Play Sexuality As Art
From Bluetruth
The masculine directs, the feminine invites.
How do you keep passion alive in an intimacy, even with all the daily decisions and chores that need to be done? To understand the art of sexual gifting, you can begin by feeling the nuances of how talking and acting affect your lover. As you grow more open, your every word and gesture can be a gift to all—or not. Openness includes all possible qualities, including masculine and feminine. The feminine is life force, the effusion of light and love that dances as your body, emotions, and the shine of the entire moment. The masculine is consciousness itself, the no-thing of simple presence, the emptiness or silent witness of this moment’s show.
As you deepen your capacity to open as consciousness, you come to know who you are and how to live your deepest purpose in a world of change. The capacity to know your deepest purpose and consciously navigate your life, as well as the lives of others, is part of your masculine capacity, whether you are a man or a woman.
In today’s modern culture, most people still glorify masculine purposefulness and vilify the force of attraction that is inherent in the feminine display of life. Every morning as you wake from deep sleep, you can feel how this moment’s light attracts and invites consciousness into life’s show. In every moment, the feminine display invites the masculine into action. In today’s anti-feminine culture, however, men and women are supposed to stand back and direct rather than offer life’s full showing, the feeling of life, as an invitation for action.
For instance, you are supposed to direct someone, even your lover, by telling him or her what to do rather than by inviting their action through expressing life’s feeling. Your masculine statement, “Please turn on the heat,” is considered more honest than your feminine invitation-through-feeling-expression, “I’m feeling really cold.” People who are particularly proud of their masculine capacity consider this feminine style of invitation to be manipulative and covert.
In the realm of business and friendship, using your masculine to direct someone toward specific action is often the most effective way to get something done. But in the realm of intimacy, where the flow of sexual energy often defines the texture of the moment, your speech is more a matter of erotic art than functional efficacy.
How can your style of talking increase or diminish sexual flow? Sexual passion flows between two energetic poles: masculine and feminine. Similar to the electrical flow between positive and negative poles, or the magnetic flow between north and south poles, sexual energy always flows between the two poles of masculine and feminine. If you and your partner are both in your masculine—you are both offering the gift of direction, for instance—then sexual flow stops because there is no feminine gift of invitation to complete the polarity. This is equally true in homosexual and heterosexual relationships.
When you give direction, you stand as a masculine pole. For instance, suppose you are the feminine partner in an intimate relationship. When you tell your masculine lover what to do by specifying a course of action—“Would you please take off your shoes?”—your masculine energy won’t allow a flow of polarity with your lover’s masculine. You have sexually neutralized the flow. Your masculine lover will feel turned off. To recreate an arc of sexual polarity, either you or your lover can offer the feminine energy of invitation. You can freely choose who plays the masculine pole and who plays the feminine in every moment. Whose masculine presence—and whose feminine radiance—is more desired in the flow of sexual passion?
The effect of sexual neutralization through lack of polarity and can be quite subtle, although it accumulates over time. Again, suppose you are the feminine partner in a relationship. If you repeat masculine directiveness often enough—“Can you take out the garbage? Would you pick up the kids from school?”—you can inadvertently create a complete lack of sexual attraction, even repulsion, between you and your lover. Your masculine lover needs to feel your feminine energy in order for an arc of sexual attraction to flow and pull him toward you.
If you want to offer yourself as the gift of feminine energy in your intimacy, then offer the energy of pull rather than push. Invite action through expressing your full feeling-experience rather than direct it by sculpting a course through your action-specifying question. Open a door, but don’t ask your lover to come through it. Allow the open door to be an invitation—if you want to maintain the full flow of sexual polarity.
Rather than, “Would you please take off your shoes?” open the door with, “I’d love to touch your feet.” Rather than, “Can you take out the garbage?” invite action by revealing your sensual world with, “I’m beginning to smell the garbage.” Rather than, “Would you pick up the kids from school?” flesh out your living experience by expressing, “I’m worried about the kids waiting at school.” Simply invite action by expressing your feeling-experience, and allow your masculine lover to specify what course of action to take or not.
