Intimacy Happens In the Unknown

Life happens in the great unknown. As much as we may hate to admit it, none of us know what this next moment will bring. (And if we’re honest with ourselves, we don’t know much about what’s going on in the mystery of this present moment either.) It’s natural to want to find a way to orient, organize and systematize our worlds, to map out known territories and stick to our favorite regimes; its part of being a mammal and all that goes into helping ourselves feel safe and secure here on planet earth.

However, authentic relating and true intimacy always happen on the edge of the unknown—where we quake in our vulnerability, where we don’t know the answers, where we allow ourselves to be touched and moved by life, where we exchange our compulsion to know and our urge to control for more presence, aliveness, and wonder.

Great sex happens in the unknown, too. When we release the grip of familiar patterns and discover deeper presence and deeper surrender, far from the shores of mapped territories. When we lose our heads, when we forget who we are, when we lose our sense of time and space. The paradox of our humanness is that we yearn for this with all of our heart, and yet tend to do everything in our power to avoid it.

When we soften our need to control, and allow our body to move as it longs to move, we cannot know where we will be taken. We are entering the unchartered present. And while this may terrify, in the meeting of the unknown, the unknown becomes known, fear dissolves in this knowing, and likely we discover, again and again, that there is a deep and trustable wisdom both in our bodies and in life that is graciously moving us towards greater balance and integration. Over time we begin to gain confidence that we can trust the intelligence of the energy that moves through us; we can trust in the goodness of life. Our deep presence and willingness begins to open the door to all we have longed for.

If you are like many, it can be natural to blame externals for our unwillingness to surrender: if only I didn’t have to pick the kids up at 3, if I weren’t so preoccupied with work demands, if my partner were a more skilled lover, and on and on…. we could allow ourselves to surrender more fully. But this is simply not the case. Letting go is an inside job. We can find any excuse in the world not to surrender, and by the same token, any excuse in the world to surrender: the brush of another’s flesh over our skin could potentially erase all memory of past and future, and draw us fully into this present moment, if we let it.

Having expectations is generally contraindicated when attempting to relax into the unknown as well. Expectations tend to pull us out of the present moment and usher us into a facsimile of reality, where old scripts replay in an attempt to produce familiar outcomes. This does not support showing up fully in this moment, one that has never occurred in the history of time, and will never occur again. How precious, how unchartered, how much more exciting to show up for this moment and be surprised, delighted, and moved by its impossible mystery.

Try arriving for your next sexual encounter, be it a self-pleasuring practice or rendezvous with your partner, as if you have just arrived on planet earth, no past, no future, only this unbelievable present. See how present you can be, how much wonder and awe you can enjoy. As soon as you enter into known territory, a familiar routine, take a pause, reestablish your sense of newness, wonder and awe, and commit to only reengaging when you find yourself present again, in this precious and utterly unknown moment of now.

Love Check

Tender, tender, how full my heart is; how much we love and are love.

I am remembering my wardrobe senior year of high school, 1990–1991: a black armband pinned on religiously each and every morning in private protest of the Gulf War. And weekends spent on intersections holding handmade signs of protest with my friends. I remember the heartbreak and outrage at humans’ lunacy at that sweet age of 17.

Today my activism feels just as passionate, but worked from a different vantage. The reality of our interconnectedness is so clear that I feel my greatest service is to shine the light of love through my cells here where I am, knowing that this contributes, cellularly, to the collective at this moment on planet Earth.

Strangely, when I surrender to my tears and heartbreak, I feel complicit with the wounding; I long to be complicit with its solution. (And of course, crying is good too—a love warrior is in a constant state of heartbreak on some level, and knows how to surrender to even more love as the heart breaks open more and more.)

Think “the butterfly effect”: a butterfly’s wings in Brazil facilitating tornadoes in Texas. In complex, interconnected systems like weather and human societies, small events cascade into enormous effects. When enough of us choose to embody true love here on planet Earth, our whole collective field reorganizes. The collective field responds to these small awakenings; personal transformation contributes to collective transformation.

We know this.

It’s why I am passionate about my work as a couples therapist. When we can do love in our homes and in our own skin, we will lose our collective appetite for violence. I dream of the day our collective stories are of powerful, transformative, illuminating, seamless love—and that it deeply offends and mystifies us to see one human hurting another, whether in our fiction, our kitchens, or our global politics.

