Finding Bliss Beyond Comfort

From Bluetruth

Is She Mine?

In the midst of making love, she began to speak to me. “I love you. I am yours forever. Nothing can break us apart.”

In that moment, it was true. We were love, and we were forever. Nothing could break us apart, since we were as one. But I could also feel her emotional need. I could feel her desire for security creeping in around the edges. Her confession was true enough, but it was tinged by hope. And beneath the hope of forever, lurked the fear of loss—in her and in me.

I wanted so badly to wallow in her confession of love. I wanted to feel that she was mine. That she had given herself to me for good. And, although this was true enough in the moment, similar things had been spoken before, and forever didn’t last. As a confession of love in the moment, it was true and beautiful. But as a hope, it was a lie. We did not own each other, and never would. Our loving was as fragile as our personal fears were strong. It would take only a hurtful moment of emotional collapse and we would be broken apart. Maybe just for a few hours or days. Maybe for good.

In that moment of our lovemaking I could feel both truths. The truth that we had given ourselves to each other as love eternal. And also the truth that we could leave each other in any moment, due to emotional closure or meeting a better intimate partner, in the inevitable event of death, or simply because we were distracted by a fresh piece of ass or chocolate cake.

Surrendering to the truth of our love was blissful. Mixed in with that love, though, was the need to assure ourselves that it would last. True love was mixed with fear. Looking into her eyes and feeling into her body, I began to sense that we were drifting more toward the need for security. We were beginning to grasp onto the emotional need for feeling loved, rather than surrendering into the open gesture of being and giving love.

I practiced to recognize my own need for her, and, to the best of my ability, I felt through my neediness. Even though a part of me wanted to own her forever, this part of me was really formed by fear. Her adoration assuaged my fear and buoyed my self-sense. Her insecurity and neediness made me feel more secure in my ownership of her. This dynamic wasn’t love—it was emotional bondage.

By recognizing and feeling through this neediness, even as we were both beginning to slide into it, I rediscovered, magnified, and surrendered into the force of real love. Without saying a word, my authentic presence in love began to resonate her from sentimental need to deep-hearted devotion.

Her devotion was not to me as a separate person but to the love that we opened ourselves to through our relationship. Our attention shifted from the hope of a future together to the present depth of love that is always the truth of our very being, intuited in our deep heart.

Neediness Is Fear of Loss

Try to notice the moments when you surrender to something less than your deepest truth. Often, an emotion may be so pleasurable that you spend long periods of time wallowing in the comfort and false sense of security, which the emotion gives you. Perhaps your lover’s personal need to feel loved makes him or her do and say things that tie into your needs. Your lover knows your weaknesses. He or she senses your need to feel loved and knows just what to say or do to make you feel powerful, worshipped, or comforted by a love you have always wanted.

Your partner doesn’t do this purposefully, usually. It is just an automatic emotional match: your partner’s needs tie into your needs, and you hook each other. Suddenly, you are treated in a way that makes you feel invincible, certain of being loved. Or perhaps all at once you feel perfectly secure, even infantile, snuggled in the assured love of your partner—assured because your partner needs you as much as you need him or her.

Relationships based on the need to feel loved are always relationships based on fear. When one part of you finally feels loved, another part of you fears the loss of this love. Recognize your moments of emotional need, feel them fully, and surrender open as the fullest giving of love.

Give love so completely that you are disappeared in the giving, existing as love, rather than sexing in the hope for love. You are love. This is your truth. All other sexual expressions are smaller than this truth, however pleasurable or emotionally satisfying they may be.

For Him

Beyond the White Knight Script

Sexually speaking, a woman’s weak link is her need to feel special. Her adolescent hormones started flowing in the midst of an emotional fantasy life filled with her version of princes and princesses, unicorns and damsels in distress, white knights and the hope for her father’s love.

Then, in her young adulthood, sexual desire was probably mixed with her emotional need to feel exclusively loved by her intimate partner, even adored for her special qualities. As an adult, her desire for personal love—for romantic love—remains intertwined with her sexual desire. To grow beyond mediocre sex into the deepest blisses of love, she can learn to love larger than her personal relationship.

Your woman probably has emotional fantasies of a man who will rescue her from loneliness and make her feel special. She confuses romantic, personal love with love itself, which is eternal, boundlessly deep, and at the heart of every being.

Romantic love is very different from unqualified, unrestricted love. Love without boundaries won’t make her feel special. In fact, it will dissolve her in utter radiance, bliss, and openness. The personal self and all its hopes are consumed in the hugeness of this love.

One of your woman’s biggest blocks to spiritual growth is probably her attachment to your personal affirmations of love: the way you care for her when she’s sick, your devotion to her, the security you provide. These are beautiful examples of personal love, not to be avoided. But women often reduce divine love to personal care, warm affection, and emotional security. Very few women are able to enjoy a man’s adoration (or rejection) and at the same time remain full in radiant, unbounded love.

