To begin to practice the art of making love is first to shake the mind and senses free of anything that has accumulated. This can be challenging because making love can feel so rife with meaning that we may want to reassure ourselves that we know what we are doing to cover the fundamental insecurity that we feel. But that insecurity is sex itself. It is the substance we are working with. Feel it. Turn toward it. It is likely a little tight, shaky. We will want to focus on our partner or the various instructions for how to “act” in response to this fundamental shakiness. We will likely hear a barrage of suggestions and opinions. We keep driving our attention into that shakiness. The difference between making love inside this insecurity and outside of this insecurity is the difference between a photo and the actual experience, 2D and 3D. Inside of this insecurity is the dimension of sex.
Our mind will want to run fast. More often than not, that is the response to insecurity. Instead, we get curious. Consider the way it feels. Often, it is accompanied by a feeling of wanting to reach out and grasp for something, something to re-secure ourselves. The racing in our heart might feel like we simply do not have time to focus and have no option but to react. Instead, we keep focusing into the center of the feeling of insecurity. There is a center that is often like a tight bud. It will be precisely what everything in us wants to avoid.
To slow the horses of the mind, focus on detail. Every detail matters. Scent is often the best to start with because it is not as potentially arousing as sight. At first it may be difficult to tune into the scent over the voices in our head and the impulse to reach out. We can start by focusing simply on the breath itself and the intake of air. We can notice what enters with the inhale. We will likely smell the aromas of the body as they are releasing hormones. Focus on taking the scent in. Feel it enter through the nose as it makes its way to the top of the head where it processes as “scent.” Note whether it is sharp or soft, spicy or flowery. We notice how the scent has a sensation connected to it and how that changes the feeling throughout our body.
Next, we take note of the sensations in our body. The beating in our heart. Tune into the specific rhythm. The feeling as the blood moves to your hands and extremities. The heaviness or weightiness. Notice the feeling of the skin. Perhaps it feels taut or buzzing. We are beginning to move into the erotic mind, from the stasis to the process. The tightness of the insecurity should be opening, and from behind it, there should be a feeling of movement. As we focus more on the various sensations — occupying the mind with the what feels dynamic: the mind organized around the tightness of insecurity and little tremors begin to spread throughout the body. It is as if we have opened a spring that pumps carbonated energy into the body. There is a distinct shift from tension to aliveness. The feeling that the horses locked behind a gate transitions into a more concentrated slowness.
We must watch the mind here. It can feel like it lost something in the feeling of intensity. Tension occurs as a compelling sensation that when shifted, takes a moment to adjust to. It is like our vision adjusting in the dark. Rather than racing to get back to the feeling of intensity, we give ourselves a moment.
Pause is always good. A single pause where we take an inhale and release an exhale. We notice our hands and how hot or cold they feel; if there is any perspiration. There will be a slight feeling of percolating that will almost make us want to rise up out of our body. The instruction is instead to come down into it. Rather than being on top of it, have the feeling inside of us. We do this by deliberately focusing our attention on the place where our body is making contact with the ground or the bed. Feel as those points carry with them a downward sensation and let them pull us down and in.
We will likely go through several experiences. The first will be to just notice the physical body. The next will likely have an emotional quality. We may notice things we do not expect, like a moment of repulsion or even disgust. Or we may feel a quality or flavor of yearning. We feel it, but keep allowing ourselves to be carried down and through it. It will be a stream in our experience but we do not want to get lost here. If we keep allowing ourselves to be carried down, there will be a place that we come to where the energy is neutral, has an emotional quality, but is bright, alive and electric. We will likely feel a jolt; a slight feeling that an internal light has been turned on. This is the body electric, and marks where we go from the physical act of having sex to the experience of making love. If we do not make it to this level, it remains merely physical.
Here is a good time to make contact with our partner. From this place we have the electricity to burn through the tumescent layer of self consciousness to the location of the erotic self, unencumbered by propriety or perfectionism. When we hit this location we can discern what our body is actually sensing, not what we think it should feel. This is also the place of exponential sensation because it is not obstructed by the insulation layer of judgment where we usually live. More often than not, we are in the second or third generation of what we are actually feeling. This is pure sensation, direct from the spring.
Be aware, there can be a shock to the everyday mind when we hit this spot. We move from the hard, rock, solid, mass, predictable world of impacted thought into the swirling mass of nonsensical atoms. There is a weightlessness to it in the same way that the mind is free when the body floats in salt water, because no energy is spent on holding up the organs. That energy is released into the body and thought moves onto a different plane or dimension. Allow the thoughts to move through. It can be pleasurable to see a whole new stream of thought, never before witnessed, move through a mind that has such deep and predictable grooves. But do not stop to pick any one of the thoughts out.
