Breaking Through

Breaking News! What a Body Knows will be a book!!

Actually, it already is a book, but now it will be published and sold by a dynamic young publishing company from the UK, O Books, and no longer lying on my study floor. The expected due date is May 29, 2009. You will find information about my book HERE.

Meanwhile, I will continue writing this blog, introducing ideas here that are treated with added depth and anecdote there. There I flesh out the experience shift I imagine possible in relation to our desires for nourishment, physical intimacy, and spiritual affirmation. Here I apply ideas in the book to happenings in the news week to week. The dream has always been that this blog would become a place for readers of the book to ask questions, share their reading experiences, work out the details, and comment on contemporary events. May it be so!

Until then: more!
*
Two books are in the news and on the blogs this week: 365 Days and Just Do It. Each book chronicles the story of a married couple who decide to have sex every day for an agreed-upon time--one year or 101 days. In each case, the couples confirm: the experience increased intimacy. Their relationship is better; their sex is better. They feel and are closer to one another, more in love.

Such positive results might seem guaranteed (of course more sex is better!), until you move beyond the titillation factor, and think it through. A big question looms: how do you manage to share yourself with a partner day in and day out for that long? How do you allow yourself to open to feel what you are feeling, regardless of your stress or performance anxiety, your level of confidence or happiness, your attitudes towards your self, body, work, or what you did and didn’t do on a given day? Takes guts! Humility. Determination. Faith in the practice and process and partnership.

Sure, it is possible to have sex without intimacy. Happens all the time. But when partners take on such a project as friends and co-parents, involved in each other’s daily lives, at least remembering that they took vows for life long love, then it is highly likely that the project will attune them to one another more and more. Why? They have to pay attention. They have to pay attention to each other and to themselves, not television or email. That is what made the difference in their relationships. Not the sex.
*
Our desire for physical intimacy is and is not like our desire for food. On the “like” side, both desires are rhythmic, tracking arcs of pleasure that rise and fall. Both are sensitive to triggering by memories of past pleasures or promises of future satisfaction. Both activate the same reward and pleasure centers of the brain. Both impel us to create the conditions needed for their satisfaction. So too, both are vulnerable to the mind-over-body training we receive. We can learn to sense and respond to each with doubt, denial, and deferral.

Our desire for sex, however, is "unlike" as well. It is relational. With that relationship comes the additional challenge of coordinating arcs of desire—mine and yours. For, as we saw last week, what we most want cannot be taken, forced, or bought. What I most want is you wanting me.

It is over these last two words, “wanting me,” that partners tend to trip and split. For if one “wants” and the other doesn’t, then to the one who is wanted, the wanting doesn’t seem like it is “for me.” And for one who doesn’t feel wanted, the want is all the greater. A pattern begins: demand and withdrawal. One partner demands, the other withdraws, or more to the point, counters with another demand. Standstill.

This is a primary challenge in every relationship between lovers: how can we embrace the mismatched, cross-hatched desires of any given moment as an opportunity to be together, to grow more in love, to give and receive a life-enabling touch?

The solution to have sex every day for a period of time gives this tension a rest, for sure. Partners no longer have to worry if and when and how. It is already decided. Still, this decision doesn’t make the task of relating that much easier. It just dramatizes what is always true. It allows the desire for sex to be a force driving partners to learn to live in the love that they share.

It’s the bulldozer effect (see June 3). Our desire for sex, even if acted out in a contract, provides the motivation and direction we need to create a relationship within which our ever-evolving pleasure is possible. We pay attention. We deal with our stuff. We have to in order to be present with ourselves, with each other, feeling what we are capable of feeling. It is how we learn to live in love.

Neither partner of either couple suggested continuing the practice beyond the allotted time. (It wasn’t that good!) And the question remains: can temporarily suspending the tension involved in negotiating if, how, when, why help us develop the ability to stay present with ourselves and each other more consistently, able and willing to give and receive on all levels, including physical, the touch that enables our ongoing lives? It might work. For some. But only when they realize that sex is not the issue, and never was.
*
It is hard not to think of sex as the goal. We want to make sure we get it. But when we focus on sex as goal, we miss it. We forget that pleasure is a function of our openness to it. What we can sense depends on how open we are to sensing. And the more open we are to ourselves and each other, along the multiple folds and dimensions of our living, sharing our pleasant and not-so-pleasant thoughts, the richer our experiences will be.
*
So what does the cycle of breaths (see side bar) have to do with this? As with our desire for food, having such a practice can open up a perspective on a given moment—those yuck feelings in particular—that allows you to find opportunities for sensing and responding that you didn’t think possible. The perspective that opens is one in which I am aware that I am the movements making me.

Breathing down into the earth, I allow myself to let go into the desire, to affirm it in the moment, whether knotted in irritation and resentment, or extended in longing, as who I am and what I am creating.

Breathing open and releasing into air, I allow those crimped and cramped sensations to unfold, supported by the ground in myself.

Breathing down in the fire at my core, I discern the heart of the desire, finding in yuck feelings the truth of what they represent: a desire for more in the relationship. For more given and more received. More living in the love that is possible.

Breathing through the opened, warmed, grounded space, my righted desire finds ways to be present and open with my partner. To pay attention to how we are creating this impasse, and finding in the pain direction for how to move, what to say, how to engage, differently.

Next week: How it works.