How It Works

Life long passion may be about learning to love, yet it is not about learning to love in general, as honorable an activity as that may be. It is about learning to love and be loved by a particular bodily individual, and doing it well. It is about learning to express our love in ways that allow our partners to feel that love as a force releasing them into freedom and creativity, pleasure and joy. It is about learning to give and receive a touch that is, in this sense, life enabling.

For this journey, there is no formula, map, or destination. There is only an ever-unfolding process of tuning in to what we and our partners need in order to be released into the flow of our own becoming.

Most of us, however, are not mind readers—or body readers. We don’t know how our partners want and need to be touched. We barely know how we want to be touched. And rather than find out for ourselves, our tendency, given our cultural mind over body training, is to rely on images of love and sex plied to us.

We imagine that touching and being touched is a technical matter of identifying the right spots and applying pressure as needed. For our part, we want to think of touch as merely physical, for if it is then we can be sure that we will get the satisfaction we desire, even if we are not on the best of terms with our partners. Better yet, we know that we will be able to give it to the other whether or not we feel like it. Satisfaction guaranteed.

It’s not. In attaching to such images, we are training ourselves not to be able to ask for what we need. We cannot imagine that our tenacious sensations of physical yearning might be pointing towards kinds of touching that are not merely physical—the gentle question, the inquiring glance, the encouraging comment, the well-earned appreciation. We cannot imagine that there is work to be done in breathing into our selves, and bringing our sensory awareness to life with another person. It is about getting to know another person, for sure, and it is also about being willing to be present with ourselves, to allow ourselves to be known.

Even if we have a small inkling of the need for such work, we are likely to ignore it. For it is easier not to ask than to risk opening ourselves to the disappointment that we, or our partners, will not or cannot touch us as we or they need to be touched.

No asking, no friction, no fear.

We thus lose registers of discernment—the sensory cues that would help us recognize in ourselves what releases us into pleasure. It remains a mystery.

When we don’t know what we need and don’t ask for what we need—even and especially when we think we are doing so for the sake of holding the relationship together—we create pockets of silence in ourselves and in the relationship. Dead spaces. The relationship shrinks; the sensory space it occupies in us shrinks. We are less satisfied with the relationship as it grows less able to provide us with cell opening blasts of life enabling touch. So is our partner.

When I ask for what I need, I have more to give.

It is a paradox, but true. When I ask for the touch I need, just ask, without expectation, as a way of being present to myself and with you, I give you the greatest gift. I give you what you need to succeed in doing what you want to do: love me. I give you the pleasure of releasing me into ever greater love for you. Intimacy deepens. Love grows, and I find in myself more capacities for responding to you when you ask of me.

This logic cuts across conventional wisdom and bears repeating. When we do not ask for what we need in order to be seen, feel whole, or unfold fully, we prevent our partner from getting what he or she desires.

When we ask for the kind of touch that will enable us—and open to explore what that might be—we give the gift that is most desired: the gift of ourselves.
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How do we know what we really need? We need a relationship in which our physical satisfaction is an ever-evolving reality. And for that, we need to share and listen, be present with ourselves and for another, and honor the tangled yearnings and tired frustrations and pesky irritations we feel as guiding us closer to one another.

When we breathe down and through such yuck moments, we can begin to appreciate them as gifts. They are expressions of what we want, of what we believe is possible. They are opportunities erupting in us to ask for the precise compassion that will release us into the flow of our love for the other person.

We can ask without fear or resentment, because we trust in desire.

We can listen too. We can listen in response because we know what we want.

When our partner asks us to move in a particular way, it is easy to feel defensive (I already did that), or inadequate (I didn’t think of it), or overwhelmed (I have way too much to do, can’t you see?!). It is easy to get wrapped up in the fear that we are letting our partners down.

However, if we are able to recognize the wisdom in our own yuck feelings, then we can hear it in our partner’s as well. We can hear our partner’s asking of us as evidence that s/he trusts in his or her desire for us. That she believes in the relationship. That she has more to give to the relationship. We can hear such requests not as signs of our inadequacy, but as signs of our partner’s desire to move closer to us.

How can we find a way to connect right now?

It takes time. Attention. But gosh, it is good.