The suggestion is to make very simple contact. Our hands may feel like they extend out much further than our skin. It may feel a bit awkward. What we should notice is that there is a sensation that is different from regular physical sensation by orders of magnitude. It is a similar feeling to rubbing a balloon on our hair, that same field around it. That should come into contact with the complementary field in our partner. That is the “love” that we are making. We will be building, concentrating, and stabilizing this field.
We let our hand be moved. There will be a natural feel-good to it. Focus on that and not on “making” them feel any particular way. That would remove us from our capacity to sense. As if our hand can inhale, draw in the magnetism and the sensation of the other person. The way that we would stroke a cat for how it feels on our hand, not how we are making a cat feel. Or even better, velvet, where we can feel the tiny fibers moving in one direction, then another. Our mind will want to interfere, to censor and direct our touch for a result. Even if our hand and our touch feel a little bit stiff or creaky, we keep going. We are bypassing the “stop” mind that is trying to protect us from the very abandon we are aiming towards. We do not allow it to take root.
We will notice something strange about our hand. It will feel almost like it is going out of control. As if it has its own agenda and it is responding to something other than the rational mind that usually seems to direct it. This is good. Let it be moved by sensation. Eventually this will “catch fire” and our whole body will move and be moved in this way. We are shifting from a solid to a liquid. This is how we are able to become like a musical instrument. The music is being played through us rather than us playing it. This access to entering an experience of now that has never before been touched and concurrently discovered with another, is the experience of intimacy.
We do not get logical; and most importantly, we do not go outside of ourselves to observe how we appear and then contort the body to look a certain way. Stay inside it and know there is no way that we could appear for our partner or that our partner could appear for us that could ever begin to produce the sensation of contact between the bodies electric. In fact, the visual faculty can be so strong — with women imagining how they look in an effort to turn themselves on, or the man taking in her image — that it can be a hindrance anchoring sensation in the mind and the mind’s eye rather than allowing it to free float and carry us.
We will feel tempted to get carried away. We have hit the source of life force energy. It carries with it a propulsion. It pushes things open. We are in touch with nature itself. The same force that makes tsunamis and rainstorms and turns night into day is being revealed from behind the layer that we usually buffer consciousness with. It is not uncommon to feel swellings and upwellings. This primal self is rising to the surface. It fills the lips, it puts a layer of perspiration on the skin, and brings fluids to the genitals. But it can also bring tears to the eyes, and mucus. It can bring anger that has been tamped down inside the chest. What is rising is who we are uncovered by the rock of appropriateness.
There is a distinct feeling to Eros here; it is a magnetic force that moves of its own accord sweeping through the body. It collects, absorbs and concentrates all of the dissipated energies. As this moves through, the erotic body is opening. There is something different in the felt sense of this body; a sentience. If the body electric felt alive, this body feels rich. There is a cool darkness to it. It can occur as the feeling of healing itself, the senses are calmed and cooled, the internal lights are dimmed and the mind can rest into itself. In this place a different knowing wakes up. Where there is contact with our partner, there is a type of communication. We can feel like we are listening in on a conversation.
The primary sense is of this place of darker essence becoming permeable to the other. The feeling that information is being exchanged or shared. In the same way that when we inhale, we inhale air that has been inside of countless others and the whole of nature, this deeper aspect of being is in exchange. There can arise the sense that we are immersed in a meaning-making activity when this body is connected to another. That this is what matters and that we are given access to a massively magnified version of the exchange that life is – like we are seeing life from the inside out.
Fuller body contact can feel good at this point. It can feel like our body knows precisely how to pull towards the other, as if perfectly suctioning itself. The feeling of the locking on can feel incredible as this exchange between essences begins. The conversation between bodies has an intelligence. We can sense how connective the conversation is by an increase in vividness. Colors get brighter, sounds get more poignant, scents that were once faint or subtle grow thick as a blanket.
At any point in the experience — or between experiences — we are going to encounter resistance, usually in the form of “what if?” What if we cannot make it through the insecurity or what if the erotic body does not light up?What if we get too excited too fast? What if we experience a thought or a feeling that we cannot get beyond? What if we do not like a scent or feel disgust at something we see? The amount of opposition we feel is in direct proportion to the amount of potential opening there is.
So the response is to be steady, kind, direct and without aggression. It is common to meet internal opposition with an aggressive stance, an energetic demand that one of the senses or bodies open, or a threat that if it does not, we are going to protest and deliberately shut it down. This is often the response to our sexual impulse because we do not understand that its power is rooted in its sensitivity. We feel the power and think we need to match it by hardening. The instruction is to instead become softer. This is so difficult to remember because we are trained to view sex as a less important function so it will not comply on demand. It will only open to our genuine open kindness and appreciation. People do not trust their sex or they see it as unreliable because they are not trustworthy with it.