Whoever specifies the course of action by directing it—through words or behavior—carries the masculine energy in the moment. If you say, “Could you fill the car with gas?” then you are specifying your partner’s action through your request. But if you say, “I’m worried that the car is running out of gas,” then you are creating an invitation for action by expressing your feeling. You open a space in the moment for your lover to fill with masculine direction. You offer the water of possibility for your lover to enter and navigate.
This difference between directing and inviting your partner may seem small, but over time it can make a big difference in the flow of sexual desire. You may get the action you want faster through directing your lover, but you may also depolarize and weaken the arc of passion.
Your masculine lover, unfamiliar with offering his navigation as a gift, may actually prefer that you navigate for yourself and specify what you want in terms of clear direction—and then lose sexual interest in you without knowing why. You can decide which is more important moment by moment, functional effectiveness or sexual polarity. Then you can artfully choose the efficiency of specifying direction or the attraction of maintaining polarity. You can choose to direct or invite.
You can love your partner when both of you are expressing your masculine and trying to direct the moment. But how you play your sexuality together all day—energized in attractive polarity or neutralized in efficiency—imbues your bodies in bed at night. You will only want to ravish or be ravished by your lover when one of you is lovingly open as radiant, surrendered, untamed, feminine life force and the other is lovingly open as masculine consciousness, the force of clear purpose, confident navigation, and utter presence.
If you relinquish your directiveness to offer your feminine gift of invitation, then in order to create two sexual poles your lover must reciprocate by animating the masculine gift of conscious navigation. Your lover must be present and clear, noticing what needs to be done, and then following through with integrity. You wouldn’t want to relinquish your masculine navigation if your lover was scattered, unaware, or weak.
If you are the masculine partner, you can deepen your presence by knowing your deep purpose. Ask yourself, “Why am I alive? What must I do or become so that when I die I can die complete, with a smile on my face, knowing I’ve given everything I have to give?” What must you do today, so that when you go to sleep tonight you know you have given everything, loved as deep as you can, offered the most genuine gifts you have to give? To live this way day by day is the way to prepare for death. When you can align your daily actions with the calling of your deepest purpose, then you can live with honor and without regret.
Free of feeling burdened, you can act with clarity and precision. If your deep purpose involves getting married and raising a family, then you can pick up the children and take out the garbage impeccably and without resentment because they are part of your deep calling, a part of the way you give your deepest gifts, day by day.
Otherwise, if you aren’t in touch with your deep calling and the way you must offer your love while alive, you will feel undirected by depth. Your course will be ambiguous. Your decisions will lack commitment. You will oblige your feminine lover to animate the masculine energy in the relationship because your clarity and direction are lacking. With your sense of direction collapsed into your lack of purpose, you will do things you don’t really want to.
Without a deep sense of purpose to direct your daily life, you will be directed by externals—financial need, your children’s needs, your lover’s needs—and you will begin to blame them for your lack of fulfillment. You will feel trapped in obligations, and your resentment will show. You will hold back in your relationships with your lover and family, not really wanting to be there, unsure what else to do, mired in ambiguity, guilt, and anger. Your actions will lack integrity and follow-through. Your feminine lover won’t be able to trust you in everyday life or open to you sexually.
When you practice to open deeply, and thus allow your deep purpose to emerge through your life, then your actions spring from a profound confidence. You do what you deeply feel you must do, from your heart. You give your depth and your love fully, without resentment or withdrawal, in your chosen relationships. You are lovingly—and intensely—present.
Your consciousness is clear and unambiguous. Your actions are precise and taken to completion. A deep sense of mission guides your life, and therefore you are with your lover only when you deeply desire to be. Your lover can feel your intensity of purpose, your undistracted desire, your unambiguous presence. As in any moment of masculine clarity, when you are with your lover, you are fully there.
Where is your attention now? If your attention is mostly drawn to the itch on your cheek, then your lover will feel your consciousness as deep as your scratch. If your attention is feeling deeply into your lover’s heart, breathing as if her suffering were yours, then your eyes, gestures, and breath will convey deeper presence to her. She will trust your deep and loving gaze more than your distracted cheek scratching.