I was in a session recently with a wife sharing her devastation about the war, and the actions she was taking to send funds to humanitarian organizations and petition her government representatives. I could sense she was willing to move mountains to do whatever she could possibly do to help. I rejoiced and supported her passionate actions.

And internally, I knew there was a cold-hot war between her and her husband taking place inside their home—and more insidiously, a chronic warring within herself. I gently encouraged her to also take a stand for learning how to be a beacon of peace, collaboration, and mutual respect in all arenas of her life. To commit to being a force of peace inside her own life, her own mind, and her own heart. Because this, too, is a way we positively influence the collective.

What is the climate of your internal terrain these days? One of beauty, strength, well-being, and love—an abundant garden with fruits to share? or low-grade dissatisfaction to downright angst?

When I contemplate the atrocities occurring on the planet in this moment, I feel incredulous. But then I think of the internal states of most of my clients, friends, and myself—without exception (albeit all in our unique ways and along the continuum of recovery and rehabilitation)—we are waging mini wars against ourselves and the people we love, a little to a lot, throughout each day.

Most feel entitled to treat themselves harshly, to speak to themselves in ways they would not, in their wildest imaginings, consider speaking to anyone outside of their own mind—to denigrate themselves in service of theoretically helping themselves do better. And a similar license, oddly enough, tends to get taken with our partners.

But guess what? It doesn’t work this way, bless our sweet hearts.

If we want to see a loving world outwardly, we must be impeccably enacting love in the internal spaces—the places no one visits but ourselves. We must hold ourselves accountable to this, because no one else possibly can.

This is not easy, obviously. We all come from a lifetime—and a lineage—of warriors and warring habit patterns, unceasingly fruiting within our unconscious and conscious minds.

So I recommend a cross-training approach. We are kind and supportive to our friends; people would not want to be around us if we weren’t. So initially, let this be the bar for our self-talk. And I recommend going a step further: if we are ready to put effort into building new internal habits, why not be the most supportive and encouraging friend to yourself you can possibly imagine? Be your own beloved. Sweet-talk and love yourself up unabashedly. Why not? Generating love states is generating love states. Whether we do it with others or with ourselves, our cells vibrate similarly—and impact the collective similarly.

Or look to the natural world for perspective and support. Animals teach us to be in our naturalness; they are not trying to be something other than what they are. They are not aggressing against themselves or their circumstances in the ways most humans do.

Or commune with the elements, each of which reminds us of our size—both small and large. There is nothing like communing with the sky when our internal state begins to feel tight and unpleasant. Sky puts us back in relationship with our own internal space (of which we are 99.9 percent comprised).

I like to put a subtle grin on my face. This naturally relaxes and increases the parasympathetic nervous system. This, along with deepening my breath and inviting myself to place my attention on what feels pleasurable in this moment—or on someone I feel deep appreciation and love for (animals count)—supports arriving in a state of well-being, presence, and love.

What works for you to enter into a land that feels like love inside your own precious mind, body, and heart, in this precious moment here on planet Earth?

Sex

If you are like me, you have tended to undervalue one of our most precious natural resources: pleasure. And if you are like most, you have relegated your sex to only a small morsel of what is possible—an often rote program of genital stimulation and discharge that may momentarily soothe and satisfy, but rarely offers lasting nourishment and certainly does not tap into your deeper creative potential.

You may have forgotten—or worse, never known—that when you bring more breath to your sex, you can experience more pleasure. And when you allow sound, even more.

Through breath, sound and imagination, genital pleasure can be drawn upward into the heart. What a gift this becomes—for ourself, our partner, and perhaps even for the planet—as we use our sexual energy to open our hearts and become more heart-centered.

Consider the idea that 90 percent of orgasmic pleasure arises from breath, and only 10 percent from touch. If we limit ourselves by holding our breath, and rely solely on vibrators or physical stimulation to reach orgasm, we miss a powerful dimension of accessing and circulating our sexual energy.

When we fan these small embers of pleasure with breath, sound, awareness, and imagination, we access a deeper well of energy within us. When practiced and developed, this energy can grow powerful and luminous enough to open our inner channels and usher us into expanded states of awareness.

In this way, orgasm itself becomes more than a fleeting release. In a full-breath, full-body orgasm, we momentarily experience ourselves as interconnected with everything. It begins to remind us of who we actually are.

