Just in case you don’t quite know what this chapter is about while reading the next few lines, let me announce it clearly right here: this chapter is about sexuality – or rather it’s about physical love.
This morning I woke up and everything I felt and saw was saturated by love. I know how corny that might sound. But it is the truth. I could now easily continue in the vein of a romantic love song and describe the feelings that flooded me like gentle waves all morning. The transition from night to day was a soft one and I found myself still in the same lovely sensual oceanic state. I stayed in bed with my eyes closed and enjoyed surfing through my body. Soft warm waves tickled me everywhere and gave me a feeling of being utterly alive, of being capable of anything. Opening my eyes wasn’t easy, but the world out there also seemed rich and abundant. The colours of the autumn leaves in our garden seemed stronger and more vibrant than before. When I jogged through the woods, the earthy smell was richer and more intense. At some point I stopped running so that I could experience every single step on the soft earth more intensely. Time and again a thought went through my head: ‘Everything is possible!’
Do you want to know the reason for this divine state of mine? After two tough days of tension, overshadowed by the past, my husband and I met again last night in a deep and heartfelt way and made love. The important word here is ‘love’. Even more importantly, I am not talking about sex here, but about physical love. We had both loved, through our pain and our sullenness, until we could find our true and peaceful nature in each other again. We had stayed together until finally our hearts and bodies could fill up again with love and join each other until the nourishing stream between us was flowing freely again.
We both know that we love each other deeply and with all our heart. We both know by now that our relationship has really gone beyond such days of tension and conflict. During those two days it was as if we were both suffering from hallucinations, as if we were seeing each other as monsters, as if we were hearing malicious voices. In reality we know that no one is responsible for our own negative feelings. We know that we only slide into that state when we have not looked after ourselves well enough, when things are too hectic or when we are under pressure to meet external demands. We know that we become obnoxious and sterile if we don’t take the time to let go and play. We know what will happen if we tick off jobs like robots and don’t take the time to see each other’s heart, if we work mechanically through lists and don’t ask each other how we really feel. We have known for a long time that we lose contact with ourselves that way and lose contact with love as well. We know that a clash is inevitable then. And still it happens to us – though not as often as it used to.
By now my husband and I are quite experienced in muddling through the occasional dip and crossing the next relationship ditch, hopefully without injury. This time we argued more and more frequently about increasingly trivial issues for two days. My husband repeatedly tried to escape and I just pursued him the whole time. Little things made us go for each other like two terriers. Whenever I managed to relax for a moment in between bouts I tried to explore as thoroughly as possible what it was that was pushing its way up to the surface, what old pain it was that was crying out to be healed. Then I realized that the first crack had opened when we had been in a particularly good mood and had decided to go dancing. We hadn’t danced for a long time. But on the dance floor our bodies only moved mechanically, routinely, habitually, without any real contact. While my husband eventually started looking around vaguely, I tried to catch his eye and became tense. We carried on dancing, but it was as if we were immune to each other. We touched, but not really. Worst of all, we didn’t address this feeling but simply tried to ignore it.
It was that night that the nagging and the tension between us started. Finally, after yet another argumentative and unpleasant day, we managed to find words for what was happening. Slowly, bit by bit, we began to express what we were feeling and what we were really missing. It turned out that behind all that niggling we both had felt insecure, rejected and a failure when out dancing – but neither of us had been conscious of it in the slightest.
Our conversation was a bit like a cotton bud with iodine on it being placed over an open wound. It was necessary for clearing the mind and cleansing the soul, but what remained was a stinging pain. One wrong word and my husband froze. One more defensive retreat and my nagging and pestering continued. We were back with our old issues, trawling through all our old emotional baggage. But as we are now very experienced at this, we also looked for our love in between. That night we went to bed with the firm intention of retrieving our openness, our peace of mind and our mutual contact before the day was out. We didn’t want to take all that pain and anger through the night. So there was no other way but to express everything that was between us, because only that way would we ever find our love again.
