Navigating Needs Moods and Affairs
From Bluetruth
My Desire Grows Huge
On Monday, I really wanted her. I was thinking about sex all day. I imagined satisfying myself with her. We never got together.
On Tuesday, I could hardly wait. I could feel her body against mine. Where was she?
On Wednesday, I finally saw her. We ripped off each other’s clothes, and I entered her while standing.
I immediately wanted to ejaculate. The pressure had been building for days, and now I could release it. I wanted to so bad.
But something felt off. I wasn’t making love with her at all. I was using her for the sake of my own release.
So, I began to practice through my need. I felt my whole body, rather than just my genital urge. I felt outward from my heart, into her. I slowed down and deepened my breath, circulating energy through both of us with my breath. I felt into her more deeply as our hearts opened wider. I relaxed into loving, instead of driving to dump the load of my desire.
As I relaxed more and more into our loving, my desire grew. But it grew in a big, round way. It wasn’t sharp. It wasn’t seeking release. It was as if a huge ball of desire grew out from my center, consuming both of us in its vastness. Eventually, the universe itself felt like desire: open-ended, not trying to resolve itself, but churning in its own expanding heat.
We made love for several days in a row. I didn’t ejaculate but continued to magnify my desire. In our loving, the edges of desire were smoothed and opened. Before, my need was pushy and aggressive. Now, my desire was so huge, so edgeless, so as to be unsizable. It had nothing anymore to do with ejaculation or the need for release.
Her desire also enlarged. We walked around in a state of immense openness. We were full of force and at the same time only love without need. We could have sex or not—it hardly mattered.
I learned that my neediness of sexual craving is this vast desire made narrow, focused on a goal, targeted toward release. Penned into a corral of sexual fantasy, it would run wild, generating thoughts and motives of penetrative aggression. But this same desire, articulated as sex, loosed in the space of love, is the motion of all life.
Magnify Desire through Sex
Sexual desire should be magnified and smoothed large, not satiated or depleted during sex. As your addiction to ejaculation or orgasmic release is broken, your sexing becomes less craven. Aggressive need can become passionate love.
If you notice that you look forward to sex in order to release tension, practice using sex to round out your energy, rather than to deplete it. Open your desire, and realize its power.
Huge sexual energy necessitates huge love. The more you magnify desire through sex, the more you must match love to the size of your desire. Otherwise, your magnified sexual need becomes demonic, subverting your relationship into an arena of brutish grasping and expenditure.
But when you relax your desire as the openness of love, its wideness swallows its sharpness. There is plenty of room in infinity, and huge sexuality splays as huge love. Use sex to magnify desire, not to diminish it. Enlarge desire as the edgeless space of this moment. For Him
A Woman’s Sexual Energy
Your desire for intimacy with a woman comes in two basic forms: your desire for love and your desire for a certain kind of energy.
You may love your intimate partner—you may open in oneness with her—but you happen to see a woman at the grocery store who really turns you on. There is something about her that you want—something other than what your partner gives you. Your whole body feels magnetized toward this stranger. It is as if she offers you a different “flavor” of feminine energy than your partner does.
That which makes a woman sexually desirable to you, in particular, is her energetic flavor. In your committed intimate partner, you probably also want depth, intelligence, compassion, a good sense of humor, and a number of other qualities. But you have a certain sexual “taste” that may not have anything to do with these other qualities. You might not know a single thing about the woman in the grocery store, yet she can still evoke your sexual desire. Her energy alone may evoke your desire.
Some women are hot and feisty. Some are cool and calm. One woman may have the energy of an innocent little girl while another may feel like an ornery slut. One woman may slink like a tiger while another may prance like a gazelle. Some women seem like elegant sophisticates while others appear to be dangerous fiendesses. This woman may have sex with you like a freight train while that one may tickle you with delicate kisses.
Every woman—and every man—can embody, express, and desire any or all of these energies. Nonetheless, each woman predominately radiates a characteristic flavor of energy, and each man has a specific taste in women. There are, of course, many aspects to a woman other than her characteristic quality of energy, but this quality is very important when it comes to your sexual desire. If you don’t understand your desire for energy, you may confuse it with your desire for love, your desire for deep oneness and openness of being.
For Love or for Sex?
A woman’s devotion—her depth of love—may open your heart and evoke your love, but her energy evokes your sexual desire. Both at the same time is best: a woman who is deeply loving and who also radiates the energetic qualities you find sexy. But even a shallow woman, a woman who doesn’t love you at all—a woman you don’t even know—can turn you on sexually if she has the right energy. You may not want to spend the rest of your life with her—or even the rest of the day—but your body wants to taste her energy, sexually or perhaps just through a glance.
