Emotional Conversion to Reality

The process of healing and realization is in relationship with actual others. It is in the mutual intimacy between two actual people who freely choose each other. Practice of intimate relationship, including sex, is the process of all psychological adjustment, self discovery and understanding.

In relationship, we release what is not needed to receive what is needed. The natural flow of feelings from anger, to its cause, pain, to grief, to compassion and forgiveness is enacted and practiced, in that order. The next more basic emotion is predicted and permitted.

Practitioners learn to speed this process, and the overwhelming whole body heart connection to all things is understood to be the point of human life.

Love brings up everything that is unloved to be seen and understood.

So the process of relationship can be disturbing, as all of society’s dysfunction and the pain in one’s family lineage is released. Therefore the practical means of practicing intimacy need to be given.

Our world is full of spiritual and psychological processes that do not fulfil this most fundamental need. It is shocking how so many great spiritual teachers never even mention sex and relationship, or acknowledge it as the basic method of transformation. Such teachers are often seen as the model of human attainment, so their sexlessness is passed on as the norm or regarded as a superior state.

On the other side of the problem so called tantric or “sacred” sex teachers sell exaggerations, false desires and public confusion without giving the practical means of a real yoga (union), intimacy with life via body, breath and relationship, in that order.

Whether it is new or old world religion, mindfulness meditation, popularized yoga, dance, shamanic medicine ceremonies or the myriad offerings of our secular world, there is scarce training for successful intimacy and sexuality. Nor is there acknowledgement that intimacy with all ordinary conditions including male female (same sex or opposite sex intimacy) is the means to know reality or “God.”

In fact, the usual spiritual offerings teach processes for the individual’s internal reveries that result in dissociation from all ordinary conditions. Such cultures created society’s sex dysfunction in the first place.

These practices belong in the context of a robust prior practice of intimate connection. Otherwise they cause delusion and separation.

Mark Whitwell