sexuality

In this episode of comfort blankets, I’m going to talk about sexuality. But before I do so, I want to stress that sexuality, sex, in itself is not a bad thing, not at all. And in fact, most of the troubles of humankind have come from us demonising sex. We are sexual beings and yet, for various reasons, we have come to label sex as wicked, naughty, bad, wrong. And that’s not my message at all. Sex is beautiful. It’s a wonderful part of life.

So why do I say that sexuality can be a comfort blanket? Firstly, of course, we can use sex as a way of escaping from problems. We tend to have minds that worry about things, and it’s unpleasant to be living in that world of thoughts going round and round in circles, seeing problems everywhere. Sex can be a relief from that, an escape from it.

But that’s not the main reason I say that sexuality is a comfort blanket. A much more significant aspect is that we identify ourselves, rather unconsciously, with our sexuality. As a man, I identify myself as a man, and similarly a woman will identify with being a woman. It becomes a core part of our personal identity. And being heterosexual, I identify with being sexually attracted towards women. It becomes also part of who I consider myself to be, at a very deep level, and in a very physical, biological way. So much so, that if I am attracted to a man, it feels disturbing, deeply disturbing to my psyche.

This identification with our sexuality feels so natural that we don’t really question it. But here, I’m inviting you to question that identification, to look into it more deeply, because as with anything we identify with, it can become a restriction on our spiritual journey.

Although these sexual feelings, and the pleasures that sexual acts, are very enjoyable, they can lead us to believe, usually unconsciously, that we are incomplete. As a man, I might feel that I am missing the feminine aspect, and vice versa as a woman. But the deeper truth is that each of us is whole. A man carries the feminine within himself, and a woman carries the masculine in the same way. During sexual interactions, we set this aside and each of us occupies one polarity: the masculine or the feminine. And the more total we are in that polarity, the greater is the sex energy between the two. So to really enjoy sex, it is beautiful that we can move into one polarity or the other, as completely as possible. But if psychologically we get stuck in that polarity, if we begin to believe that’s all we are, we are limiting ourself, and we become dependent on the other sex for that sense of completeness. And then our sexuality has become a comfort blanket, but also a dependence.

When, through meditation or through other means, we enter into the deepest part of our being, we find that we are utterly complete, and that we are neither masculine nor feminine. Each of those aspects is merely a part of who we are. Ironically, one way to discover this is through sex. Having occupied one polarity to the extreme, through that energetic release of orgasm, one can end up in this complete space – a soft space of masculine and feminine blended together – this is sexual tantra for me. But even though that is not the route through which we surpass the masculine and the feminine, we should know from the outset that in our essence we are not man or woman. We are not essentially sexual. In our essence, we are asexual. And if you can experience that, then the play of sexuality can become light and all the more enjoyable, for it is no longer defining who we are.