Imagine how this moment on planet Earth might be different if more of us understood how to open our hearts in our sexuality. Imagine allowing heartbreak and all that feels imbalanced within us to be gently metabolized through presencing ourselves with breath and pleasure in our sex.

And imagine combining pleasure with the unstoppable force that catapults us into the future, leap-frogging into forever—the primal drive that procreates species, this urge that knows how to birth ourselves as Gods and Goddesses and create life itself—when we connect awareness, breath, and intention to this raw sexual power, we find our portal into presence and the opening of dimensions. Where the deeply natural opens us to the supernatural, and we experience our true nature and true size.

Try bringing more breath, sound, and imagination into your sex today. See how you can bring your sexual energy into your heart and also the places in your body that need balance and restoration. Enjoy some of your natural abilities for sexual healing, health, and empowerment.

Pleasure as a Portal into Presence

When we slow down and invite more breath into our bodies, a strange thing inevitably occurs: pleasure.

There is a power in pleasure that encourages us (yes, gives us more courage) to become more present in the present moment, the place where life is actually happening.

If you are in a moment of challenge or pain, these words may not easily land. I get it. Or, if you are born and raised like me, driven to be incessantly productive, the notion of pleasure may not spark your interest or care.

But pleasure is an under-valued natural resource we would be wise to consider. One that can restore presence, balance, and optimism in our bodies, hearts, and spirits.

Our minds can only occupy known territories and tend to concern themselves with what is troublesome about ourselves, our partners, and existence. But pleasure belongs to the present moment, to body, breath, awareness and sensation. And even what is perceived as unwanted to the territory of mind may very well be revealed through direct present moment experiencing as yes, pleasurable.

Pleasure also opens a gateway into understanding ourselves as the interconnected beings that we are, and reveals our nature as spiritual beings having a physical experience. Pleasure is how spirit actually inhabits the physical; it is the bridge between the physical and the Everything. As we draw the ineffable into us with breath, and apply the light of awareness to sensation, space and fire permeate the earth of us, supporting us to feel our nature more as mystery than known, more interconnected than separate. When we are in our pleasure, joy, ease, and openness we are closest to ourselves, our naturalness, and our interconnection with existence.

Pleasure functions as a portal into presence because pleasure can only be experienced when we are present in our bodies, and bodies can only occupy the space of now. Additionally, when we allow ourselves to bring breath and awareness to sensation, something else happens, magical and noteworthy: pleasure itself starts to draw breath and spirit more powerfully into us. So our portal pulls, like a magnet, drawing more life force energy into us, opening us to yet more and more life force energy: we become magnetic, we become a life-force generator.

Even if it is only a moment of chocolate melting on your tongue, exploding in your mouth, momentarily interrupting your scrolling or litany of to-do’s, this counts.

The more moments like this we allow ourselves, the more we fan the small ember of bodily presence within ourselves. As the ember gets fanned, pleasure and life-force energy grow, and our appetite for aliveness grows with it. Breath deepens. And yes, an ember may very well become a forest fire.

Three ingredients are essential for pleasure: slowing down, breath, and awareness. The body moves at a slower pace than the mind. And only when breath moves in the body can we feel. (Many of us have developed brilliant strategies of how to manage our feelings by minimizing our breath, strategies developed early in response to unwanted experiences, which we can now begin to unlearn and rewire.) I can devour a piece of chocolate and it is wonderful. But when I slow down, savor it, and bring breath and awareness to the experience, it can become a full body awakening. The same is true when walking: when I slow slightly and allow the full swing of my hips, feeling breath moving through my entire pelvic structure, I begin to feel more present, more full of feeling and aliveness.

Try noticing what feels good to you in this moment and taking a deeper breath. Continue placing your awareness on this pleasurable sensation while drawing in more breath. Notice how these two actions support you to become more present. Have fun with using pleasure as your new portal into presence.

Taking A Breath

Some moments are easier than others to choose love. In the face of abomination, we are more likely to want to close our hearts rather than find a way to keep them open. But cognitively we understand that closing down is never wise—that if we want to see a loving world, it has to start within our own skin.

The closing down has a pain in it. Life wants to flow through us. When we resist this, we suffer. Especially when we are hurting, especially when we are feeling deeply, life-force needs to move through us. This is what can best restore us to balance and make us once again intimate with ourselves and the stream of livingness we are part of—where we know who we are and our place here, our interconnectedness and belonging.

