Sexual Fulfillment – Part 2: More Joy In the "Process of Becoming"

Morning Coffee time with Pat and Gary – Wednesday 2/26/14

Once again we began the morning together with the meditation guided by Adyashanti – Breath as Life and Death (link to this 32-minute guided meditation). Pat is not as sure that this meditation works for her, but says she has much to learn from it and that fact alone may mean it is correct for her. I want her to practice what feels right to her, but I noticed a sadness in me as she expressed her reservation. It feels important to me that we do our meditation together, and I’m glad she is willing to stick with this for the next few mornings. The meditation was followed by an “oh-so-rich” 2-hour coffee-time conversation. Because of its sensitive nature, much of our conversation must remain private between Pat and me, but some of its lessons for us seem worth sharing. So here it goes …

Gary: I am still alive from writing my blog on sexual fulfillment yesterday. The title I gave it was: Fulfilling Sex Life – Not a Goal But a Byproduct of the Beautiful Process of Becoming. The idea of beauty being “in the process of becoming” feels very important to me for our process. Pat: Perhaps instead of, or in addition to, beauty, it is Joy we experience from being “fully present to the process of becoming whole.” Gary: Yes, Joy!

Pat: As we were awaking this morning I felt your presence and touch in a different way. It felt new – maybe because of me, maybe because of you, or maybe both. I had a sense that you were cherishing me. I was feeling cherished! Gary: While I could not say I was aware of this new way, this cherishing you as you say, as you speak of your experience I can quickly say, “Yes, I was cherishing you.” Actually, to be totally honest, I would say I was daring to take the risk of cherishing you, of allowing myself to risk cherishing you. For I am cherishing you from a deep place within my soul. The arising of the cherishing is involuntary, natural, and spontaneous.  It feels strange and awkward, even more risky, to say this, but on  some level this cherishing you does feel risky to me, fearing that my cherishing, arising spontaneously out of my Essence, will not be received – all tied to what I came in with and to my relationship with Mom issue of course – not feeling that my cherishing Mom was safe, not feeling that my cherishing her would be received, perhaps even fearing that my cherishing her would be ignored or possibly even rejected by her. So my hypersensitivity comes in and controls what wants to arise spontaneously: cherishing you.

Pat: I get it, you would like your cherishing of me in my feminine body to be received by me, and also I would imagine that you would like mutuality – to have your masculine body cherished by me in like manner. Gary: Bingo! Absolutely! To have my physical masculinity, my body, to be welcomed, celebrated, and cherished from a deep spontaneous place in you is a deep longing. This welcoming energy was not there from Mom. In fact my little boy felt Mom was frightened of my physical maleness, did not know how to relate to me as a male child. I do not know if this was true, but this is what arises this morning. Pat: I’d bet it was true. And I would of course like to hold an attitude of being welcomed, celebrated, and cherished in my feminine body by my own psyche!

Gary: Yes, healthy and needed self-love – something we both need — to feel welcomed, celebrated, and cherished by our own being. With my strongest relationship with a woman, a relation 20 years ago that truly awakened me out of my life-as-usual slumber and ultimately led to my divorce, I can say, correctly or incorrectly, that I felt this feeling of being welcomed, celebrated, and cherished by her. And I sensed it was mutual — that she felt my welcoming, celebrating, and cherishing of her. For me, the relationship was transformative in so many ways. It may sound crude and unromantic, but I’ll call her my “transformation woman” – for Spirit worked through her to transform my being.

Pat: My sense of that relationship is that each of you were the invitation for the other to feel welcomed, celebrated, and cherished. The configuration was the perfect match for your respective conditionings, beliefs, patterns, and life experiences. No other woman would have worked for you, and perhaps no other man would have worked for her. Now with this transformational experience in hand you can say, “That is what I want!” It was a very strong taste, and this was the necessary experience your respective souls orchestrated in conjunction with the Cosmos! And though it lasted only five years and the came to an end, this relationship set you free on many levels. Now your and my work is to bring “that” state which you tasted with her into being in us!

Gary: As I wrote in my blog yesterday, this “That” has been the “bait” for me supplied by the Cosmos. I say the “That” was “sexual fulfillment” on some level. Now the “switch” of the Plan of Salvation’s “Bait and Switch” strategy is to move me from longing for “sexual fulfillment” to longing for “Wholeness and Union” through my spiritual and personal development, through my purification and transformation in accord with the Plan of Salvation.

Pat: You are saying that the “That” that is the “universal bait” for humankind is somehow related to sexuality – “Sexual Fulfillment.” I think that the idea that “Sexual Fulfillment” as “Bait” is the driver and motivator to the higher goal of wholeness and Union is a “Guy thing.” Sexual Fulfillment is not the bait for us women. We are not as motivated by sexuality or the promise of sexual fulfillment. Gary: Pathwork would posit otherwise and suggest that sex and Eros are tools of our transformation, and finally that Eros is the bridge to Love (Pathwork Lecture 44: The Forces of Love, Eros, and Sex lays this out, but it is suggested in many other of the Pathwork lectures as well). And I would say that my experience with some women, including my “transformation woman” some 20 years ago, suggests that sexual energy is strong and plays a critical role in women. But of course I am not a woman!

Pat: Rather than sexual fulfillment, I think that emotional connection is the “bait,” the attractor for women that leads them to pursue transformation and Union. Gary: Amazing for you to say this. Thank you, because I instantly see that for me I too would say that emotional connection dominates over sexual attraction. But I would go on to say that emotional connection is an essential part of sexual fulfillment. This is my experience. For my “transformation woman” there was definitely emotional connection, and this emotional connection was not very present in my other relationships in life to that date. It was the true emotional connection I experienced with her that so baited my life. This was the experience I got a taste of in her and longed for ever since! And so I say, emotional connecting is indeed an aspect of sexual fulfillment.

