It's vital for mindful acts of emotional and spiritual intimacy to steadily develop as a daily practice for healthy sex. To that end, Center for Healthy Sex has created daily meditations to help you reach your sexual and relational potential. (You can subscribe for free here.)
Even momentarily concentrating on healthy solutions rewires psychological patterns to receive and share healthy sexual love in the present. Here are three meditations with the themes of lust, blame, and balance for you to ponder and practice this week.
Meditation 1: Lust
"If love has attachment in it, it is lust. If love has no attachment in it, only then is it not lust. When you are in lust you are not really thinking of the other, thinking of your beloved or lover. You are simply using the other for your own ends." -- Osho
Certainly for lust to cloud or coerce our decision-making is a moment that most of us have experienced, if not all of us, along the path to psychological maturity and self-mastery. We have knowledge of an ideological concept in many religions that lust is a great sin. We are aware of the preaching of the perils of lust -- mostly fear-mongering threats that can repress true spiritual recovery. There's so much that's unfair about lust, right? I mean, why does one even get tempted? It's like the whole Icarus myth where a child who has yet to master self-control is given waxen wings and admonished not to fly too close to the sun. Why put someone in a situation that they can't handle and morally condemn them to fatal suffering when they fail?
Lust inflames a part of the body that feels like a refuge sometimes. It's one place where we are totally alone, where no one can get at us. So it's a place where it feels like we have personal power. Surrendering to lust is unconsciously based in this idea of reclaiming a sense of personal power, which sadly rarely matches up with our own internal values. I think this is one of the reasons why we experience the whole split between feeling unfairly judged by external moral values that are not our own. When in truth, the real situation when you peel the layers is that our own lustful choices oftentimes do not match up to our own true internal values.
Daily healthy sex acts
- Take an inventory of lust in your life. What specific images or events provoke your lust? Write about the feelings that happen in your body and being. Trace back to the earliest times that you felt these feelings. What other feelings can you remember at that time, and how was your lust resolved?
- Recall the past situations that have stirred your lust. Imagine a way for each situation to be best resolved, but that doesn't result in sex or romance. For instance, the high school crush lets you know how wonderful you are, or the models in the underwear ads appreciate YOU for your own beauty and fascination. What really drives your lust?
Meditation 2: Blame
"The enemy of a love is never outside, it's not a man or woman, it's what we lack in ourselves." -- Anaïs Nin
In our weakest moments or when we're operating out of the worst parts of ourselves, we have a tendency to blame our partners. When we put responsibility for fault on someone else, we're not confronting ourselves. Take a look at your complaints then turn them back around on yourself. Take stock of your shortcomings and start to focus on what you can be doing differently to change the things in your relationship you're unhappy with.
If there are aspects of your relationship that you need to talk to your partner about and they won't talk to you, or remain unwilling to take responsibility for their behaviors, then make note of that. What part of the problem belongs to you and what part depends on them? Remember, ultimately, the relationship game is about you making yourself okay.
Daily healthy sex acts
- Try for one day to take responsibility for all that happens in your life. If someone cuts you off in traffic, or doesn't say hello, or fails to deliver on a promised action, just for today, explore staying out of the blame game and tell yourself: "I am the only one responsible for my reactions."
- What happens if you just smile despite disappointments and let everyone off the hook -- including you? We're all doing the best we can with what we've got, and perhaps if we all receive love and kindness instead of shaming and guilt-tripping, we might do better.
Meditation 3: Balance
"I do think the heart can balance out the mind, if your heart is in a good place it can give you the strength to do the right thing and behave the right way and overcome the mind." -- Alexis Arguello
Bringing life into balance is an ever-changing proposition because the nature of life is ever-changing. It's unlikely that anyone lives in balance, but it is possible to seek balance in all areas of our lives. Like a tightrope walker, balance is a step-by-step negotiation requiring thoughtful consideration and the ability to breathe in stressful moments to ensure a safe and favorable outcome.
Often times when one area of life comes into balance, another shifts out. Being flexible and willing to "roll with the punches" allows for more harmony and less rigidity. If at any time one area of your life becomes unmanageable, then you're clearly out of balance. Use your heart instead of your head as a way to balance out your decision-making and as a way to increase your internal flexibility. You might be surprised to find that balance may look and feel differently than you once thought!
Daily healthy sex acts
- Take stock of the areas of your life that seem out of balance. Areas may include but are not limited to health, exercise, diet, order and cleanliness in your home or office, problems in your primary relationships and so forth. Choose one area to address then move on to the next.
- Notice if you can sustain balance over time in multiple areas or if you have difficult with one.
- Seek professional help if you think you have areas that are consistently unmanageable.
For more by Alexandra Katehakis, M.F.T., click here.
For more on conscious relationships, click here.