Sacred Sex: The Experience

Mind gone,

body open,

heart blown apart

by pleasure so intense

that nothing can contain it.

Surrendered.

I know beforehand if I am open to this or not, whether I am available for deep physical intimacy or whether I am in a place, emotionally, physically or mentally, that is blocking me from making that connection with another. Then I have a choice whether to just go with it and trust that the experience will clear those blocks, or whether to postpone the connection to another time.

There was a time in my life when I would have pretended everything was fine. I would have pushed any discomfort aside and gone ahead anyway. I would have lied through my physical reactions to make it appear as if I was available when I wasn’t really - just to please another’s expectations of me. But that time is long gone, thankfully. And you can’t really lie anyway. At some level, energetically, you give yourself away, and your partner will also sense, at some level, that you are not truly open. There really are no lies in an energetic universe. At some level, we all know how things really are.

When I am willing to try to be open, though, the mere thought of connection starts the process of opening me. The opening happens on so many levels. It happens physically and energetically, as I start to get close to my partner. My body responds to his. Deep inside, at my first and second chakras (the areas around the perineum and the low abdomen), I feel a warmth and a sense of excitement starts to flicker. It starts as a glow, and then builds to a fire with the initial kisses and touches. Because my body is now used to my patterns of encouraging the energy to flow upwards, the warm feeling automatically rises and starts to warm and open my heart, then reaches my crown, leaving me feeling slightly lightheaded. It also spreads outwards, warming the whole area of my chest, and down my arms - like warm liquid honey spreading through my veins, melting any minor resistances it meets. I start to feel less solid, and my boundaries feel blurred, expanded, as if I’m becoming more liquid myself.

The opening also happens emotionally. As my body starts to feel as if it’s melting, my emotional state becomes more fluid too. Sometimes unexpected emotions rise and wash over me - sadness, surges of joy, passion, even anger, can appear out of nowhere but then they continue to flow on and out, as I’m no longer rigid enough to hold them. Images, too, can appear - as if they are past life memories or symbolic representations connected with the emotions I’m feeling.

Mentally there is an opening as well - an inability to contain much in the way of thoughts or attitudes, as the body melts in the glow of sexual arousal. The more I bring my attention to the physical sensations I am feeling, and to other immediate responses I’m having, the more my mind opens. In the same way that highly-focussed concentration on anything helps to pull us completely into the present, being completely present to sexual arousal allows us to be entirely in the moment with ourselves and our partner. It is a meditation in itself - a deep communion with the present, moment by moment, using our physical intimacy with another as a vehicle. What makes it an incredibly effective vehicle is that intense feelings of pleasure (as with pain) can be so overwhelming that they encourage a natural letting-go that many people find difficult to achieve in other ways. The concentration is not just of the mind - it is a complete immersion in the experience through the senses, a complete surrender of the body which allows the mind to let go into the moment too. Thoughts vanish, swept away by the force of the experience washing over me. I know I could hang onto them if I chose to do so. I could choose to feel nervous, or annoyed, or half a dozen other emotions that hover there in the background, but I’d be just looking for an excuse to remain closed. I know by now how blissful the surrender is, how it washes me clean, so I choose to focus on the pleasure that the body is feeling rather than on what the mind or ego might be presenting me.

With that opening into the moment, there is no past or future, there is only what I am feeling here and now with my partner. Even distinguishing between my partner and myself becomes a nonsense. In the moment of surrender, the lines between us disappear and we become the flow of energy. I’m no longer clear about where my body ends and his starts, and it doesn’t matter. I have expanded into a much bigger existence than merely my own physical one.

And with no past or future to distract me, and no ‘other’ to focus on, it becomes even easier to dive ever more deeply into the moment, into surrender. Once you start to let go, to open, it becomes easier and easier - no effort is needed, it just calls you in. I become lost in the flow of the moment, in the rise and fall, ebb and flow of each movement. It is a dance. But there are no set steps once you have mastered the basics, no boundaries beyond which you can’t go, no external music to keep time to. There is only the expression of what I feel inside me - and what I feel is such intense love and physical pleasure that it forces ‘me’ to stand aside so that it can express itself. There is no sense of needing to ’achieve’ anything, just a desire to keep diving deep into the moment, to stay in that place of expanded communion. It becomes a practice of using the pleasure of the body to expand the heart and self.

Sometimes I’ll be pulled back to the physical body by the intensity reaching the crescendo of orgasm which would signal the end of communion, and I slow the momentum down using my breath or body. Sometimes I’ll do the same for my partner if he’s in a similar place, for there’s no difference between us in this space. His rising intensity brings mine to the same place, I feel his responses in my own body.

I feel an incredible vulnerability in this place of communion, a feeling of being laid completely bare and open. The exquisite sweetness of the moment could ask anything of me and I would oblige, could not say no. Life is too beautiful to resist. I breathe in beauty, breathe out beauty. I feel humble and in awe at its immensity. If I look into my partner’s eyes, I see the Divine looking back at me, the power that is expressed through the intensity of that look draws a similar power back through me, yet also deepens the humility and awe that I feel.

How long the experience lasts depends on all kinds of things - whether we are under any external time pressure, the natural ebb and flow, how strong the physical intensity is, what space we were in individually before we came together. But at some stage there is a natural ending - either the energy gets released in orgasm, or we wind down with the energy being retained. Some days it feels good to let it go, other times a release doesn’t feel like what’s needed and we just quietly subside.

Lying together afterwards we start to get a sense of our individual bodies again, start the process of coming back to ourselves while still feeling the energy flowing within and between us. My heart feels wide open, full of appreciation and gratitude - not just for where I’ve been but for everything. I feel a renewed sense of perspective on life and a warmth which is more than just physical. I feel in harmony with life.