This book is meant to be an invitation to a great adventure. It’s an adventure that I’m still on and will be until my last breath. From where I’m standing, I can tell you the road spreads out as far as the eye can see and then keeps going. You don’t need anything to start out on this journey except a little willingness.
If you like things to be neat and tidy, you’ll need to let go of that. This adventure gets dirty at times. If you don’t want to question your own beliefs, you’ll need to let go of that too. This adventure will make you question everything you thought you knew. If you want to reach the finish line and win the game, guess what? You have to let go of that. There is no finish line. The adventure continues.
If you are ready to begin, you only need to remember that you have always been on this adventure. There’s nowhere else that you could have been.
There are a few last things I’d like to share with you. When you earnestly commit yourself to a spiritual practice, there will be certain traps and challenges along the way. I’ve had my share of experiences with getting stuck and then unstuck in my development. I’ve also had the honor of helping my students navigate the waters of awakening. Here are some of the most common icebergs and sandbars.
As I’ve already mentioned, meditation is strong medicine, especially techniques such as FOCUS ON SELF. Be prepared for your life to change when you begin to deconstruct yourself. For some people, life can get worse before it gets better when they start meditating. Having a trusted teacher can make the ride to awakening much smoother. If you have a history of mental illness or heavy drug use, I highly recommend working with a meditation teacher in conjunction with a mindfulness-based therapist.
Not everyone is going to have dramatic unwanted side effects from meditation, and it’s not necessary for spiritual growth. But some of you will, and there is no reason for you to go at it alone. Get a good teacher and find a meditation group to join. Having the direction of a teacher and the support of a community makes all the difference.
There are times that it can feel easier not to engage in your life or your sexuality. It’s too scary, takes too much work, or you think you don’t deserve it. The truth is that it’s not easier to disengage: It’s just a habit that you can change. As you bring mindfulness to your sex life and beyond, you will see that engaging is actually the easier and softer way. It takes so much energy to resist waking up and having the amazing sex you deserve. The world is constantly calling you to open your eyes, open your heart, and dive into the mystery. Why resist? Engage with this glorious thing called life. Feel the heartbreak, mingle with the imperfections, merge with the simple splendor. When you choose to engage and make meaning in your sex life, you are saying yes to all of life.
Spiritual practice can lead you to a disillusionment with life. It can start to seem that everything is meaningless, even sex. This is a side effect of deeply encountering thought and emotion for what it is: impermanent and nonpersonal. When you understand that all of your egoic experiences are made of nothing but the fluff of thought and emotion, life can become dull. The “trap of meaninglessness” is one that many folks, including myself, can get stuck on. I spent a good deal of time there before realizing that my feelings of meaninglessness were but another example of thought and emotion becoming personal. This is kind of hilarious to me. A sense of humor is a good antidote to disillusion.
If you find yourself in a brush with meaninglessness, you have a choice. You can choose to disengage from life, deciding it has no meaning. Or you can choose to engage, and make meaning. It’s really as simple as that. I suggest the latter choice. Life is so much more fun that way. Exploring your sexuality is but one way to make meaning—there are countless possibilities if you open your heart and your mind.
This may come as a surprise, but your spirituality can be used to attempt to transcend your life in unhealthy ways. That’s called spiritual bypassing. Perhaps you’ve realized that suffering is optional, so when you encounter your own suffering, you stuff it down with a Namaste. Maybe you have had the insight of no self, and now you think you never have to do any personal growth work again because there’s No one there to work on.
After years of suffering, the equanimity that meditation brought was like a cool compress on my fevered forehead. I had no interest in going back to suffering, and I wanted to float above anything unpleasant forevermore. I had gotten pretty good at deconstructing any emotional or mental experience that I had. I got so good at it, in fact, that I started to use my spiritual practice to bypass my true feelings and issues.
I had a job that was not right for me. It was holding me back from an expansion in my life that wanted to occur. But I was afraid to jump without a net, and so I kept working that job long past when I should have moved on. This was made possible by my spiritual bypassing. I would go through the motions of accepting the discomfort of working there, when in reality I was repressing my true feelings in order to stay at my job.
