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Last week, I started a series of arti­cles. I sug­gested that four areas could be looked at for guid­ance on how our lives are pro­gress­ing, and that the four needed to be no less than neu­tral in “feel,” and to be in balance.

Here’s a graph of what I mean:

There’s a book called High Level Well­ness, by Don Ardell. His the­ory of well­ness really hit home. His scale runs from “dead” (1) to high level well­ness (10). He says that most peo­ple get to 5 (asymptomatic—i.e. not in pain,) and stop—stop ther­apy, stop exer­cis­ing deeply, just coast. Ardell is mak­ing the same point I was—set­tling for less than neu­tral is silly, and neu­tral is only mar­gin­ally better.

This week, we’ll look at sen­su­al­ity and sex­u­al­ity from this same perspective.

First of all, you might be won­der­ing, “why sen­su­al­ity and sex­u­al­ity?” I would sug­gest that our sex­ual nature and our abil­ity to be sen­sual (engage, at will, with our senses) is fun­da­men­tal to our human natures and to our well-being.

And, I know this is an issue because of how many of you are now squirm­ing or won­der­ing where I’m going with this.

When we are born, we are “all senses.” I received a ques­tion from a writer, who is work­ing on an arti­cle, the gist of which is, “Why are kids joy­ful, and then learn not to be?”

I wrote a cou­ple of things to him:

1) Phys­i­o­log­i­cally, there is no dif­fer­ence between an adult’s and a child’s expe­ri­ence of any­thing. (We are all hard-wired the same.) The dif­fer­ence comes as we social­ize our chil­dren. We add to the expe­ri­ence the idea of judg­ment. (“SHOULD I be feel­ing this way?”) This eval­u­a­tive process is nec­es­sary for the child’s sur­vival (so, for exam­ple, they don’t walk into the “pretty” camp­fire.) It goes off the rails as, more and more, the child is taught to repress bod­ily sen­sa­tions in favour of “over-thinking.”

2) Chil­dren expe­ri­ence their feel­ings directly, and “in the moment.” That’s why they can be hav­ing a tantrum one moment and gig­gling with plea­sure in the next. They stop doing this spon­ta­neous liv­ing as they gain a sense of past and future. They begin to ques­tion their expe­ri­ence, its valid­ity, and pack onto it what oth­ers have told them they ought to be experiencing/feeling.

3) I would sug­gest that ther­apy and Body­work are two tools some peo­ple use to re-learn to expe­ri­ence the here and now. Sadly, most peo­ple (to para­phrase Thoreau) choose lives of quiet des­per­a­tion, and die with their song still in them.

The way out is not to think of it as “re-capturing youth,” but rather to com­mit to free­ing one’s spirit to fully and com­pletely expe­ri­ence life.”

Our sex­u­al­ity is a deep and hard wired part of us. Chil­dren are sex­ual beings. We all know that kids, to put it politely, like to rub cer­tain por­tions of their anatomy. This ten­dency seems to go back­ground around school time, only to re-surface with a vengeance at puberty.

Most of us learned about sex lit­er­ally or fig­u­ra­tively in the back seat of a car. Fast, dumb, and not much fun. Most peo­ple never get much far­ther. There may be some exper­i­men­ta­tion with bells and whis­tles, but mostly, the expe­ri­ence is a mile wide and an inch deep.

Most peo­ple never learn about sen­su­al­ity. Many of my female clients bemoan the lack of “cud­dling.” By this they mean that they want sen­sual or erotic, non-sexual con­tact, and every time they try to get it, their part­ner thinks it’s an invi­ta­tion to sex.

By the time peo­ple get to ther­apy, their sen­sual and sex lives, in the main, are bor­ing, shut down, pre­dictable and infrequent.

We’ve lost more than a bit of cuddling—in a sense we’ve lost our souls. Many moons ago, I wrote about the sculp­tures at the Kha­ju­raho Tem­ple in India. The Tem­ple at Kha­ju­raho is described as a sculpted Kama Sutra. The idea seems to be to dis­play the nat­u­ral­ness of sen­su­al­ity and sex­u­al­ity. And the best place to study this, the archi­tects decided, was in a Temple!

