LIVING THE GIFT AS MEN AND WOMEN

by Alan Lowen, founder of The Art of Being®

Neither the deepest beauty nor the greatest pleasure of sex is to be found in sex itself! Sex is only the way in to an experience as vast as existence. By its very nature sex invites us to open ourselves in ways that enhance our entire experience of being alive. This includes how we experience sexual intimacy. Tantra is all about discovering and learning to live this opening of ourselves to experience life’s richness and depth. It is a journey that awakens more and more of our being. It is the pursuit of our human wholeness, and so of our spiritual awakening too, since to be whole and total in our being inevitably awakens us one day to the eternal spirit within existence. This is why to some people Tantra seems to be about sex while to others it has nothing to do with sex. Both are right. Tantra means “embracing the totality in existence”. It is the opposite of Zen; they are like two paths heading one East and one West around the world to arrive at the same place. In Zen we sit in the presence of all that is and keep releasing ourselves from all that we experience: to everything we say, “No! Not this, nor this, nor this, nor this…” until we come to nothing. And to nothing too we say, “Nor this.” Finally one day we awaken into that state of no-mind in which we are not separate from all that is and is not.

Tantra makes the same journey of awakening going in the opposite direction. Everything that we experience is to be accepted. “And this, and this, and this, and this… ” until all our fears and judgements dissolve and in our freedom we can be one with all that is here-now. In our total acceptance of all that life touches in us we live awake and in love with the eternal present.

The essence is the same; to become free of the very normal personal fears and limitations that keep us shut down and unconscious and to become free to experience life as conscious beings celebrating the precious gift of being. There are all kinds of ways to open the gifts of our being – which, incidentally, is why The Art of Being offers a variety of workshops and courses.

Tantra is really anything in life that teaches us how to drop our limiting beliefs and attitudes and instead to learn how to experience the totality of whatever is. This does not mean that we have to agree with everything that is. But it does mean that we are open and sensitive enough in our being to sense all that life here and now is touching in us. When we are so open, our experience is always vivid and we function at our best because we have all our inner resources available for engaging with life. This of course includes our experience of sexual loving, and since this is one of the great delights of being alive, it is very meaningful to discover the Tantra of life through sexual loving. Tantra is about intimacy with existence and this means being able to feel – to feel to the very core of our being. We have to be willing to feel, in a friendly way – not as problems or burdens but as colourful sensitivities that may make us laugh or cry – every nuance of every touch of life on our personal being, from the touch of a feather on our skin to the touch of love or joy or tragedy in our belly and heart and soul. Tantra implies the willingness and the learning to be present to all and everything that touches. It is thus about our quintessential aliveness – body, heart and soul! It offers us alchemy: transformation of our nature through our nature.

We live in a culture that alienates us from our nature. We are not taught to honour our feelings, and although sex is a major theme in our media, most of what is presented in television, film, the press and so on only reflects how much we judge ourselves as sexual beings and how little we have learned about integrating our sexual nature with our feelings, our hearts and our souls. How not to become confused growing up in a society that is among other things insecure, ashamed, obsessive, puritanical, frightened, hungry, pornographic, exploiting, macho, giggly or indifferent about sex? What a soup! It is because of the powerful, instinctual vitality of our nature that we learn to somehow survive anyway, but we deserve much more than survival. We deserve our light and lightness, our beauty, playfulness, creativity, passion and compassion.

Our natural instincts look after us very well. The hallmark, and the greatest gift, of being human, is that we have an instinctual drive to seek the truth of who we are: unless it is suppressed or damaged during our childhood, we are inwardly compelled to awaken to being. This simple word conveys a transformation of the way we experience life that is tantamount to being reborn or feeling that we are for the first time ever, really present! All Art of Being workshops and courses, no matter what the theme, are designed to inspire this awakening, and to deal with the inevitability of those habitual falls back into mechanical unconsciousness.

There are as many ways to awaken as there are experiences in life! As I see it, the whole of life, from its sweetest blessings to its most impossible challenges, from its brightest delights to its darkest chasms, is an invitation to be here now. In a healthy culture, growing up would have to mean this awakening, and our educational system would be about this – which is to say it would be rooted in consciousness and love. It is not so in our civilization, and so each one of us has to find our own way. If we are lucky, the damage done to us growing up in a culture that instead is busy with self-image and the personality cult, with competition, success, failure and all their accompanying psychological distress, with repression and the violence to which it leads, with money and exploitation, with getting what we want and the criminal culture that is part of all this - if we are lucky we can still hear within ourselves that urgent, perhaps even anguished voice that cries to no one, “There must be more to life than all this. Surely this isn’t what it’s really about?” Then we have to go looking, questing. And there are ways these days. The Art of Being® is only one of innumerable paths of awakening.

Sex plays a key role in inviting awakening. Sex is about the body, about pleasure, about us as men and women delighting in our own and each other’s natures. But it is not only this. One of the funny things about sex is that if it does not become a path of awakening for us, then it either becomes a dull dead-end because we get bored with its mechanics, or it becomes a drug driving us into ever-kinkier experiments in search of more. The trouble with this option is that we don’t grow, we don’t blossom, and one day we run out of options anyway: nature sees to that! Letting sex become a way of growing not only brings more pleasure anyway, it also, and essentially, brings the integration of our sex with our feelings and consciousness. It is a way to become whole, happy men and women who know how to love and for whom sex is sacred, beautiful and ecstatic. This is what Tantra is all about. It is not about learning techniques to make sex better. The need to do that is part of the problem, not the solution! No, we have to rediscover the inner world of our feelings and nature, and learn to celebrate all our gifts as men and women living an existence that is both spiritual and physical, sexual and sacred.

We need this in order to have the intimate love relationships that most of us really long for. The media constantly tantalize us with the dream, but they don’t show us how to live it. To do that we have to wake up and find within ourselves all the riches we were dreaming of. Intimacy is the delight of sharing our treasures with each other. This is what The Art of Being® is all about. In essence, all Art of Being workshops, whether on birth, death, relationship, sex or being itself, are invitations to become the celebration of all that we are and all that is. To learn this through reclaiming our fullness as men and women who live happily and love passionately is for many of us the most meaningful and fulfilling path of awakening.

© Alan Lowen 2002