This can only go on so long before something has to give. In my case, my health got worse, I was grumpy at home, and I started doing a subpar job at work. Eventually, with the help of my partner, friends, and teachers, I was able to see that it was time to stop bypassing my experience, acknowledge my true feelings, and move on.
Spiritually bypassing has all kinds of nasty side effects on your life. It’s a kind of dishonesty that makes you feel separate from your fellows. You can become convinced that you’re beyond the human realm and have transcended to a higher echelon. You can of course see how this type of attitude would also wreak havoc on your sex life.
Repression does a number on the body. It gets heavy to hold everything you supposedly have already accepted. Each time you jam an emotion down or pretend your thoughts are only of lotus flowers and unicorns, you are adding more weight to that load. Eventually, you will find yourself with knots in your shoulders and an upset stomach.
Bypassing also takes a toll on your emotional and spiritual growth. You may as well drop an anchor right where you are and build a wall around yourself. If you are using your practice to avoid dealing with your issues, you aren’t going to get anywhere.
I’m always keeping an eye out for any spiritual bypassing happening with my students, just as my teachers and peers are doing for me. If you find that you, like me, have the tendency to bypass, you’ll want to do a daily check in with yourself. Practice FOCUS ON SELF and notice what material you are quick to try to “meditate away.” Focus on that, without glossing over it or attempting to transcend it. With practice, you will learn to stop bypassing and start experiencing. Then, and only then, can you truly have equanimity and acceptance. With that shift, you will move into a simpler, more grounded, and human kind of awakening.
Perhaps you just picked this book up because you wanted to have better sex, more connected lovemaking. You wanted to get off without checking out. If your sex life improves a bit as a result of reading this, I’m happy and I think I’ve done my job. I do hope, however, that some of you have taken the invitation to start up a daily meditation practice. This is how the real change happens. A dedicated spiritual practice will produce results like nothing else, giving you a whole new capacity for living and loving. This book isn’t just about good sex, it’s about waking up and having a full life.
Sex is a spiritual path all on its own, if you are willing to bring mindfulness and wakefulness to it. Sex can also be an easy place to go unconscious and become attached. Part of having mindful sex is actually being mindful about your relationship to sex, pleasure, love, and lust. Being dedicated to having good sex doesn’t mean having sex all the time. It doesn’t mean that our sex life overshadows everything else. Our entire life deserves our time and mindful attention.
The same way a good sex life needs nurturing, so do our friendships, family relationships, career, exercise, service, and spiritual life. Ideally, we are making deposits into all of these accounts on a regular basis. It’s to be expected that sometimes we will be more focused on one area than another. It’s just important that you are being honest with yourself about this tendency. Every moment is a possible opportunity to find more balance. Getting ultrafocused on any part of life can have some benefits, but you don’t want to get attached in an unconscious way.
We can get attached to anything—even spirituality. When I first began a daily practice and started to wake up a bit, meditation was all I wanted to do. I was making plans to live off the grid at a meditation center, talking about meditation nonstop, and meditating for hours a day. It was a special time, and I don’t regret it in the least. However, I was not giving attention to the other parts of my life, or to the people I loved who didn’t want to discuss peak states of consciousness all the time. I was also spiritually bypassing many things. I had essentially translated my life into that of a “spiritual person,” and I was hooked. What I didn’t realize is that what awakening calls us to do, as philosopher Ken Wilber says, is transform, not just translate.1
Translation is a common pitfall when it comes to personal or spiritual growth. It can happen in twelve-step recovery groups, religious groups, and as part of a spiritual or sexual awakening. When you are translating, you are using a group or a set of teachings as a crutch—as something you are depending upon.
In contrast, transformation is the process of using a group or a set of teachings as one part of a holistic personal transformation. When you transform, you are not dependent or attached to an outside group or a set of teachings. You are working with outside resources to change your life and spur an ongoing personal revolution. You may still want the support of a group, religion, or specific spiritual path, but you are not completely dependent on that support.