The immense and culturally universal history of prostitution, mistresses, sex shows, and polygamy—often in spite of penalties for engaging in such activities—speaks loudly of man’s need to sexually experience different flavors of feminine energy. One woman may be enough—more than enough—to occupy a man’s longings for love, companionship, and sacred union, but his body responds to countless sources of feminine energy day after day.
Sources of Feminine Energy
If a man’s energetic neediness grows strong enough—if he isn’t getting the specific flavor of feminine energy he needs from his wife whom he loves, for instance—he will seek it elsewhere. For some men, just glancing at a woman in a grocery store is enough. Other men need a more distilled dose of feminine sexual energy, and so they use erotic movies or adult magazines to drink in the flavors for which their taste is greatest.
Some men enjoy feminine energy by flirting with co-workers or conversing with women friends. Some men receive the woman of their dreams through masturbatory fantasy. Some go so far as to hire a professional feminine energy source to get what they need, through sex or through dancing, massage, or role-playing.
Many men hire prostitutes or adult entertainers not so much for sex itself, but to experience certain kinds of energies—dominant or submissive, innocent or nymphomaniacal, nurturing or wild. If all a man wants is sexual release, it is far easier and less expensive for him to masturbate in private. But masturbation isn’t sufficient if his hunger is for a specific quality of feminine energy.
Men have been known to risk losing the woman they really love in order to get the feminine energy they need from another woman. Of course, when a man really loves a woman and she is also able to give him the feminine sexual energy he needs, then his attraction to her is complete—though this won’t prevent his body from being momentarily attracted to random women throughout the day whose energies happen to fit his tastes and therefore magnetize his sexual appetite.
Your Sexual Needs May Change
As a man, your energetic needs may change throughout your life, depending on the stage of your spiritual growth, the demands of your career, your health, and even where you happen to be geographically—the kind of women you are attracted to in Paris will be very different from the kind you are attracted to in Hawaii or at home. And as the style of your work changes—from sitting alone in an office to managing a group of 50 people face-to-face, for instance—the type of energy you are sexually attracted to will also change.
This attraction has nothing to do with trust, commitment, or even friendship. It is simply an attraction based on the energetic disposition of your body at the time. The strength of this attraction may be intense—you may find yourself doing something very stupid for its sake—but it is not about love.
When Women Have Affairs
A man’s division between sex and love isn’t easy to understand for a woman whose heart and genitals are emotionally connected. She would find it difficult to open sexually with a man she didn’t trust and love. However, this is not to say that women aren’t attracted to strangers or don’t enjoy an occasional fling or affair. Sometimes they do.
Sometimes women have affairs for the same reason that men often do: They want to taste a specific flavor of sexual energy. Women especially begin to feel this way when their intimate partner is energetically “dead” or uncomfortable in his body.
But most often a woman considers having an affair because she is attracted to a man with more presence, attention, and desire for her than her partner offers. What really distracts a woman from her committed intimacy is when she meets a man whose love penetrates her more deeply than her partner’s. When a man moves her with deeper presence and more trustable integrity than her husband—perhaps her therapist, tennis instructor, colleague, or teacher—then her heart may become divided.
Should You Have an Affair?
If you are a man for whom sex and love are not the same, then you know that your sexual attraction to other women does not necessarily divide your heart. Often a man discovers during the course of a committed relationship that the woman he truly loves and wants to spend his life with does not give him the energy he wants sexually. And, he discovers that he can continue loving his chosen intimate partner with all of his heart while having a sexual relationship with another woman to get the energy he needs. According to statistics on extra-marital affairs, prostitution, and multiple relationships, the majority of men in most cultures on earth seem to feel this way, and more than a few women do, too.
To grow spiritually involves aligning your life with your deepest motive. Although sexual attraction can be extremely strong, it is rarely your deepest motive. In fact, after an ejaculation or two you may be quite ready to ditch your mistress or prostitute and go home to the woman with whom you share your heart. The question to answer for yourself is this: Which sexual behaviors most support your growth so you can sink into the depth of your being, relax as the openness who you are, and give your deepest gifts?
There is no single answer to this question that will apply universally. No particular sexual style is correct for everyone. There have been highly evolved men and women—great men and women recognized in their time and place for their great gifts to humankind—of all sorts, including celibate, monogamous, polygamous, homosexual, heterosexual, and bisexual.
Some great men have enjoyed the company of whores. Others have had royal harems, or lived alone in caves and jungles, or spent their entire life raising a family with one woman. Some great women have had one husband and many lovers, while others preferred the company of cats, or enjoyed intimacy with women more than with men. If you can imagine it, some great man or woman has probably lived it. Each person is unique and manifests their gifts in different ways, from creating a beautiful family with one devoted intimate partner to founding new forms of art fermented by the juices of assorted vamps, skanks, or scalawags.
