FROM SEX INTO SOUL

A short article about the new Spiral workshop

by Alan Lowen, founder of The Art of Being®

It isn’t anything sexual that makes our sexual intimacy deeper, richer or higher-flying. It’s how present we are! Unless we want nothing more than physical sex we look for this in our partners too because we know intuitively that without presence we can have no intimacy and no ecstasy.

In ordinary everyday life we are often not fully present. We think more than we sense and feel, and so of course there is a lot that we miss. Not surprisingly this happens in our love-making too even though it is sensing and feeling that turn us on! However it happened – and that is a very personal life-story for every one of us – we tend to be less than fully open. Some parts of our inner realm are closed. If we had a rough childhood this may have happened as a form of self-protection or because we lost trust, or it may have happened just because no one nurtured our feeling-sensing being as we grew up.

We may know we are somewhat closed, but just as often we may have no idea that we are limiting our experience of life! I well remember how open I thought I was in my twenties. One magically transforming day I realized I had been living on the thought. That was the day my real life began, and though I did not name it so until nearly 20 years later, it was the day The Art of Being was born. It is only if something happens that awakens us to what we have been missing that we realize there was a gap in our being. Then we have one of those, “Oh my God, where have I been all my life?!” moments that is not only ecstatic, but that changes us for ever. We are suddenly more than we ever were, and so is our experience of life happening here and now. Everything that we had before is ours still, but it has become part of a far greater happening.

So it is too in our sexual life. When we are very closed down, the only thing that matters in sex is sex. As we open, sex becomes woven into the new spaces to which we are opening. These spaces are never ends in themselves. For example, if we have learned to water down our passionate joyfulness, and through some remarkable circumstance we find ourselves allowing our joy to happen, not only is our experience of sexual intimacy transformed. We also encounter new and still deeper possibilities. We may find within our joy a well of tears. If we have the courage to fall into its mysterious sadness, we become attuned to qualities like tenderness and vulnerability. They deepen our experiences of ecstasy beyond anything we could previously have imagined.

Tantra is essentially this process happening in us. It is not about techniques. They are only relevant insofar as they enable us to open to more of our being. If we practise them to enhance our sexual performance they only add to our limitations. We make technical proficiency stand in for what we dare not experience in ourselves. What we really need is to surrender ourselves to something that is not of our making. We have to go beyond performance.

The real adventure in Tantra is to open ourselves boundlessly until we transcend our personal limitations. Drowning in sexual intimacy we disappear into the divine. “Gate, gate, paragate, parasam gate, Bodhiswaha!! It means, “Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone altogether beyond. What ecstasy!” This sublime sutra from the Buddhist Heart Sutra praises the surrender that is our only way to be one with the spirit of the infinite – our only way to know God. As in death, we cannot help ourselves. We can only let go. To open to spirit is more innocent than any of our doings. We can be a prayer. We can trust. Doing anything only re-asserts our own will, and that is what is in the way. “Thy will be done!” captures the essence not just of Jesus becoming Christ, but of all spiritual communion. It is the same in making love. Opening, we dissolve our psychological and physical resistances. Celebrating our nature we spiral all the way from sex into spirit. This is Tantra.

© Alan Lowen 2009