The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover (4 page)

1. Circulate your energy to heal and rejuvenate the body and emotions.
   Once the internal energy circuits are cleared of major kinks and the energy flows through you in full force, then you can direct your heightened sexual energy for specific healings. Through visualization and intent, you can send energy to your kidneys, liver, lungs, stomach, and other internal organs. You can bring energy to parts of your body that may have been wounded by past traumas or injuries. You can open up areas of your body that have become tense or weakened by the demands of your daily lifestyle. As you read the following exercise, imagine yourself performing it.
   

   MAGNIFYIN G AN D CIRCULATIN G YOU R HEALIN G ENERGY
   

   A simple way to practice magnifying and circulating your in• ternal energy is to stand straight with your feet parallel and about shoulder width apart, toes pointing forward. Bend your knees slightly. Hold your arms out in front of you at about heart height in a rounded position, with your elbows slightly bent and your palms facing your chest, as if you were embracing a large beach ball. Allow the tip of your tongue to rest gently against the roo f of your mouth. Relax your body
   

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   as much as possible while still maintaining the integrity of the posture, your feet flat, your spine elongated, your half-closed eyes gazing at the horizon.
   

   Practice breathing in the circle just as you would practice this during sex. Inhale energy down the front of your body, filling your belly with enough force and breath to feel an in• ternal pressure pushing against your genitals. Then contract upward with your genitals and entire pelvic floor while exhal• ing the energy up your spine.
   

   To keep from becoming too rigid, smile. Smile with your face, and also feel the insides of your whole body smiling, especially your belly and chest. Continue standing with bent knees, extending your arms as if they were embracing a large ball of energy in front of your chest. Keep your lower back relaxed. You can imagine that a string from the heavens is attached to the very top of your head, pulling it up, and a thousand-pound weight is attached to the tip of your coc• cyx, or tailbone, pulling it down , elongating and relaxing your spine. You can relax the smile on your face but maintain the sense of your body smiling inside, especially when the posture begins to feel difficult to hold.
   

   Holding this posture and breathing in this circle will in• crease your internal energy as sexual stimulation does. Some people are very sensitive to their internal energy flow and oth• ers aren't, so don' t worry if you don' t feel energy moving up your spine and down the front of your body at first. With practice, as your obstructions clear and your energy flows more fully, it will be easier to feel.
   

   If you experience sharp pain in your joints, such as your knees, hips, or shoulders, then immediately come out of the
   

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   posture and rest. However, trembling and rushes of heat or cold in your muscles are normal while learning to circulate your energy. If your legs begin to shake, or if your entire body shakes, that is fine and good. Stay with the exercise, hold• ing the posture, resting your tongue against the roof of your closed mouth, always breathing through the nose, breath• ing your energy up your spine and down your front, smiling with the insides of your body. Practice this exercise for a few minutes a day, gradually building up until you can hold the posture for about ten minutes.
   

   Remember to keep your heart area soft, open, and re• laxed. It sometimes helps to imagine you are embracing your lover body-to-body while doing this exercise.
   

   Once you develop some proficiency at feeling the force of your internal energy flowing up your spine and dow n your front, you can visualize or imagine i t flowing to the parts of your body tha t most need it. Suppose you feel a knot in your gut from the stress of a tough day. As you inhale energy down your front , also inhale energy directly into the tension in your belly. Feel as if you are filling a balloon, expanding the knot wit h the force of your breath so it opens and loosens. Then , as you exhale, release the tension from the knot so i t circulates freely throughou t your internal circuitry. Inhale fresh energy into the knot, then exhale tension and circulate the energy. Repeat this for several minutes. If the tension fro m the knot feels like i t wants to be released ou t of your body, exhale i t ou t of your hands and feet.
   

   In addition to bringing energy to various parts of your body, you can use this kind of standing posture to direct your
   

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   heightened energy into emotional areas that require healing. If you were sexually abused as a child, for instance, you can carefully and lovingly re-create the situation of abuse with a trusted and trustable partner. Then, in the midst of the re• created traumatic situation, you can run magnified internal energy through the blocks and kinks, reopening the natural circuitry of your body.
   

   You can do this practice in conjunction with sexual stimulation, following the instructions in Part Four, or you can move your internal energy and reopen your natural cir• cuitry by modifying the standing exercise described above, using a sitting or lying position in order to help replicate the situation of abuse. It is best to practice these kinds of exercises under the supervision of a qualified psychological or medical professional.
   

   By learning to circulate magnified energy through your internal circuitry with compassion and love, you can carefully dredge through the emotional and physical obstructions formed by a wide range of past wounds and recurrent memories. Physical and emotional healing can take place exceptionally quickly and thoroughly, once your body has been opened through persistent practice and you know how to circulate your energy,
   

   With practice, you can heal deeper and deeper levels of ten• sion-residue accumulated in your body and mind from past hurt and trauma. Meanwhile, you learn to clear daily obstructions as soon as they occur. Eventually when you have healed enough of your
   accumulated
   kinks and resistances, your practice deals more or less entirely with your degree of openness or closure in the
   present moment.
   Being love or being unlove? That is the only question.
   

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1. Be free consciousness, or love, in the midst of sexual energy.
   It is all too easy to get lost in the energy process of sex. Sex is sometimes so pleasurable that you can forget all else - or so dis• gusting that you want to run. Sexual energy can be so joyfully intense or painfully stuck that you become distracted by the sensations or emotions. Sometimes sexual practice can seem so interesting or so boring that you become completely engrossed in perfecting or hating a sexual technique that you are using to try to fix yourself or your partner.
   

