a connection between the more gross and subtle aspects of being. There are a number of specific ways you could practice. But all of the practices are used so you don't separate yourself away from experience as if you were an invulnerable and isolated separate-self in this present moment. Most spiritual practices are actually counter-practices to the separation you are already “practicing;” they are ways to help you relax this act of separation, once you realise that you've contracted yourself into your own implosion.

One thing I get from that and from your other books is that you talk a lot about feeling open and feeling through these moments and indeed life. I just wondered - it took me quite a while to unclench my emotional centres, so to speak. I had to do about 10 years-worth of intense emotional release bodywork. I was wondering, for people who haven't done that, is it possible to feel open, or are we all just repressed?

Ten years is pretty short, by the way [laughs]. Yes, we are all doing what you're describing, clenching into tightness at some level, physically, emotionally, mentally, even spiritually. So you've described it at the physical body level where we can develop these knots of tension. The entire body can tense up; your breath can also tense up, your mind, your emotions, your subtle body, your internal yogic nadis - these are not physical but are energetic flows - these can also tense up, and all of these reactions of tightness can be met by a practice at their same level of density or “thickness.” The physical body is the densest; I don't mean that in a negative way. To do bodywork you put your hands on the body, depending on the type of work, of course. It could be as physical as Rolfing or more subtle.

You could do the same thing with talking, like Genpo Roshi using voice dialogue in a Zen context. He talks people through situations where they realise they're not their inner 'controller', or their inner 'critic' – these are all voices in their heads. They can discover that they are not identical to these voices, and this discovery relaxes the tension in their mind much like a bodyworker helps you relax the contraction of your body, so you can enjoy your natural spaciousness of being and offer it to others as a gift. I enjoy bodywork because it opens my body and makes me more functional. There are a lot of very good reasons for doing it, but it doesn’t result in enlightenment any more than any other technique does. It does help provide a fertile ground that you could work with, which is important.

So the feeling-function could be accessed in this ‘instant’ way and you can feel open; you don't have to do the relaxation of the bodymind, or the release work?

Some of us may require significant bodywork before we are able to simply be, or simply relax open as love. Others may require years of meditation or raising a family or chanting devotional hymns. Whatever works for you is what you can practice gracefully and with humor, but I would hope that people didn’t try too hard to make their unique set of practices into a religion that they believe should apply to everyone.

Just coming off the back of that, I wondered who you think the book is aimed at. What’s your intended audience?

Anyone and everyone who could use it. I’m guessing that Instant Enlightenment will appeal mostly to those who are young in mind, meaning they're not rigid-minded …

They're pretty playful?

Exactly, that's a good word to describe the audience for this book - the kind of person who is playful in their heart and in their approach to spiritual life.

The Love that Washes through Patterns MP3 Sample

LianaG — Sat, 06 Jan 2007 16:13:00 -0500

"If you are in a good relationship, the worst, hellish stuff that you're ever going to face is going to come up." With these sobering words, David Deida goes on to describe and lead workshop participants through practices of love that transform those patterns of behavior which limit our intimacies, popping us through the patterns to the ecstasy of love-bliss that lies waiting on the other side. Click on the attachment to listen to a sample of this talk.

Click here, if you wish to purchase The Love that Washes through Patterns by David Deida

Trust Him More Than Yourself

LianaG — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 22:53:00 -0500

For a woman to experience her deepest sexual bliss and openness, she must trust her lover’s masculine more than she trusts her own.

Most women are capable of very deep sex. As a woman, your body and heart desire utter ravishment, total surrender, wave upon wave of pleasure and blissful love. But usually your sexual experience falls quite short of this.

If you are like most women, you know that sex can be better than it usually is. Even if you have not yet experienced it, you intuit a deeper sexual potential, although you may not know exactly how to get there.

For most women (and men), there are sexual skills to learn and emotional knots to untie. But no matter how skillful or easeful you become, your partner plays a huge role in how fully you will be willing to open sexually, physically, emotionally, and spiritually together.

Deep, ravishing sex involves the loving play of masculine and feminine forces. The masculine is consciousness, and manifests through the body as presence and direction. The feminine is love-light, and manifests through the body as radiance and life force. A sexy masculine person is very present and confident in direction. A sexy feminine person is very radiant and alive with life force. Presence and radiance attract each other and can realize their oneness in the depth of sexual embrace.

In truth, masculine and feminine are aspects of the one conscious light that is called the divine by many names. For the fullest expression of sex, love is necessary but not sufficient. In order for sex to become sacred ravishment, conscious light plays as two: one partner embodies the masculine force of consciousness, presence, and purpose, while the other partner embodies the feminine force of love-light, radiance, and life force. These days, many men and women are afraid to sexually embody these divine expressions. Why?