Show up. Be kind. Don’t posture with it. It knows it is more powerful. We should not try to steal from it and get the goods without giving ourselves. The goods are us giving ourselves. The feel-good of endorphins is a sorry consolation prize that we are given when we did not make it through the gateways that can open. We can do this daily. We can show up for what is inside of this experience, whether we feel ugly or dirty or beautiful or sad or dead or bored. What is inside of making love will come to trust us and when it does, for every move we make in its direction, it will reveal doorways unimagined.
Our bodies get filled up with so much undigested material from the experiences of our daily lives, but if we can make it down to this erotic body, what we discover is that undigested material gets transformed into rich, fertile experience in the process of making love. Our erotic metabolism begins to speed up and it is as if we have made it to the part of the forest where beneath the pile of leaves there is heat converting what is dead into nourishment. The same experience we have at the physical or even the emotional level, which can feel jagged or rocky or unsettling, is imbued with beauty down in the erotic body.
With our erotic body in contact with our partner, as the material of grief (for example) gets heated up, it becomes a mournful, salient sensation that connects rather than separates us from the world. We can be taken over by the beauty and awe of shared experience. This is the eroticization of material, where what would have otherwise been uncomfortable or irritating is made rich and beautiful in connection. We move into a kind of alignment with nature herself. Something deeper opens.
We have made ourselves available, offering the material we wanted to keep hidden. The response is the opening of the interior body of knowing. What it primarily knows is how to cooperate with life in such a way that it is entirely behind us and we feel it as our body is moved in accord with that of our partners’. What we clumsily struggled to know — what we so desperately searched for techniques to understand — is right at our fingertips. And yet there is a resolve that wakes up in us that we may or may not have known before. It is a gift of the interior body accessed through making love. It is a power that is solid and unwavering. It is granted to those who remain with the impulse, rather than getting carried away with fantasy and consumption. Consumption is the mimic of the kind of nourishment that we can only access by going deeper and deeper into the sheaths of the body.
As this body opens, it can feel dream-like. On the one hand, we just know. Without doubt, we know. We know how to “handle” our partners’ body in a way that will have them able to let go. Vague boundaries are now black and white clear. But we can hear their thoughts. And more importantly, we know our partner. There is no mystery. There is no question. There is no searching.
We know our partner, except the us who knows does not feel entirely like the us that we have known. The concepts have all burned away. There is a sensing organ that is alive in us. The feeling is that there are two forces who have always known each other since the beginning of time, playing hide and seek in various bodies. There is a sense of “oh there you are.” More often than not, there is a flood and a release of emotion. We are in contact with love itself. This is the conduit that has traveled since beginningless time through every body, as lover and beloved.
At the same time there is playfulness humor, and spontaneity as we “catch up” with each other and the lives lived since the last time. This is the place where information gets processed, where things make sense about why we turned left or why that job did not work out. There is a sense that we had to make it to this appointment, despite the conditions of our daily life. It was all for this, because this is where we get to be who we are, off the stage of the performative life.
Here, there is a kind of self-possession we cannot know anywhere else. We are not running from anything. The various voices can play out in our head and we are so seated in who we are there is nothing to defend. There is a strange sense that we have at once shed and inhabited our body. Where there was once bondage, now there is security. But, it is the security we can only find by staying with insecurity. It is the security of the erotic self, making it to the depths where it can breath and express its nature. It is the feeling where we make it home and can take off our clothes and relax. Only it is ourselves making it to the home inside us.
At this point, the instruction comes through clearly as to precisely how to move and look at our partner, where to touch, when to stop, when to start. Our body is merely taking dictation. The movement is an overlay, like lyrics on a melody so beautiful that we scarcely tune into the words, but when we do, they add rather than detract from the experience. There can be the sense that both we and our partner have been liberated from the body while inside of the body because the movement is so free, so unfettered, so entirely unselfconscious. The motion or movement can have a hypnotic quality, where the mind moves in accord with the rhythms and loosens even further from “normal thought experience.” It begins with a pronounced sense of unity. There is no separation between us and anything else. There is a sense of stillness in the seamlessness of experience. Our experience now has a revelatory quality. We understand the nature of touch. We understand the nature of love. We understand in this very moment, the nature of forgiveness. It is explaining itself to our heart.
For many, this is the first experience of the unhindered self with a felt experience of perfection.
This is the arising of erotic wisdom and the language we must understand to enter the next body. Remain with the sensation, as this body can get so subtle that it can all feel “trippy.” If we feel foggy or fuzzy, we have disconnected. If we feel “high,” we have disconnected. Come back and feel the contact of skin on skin. Of skin on sheets. Or just stop and breathe. As we do, we may feel a kind of “clunk,” almost like we were hovering over our body and we now dropped in. This is good. The nature of the art of making love is not to get into supernatural states, it is to get into our most natural state. It just feels unfamiliar to the everyday mind but there should be a part of us that feels like it is driving to a very familiar home. If there is a sense of being untethered or lost, there is no need to go further. True love-making is an art that takes a lifetime to develop.