There seems to have been a golden age of sen­su­al­ity some cen­turies ago, which got pushed back­ground around the time of the Dark Ages, through the influ­ence of Augus­tin­ian Chris­tian­ity and Islam. There came a time when women were blamed for pol­lut­ing the minds of men (like men need any help…) and many reli­gions lit­er­ally and fig­u­ra­tively wrapped women up and stuck them on a shelf.

To see the other side, all we have to do is read the Song of Songs in the Bible, or study Tantra and Kun­dalini prac­tices in India, or “The Jade Cham­ber” in China.

Our sen­sual and sex­ual natures are not optional. They are a part of us—a fairly big part, actu­ally. We are turned on, at the cel­lu­lar level at the least, by many things. We may go into our heads and try (or suc­ceed) in block­ing our recog­ni­tion of what we are feel­ing (we push it down to the sub-conscious level—by deny­ing our nature— and cre­ate a back­ground hum that feels like a painful longing—familiar?)

So, what’s up with “neu­tral or bet­ter” as regards sex­u­al­ity and sen­su­al­ity? Well, the tem­ple in India points us in the right direction.The tem­ple sculp­tures demon­strate how sen­su­al­ity, sex­u­al­ity, and spir­i­tu­al­ity are entwined. (Given the posi­tions demon­strated in some of the stat­ues, a great choice of words.) This golden age was a time of experimentation—and the exper­i­men­ta­tion involved using yoga, mas­sage, med­i­ta­tion and Tantra—all designed to open par­tic­i­pants to the free move­ment of kun­dalini energy in the body. The goal was to use that which is plea­sur­able to build up, strengthen, and move the energy up the spine, toward the top of the head, and in this process, to open to a deeper spir­i­tu­al­ity.

Sen­su­al­ity and sex­u­al­ity, then, became tools and devices for deep­en­ing one’s self-knowing, and in that process, open­ing the per­son to bliss.

Or, as Joseph Camp­bell put it,

“If you fol­low your bliss, you put your­self on a kind of track that has been there all the while, wait­ing for you, and the life that you ought to be liv­ing is the one you are liv­ing.
Wher­ever you are — if you are fol­low­ing your bliss, you are enjoy­ing that refresh­ment, that life within you, all the time.”

Here’s the point. Your sen­sual and sex­ual nature are real. They are fun­da­men­tal to who you are. The energy “lives” in the root and 2^nd chakras, and for most, this energy stag­nates there. And then peo­ple com­plain that their life is not stim­u­lat­ing, fun, inspired, pas­sion­ate and cre­ative. Most peo­ple just put up with this. Many are the peo­ple who have had “bad” expe­ri­ences in this area and “stick there,” refus­ing to move past the accu­mu­lated pain, judg­ment, and dis­tress. Neu­tral or worse.

Oth­ers shut down and pre­tend to be “spir­i­tual.” They live in their heads and deny their bod­ies. (Hair shirts, any­one?) Ungrounded spir­i­tu­al­ity is sense­less (get it ??) and fool­ish, and unwork­able. You can be spir­i­tual when you are dead. In the mean time, ground­ing into all of your feel­ings is crucial.

Now, some of those feel­ings will be uncom­fort­able. If you breathe into them and accept them as a part of you, they will release you from their thrall. And you will move past neutral.

Sen­sual expe­ri­ence is not a head expe­ri­ence. You’ll not find a sat­is­fac­tory expla­na­tion for why it is essen­tial that we feel, and feel deeply. Rather, to move beyond neu­tral, there must be a sur­ren­der­ing into the feel­ings, and a sur­ren­der­ing of the need to know.

Neu­tral, really, is half-dead. Why would you choose that?

Next issue, some ways to work with this energy, alone or in groups!

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Make Con­tact!

So, how does this week’s arti­cle sit with you? What ques­tions do you have? Go to the top of the page, and click on the arti­cle title, and leave a com­ment or question!

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Work­shops, Retreats!

Dar­bella and I can help you to find a new, vibrant, rich path. We offer day-long and week­end events —just you and us—and we will work with you, to be the change you want to see.

Read about it here:

Day-long Inten­sives
Week­end Residentials

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Related posts:

1. Sen­su­al­ity, Sex­u­al­ity, Spir­i­tu­al­ity in Practice
2. Sacred Sex­u­al­ity
3. Tem­ples of Tantra

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Tagged with: Sensuality • sexuality • spirituality • Tantra

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