The Friday Sex Blog [Awakening]

¡Hola! Everybody…
Es un dia bonito aqui in the Center of the Known Universe…

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-=[ Awakening to Emptiness ]=-

Oh no,
my body used to scream and,
curse that final spasm.

Love is the process
I would proclaim,
to finish it
my crime.

The other day, I was sitting down with a casual acquaintance engaged in a rather interesting conversation. As often happens when you’re having a good time, time seemed to fly and my friend excused himself. When pressed, he admitted he had to go home because he and the wife had scheduled time for sex. He didn’t seem especially excited. In fact, he looked like a condemned man going to his execution. And… his wife is a babe. She’s, like, instant hard-on gorgeous.

Sooner or later, even sex with someone you love can become routine. It can become a dry series of rituals which one has to perform dutifully.

The irony is that sex is so full of promise. Passion with skin on fire and almost unbearable bliss. The weeping embraces of vulnerable rapture -- yeah those moments when you make that noise that sounds like a chuckle married a sob. Those moments of transcendent merger as oneness… but usually, sex is pretty much mundane.

Men get hard, pump and grunt, squirt, let out their tension and relax. Women get wet, moan and hump, clutch and weep, and snuggle in affectionate comfort. Initially exciting, sex can become quite predictable. Even good sex can become standardized: you both learn each other buttons, which you push in order to get the right responses and then… pooof. Gone…

In this way sex somehow mirrors life in general. It’s actually less than you hoped. For almost anyone who’s been around the block a few times, sex and life become a comfortable or customary enjoyment, a habitualized routine of pleasure, comfort, and pain that is neurotically consoling at best, and often meaningless.

This is a good thing, dearest. Meaninglessness is a sign of growth. When something becomes boring it means that you are ready to delve deeper. When you are humping away in dissatisfaction, you are ready for deeper sex. Sex that feels empty reveals a deeper truth: sex is empty. Just like any other moment in life.

When you surrender yourself to the possibility of experiencing sex completely, you feel two things. On one level your genitals are engorged, your breathing is heavy, and your passion is inflamed. On another level… so what? You’ve been there/ done that and nothing fundamental has transpired. This moment of sex -- like every moment -- is amazingly rich and deliciously textured, but also strangely and paradoxically empty.

What happens if you dare to venture is that you come to the realization that nothing specific is missing from your sexual life. Of course, you can improve your sexual skills -- communicating your emotions more fully and enjoying multiple orgasms that last for hours -- yet, when your preoccupation with new pleasure and achievement wears off, you are again confronted with the awareness of a sense of emptiness.

The truth is all life is like that. We spend most of life energy trying to attach to or create something concrete in a reality where the only truth is that everything changes, nothing stays the same. You are not the same person you were when you first starting reading this. Biological processes have killed off cells and replaced them with new ones. Five years from now, your whole body will have been replaced using this dying/ birthing process. If you’re even a little awake, deeply held opinions and how you see yourself has changed and will continue to change. All around you, everything is dying and being reborn and dying again. Lovers come and go, loved ones pass away…

Every moment is empty in the sense that if you try to latch on to it, it slips through your fingers like the proverbial sands in the hourglass. The truth, dearest, is that every sexual moment is empty, insubstantial, unreal. And yet it is also true that every sexual moment is full, tangible, and explosively alive. Like a vivid dream, each moment is intense, spontaneously dynamic, and just as spontaneously gone, as if it never happened. Sex can be tender, a miracle of love, yet at the same time inconsequential. Sex is at the same time intense and vanished, and even when it’s utterly blissful, it is also utterly empty.

Immature lovers get lost in the brief rush of pleasure. Depressed adults stay stuck in the unsatisfying embrace of “not enough.” The truth is that every moment is substantially insubstantial -- both tangible and empty. The mature lover surrenders beyond the attachment, naked and vulnerable as life.

But to get to this level requires letting go of your neurotic need to feel good (or bad) about sex. My father, a wise man, advised me in my young adulthood to be a selfish lover. I think he meant for me to enjoy the thrill of romance and fascination for as long as it lasts because I would have to learn how to dance in the middle years of unsatisfying but decent sexual routine.

But this is where it gets really good (or beyond good or bad): eventually, when you have been shorn of your naïve hope, you will have no other choice but to relax within the reality of the emptiness. In this way, and only in this way, you’re able to wear love’s raiment of open bliss; to withstand the boundless luminosity, and you awaken to the awareness that sex is an intense revelation of what is.

Love,

Eddie

Sunday Sermon [Terminal Uniqueness]

¡Hola! Everybody...
I had something completely different in mind today, but I couldn’t finish writing. Actually, writing what I really want to post led me to something else completely. Anyway, here’s an oldie but goodie...

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-=[ Terminal Uniqueness ]=-

“Oh, that? Girl, I stopped suffering from terminal uniqueness a long time – thank GAWD!”

-- Overheard on subway, IRT 6 train, NYC

Part of the enjoyment of living in New York city is that you’re always catching snatches of conversations, like the one quoted above. Two young, professional women discussing men and heartbreak. I loved that phrase “terminal uniqueness.” The way I see it, terminal uniqueness is the feeling that many of us get when we’re going through rough times: nobody knows how I feel. No one has ever felt what I felt. My pain is unique and therefore no one can understand what I’m going through, and I’m gonna die a wretch.

I’m exaggerating a little bit here, but I think we all go through this thought process to some degree. We feel our problems are unique to ourselves and in that way, we develop an attachment to our pain: my pain is unique! We seem to be saying. And so it is: we have our own little unique crosses to bear and bear them we do: proudly, like scars earned in battle.

