On Sunday we went to the river, Katherine and I.
We soaked up the water, and the sun, and the aliveness of it all, and we talked about our “why.”
I’ve spent the last one and a half years writing a book called The Tao of Deep Intimacy. You could say that it is a fusion of two things very dear to my heart.
One is the practice of conscious relationship. I first read the book Conscious Loving by Gay and Kathlyn Hendricks when it was still in a spiral-bound pre-publication edition in 1988. I’m trained and certified now with them as a Conscious Loving Coach. I’m also completing my training with Terry Real in Relational Life Coaching, and I’ve also been very much influenced by John Gottman, Sue Johnson, John Gray, and a host of others.
‘Conscious relationship’ means to recognize that the habits we all carry from our family of origin, from the culture, and from gender stereotyping in many ways do not lead to healthy relationships. It means to slowly unravel those knee-jerk responses, and to replace them with new ways of being intimate.
The other major influence on this book is Taoist practice. I first started studying with Grandmaster Mantak Chia in that same year, 1988, and I’m now certified to teach more than 20 of his Chi Kung disciplines. I specialize in the practices known as Healing Love, which are the Taoist Sexual Practices.
Katherine and I went to the river, and we talked about our “why.”
Why another book on relationship? Why another book about sexuality? Hasn’t it all been said already?
There are lots of different reasons why we might work on relationship or sex.
- We want to have more pleasure,
- We want a peaceful, happy, harmonious household,
- We want the kids to grow up in a loving environment,
- We want to heal trauma and attachment wounding,
- We want a companion with whom to have fun,
- We want to experience mind-blowing orgasms.
As we sat by the river, we realized we’ve neither of us got nothing against any of those things. They’re all very intelligent pursuits. But none of them are our deepest ‘why.” None of them are why I chose to spend one and a half years researching and writing this book.
To make relationship and sexuality into a conscious practice – a discipline – means putting a lot of time aside; it takes prioritization. It means breaking old deep-rooted familiar habits, which can be difficult. We have to have a driving and compelling ‘why.’
There is something which sometimes happens to all of us. It could be planned, or it could take us by surprise. I call it being ‘immersed in the sacred.’ It’s those moments when everything falls into place. There’s no more desire. Your mind and body become calm. Your heart is full to overflowing. You feel you could die right now, this moment, and you’re complete. Your whole life has been worth living, with all its trials and tribulations, to feel this depth of connection. You’re completely immersed in the present moment. That usually brittle sense of an ‘I’ or a ‘me’ has softened to become less separate from its environment, from the source of all things.
If you savor these moments of tasting sacredness with awareness and treasure them, they can carry over into the rest of your life.
I would call a moment like that ‘self-fulfilling’. It justifies itself. You don’t need anything more after that,
This longing to be immersed in the sacred, to be taken over by it, has been the constant of my life. Every book I’ve written, every course I’ve taught, everything I’ve done since my teens has been some permutation of that longing.
I used to pursue that longing for the sacred through spiritual practice, like meditation, and I got involved with many different gurus and groups over the years. Spiritual practice can bring you into very expansive states, but I came to discover it was missing something: the activation of love of the heart, and real love. Deep meditative states can bring you peace, but they can sometimes bypass somatic and emotional experience.
When we explore conscious relationship and sexuality in the right way, Katherine and I have discovered that it can become the most powerful portal to the sacred.
You can worship a statue or a picture of Jesus, or Mother Mary, or Krishna, or Buddha, or Juan Yin, and call out to the great mystery in longing. We have both discovered that you can also discover that embodiment of the mystery in your own partner, when you learn to look with the right eyes and to become deeply curious about what is beyond the surface of things.
So that’s our ‘why’, that’s what we came home to at the river together, once again.
That’s what this new book will offer you: an opportunity to cultivate a portal to the sacred through conscious relational practice and the cultivation of sexual energy.
