Sex and Embodied Being

Adyashanti says when we cease identification with the body-mind freedom comes, and that the best thing we can do to achieve this is to engage with an enlightened/awakened teacher; listen, don’t interpret, don’t think, don’t try to understand, just let the words sink in. That way the words will go to the Heart (to the centre of Being). As the words permeate, we will shift from addictions, indulgences, habitual patterns (whether, for me, sexual or otherwise), to no longer being dominated by our wants (even our spiritual wants) and come to stillness.

The practice of True Meditation will help bring about this silence and stillness of being, revealing your natural Self. These are not states but the natural conditions of who we are. We therefore can’t produce them or create them, but we can reveal them through asking “Who or What Am I?” taking us away from the tyranny of object-experience and ego-personality to Being-Consciousness-Bliss (Sat-Chit-Ananda).

Once we recognise we are consciousness and let go of our attachment to thing-ness we stop doing, we stop making an effort. We abide in the stillness, that is, let everything be as it already is. We stop trying to control or manipulate our experience. We stop fixating, trying to understand, conceptualising. We surrender all separateness.

We let go of struggle, especially the struggle to surrender. This is merely the ego trying to maintain a sense of control and the separate self. When we let go of struggle, we lose our familiar ground and fall into insecurity. But once we come to rest in this stillness, in the insecurity of the unknown, we begin to lose attachment to the personal ‘I’, and in the absence of a personal ‘I’ our fears and insecurities subside.

Once we have lost attachment to the personal ‘I’ true embodiment can occur, that is, the continual stripping away of all remnants of attachment and ego. Embodiment then is the realisation that every manifestation is your true body. This takes us from the human body (which is a localised sensing instrument of consciousness) to the entire body, to everything, the entire cosmos.

So, embodiment is not about ‘me’ and my body, but about how much of myself I give to the vastness, how abiding I am in Being. If we consider this in relation to sex, we see that sex, per se, is not central but simply the content of experience, a localised sensing of consciousness, which may or may not happen depending on the nature of the localised sensing instrument (ie, the individual person).

The question, then, is not whether we have sex or not, but how much we see the localised sensing instruments (ie, the person/s) as subject-object or as Being-Consciousness.

To me, this seems to imply three key areas of enquiry.

1.     My practice of stillness, revealing my natural Self. This, I think, connects to healing as ‘making whole’. So, for true healing to take place I need to go to that place that is already whole, Being.

2.     My attachments to thing-ness and the personal ‘I’. This, I think, connects to the notion of being drawn to thoughts through habit. But thoughts are only problematic to other thoughts, not to Being Aware. So, I need to establish myself and abide in Being.

3.     My issues around control (connected to habitual patterns around safety, such as, sexual compulsion). This, I think, is about recognising triggers, which are in the body-mind. Learning to notice the experience rather than getting lost in it, “I am not these experiences. I am that which notices them.” And so, abiding in the space of awareness. The more this happens the easier it will progressively become to return to the space of awareness at trigger points.

Underlying my habitual patterns are habitual thoughts of a lack of self-worth, and so self-love. I now realise I have been trying to build my self-love through the separate ‘I’, as a sticking plaster, temporary fixes, when true self-love ‘is’ my true nature. This is where I need to rest – abiding in Being.

Bringing it all together

Moving beyond body-mind identification (which takes us beyond compulsive sexual thoughts and practices) allows us to come to a truly embodied approach to abiding in Being through the realisation that every manifestation is our true body. This eliminates our separate ‘I’ sense of a lack of self-worth, where we recognise our true nature as self-love.

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Email me direct if you are interested in mindful, embodied, trauma-informed, or spiritually-informed coaching, or if you would like to join my new Pink Tantra Towards Awakening group for chat rooms, video channels and in-person workshops around tantra and intimacy practices robert.pinktantra@gmail.com

See my personal development / personality profiling book DISCover the Power of You published through John Hunt Publishing Ltd, 2017. ISBN: 978-1-78535-591-2

And for a bit of light reading, see my first historical fictional novel Fermented Spirits published through Austin Macauley Publishers, 2022. ISBN-13: ‎978-1398437159