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.