As you grow, you will find old husks and needs dropping away and new priorities emerging. As this process transforms your sexual life, always commit your actions to your deepest truth. Discipline yourself so that you attend to your deepest desires and allow them to govern your more superficial ones.
However strong it may be, the desire to get laid is relatively shallow, spiritually speaking: You share it with earthworms, fish, and flies. Don’t have sex with everyone you are attracted to. That reduces your motives to the purely animal level of desire. But also, don’t deny when you truly hunger for certain inspirational or healing energies, deceiving yourself for the sake of emotional security.
Cater neither to your body’s desire for animal lust nor to your emotion’s desire for succor and dependable comfort. Rather, discover how you must arrange the details of your life to manifest the deepest love on earth. For most people, a long-term committed relationship affords the best opportunity to grow spiritually while manifesting love and learning to give your deepest gifts to the world.
The Sexual Bottom Line
No sexual arrangement will end your cravings. So what if your body remains promiscuous and lustful, or if your emotions crave a more cozy and consoling nest of comfort? They will in any case. Even if you have a hundred lovers, even if you have one lover who adores you, your body will occasionally want others and your emotions will occasionally crave more security. You can never get enough money or affection, sex or security, so that you feel complete.
Completion lies in utter surrender or relaxation as your deepest truth, opening yourself as the flow of love, and giving your true gifts. When the unthreatenable presence of deep being saturates your body, mind, and emotions, then you will know how to express your love, spontaneously and authentically. Until then, the changing tides of your sexual hunger and your need for emotional security will pull you this way and that way, creating divisions within you.
Live Your Fantasies with Your Partner
Energetic desire is very real and natural. You are not a bad person because you love your woman but fantasize about spending time with a lady who wears leather and beats you with a whip or dresses like a cheerleader and obeys you like daddy. Communicate your desires with your chosen and committed intimate partner. Usually, she can find the qualities of feminine energy within herself that you need to heal and grow beyond your current cravings.
If she can’t give you that energy, or if you are too embarrassed to receive it from her, then try to get it in other ways, but in her company. Watch an adult movie that gives you the flavors for which you hunger, but watch it with your woman. Make it a shared relational event, enjoyed in love, humor, and intimacy, not a secret indulgence cloistered in guilt and shame.
Unkinking Love’s Desire
Most of your sexual desires, no matter how weird or kinky they may seem, are rooted in your need to give and receive love or your need to experience a specific part in the spectrum of feminine energy. These needs are natural, although if denied or hidden they can grow into “pathological” forms that require healing. If you don’t embrace these desires in yourself with compassion, you can create an inner division that results in an energetic kink.
For example, your natural desire to experience the energy of feminine innocence and vulnerability can get kinked into a pathological need to be sexual with an innocent and vulnerable little girl. To have sex with a girl who is too young virtually always violates her sanctity, confuses her mind, tortures her heart, and creates ripples of pain that can spread throughout her entire life. No man dedicated to realizing his deepest truth and expressing love in the world would do such a thing. But if you are not allowing yourself to receive this aspect of feminine energy in a mature intimate relationship, then fantasies and cravings will begin to attract your attention—if only to watch the topless Little Bo-Peep show at the local men’s club.
The more you grow spiritually, the more you are able to feel, acknowledge, and embrace your desires before they grow into “demonic” or pathological cravings. Always remember that at your core you want to give and receive love, however tense and disturbed you may feel. Remember that it is natural for you to want to give and receive love through specific shades of the spectrum of feminine energy—usually those parts from which you feel most alienated or separate.
Ultimately, as you grow spiritually, you won’t feel separate from any energy. You will live as love in communion with the entire spectrum. Then, your sexual desire will become aligned with your heart’s deepest love rather than with your heart-separate pockets of craving. But as long as you have divided yourself from your own desires, those parts will seek acknowledgment, expression, and healing, quite naturally and inexorably. It is your responsibility to find a loving and benevolent way to balance yourself energetically—such as through massage, with music, nature, and art, or in play with consenting adults—before your desires take on a “demonic” life apart from your deep heart-integrity. For Her
Yearning Is Natural
Your yearning for love probably never ceases. Occasionally, while absorbed in relationships or distracted in tasks, you won’t notice your yearning. But sooner or later you realize that you are not deeply fulfilled in the center of your heart. There is an emptiness, a vacuum deep inside you, that wants to be filled with love.
If you are not in a relationship, the first thing you blame is your loneliness. “If only I was with a good man who really loved me, then I would feel fulfilled.”
If you are in a relationship, you may blame your man for your unhappiness, for the yearning deep in your heart. “If only he would open his heart to me more, desire me more, and love me more deeply.”