After a few years of meditating seriously, I had transformed somewhat, but I was also translating. I had translated my unhealthy perfectionist drive to my meditation practice. I had to practice every day for hours, talk about, read about, and think about meditation all the time. While this had some clear benefits for a time, it eventually cut my development off at the knees. My life was rather dull and consumed by my practice—I certainly wasn’t having good sex at that time. I needed to have a little more life in my spiritual life.
In this case, the poison was the antidote. Meditation and spiritual inquiry led me through the translating phase and into transformation. Good teachers helped as well. Sometimes a translation has to come first, to pave the way for a transformation. You get to decide what is right for you—that is the vehicle of transformation. I always encourage balance in whatever you choose.
It’s not at all uncommon for someone who has just realized the benefits of meditation to want to scream it from the rooftops. People who have gotten a taste of awakening can be a bit like evangelicals. God help the families, partners, and friends of someone who just got bit by the meditation bug. In my case, strangers had to watch out too. I had a habit of offering “spiritual insights” to random strangers who seemed to me in need of help. Now I save my guidance for students who want it. Proselytizing isn’t actually the worst thing that can happen, though. The worst thing is the self that forms and tells you that you are better than most other people.
This spiritual arrogance is an incredibly common stop along the path to awakening. I’ve known people who became polyamorous and then decided that anyone who practiced monogamy was lesser. A full sexual awakening would show that no one is lesser than anyone else, because there is no separation. But beliefs are tricky, especially enlightened beliefs.
You may notice that once your friends, family, and lovers say no thanks to meditation, you will start to feel a little more evolved than they are. You’ll perhaps place yourself in another category. A spiritually awakened category. Maybe you feel depressed that you are all on your own up there, high above the rest. Or maybe you’ll get high off the assumed power of being so much further ahead at the game of life. Maybe you’ll just isolate yourself and practice tons of meditation, grasping at a bigger awakening, trying to graduate.
Some people get stuck at this point for a long time. I’ve always been taught and shared with my students that you should get through the “I’m better than everyone” stage as quickly as possible. It is a very sticky trap indeed, as that spiritual self is a real know-it-all. If you get too stuck, your teachers may not even be able to unstick you. This pedestal of superiority will stand in your way of continuing to awaken if you let it.
Don’t let it! Let life knock you off that place above everyone else, and come back down to earth. When you are no longer comparing and judging others, you will begin to see that there is truly no separation between you and them.
If you are having trouble letting go of your arrogant spiritual self, love it. Deconstruct the strands that make that self using FOCUS ON SELF, and then love every little bit of it. Over time, that self will join the flow of everything else, no longer needing to stand apart.
A peak meditation state is one of the most enjoyable things a self can experience. When you find yourself relaxed beyond the effects of any drug, and with a mind as quiet as deep space, you will want to stay that way. It’s easy to become attached to something that feels good. I’ve had students that became addicted to peak states in meditation. They chased after trippy experiences the same way a drug addict chases after the next high. Their need to blow their own minds using meditation overshadowed their practice.
When I come across a student like this, I do the same thing that my teachers did for me. I pop their bubble and try to bring them back to earth. Those who are willing to let go of the attachment to the next meditative high are able to move deeper into the waters of awakening. Those who aren’t stay just below the surface, not seeing the ocean for the waves. It’s the difference between a vertical journey and a horizontal one.
It’s absolutely okay to enjoy the blissful and exciting fruits of your practice. Have a good time. Just be willing to accept that you may never have the same experience again. You must greet each meditation, each moment, each breath, as an entirely new arising. Don’t get stuck spiritually masturbating, when there is so much more to learn.
There’s nothing much worse than having one foot in and one foot out when it comes to waking up. I see it all the time. Someone will come to my classes religiously for a few months. They will start to feel better. Get better sleep. Have better sex. Feel less stressed at work. Then something will happen. They will start to see the cracks in their reality. They will begin to wake up. And then they will jet away, as fast and far as they can.
It can be scary to wake up. I know this. When my awakening began, my good friend and first teacher Michael Taft sat me down and said, “This is going to destroy your life.” He did mean in a good way, but not just a good way. It’s painful and destabilizing to have your life destroyed. The key is to stick it out until the reconstruction begins. Many people get a glimpse of what’s to come and they hit the brakes and resist. Doing this will not enable you to un-see what you saw.