A woman’s capacity for sexual and spiritual bliss is based on her heart’s capacity to remain open as unobstructed love—the love that is her very nature—even while enjoying or suffering her personal relationship with her man. You can help your woman in this growth by remaining aware of all the ways you actually hook her into depending on you emotionally. Practice liberating her heart from need rather than binding it.

Practice widening your woman’s heart larger than the merely romantic. When you give her flowers and she melts into your embrace, penetrate her with your deepest love. Love her like the sun heats the earth, rather than according to her White Knight script. As awakening dissolves a dream, let the force of your love dispel the lingering remnants of her childish hope to be saved by a man. Help her grow toward surrendering as the bliss of love itself—with you and without you.

For Her

You Want to Be Filled, but He Wants to Be Emptied

A man’s weakest sexual link is his need to release stress through ejaculation and rituals of comfort. Your man will go through the same patterns over and over, watching TV, setting the alarm clock, kissing you a certain way, touching you in the usual places, making the familiar grunts, lasting about the same amount of time, and ejaculating. Then comes his post-ejaculative torpor: a few moments of cuddling and maybe some affectionate words, followed by his drift into deep sleep, often within minutes after his orgasm.

As a woman, you want to be filled by sex. You want to be filled by his penis, filled by his love, filled with energy and passion. But most men want to be emptied by sex. Your man probably treats you as a receptacle for his tension, his frustrations, his burdens, his semen. He wants you to absorb everything and leave him empty. For him, sexual pleasure involves being relieved of stress. For you, it involves being fulfilled by love.

It is easy for a woman to hook into a man’s need for release and attempt to keep his love by hoping he depends on you for his comfort. You end up tolerating his sexual rituals because you think he needs it. You suck out his stress and then watch him sleep in peace. But his true potential as a man is far greater.

Utter release—sheer boundless consciousness, free of fear and stress—is the quality of your man’s true and deepest nature. He tries to approximate this openness by ejaculating while in your arms, just as he learned to empty himself of tension by masturbating as a teenager. While you were lying with teddy bears and ruffled pillows, dreaming of a hero who would love you forever, he was fantasizing about a woman’s perfect body while beating his teenage meat. Mediocre lovers continue these fantasies into their adult partnerships.

Your Man Can Grow Sexually

With practice, your man can learn to empty himself not of semen and tension, but of his entire sense of separate self. In sexual embrace with you, he confronts his fears—his needs for comfort and control—and yields himself like a skydiver jumping from an airplane. He learns to let go completely into love—your love. He practices letting go of himself and feeling into you every time you have sex. The more he can learn to let go of himself, the deeper he can enter your heart.

With practice, he realizes that the love he feels in your heart is also the nature of his heart. He realizes that the ease he seeks in your arms is actually available right now in the openness of deep being—with or without you. This could be scary for you if you hope to keep him dependent on you for comfort.

He learns that he can let go of his little rituals of consolation and breathe love in any moment. Ejaculating, drinking coffee while reading the newspaper, watching the same shows on TV every week from the same chair—they barely approach the depth of release and freedom afforded by a simple moment of complete surrender, letting go and opening as the depth of love directly.

If you want to maintain a mediocre relationship, then continue being the receptacle on which your man depends. Enjoy his cuddle after he has released his stress in your loving arms. But if you want to grow into a love not limited by familiar comfort, then trust total surrender, his and yours.

How You Can Help Him Grow

Without criticizing his habits, show him how you feel by not hiding your disappointment. How does your heart feel when he ejaculates in five minutes and goes to sleep? Are you truly fulfilled by his evening ritual of food, TV, smooch, and snooze? Show him your suffering, but not in words at first. Words will only engage debate. Rather, offer him an unarguable demonstration: the hurt in your body and heart.

Let the anguish show on your face. Let the pain water your eyes. You love him. He loves you. Show him how his mediocrity hurts you, if it does.

You may be quite happy with your relationship and sex life. However, if your sexual relationship is pretty good but not heart-rendingly blissful, then it may be time to invite your man into a new depth of intimacy. Let him feel your heart, unguarded and wide. If love is gushing out toward him, drown him in your love. If his superficial sexing denies your deepest desires for love, show him your pain through your facial expression, your wailing and tears, through your entire body.

If he requires words to understand why you are suffering, then express your need rather than his lack. Instead of saying, “I hate when you go to sleep right after sex,” try saying, “I need to feel you with me emotionally even after sex.” Rather than, “Don’t just come home, plop down, and expect me to jerk you off,” try saying, “Even if you are tense from work, I need to feel the strength of your deep presence before I can open to you and trust you sexually.”

Your raw expression and honesty will help your intimacy grow. You’ll still have the cozy comforts whenever you want them, but you won’t be limiting yourself to their repeated ritual.