You can strengthen your masculine presence—and thus attract your lover’s trust and radiant surrender—by deepening your attention. Take a moment now and notice your thoughts. Try to feel where your thoughts are coming from. Relax for a moment and feel a single thought coming and going. Feel where it comes from and where it goes to, and then feel open as this space. Feel deeper as this space, opening where your thoughts come from and dissolve.
You can practice the same way with your emotions. Feel the “place” where you feel your emotions. Whatever emotions you may be feeling, feel where you are feeling, and open as this place. Feel open as where you feel, no matter what emotions you feel there.
Notice how everything in this moment, including your body, is appearing. Remember how it feels to have your body appearing in a dream, as if it were really your body. Then the dream fades, that particular body appearance dissolves, and another body that seems to be yours begins appearing in your next dream, or when you awaken. With practice, you can feel your body appearing right now. Like a thought or an emotion or a body in a dream, your body is appearing to your notice now—you may even lose notice of it while you concentrate in a task.
With practice, feel open as the place where your body appears now, the same place where your dreams appear, the place where this whole moment appears. Relax open as this place of appearance. Relax open so deeply that your body, thoughts, and emotions seem to be magically arising, appearing, shining as a luminous display that you can feel and see.
Feel your deepest sense of purpose. If you don’t yet know your deepest purpose, feel where you imagine you would feel it if you could. Feel open as this deep place where you would feel your most profound sense of purpose, your heart’s deepest desire.
Offer the same feeling-depth to your lover. Practice feeling into your lover, looking into her eyes and feeling into her deeply, so you can begin to feel the openness where her thoughts come and go, where her emotions flow, where her body shines, and where her heart’s desire abides. Practice feeling open as this place, where you and your lover feel the entire moment appearing now, and practice relaxing ever more deeply as this feeling-openness. Practice this now, and for the months and years of your life.
In every moment, freshly discover and open as the deepest place you can feel, in yourself and your lover.
Allow your depth of presence to freely emerge through your whole body, moment by moment. Practice breathing from your deep belly rather than your upper chest. Feel from your deep belly into your lover’s body. Feel through your feet into the earth below and from your belly and heart into your lover and open your skull to the sky above, rather than limiting your awareness to the thoughts in your head and your lover’s image in your eyes.
Moment by moment, throughout the day and while making love, feel all while feeling through all, opening as the depth of all. Practice feeling all with your whole-body sonar, feeling from your entire body—including your feet, belly, and chest—into your lover’s body, sensing her tensions, her pleasures, breathing her rhythm, feeling her subtle changes of posture from head to toe.
If you attend mostly to your own thoughts and emotions, then your presence becomes trapped in your own head and body. You might think you are being present, but your lover can’t feel it.
When you practice feeling the thoughts and emotions and body-energy of your lover—actually feeling into her, like you would feel into someone’s muscles to massage open a knot, or feel into a room to most beautifully arrange the furniture—then your presence enlarges beyond your own surfaces. Your presence expands as far as your feeling-attention opens. If you can include your lover and the entire room in your open feeling-attention, then your presence is felt and honored by your lover and everyone else in the room.
When your lover feels your unambiguous and deep presence feeling into her, she can trust you. When she feels you feeling into her deep heart, she can open in resonance with your deep heart, the source of your integrity. When she feels you feeling open as the place of every moment, she can relax open as every moment’s living light—including emotion, thought, and body.
As deep as the moment opens, you are feeling all and she is showing all. She feels you taking her and the entire moment into account, and deeply. She can trust the integrity of your direction and surrender fully alive as love-light, offering herself to be taken open by your unambiguous and deep presence.
In every relationship, there are decisions to be made and someone has to make them. Often it is best for both partners to decide and direct together. But sometimes the feminine partner finds it quite a relief when the masculine partner doesn’t oblige her to make every decision and direct every course of action. Sometimes the feminine heart wants to relax, open, and shine as love while taken—surely and deeply—to the infinite place that every moment opens.