Yearning, however, is the natural sensation of the yet-to-be-fully-surrendered heart. Your man, or the man you don’t yet have, is not responsible for your yearning. You yearn for love exactly to the degree that you are not surrendered as the fullness of love right now. And even when you are surrendered, yearning can express your fullness of love. Punishing Your Man with Your Mood Be conscious of the way you punish your man for your own yearning. When you want to hurt him for not fulfilling your heart, you may, for instance, give him an energy he can’t handle. As strong as your man may seem, you know exactly the kind of energy that will get to him.
Perhaps your man can’t handle your anger. Or he might shrink when his sexual, financial, or spiritual capacities are criticized. Most men crumble when their woman doesn’t acknowledge their success. Other men are terrified of their woman’s emotional chaos. You know what your man most fears, and you know how to give it to him.
If your man knows how to handle it, your “testing” energy can be a real gift to him, helping him see where he is weak and dependent, and thus strengthening him. He can receive your anger or criticism, discriminate what is true and useful, make the necessary changes in his life, and embrace you with a smile, not taking the non-constructive momentum of your emotions too seriously.
But if he is not yet ready to change, then your heavy, angry, or shut-down energy becomes a pure burden in his life. Whereas the fundamental feminine bad mood is the feeling of being unloved, the fundamental masculine bad mood is the feeling of being burdened.
The Bad Mood Cycle
You want your man to love you, to embrace your moods and enter your heart, to desire you more than any other woman. Your man wants you to relieve him of his sense of burden and give him energy, enlivening his weary heart and body. When you feel your man is not desiring you in love, or when your man feels you are not rejuvenating him with love, the bad mood cycle starts ping-ponging between the two of you.
You punish each other. You burden him with mood-energy he can’t handle, and he hurts you by withdrawing and turning away in undesire. Eventually, you may feel disgusted by each other, each of you manifesting what the other hates the most. Your man knows how to express his non-desire for you with as much precision as you know how to weaken him with your energy.
How to Break the Cycle of Punishment
Your man can learn to discover the freedom and openness of deep being. Then he won’t blame you for burdening him, nor will your attempts at “hurting him back” have much effect on him. He’ll embrace you in real love, and if you continue to bitch for too long he will lovingly let you go and move on.
You can learn to discover the love and bliss that flow deep in your heart. Then you won’t blame your man for causing you to yearn, nor will you collapse when he withdraws his love. You may feel hurt by his undesire, but you can learn to remain open and full of love. If he continues to be unloving over time, you can bring your abundant love to another man who is able to meet your love-fullness with the depth of his presence. Or, you can stay with your man and surrender directly to the love that moves through you and as you, whether or not your man is able to meet your openness in love. You won’t reflexively punish him for not being able to open, though you may continue to test him.
This testing is natural on your part. Testing whether your man can match your energy with his strength of love—whether he can ravish you with his presence in the midst of whatever you can dish out—is a healthy aspect of feminine emotional play. But punishing him with your hurtful energy is a form of misplaced anger; you are blaming him for your yearning, for which only you can be responsible.
How Yearning Can Grow into Devotional Strength
Feel the yearning in your heart. Breathe deeply, receiving and releasing love-energy with every inhalation and exhalation. Relax your feet into the tender earth, even through harsh floors. Allow your body to soften into a river of energies, hot and cold, swift and calm, angry, hurt, joyous, peaceful, and wild. Suppress nothing as you surrender wide as the ocean of love from which these energies flow.
From this disposition of devotional strength, you can bless your partner—or anybody else—with whatever energy most serves him. At times you might give him testing energy, and at other times you might give him healing energy. But you no longer use the force of your energy to punish him because you yearn for more love than he gives.
Your Fullness Need Not Cease
You are not a victim of your man’s disability to love. If he is not loving you, if he doesn’t desire you, that’s his problem. You may feel hurt by his unlove or by his lack of desire, but your heart knows that hurting him back is no way to evoke his love or desire. A part of you may want to punish him—and you know exactly how to do that—but the deeper part of your heart is filled with compassion. You know you are love, and deep down, so is your man. Your man is going through whatever lessons he needs to open more deeply in love with you. You may want to celebrate this love with him, but if he is presently unable to embrace you, your own fullness need not cease.
When you don’t collapse into victimhood or punish your man due to blame, then you remain radiant, full of energy and love. You will naturally attract a man who does desire your love-fullness. Or, you will evoke in your man his desire for your love-fullness, helping him to pull through whatever lessons of love he needs to experience. If he isn’t able to love you, if he isn’t able to want you, the softness of your heart may be pained but the fullness of your love can remain strong.