We went to bed, face to face, and looked each other in the eye – not without resistance at first, but we knew this would be a good way to be honest. Calm was restored and we were able to make the effort to talk to each other again straight from the heart, to slowly begin touching each other again with love until our bodies were filled again with a peaceful vitality. At first we only touched each other in a wary and alert way, as if picking our way through a field of landmines. But then something happened which you cannot make happen, you simply have to let happen: something within us began to relax and our bodies found their way back to their own peaceful, powerful flow. Never before had I been able to perceive so clearly and consciously that as I saw myself more and more clearly and shared my pain, everything inside me filled up with life again. It was as if my whole body had been blocked. And slowly I began to feel love again. My love could flow more freely through me and it had only one goal – to reconnect with my husband.
I have written every single word of the last few paragraphs as a passionate plea to illustrate that there is deep innocence inside our bodies and our sexuality waiting to be accepted, to be freed from shame and to be acquitted. Nothing has been raped more violently than physical love. Sexuality has been distorted as pornography, pursued and driven to excess, condemned and shamed by the churches, and in countless bedrooms it has simply dried out and died.
Consciously or unconsciously, everybody longs for their life to be nurtured and enriched by physical love, but hardly anybody knows the ancient secrets of sexual energy that give us sparkle, connectedness and peace in mind and body. Most people struggle through puberty in search of satisfying and bonding physical love. Most of them find themselves either with a broken heart or in a sexual dead-end street. Only a few find the key that can open the door to fulfilling sexuality for good.
I remember the uneasy feeling after I had slept with a boy for the first time. I had been lucky really. My first boyfriend was a wonderfully sensitive person whom I trusted. But still, after our first night I felt strangely empty and disappointed. Was that all? Was that what everybody dreamed and talked about incessantly – at school or at home behind closed doors?
After that I started looking for something I didn’t have a clue about. I was curious, uninhibited and open, and had all kinds of sexual experiences. Sometimes it was surprising, as if I had discovered something important. Often it was fun or exciting, sometimes I was even insatiable, wild or entranced. But on the whole there was always something missing and I never felt deeply touched for long. My heart was still yearning and more and more often I felt a kind of lingering sadness. I would split up with one man, only sooner or later to end up in the arms of another, and it seemed as if the greatest secret of life kept escaping me. The crazy thing was that I had never experienced it but something inside me knew that there was a secret. So I kept on searching…
There were situations and events in my life that at first, and even second, glance didn’t seem to have anything to do with sex, but they were totally different from anything else I had ever experienced. At times, for a brief moment, I felt fulfilled. Space and time seemed to disappear and I felt free of everything, full of love and deeply connected. It was as if all burdens had fallen from me and, as if led by a magical power, I had glimpsed my own being. Back then I had no words to describe this boundless and unreal sense of happiness. I was worried that an attempt to describe it would sound crazy and so I didn’t dare to share my feelings with others. That’s why I never had any idea that sexuality could have something to do with the feeling or that the feeling could have something to do with sexuality.
Later I discovered that the feeling only happened when I was unusually relaxed. I noticed with surprise that it occurred several times when I couldn’t control events, had challenged myself beyond my limits and was determined to control something that was evading me. It was years before I read something about sex that made the connection, something that has stayed with me ever since. I was married to my husband by then and already had the feeling that sex with him would not bring me what my inner being was longing for so much. That’s when I came across a book by the Australian writer Barry Long with the title Making Love: Sexual Love the Divine Way. His central thesis was that whenever a woman felt that her man was driven by a sexual urge and not by nurturing love, she should say no.
A book on sex that was out to ban sex from our bedrooms…? A book written by a man that started with the following words:
Woman’s basic unhappiness, her perennial discontent, is because man can no longer reach her physically. Her emotional excess, depressions, tearful frustrations, even premenstrual tension and the conditions leading to hysterectomy and other uterine problems, are due to man’s sexual failure to gather or release in lovemaking her finest, fundamental, female energies. These extraordinary beautiful divine energies are intense and exquisite and when left untapped in woman, as they are now, they degenerate into psychic and emotional disturbances, and eventually crystallize into physical abnormalities. The womb gives birth to all things.3
To me it sounded like a pamphlet by a hardcore feminist, but it had been written by a 70-year-old man who loved sex and loved women. It was a radical challenge to men to abandon their sex drive in favour of love.