Fact is, however much you’re hurting, someone has you trumped, sweetie. There’s that old cliché about having mourned going without shoes until seeing someone with no feet. Sure, it sounds a lot like what our parents would say about eating all the food on our plate (“Do you know there are kids starving in Africa… ”), but the thing about clichés is that they become clichés because they are often true. We want to hold on to our pain, as crazy as that sounds, because for many people our pain defines us, makes us unique.

Much of what we do is process -- much of letting go involve grief and grief has its stages. Don’t get me wrong: processing is important, but there comes a time that “processing” becomes another excuse to stay stuck. After a while, it’s merely disguised indulging. Or, worse, we don’t allow ourselves to feel completely what we’re feeling. We try to make too much sense of it, we analyze it to death. Ask someone what they’re feeling, and more often than not, they’ll come back with what they’re thinking about what they’re feeling. The majority of the time most of us cannot name what we’re feeling.

I’ll tell you this much: there’s a big difference between feelings and emotions. Emotions are the “Drama Queens” of our inner life. Feelings are the reality. Yes, we have pain, it’s part of life, but then we also have what we bring to that pain. If you’re “processing” the drama, you will continue processing until the cows come home. All the crying, gnashing of teeth, ripping of clothes, loss of hair, will not get you through life with any measure of sanity.

Neurosis is a poor substitute for real feeling. In order to feel genuinely, we have to drop the drama and get to the feeling -- the core. And we have to feel completely, without fear, without contraction. Crying? If you think crying is an indicator that you’re moving through the “stages” of grief, you’ve merely taken a concept and distorted it. You have to feel -- really feel, completely and totally, opening up to whatever it is so that you become more and more transparent, allowing the love within you to shine through.

I recently had a client come to me and tell me, before we even started our session, “Please! Stop telling me to open up my heart, because I’ve been opening and opening and the shit is still hitting the fuckin’ fan, Eddie!” LOL

I had to laugh, because I totally understood. It’s part of life. There are no guarantees and just because we’ve decided to effect a shift, it doesn’t necessarily follow that the world will now dutifully conform to our perception and roll out the Red Carpet. Now, that’s the process! Co-workers, lovers, relatives will all “conspire” to fuck up our little strategic plan for better living. It’s their job, actually. Our job is to drop the terminal uniqueness and realize that taking it all so deeply personal is the true source of our suffering.

Love,

Eddie

With Eyes of a Child's Wonder

¡Hola! Everybody...
As a boy of 13, I was sent to spend the summer vacation in Puerto Rico. Our next door neighbors were jibaros -- humble country folk in the city to toil as laborers. They suggested I go spend time in their small town. The town was smack in the middle of our beloved rainforest -- El Yunque. In order to access the town, you had to leave the car behind and walk two miles on a dirt road. There was no running water and these simple folk lived in ramshackle house. I never knew a happier people.

One day, the other children, seeing that I was besting them in baseball, invited me for a “swim.” El Yunque is nestled into Puerto Rico’s mountainous region and, being a city boy (I though a hog was a cow), I had never been at that altitude. I was an excellent swimmer, having learned to swim at Pitt St. pool at the age of five. We had to climb this mountain in order to get to the swimming locale. I almost died! Between the altitude, the heat, and the humidity, I became very weak. Determined, I plodded on (this was a mere walk in the park for the other kids). When I reached the top of that mountain, I saw a sight I will never forget: before me lay the most beautiful landscape ever imaginable. Their swimming pool was a series of cascading falls that looked like shimmering steps cut into the magnificent mountainside. I was awestruck -- glued to the spot, it was so beautiful to behold. I wish I had the ability to convey the beauty of that mountainside, but words fail me. It was so majestic; it was almost scary to look at.

I stayed in that small town for most of my vacation and when I left, the whole town came to see me off and everybody cried. By the time my aunt came to get me, I myself was a jibaro: shoeless, mosquito-bitten and toasted a light cinnamon by the Puerto Rican sun. I have never forgotten that experience.

One of the best things about being human is the ability to wonder at ourselves and the world, and be stunned into silence by the magnificent mystery of it all. My sense is that there are too many people with the attitude of “been there, done that” where in actuality they haven’t been anywhere or done much of anything. I am a skeptic, but I am not a cynic. I hope I never lose sight of the very human gift of wonder. For at that time, I will have died... Maybe I wasn’t born in El Yunque, but El Yunque was born in me. I’ve added a song, a very famous Puerto Rican song, called Lamento Borincano (click here for translation/ history) It is performed beautifully by Caetano Veloso. It is a song about El Jibaro.

Repost...

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-=[ Dependent Origination ]=-

“The fear of letting go prevents you from letting go of the fear of letting go.”

This is the doctrine at the heart Buddhism. You see, my dear reader, it goes this way: you are an insecure collection of coincidences held together by a desperate and irrational clinging. There is no center -- no center at all. Everything depends on everything else, your body depends on the ecology, your thoughts depend on whatever conditioned debris floats in from the media, your emotions are mostly from the reptilian end of your DNA. Your intellect, dear reader, is a chemical computer that can’t add up a zillionth as fast as a pocket calculator. Even your best side is a superficial piece of social conditioning that will fall apart as soon as your significant other leaves with the money in the bank account, or the economy fails and you get the boot, or you get conscripted into some village idiot’s war, or they give you the news about your brain tumor. To name this combination of self-pity, vanity, and despair self is not only the height of conceit, it is also proof that we’re a deluded species.

We are in a trance from birth to death. Burst the balloon and what are you left with?

Emptiness.

It’s not only us -- this radical principle applies to the whole sentient world. Dependent origination is not exactly everyone’s cup of tea, I admit. But it does have a compelling point: stop for a moment, still yourself, listen -- and you will find yourself on a planet you no longer recognize. Those needs and fears you thought were the very foundation of your existence turn out to be no more than bugs in your software…

Love,

Eddie