But how many of us allow this in our day-to-day lives? For most of us, our lives have become so busy and our bodies so tight that few remember to take an adequate breath—one that can allow feeling and life-force energy to flow.

Instead, we eat, drink, take an Advil or an antidepressant, or point a finger at our partner or the tragic state of affairs in the world, even as the pain in our bodies increases and, with it, our urge to separate from ourselves and from existence. And, quite against our heart’s deeper desires, our contribution to ourselves, our families, and our community becomes more pain.

What if a deeper breath, right now, is the greatest service you can offer to yourself, your beloved, and the planet? What if it were the most radical form of activism you could participate in right this second on planet Earth?

A full breath.

And then another.

Allowing the energies within to begin to move, allowing balance to be restored right where you are…

The Radical Evolutionary Moment....

One of my favorite ideas to return to in moments of challenge is this: we cannot solve a problem using the same mindset from which the problem arose.

And yet, how often do we wrestle and ruminate, trying to hack our way through the prickly, tangled subterfuge of a moment’s challenge in desperate pursuit of insight, illumination, or freedom? Bless our sweet hearts and good intentions—but when we are mired inside the challenge itself, we most often lack the perspective needed to touch into true solution space.

This is why, as counterintuitive as it may feel, there is real wisdom in pausing—allowing our nervous systems to return to a state of balance, regulation, ease, and safety. With this pause and reset, we create space. We widen the vantage point from which insight can arise. We become open again.

My yoga teacher used to ask, teasingly, How much time do you want to spend examining your navel wax? A reminder of how easily we can circle the same point of pain, mistaking repetition for depth or analysis for healing. There is a way we can get lost in the examination itself.

In the Sweet Medicine Sundance path, human beings are understood as “magnetic, thought-attracting fields.” Thoughts are drawn to us based on the vibration we are generating. When we repeatedly revisit a problem from within the same emotional and physiological state, we remain confined to the same thought-landscape. No new thoughts can enter.

We need a state shift, but how do we do this? How do we drop the bone in actuality and allow ourselves to recenter, when it feels so deeply counterintuitive to let go?

I call this the radical evolutionary moment. Will we continue to circle familiar territory, or will we risk releasing what is known and venture into the unknown?

My brother recently reminded me of the wisdom found in the Twelve Steps, where the shift comes the moment we admit helplessness and turn toward something greater than ourselves. A moment of humility and surrender: I cannot see beyond this right now. Please help me. Please remove this defect.

This is not giving up—far from it—but rather a recognition of the limits of our efforts alone. When we loosen our grip and open to something greater than ourselves, a miracle sometimes occurs. A sweet release that creates space for new information to arrive, for fresh insight, possibility, and awareness.

This morning I came upon a young raccoon trapped in a dumpster. I could hear and feel her circling in agitation and despair. I dragged a large branch over and placed it inside the dumpster, allowing her to discover her sweet release. Whether or not she experienced her own radical evolutionary moment, the truth is that without intervention by forces greater than herself, she would not have been able to get out.

What might it be like to orient more quickly toward the great unknown—to wisdom, love, and the pleasure of being an open vessel in moments of challenge?

Dropping the bone, as tasty and delicious as it may be, might just be the most efficient—and wisest—way back into the fabric of connection and the deeper nourishment available here.

Why not? 3 Common Objections to Psychotherapy

1. “I’m not creative,” or “I can’t make art.”
   
   You don’t have to have any prior art experience or art proficiency to be able to benefit from art processes. My clients with no art experience benefit just as fully as those with art experience. And, depending on what you need, art process interventions may or may not be part of your unique treatment plan. 
    
2. I can’t afford it.
   While psychotherapy can seem expensive, it’s nothing compared to the cost of not doing this work. You are worth it.
    
3. I’ve been to so many healers and practitioners and no one has been able to help me. Why will this be different?
   
   Body-centered and art psychotherapies are designed to bring you into direct and immediate relationship with yourself. You no longer risk giving your power away to a middleman. You will gain immediate skills to be able to see yourself clearly and align with yourself. The therapeutic modality itself is empowering. 
   
   As an art psychotherapist I use art-making as a way to get you out of your head and into your body and heart (where your greatest wisdoms lie). If you've talked about your issues for a long time without seeing significant changes in your life as a result, it's time to try a modality that will take you directly into the crux of the matter... and deliver to you a fuller version of yourself on the other side.