Gary (continued): But now we have to define the experience of emotional connection. As I said, what I experienced with the “transformation woman” was a relationship in which mutual welcoming, celebrating, and cherishing of each other in our totalities were at its core. I felt totally seen and cherished by her just as I was. And I cherished her in the same way. And yes, I can see the role of projection in this from my end. I was projecting my anima (using the Jungian term for my inner feminine) onto her. This was the “in love” piece. This was the Eros in the relationship that went well beyond sexual attraction – but was and essential part of sexual fulfillment. This mutuality was totally new for me at the time.

Gary (continued): And this is what I was recreating with you – I felt on some intuitive level that this emotional connection with you was the same connection that I had had with her. Pat: Let’s pause here. … So what was the essence of my being attracted to you?  The first thing that comes up is trust. I intuited something that said you were trustable. Second, you had an innocence – a sweet, gentle innocence that was very attractive to me.

Pat (continued): But there was something beyond all of this. I would say we spotted each other on a soul level at a very deep place, and that sense of soul connection anchored us, no matter the difficulties we might encounter. I simply had the confidence, without a doubt, in the rightness of our being in relationship – an underlying confidence in our relationship.  Gary: I certainly felt that also. I felt welcomed, celebrated, and cherished by you as I was. I intuited that you had the capacity to see all of me and intuited further that on the basis of what you would come to see you would welcome, celebrate, and cherish me. Pat: There was the potential in me, but not yet the capacity. We knew that together we could bring “it” about. We were grounded in this intuitive knowing in each of us. Gary: Absolutely. This is why I was so shattered when our relationship began to fall apart on the physical/sexual level. Our breakup in the fall of 1999 broke my heart. I was devastated emotionally.

Pat and I then explored the history of our breakup, where we each went, and how Spirit and our respective souls configured our lives to keep both of us in the constellation of “us,” though our position in the constellation was very distant at times. …

Gary: So fragmentation was big during this “breakup time” in both of us. During this three-year timespan I was in a relationship that, for me, though not her it seemed, was fragmented, and so were you. Pat: And I recall that the “transformation woman” many years before had insisted on staying fragmented with comments like, “No one, including you, will ever know all of me, and I want it that way.” You simply ignored her protestations against wholeness in your relationship. I believe the energy for wholeness lives in you, in your soul. You came in with that longing for wholeness. Your soul cannot stand a fragmented relationship. A fragmented relationship will never satisfy you, hence you ended any relationship that did not work for you in that sense. But in the “transformation woman” you projected your inner wholeness (a core piece of your anima) onto her and did not see or respond to her insistence on fragmentation.

Gary: And I assumed or rather intuited that at your core, at your soul level, this longing for wholeness also lived in you. For me this was a matter of “soul longing for wholeness in Union” recognizing the other “soul longing for wholeness in Union.” Pat: This need for wholeness and “unfragmentation” was not as clear in me. Yet you saw the potential for wholeness with me that you did not see in your other primary relationships. Your longing for wholeness in Union was driving our relationship, you saw the possibilities and potential that I was not yet aware of.

Pat (continued): And yet we did not get together in the beginning. We each had life challenges and difficulties that we had to go through separate from each other before we got together it seems. I did not know it, but I was OK that we could each have some experience with other partners before we got back together again, that we had things we needed to experience and learn about ourselves and about relationships before we could come together to accomplish the task of coming to Union that our souls saw possible and longed to manifest. And for this needed experience we needed someone other than each other. The configuration of these in-between primary relationships were not in our control. Gary: Spirit and our souls were at play during this time, while our egos were clueless, confused, and in pain.

Pat: Even when I saw you in other primary relationships during these confusing in-between years at no point did I interpret from these other relationships you were in that you and I would not be in relationship! The significance and consequential nature of our relationship underlay whatever was going on between you and other women during these few interim years. Gary: It’s pretty amazing that we survived these years. Pat: Yes. Even you and I starting the business Stillpoint Center for Therapeutic Massage together in 2000 – during the midst of our tumultuous times with each other – was Spirit’s and our souls’ work of configuring our lives in a way that would keep us in connection when all seemed to be falling apart between us. Without Stillpoint we may have drifted apart forever.

Pat (continued): This morning as we discuss this I can see how Sage and Anthony (our couples counselors) would say we were “frightened rabbits,” and I find myself less adverse to their saying that is what they see in us. But now I can see the truth here. We are frightened rabbits in many ways, AND, importantly, we recognize that we do not need to be further along our path than we are! We are where we are. It is a blessing that we are here exactly where we are in our life and in our relationship. AND even in this blessedness where we experience the preciousness of life there is the reality of impermanence. At some time one of us will be called home.

Gary: Our two hours together this morning, going through all of this fragile material with curiosity, material leading to deeper understanding of ourselves, the other, and our relationship, gives us a taste of the “Joy of Becoming” in this evolutionary process that is taking us evermore toward wholeness and Union. Taking in this NOW experience of this process of evolution is what Sage means by “intercourse on every level!” So “Sexual Fulfillment” is not an experience of a few “fulfilling sexual experiences.” Rather, it is much broader than this. It is intercourse on every level – physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual. And, as my previous blog entry said, “Sexual fulfillment is a verb, not a noun.” And this verb holds erotic energy! We are experiencing sexual fulfillment as we have this exchange this morning. Amen!

Pat: I can see how you could say that. The Erotic force is the Life Force! And as Adyashanti invites us to do in his meditation, we let this two-hour experience this morning imprint our souls, imprint our psyches. Yes, we imprint these feelings into our skin and bones, into the core of our being. Gary: What a morning!

Shared in love, Gary