Resistance to waking up can come in many forms. Some of the most common are falling asleep every time you meditate, upping your alcohol intake, getting in a dysfunctional relationship, becoming a workaholic, and cutting out the people in your life who will be honest with you. Of course there are endless ways to resist, but it’s futile. You will always know that there is another way to live, no matter how hard you try to forget it. Resisting would be like having the best sex of your life and then trying to forget it and going back to boring, checked-out sex. I suggest that you just give in.
If you don’t know where to start, try working with FOCUS ON MIND to deconstruct the thoughts associated with resistance. You can also use REST AND RELAX to literally relax the resistance away. It will often come in the form of a locked jaw, tight shoulders, and a contracted gut. Be gentle with yourself, with no forcing. You will open up and begin to let go soon enough.
Yes, waking up means losing everything in one sense, and that sucks sometimes, but only while you are losing it. You’ll find that once you get over the shock, life (and sex!) is so much richer and more satisfying than before.
There is a Buddhist saying that I like a lot: If you see the Buddha on the street, kill him. What I take this to mean is don’t get attached to a certain teacher or technique. Be willing to let that attachment die with all the rest. Ultimately, you are your own best teacher.
Whenever I have a student gush to me about how much I’ve helped them, I immediately take myself off that pedestal. I tell them that while I may be guiding and supporting them, they are the ones actually doing the work. My job as a spiritual teacher is to show my students that they don’t need me.
You can wake up with a guru and you can wake up without one. As powerful as guru worship can be—I have a guru myself—you are the one who must do the heavy lifting. A teacher or guru can only take you so far.
Every once in a while, I lead my students through a meditation that can be a little scary. I ask them to imagine being in the ocean, feet on the sandy floor, with the shore nearby. Then I invite them to begin to let go. I tell them it’s safe to leave the shore. Slowly, I guide them to swim far out into the salty sea. I always say the phrase, Swim until you can’t see shore. I can feel the joy and the fear in the room when I offer this phrase. For some, it’s an invitation to let go in a way that feels exhilarating. For others, it feels like I am ripping away any sense of safety and solidity.
I understand that fear. Years ago, I would have had the same reaction to a meditation like that. Holding on was all that I knew. I had been hanging on with my bitten-down fingernails since I was just a small child. Letting go was not safe, and I needed to maintain control to survive. But eventually that tight grip didn’t work for me anymore. I needed to learn to release control. Meditation gave me a path to letting go—a path that I’m still on, and will be on for the rest of my life.
Ajahn Chah, the teacher of some of my teachers, said, “If you let go a little you will have a little peace; if you let go a lot you will have a lot of peace; if you let go completely you will have complete peace.” The unconditional joy and peace that comes from releasing control and trusting is like nothing else. At first, there can be a lot of thinking about how to let go. I remember agonizing over it. I would be sitting in meditation, contracted in thought, thinking, I’m letting go! I’m really letting go! Once I got a true taste for letting go, I was a lot less dramatic about the whole thing. Life is always giving you more chances to let go and to wake up. You start to realize that letting go completely is something you get to do every day, every second.
Your sexuality is a unique and beautiful creation. You get to embody that creation and express its deepest truths. What a gift and what a responsibility. This precious and impermanent sexuality is yours to express. There will never be another like it, just as there will never be another you. Accept this gift and this responsibility wholeheartedly and reverently. Let your sexuality be a path of creativity, healing, and awakening.
Imagine you are in the ocean. Your feet are buried in the heavy, wet sand. The water is tickling your ankles and shins as the tide comes in and out. You can smell the salt and feel the ocean air kissing your body. You are just a few feet into the water, close to shore. You can hear the soft roll of the waves on the beach. The sun is out and warm on your skin.
It is safe to leave the shore. Imagine yourself swimming far out into the ocean. Your body is strong and sure as you move through the water. You can still see the shore if you look back, a small patch of sand on the horizon. You can see the vast ocean stretching out in front of you, reaching into the unknown.
I invite you to swim until you can’t see shore.