   But the primary purpose of enlightened sex is not to fix any• thing or anyone. Nor is it to become absorbed in sensual pleasure, fleeting thoughts, or heavy emotions. The primary purpose of enlightened sex is to live as love by recognizing and relaxing into the open, unlimited, aware depth of being that you are, whether you feel good or bad in the present moment.
   

   When you feel through all sensation, you feel into the open source of sensation. When you feel through all thoughts, you feel into the open space in which thoughts occur.
   When you feel through your sexual desire or aversion, you feel into the love that is living as you.
   This open, spacious, loving nature is your true nature. The way of the superior lover is about practicing being who you truly are. It is not about changing yourself. It is about recognizing who you are, deeply and really - who you already are, who you have always been, and who you will always be. It is about becoming stable in this recognition, so that all of your actions - throughout the day and even during your dreams at night - radiate sponta• neously from this relaxed and natural openness of being, rather
   

   than from your stressful needs and fears.
   

   A great aid in stabilizing this recognition is opening the en• ergy channels of your body, which can be done very effectively
   

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   through the sexual practices we are describing. This healing pro• cess is not absolutely necessary, but most people do need to heal some internal obstructions in order to persist with adequate en• ergy and attention in their practice of recognition.
   

   In other words, if you are frequently distracted by the plea• sures or pains of sex, then you won't have the energy or attention to persist in recognizing who you are. Sexual wounds and desires are among the greatest sources of distraction, not just during sexual embrace but throughout the day. Much of our emotional suffering is rooted in our sexual hopes and fears.
   

   If you don't clear these knots, they can absorb your energy and nag at your attention, day and night. Rather than practicing meditation, you will fantasize about Mr. Right or your cowork• er's shapely ass. Rather than practicing love, you will cram your mouth with food and slather your taste buds with drink because your partner left you for another lover. Even the most advanced spiritual practitioners are often plagued by their unfinished sexual business and emotional kinks.
   

   Therefore, the first step for most people is to clarify their sexual desires and unkink the flow of energy trapped in their emotional wounds. But once that is done, and even while it is being done, the main point of practice is to free consciousness and live as love. The breathing exercises presented here and in Part Four can be very healing and enlivening. They bring energy and natural openness to the body and emotions. But you can also get lost in these exercises, imagining that they are ultimately liberating. They are not.
   

   Even while practicing a breathing technique, you must feel the love that is moving the whole process. Feel love's openness of light, rippling as your sensations, thoughts, and emotions. Feel the love moving you to practice enlightened sex. This same love is
   

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   moving your partner, if you have one. Feel into your heart, your partner's heart, and feel every thought and sensation so fully that you suddenly find yourself opening as feeling itself.
   

   Don't become lost in an exercise, so focused on the energy technique that you have nothing left over for the primary prac• tice of being love, opening wide as conscious feeling. If you can't smile in the midst of your practice, you are taking it too seriously. If you can't feel the ultimate futility of energy practice - after all, your body is going to die and rot in any case - then it is easy to become addicted to the process of perfecting your energies.
   

   You can't perfect your body, your sex, or your energy.
   They are all going to have their good days and bad days, until finally they dis• solve in death. But you can perfect your trust of love. You can stabilize your practice of feeling through the events and sensa• tions of every moment, so that nothing distracts you from who you really are. You simply remain as you are and always have been, conscious as your eternal and spacious nature, open as love, aware as the radiant being that you are.
   

   You can forget the truth of your unbounded being - and forget that you have forgotten - or you can remember and practice recog• nizing this moment's essential openness. If you forget it and close down, then your attention begins wandering to relieve the stress of contracting your feeling. The pain of your own ongoing tension makes you look for a cure. You may begin to believe that some• thing is missing from your life. You want to earn more money, find a better lover, or make your current partner love you more. Every moment becomes a moment of stressful need, and your attention is never free enough to feel through the doings of the moment and simply open as love's always present offering. Rather, life becomes one stress after another, and then it is time for bed. Days and nights
   

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   suddenly become years. Nothing makes any real difference but the momentum is too strong to stop. Life slips by.
   

   However, in any moment you feel through the doings, you are already aware of the open bliss of being which all your doings have been seeking. You still act, but you are no longer acting in order to become or to get. Instead, your doing radiates naturally from the core of your authentic being. Your doing
   expresses
   rather than
   seeks
   openness and love. Your sexing, for example, is a gift of love's light, rather than a needy hope to be fulfilled. You and your partner engage in sex to practice magnifying love's brightness, to celebrate love with your whole body and full range of emotions, to practice being the unbounded consciousness you are, truly and deeply.
   

1. Love prevails.
   

As your practice matures, during sex and throughout the day, love is expressed more and more fully and simply. Knots no lon• ger bind you. Obstructions are felt through or dissolved. Energy flows without effort. You are free to devote your attention to the process of recognizing the openness of your being. You are will• ing to feel everything without recoiling into closure. You are free to give more love than you have ever given, because you no lon• ger need sex or your partner's attention to fulfill you.

At this stage of practice, you no longer close down so easily. Even when your partner hurts you, whether purposefully or ac• cidentally, you remain open. Your heart is continuously exposed. When you are hurt, you cry. When you are pleasurized, you moan. All the while, your heart remains open, vulnerable, alive, expressive, tender, fearless, unguarded. This profound heart-openness affects your lover and everyone around you. It affects your children, your friends, the space in the room, and, ultimately, the whole world.

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You can still be hurt. You can still become sick. You still have good days and bad days. But it all occurs with an open heart. You don't add fear or stress to the world's fear and stress. Rather, the stressful momentum of the world is absorbed in your heart. You willingly suffer the unlove of others, because to close yourself to them is no longer an option. You know the truth of love, and you live love in spite of how much you might hurt. You are simply openness itself, creatively expressing itself through every human means, including sex.