To be able to love in this way is the authority man has lost – his only true authority over woman. This requires pure love. It does not depend on technique. A man may develop his sexual technique but he cannot use expertise to make divine love. Exciting sensations and orgasms are gratifying and give him a form of authority, but they are not the love that woman craves. He may satisfy her, like a good meal. But soon she hungers again and eventually despises her appetite or herself, because she knows she is not being loved.4
I had never connected my inner restlessness, my continuous searching, so clearly with sex. For me, Barry Long’s words were very radical. But something in my heart whispered: ‘Yes, yes!’ But I wasn’t a feminist! Quite the opposite – women had often accused me of being too understanding towards men. I loved men and respected them. And now male sex was supposed to have polluted women? Long claimed it had even turned us into harpies, bitches, emotional demons:
While the world continues as it is, the fiendess will not allow man to forget his failure to love woman rightly. Woman must be loved. The future of the human race depends on woman being loved because only when woman is truly loved can man be truly himself and regain his lost authority.5
In spite of all the radical anti-maleness, I wanted to know what this divine physical love was and how you could experience physical love in a divine way. So I finished Long’s little book. It remained radical until the last sentence, but it made more sense to me than anything I had come across before. The more I read, the more I discovered that his words, in spite of their radicalism, were the most reconciling and loving that I had ever read about sex for – luckily, as it turned out – both men and women.
Since then as a therapist I have heard many men and women talk about their disappointing sex lives. A while ago I read an interview with an established producer of pornography on growth and trends in the field. The films most successful with male clients were the ones with a contemporary flair. ‘At the moment the fashion is not to show horny women but women who refuse to go along with it,’ the producer explained coolly.
Today I know that real sexual love can offer a way forward to men and women, away from unwillingness, driven sex, boredom and desperate relationships. I know that this kind of love can change your relationship fundamentally. You have to make a decision, though. You have to decide on a new form of physical love with your old partner – yes, that partner you may have dismissed as not all that interesting. To begin with, it is sufficient to admit that you won’t find the sexual fulfilment that you really long for, that you don’t really know how to get it. It is enough to simply long to find a better way. It is enough to be prepared to be yourself with your partner – whether this means being helpless, vulnerable, angry, rejecting, starved, bitter or frigid. This may not match any of the ideals of sex, love and relationships that you have ever heard of, read about or imagined. But this radical u-turn is needed for your sexuality and your relationship to truly heal.
Rather than constantly work towards an orgasm, to long for it, to focus and fixate on the climax, just relax into your natural sexual energy. It is frequently buried but always present. Rather than put pressure on yourself to do or be something else, you should be prepared for a kind of emotional withdrawal from your fantasies, images and ideas of brilliant sex. Men as well as women have to practise loving each other without thoughts, goals, emotions and fantasies. Initially this will feel strange, but it leads to abandoning all control and leaving a sexual encounter truly to the bodies and their impulses.
Maybe you are not aware of this, but sexuality is often about control – most of all about control of the self. We control ourselves – continuously, though mostly unconsciously – in order to meet our own demands and standards. We control our sexuality, we play games, we turn ourselves on and stimulate desire – only we don’t trust our own natural inner flow and our true being. Women especially need the courage to accept their physical hardening and their emotional starvation. Strictly speaking, they need the courage not to fake another orgasm or to let sex happen just to please their partner. Be brave enough to acknowledge all your fears of failure, your feelings of inferiority and your latent anger at your partner and to express them.
Men need the courage to recognize that they often ejaculate but only rarely experience an orgasm and to become fully aware of their bodies. Men are rarely in real touch with their physicality and should admit to themselves and their partners how little they know or have so far wanted to know about their physical and emotional needs, and how inhibited and insecure they feel.
When you first present yourself in this nakedness you might feel as if someone has deliberately ripped the last little seedlings from your barren field and viciously trampled on them. Maybe in the light of your new-found awareness and open discussion everything appears even bleaker and more hopeless than before. Maybe stepping off the path of your narrow routines or leaving behind the physical silence of the past makes you feel inhibited and shaken. Maybe you feel ashamed and think, ‘I can’t do this! I’d rather split up with my partner than try something like this!’ or ‘That’ll never work with my partner after all these years!’ Maybe you aren’t aware of any thoughts like that but simply feel resistant to the idea.