Each person, every man and woman, has both masculine and feminine within them. Years ago, men were forced by social custom to always play the masculine role and women to play the feminine. This felt suppressive and limited. So, modern-day social custom has evolved to idealize balanced men and women: people who are each supposed to embody both masculine and feminine in a kind of psychological wholeness and relational independence.

Being whole unto oneself is a sign of psychological health. But being able to take the next step, to relinquish your boundaries in order to realize and express something larger than yourself, is a sign of spiritual maturity. To grow beyond mere self-sufficient wholeness, you and your lover can learn to open your boundaries and relinquish sexual autonomy for the sake of two-bodied divine play.

If you are sexually playing the feminine, you want to be swooned by your lover’s unwavering presence, taken beyond all resistance into the overwhelming fullness of love, ravished into bliss. If you are playing the masculine, you want to feel your lover’s trust and be attracted into your lover’s radiant surrender so that you may give yourself utterly in the ravishment of your lover. As your hearts trust, your boundaries are relinquished, and masculine and feminine open—sometimes savagely, sometimes sublimely—as one conscious light.

But if you cling to psychological wholeness, you won’t be willing to relinquish your boundaries of self-sufficiency. If you are like many modern women, you have worked hard to establish healthy boundaries and actualize your own direction and purpose; relinquishing your own navigation seems dangerous. Yet, if you have a more feminine sexual essence, this trust and sexual surrender is exactly what your deep heart desires. So, if you want to open in deep sexual play, you can practice trusting your lover to play the masculine while you play the feminine.

Even more difficult is the fact that, today, many women have a more highly developed masculine than their lovers do. You may not want to surrender to your lover’s masculine direction because you don’t trust it. And if your masculine direction is more evolved than your lover’s is, then you shouldn’t surrender to your lover’s masculine. You are better off navigating yourself, following your own sexual lead! But if you do so, don’t expect that your masculine lover will desire you for long.

Would you like to feel your masculine lover desiring and diving into your feminine radiance? Put another way, how attracted would you be if your lover preferred his own radiance to yours? Would it turn you on if he spent more time looking at himself in his dressing room mirror than at you, desiring himself and inspiring himself with his own beauty and shine?

Would that attract you sexually, if your masculine lover were “self-sufficiently radiant,” so that he enjoyed his own shine more than yours? This is how you feel to him, if you are “self-sufficiently directional,” trusting your own navigation more than his. Deep down, if you have a feminine sexual essence, then you want him to desire your radiance more than his own, and he wants you to desire his navigation more than your own. That is how the divine wants to make love through your bodies.

The truth is simple and stark: If you want to open sexually as the feminine divine, you won’t experience the deepest bliss of ravishment unless you are with a lover who can sexually navigate deeper than you, and you trust your lover’s masculine more than your own.

This is the bottom line. It doesn’t matter how many sexual skills you know, or how open you are emotionally. If you don’t trust your lover’s masculine force and direction more than your own, you won’t open completely. You won’t let down your boundaries and surrender in deep trust to be sexually ravished by the divine masculine. Your lover’s masculine consciousness, presence, and direction must be capable of bringing you to a deeper, more blissful and open love than you are capable of directing yourself, or you won’t trust your lover’s navigation. You won’t open completely, and sex will stop short of divine ravishment.

Once you have balanced your inner masculine and feminine, once you have developed as an autonomous, whole person, then you have achieved psychological integration. But to experience divine sexual bliss, there is another step to take. Without losing your capacity for wholeness in everyday life, you can learn to relinquish your boundaries during sex, giving yourself entirely to be taken by the divine masculine force. But if your own masculine is more developed then your lover’s, then you will stop short of utter surrender—and well you should! Why follow your lover’s sexual navigation if your own is deeper and more heart-true?

Therefore, if you want to experience the fullest divine play as the feminine sexual partner, then you must choose a lover worthy of your trust. If you are in a relationship, your lover can cultivate his whole-body depth of presence as you cultivate your capacity to receive his heart-true navigation. Specifically, your lover’s masculine consciousness, presence, and direction should be more developed than yours, more capable of taking you into utter sexual openness and spiritual surrender than you are capable of taking yourself.

If your lover can offer you this gift, then why not let go of your own sexual lead and surrender to ravishment as you have always yearned?

If you don’t trust your lover’s masculine direction more than yours, then the best you can hope for is love without deep ravishment. If love is all you want, then the play of masculine and feminine is irrelevant. You can enjoy love with your friends, children, and parents. You can love yourself. You can love the divine. You can love your intimate partner in many ways, cuddling, gardening, raising a family. Love is the very nature of your being, the very nature of all being. Love is the openness of every moment.

But if you find yourself yearning for a love that includes ravishing sexual play, if you want to be taken, swept off your feet, and overwhelmed by the unrelenting force of divine masculine presence, then you must be with a lover whose masculine direction you trust—and desire—more than your own. Only then will you allow yourself to surrender, receive, and bloom open wide as the moment’s full light of love.