If you stay with it, in spite of all this, and muster up all your courage, it can still take months, maybe even years, for you and your partner to wade through the swamp of misunderstandings, hardening fronts, anger and misled fantasies. You might have to acknowledge that your original passion was for a phantom ideal rather than your real partner. You are likely to recognize ever more clearly that your partner is just as vulnerable and imperfect as you are. They might say ‘no’ or lack imagination – that is simply because they don’t know any better.
You will probably find that despite all your desire for satisfying and passionate sex you too are just as cut off from your body most of the time. Throughout the day you may hardly feel anything of its finely tuned impulses. Maybe you treat it with very little sensuality. Maybe your normal life is often hectic and anything but orgiastic. Maybe you often think of sex but rarely feel physically comfortable. You might even just be looking for someone who neglects your body and your soul less than you do.
Admitting to all this might sound alarming, but don’t run away from it. Keep going and be determined to feel all your feelings and – most of all – to express them as openly as you can to your partner. In the end you will be able to be the best teachers for each other and to supply the best possible sex for each other. In time, something will grow between you – a new kind of love and trust that maybe you have never experienced in your life before. Unlike the first ‘blind’ passion, it will be a solid and stable bond that can make true, deep, physical love possible.
You cannot consciously make this happen or even force it. You can only relax and open yourself to it. The more you learn to trust in your own love, the more it will spread within you. This takes time and patience and means shedding a lot of old habits. I can’t emphasize often enough that first and foremost we have to unlearn our fixation on the orgasm. In order to find yourself again in the natural and fulfilling flow of physical love, you have to be willing to consciously touch and explore each other’s bodies, even though you might feel cold, weak and numb at first.
Stop waiting for an extraordinary lover, a special mistress, a secret passion or thrilling affair to somehow enter your life! Do it with your partner, even if at first it feels uncomfortable and you would rather run away. Don’t give up if you feel like a sexless robot or a driven sex addict. If you don’t feel good enough because you haven’t felt any desire for your partner for a while, if you find it all too much, if you feel like a racehorse in its box that is not allowed to run, if when you become aware of your body you are overwhelmed by a quickie or a fantasy, if you live with constant desire and expectations but can’t share your kinky fantasies with your partner, then you should throw overboard all your expectations, demands and dreams of ideal sex. Forget porn videos, sexy lingerie and alternative practices. Instead, reawaken love within yourself by committing yourself to your real, breathing partner and your equally real and solid body. Decide to completely commit yourself to your partner and above all to yourself. Prepare yourself for an intimate encounter – mostly with your own body.
You will probably be amazed at how little contact you have with your body. It has probably been ages since you have listened to it consciously, felt it and loved it.
Ask your partner to look into your eyes silently. At first this might be very difficult. You might feel embarrassed, or ashamed, or want to laugh. Stay with it anyway and simply let things take their own course. Talk about what is happening within you. Share with each other your physical sensations – the unpleasant ones too. But don’t talk about what you are thinking – instead say what you are truly feeling. Examine the sensations that arise in your body one by one. If a sensation is pleasant, tell your partner so that they can feel more secure on this new path. If it isn’t pleasant, dare to stay with it anyway. Go inside yourself, open up within without severing the contact to your partner. Feel your body and trace what it is telling you. Allow your breathing to become deeper – this will relax you.
Be aware of every single sensation inside you – tension here, a tickling there, maybe nothing particular in other places. Stay alert! Recognize the point at which you shift from simple observations to judgements and values, such as: ‘I am feeling this here, but I should be feeling…’ ‘My partner does this here, but they should really…’
Helplessness, sadness and anger may surface and tear you away from the moment. Maybe excitement and desire will develop just as you begin to relax and will drive you into wanting and pursuing. Don’t let yourself be driven by your expectations – acknowledge your arousal, stay in the moment and open up from the lower part of your body into other parts. Focus on your hands and feet and on your chest. The chest is where your heart is, and true physical love always comes from the heart.
Only when a woman’s heart can make contact with a man’s can her body truly open up. Once she can get through to his softness, the insecurity of his being, she can feel herself inside him and real contact can happen. This is the point Barry Long makes in his seemingly anti-male and anti-sex book: true physical love comes from the heart. That is why he strongly condemns the male fixation on genitalia and orgasms, pornography and sexual fantasies.
A man only becomes calm when he has been able to pour his loving strength physically into a woman. A woman who can truly receive opens up her heart and gives energy through her breasts into his heart, from where it can flow back into his genitalia. Only when men and women are linked in their hearts and are open and present with their whole bodies can such a circuit of love be complete. Many people who have experienced this circulation describe it as a kind of all-body orgasm, a feeling of boundlessness and complete unity.
You don’t need to be the perfect lover to experience this spiritual dimension of sex. All this is only about one issue: are we prepared to open up to our partner and our old hurts? Are we prepared to cut through old blockages, to feel them, accept them, to share them and to heal?
When my husband and I began this we had a very special experience and I finally grasped what physical love was really all about. He and I had opened up widely to each other and had connected very deeply. He had penetrated me lovingly and then, all of a sudden, I had felt a stabbing pain in my heart. Every time my husband pushed inside me my heart ached more. I was disheartened and surprised – there was an obvious connection between my heart and my lower body. It seemed that there was a wall between them that my husband could not overcome. We talked to each other and stayed close. I shared my tears with him, he his love with me. Later we agreed that it had been a very special encounter that had brought us closer together.
Many women have described to me their pain, fear and numbness and an inexplicable aggressive tension in their body. ‘I was standing in the kitchen making dinner,’ one woman said, ‘when my husband came in and put his arms around my waist. Within seconds my whole body was completely tense and rejecting.’ This woman hadn’t got a brute for a husband and she felt ashamed telling me this. Frequently women become furious with regard to their breasts. ‘I can’t bear how he kneads and grabs my breasts.’
For female sexuality to heal it is vital that women trust their perception of touch again and have the courage to express what it means to them. It only takes women a fraction of a second to recognize the purpose of a touch. Is it about sexual desire or about tenderness and love? Women know that instantly. But they only rarely dare to share with their partners how angry and helpless they feel when grabbed in a loveless and greedy way. Far too often they feel at odds with their own bodies and think of themselves as abnormal or frigid when they tense up. Most men, meanwhile, are so starved of female receptiveness and openness that their emotionally undernourished bodies can only respond with hunger. Women, like men, often find these days that their genitals in a sexual encounter feel hard and numb, sometimes even painful or dead. Pain and numbness are symptoms of extreme tension.
Our body is our memory – all our past experiences are stored there, in the tissues of our cells. In that sense, every person’s sexual history is stored in their body, in all its pleasant and unpleasant aspects. The breasts and vaginas of women often have lots of pain, emotion and tension stored up from the past. Once we connect consciously with our body, once we make love consciously, then our sexual past surfaces so that we can finally heal it and rid our body of it at last.
Once we begin to practise true physical love, once all our movements become slower and more conscious, our genitalia will start healing and both physical and emotional pain from the past will surface. Don’t turn away from this pain – acknowledge it as precisely and lovingly as you can and share it with your partner. For some men it is particularly important to give voice to their pain, to express it in words and to let go of it with a moan or a sound from deep inside.
Whenever you feel pain, numbness and tension in your body, look at it from a different angle: be grateful for this feeling because it is showing you exactly where in your body a healing touch is needed.
Once you consciously attend to tension, numbness or actual pain with tenderness and with few words, often very soon something begins to relax in your body or in your feelings.
Sometimes tears begin to flow, sometimes you become furious, sometimes all you want to do is run away, or you feel intense feelings and sensitivity flowing to the parts that were numb before. Sometimes your whole body fills with life and love and you connect instinctively and in fluid movements with your partner. Sometimes you just start laughing. Keep laughing. Your partner might start as well. In sexuality, as in relationships in general, humour is one of the most powerful healing forces – especially when things are really bad. Many people have suffered serious sexual hurt. Humour can heal that deep pain.
Whether you want to laugh or cry, just do it. Meet your partner physically, even if your love life has been dormant or just routine. Give up all your old habits and simply love each other. Lie down together. Don’t do anything, just wait, be aware of yourself, acknowledge your body and follow it. Do it as often as you can. The more often you make this effort to open up for love, the more love will grow between you. The less often you practise physical love – no matter how often you are having sex – the more you will drift apart. The more often you connect in physical love, the more healing it is for your relationship.
You will find that sexual harmony is vitally important for contentment in love. Frequent physical connectedness strengthens the emotional bond, creates trust and makes our bodies calmer and more balanced.
Once on this path, we become more cheerful. Sometimes we get high and surf blissfully through a whole day, as I did at the beginning of this chapter. When we connect in physical love more often, we will become more loving and let other people and issues just be. Sex will have a totally different function. It will lose its mythical aspects and become a gateway to love and connection. And we will be free of the pressure of our own expectations.
Don’t get me wrong – don’t let those last few lines actually put you under pressure. ‘Now she’s saying that we have to have sex more often!’ That is not my point. You don’t have to do anything. No positions, no orgasms, no exciting adventures, secret practices or special lust and passion. I’m simply advocating being yourself as often as you can. And connecting as often as you can with your partner. Take the time for a truly intimate encounter. And for that you have to get out of your head and into your body, into the Here and Now.
You might not get any orgiastic feelings at first; instead you might meet numbness, boredom or shame, posturing like bouncers at the door of a glittering nightclub. That’s OK. Just stay on this path and love the other person just as they are. And persevere, even during setbacks. You know now that on this journey many a repressed emotion will be set free. Arguments might erupt, emotional outbursts break out. Feelings can fluctuate like a ship in a storm. Ride the waves rather than let yourself be carried away by them. Observe your own emotions and be on the lookout for love. That way it will spread and connect you and your partner more firmly.
Once you try this, you will realize more and more clearly how totally different the flow of physical love is from just having sex. If you stay with it, you may well discover what you have been seeking for years. You will be able to experience true intimacy again and can let your love grow. You can rediscover your sexual energy, your life force and your inner peace. Your body can trust itself again. Old hurts can be addressed and your body can truly relax at last.
I am convinced that physical love is deeply rooted in human nature, that when we open up our heart to someone, it quite automatically flows from us to them. All we have to do is let it happen. For that we need to rediscover our innocence – the feeling that everything is fine, no matter what we feel or don’t feel. We don’t need anything for our sexuality to return – it isn’t about positions, knowledge, skills or frequency. It isn’t about desire and lust either. It is about the physical expression of love.
We often hear of miraculous healing taking place when mentally impaired people receive physical attention. Be it people in a deep coma or people with Alzheimer’s, they respond positively to a tender loving touch, even though they might barely be able to navigate their way through their own lives any more. I recently read about a home for Alzheimer’s patients. Several dozen people lived there, mostly elderly. Most of them were so confused that they didn’t recognize their closest relatives any more and could remember only fragments of their former life. The director of the home was convinced that their humanity could flow again freely when freed of all demands of the self, of society and of duty. ‘Nearly half of our clients are sexually active,’ he said, ‘People who need help with feeding and who find thinking difficult begin to fall in love here and to feel desire – with all that that implies. When we have a party in the home, the women’s eyes begin to sparkle as if they were 18 again. And the men are tender and full of energy.’
In one of his books, Eleven Minutes, the Latin American writer Paulo Coelho tries to discover the secret of sexuality. He asks the remarkable question: ‘How can you touch a soul? By love or by lust?’ The protagonist, the prostitute Maria, gives the answer in her diary:
What does this painter want of me? Doesn’t he realize that we are from different countries, cultures and sexes? Does he think that I know more about pleasure than he does and wants to learn something from me?
… He’s an artist. He should know that the great aim of every human being is to understand the meaning of total love. Love is not to be found in someone else, but in ourselves; we simply awaken it. But in order to do that, we need the other person. The universe only makes sense when we have someone to share our feelings with.
He says he’s tired of sex. So am I, and yet neither of us really knows what that means.’6
3. Barry Long, Making Love: Sexual Love the Divine Way, Barry Long Books, London, 1998, p.7
4. Ibid., p.9
5. Ibid., p.10
6. Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes, HarperCollins, London, 2004, p.118