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 betrayal, celibacy, and sexual energy for you to ponder and practice this week.
Meditation 1: Betrayal
"It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend." -- William Blake
Deception, dishonesty, and deceit are painful to experience whether we're on the receiving or giving end of them. The more deeply we are in relationship with another, the more we open ourselves up to be hurt. In life, we naturally hurt and disappoint those we love; this seems to be the nature of human relatedness. Yet when we deliberately set out to deceive another, we step out of our integrity, violate the other's trust, and activate shame in ourselves. Being betrayed by a trusted other, especially by a lover, is one of the most painful experiences we might endure in our lives.
If you have betrayed another or have been betrayed, take stock of what you did or how you reacted then take the necessary time to forgive yourself or another. It can take years to restore trust or to forgive someone who's betrayed you. There's no prescription for how long these processes take, so don't force or rush them -- they're complicated matters. Give yourself a break, take the time you need and as nature takes her course, you will naturally heal and become stronger.
Daily healthy sex acts
- Make a list of who you have betrayed in your life. Have you made amends? Have you forgiven yourself for your misdeeds? Take one step toward repairing your wrongdoing today.
- If you've been betrayed, have you forgiven the other? If not, why? Holding on to resentment, hurt, and anger is a form of drinking your own poison.
- Let go today and let nature take her course.
Meditation 2: Celibacy
"Celibacy is not just a matter of not having sex. It is a way of admiring a person for their humanity, maybe even for their beauty." -- Timothy Radcliffe
While fasting from certain foods like sugar or carbs may give you a keen awareness of how much you crave food and under what circumstances, a palate cleanser of conscious celibacy can be a similar mindful practice, even for only a month. Or three. For however long, celibacy can be an act of reclaiming one's sexuality, which develops in areas of life that for most people were stressful. Likely your sexuality mostly evolved without any mentorship or helpful intervention unlike, say, your eating habits. Most people had constant supervision of their eating habits as children. At those crucial ages where peer pressure makes such an impression, without this supervision most teenagers might try to survive on a diet of junk food -- purely instant gratification with little redeeming health benefits. It goes to say that without intelligent sexual development, instant gratification might be the current nature of sexual experience for most people.
A period of sexual fasting often leads to a realization as to how much sexual activity is about using other people to make one feel better, and how feeling better is about not feeling stressed out, not facing one's reality. Sex, especially if it's become compulsive, can be about using pleasurable feelings to hide from real feelings, which creates disconnection resulting in a subtle neediness for ever more pleasurable feelings. For some people, celibacy might even be a long-term way to practice a certain inner vision of true connectedness, the idea of closing one's eyes to really see.
Daily healthy sex acts
- Consider taking a one month vow of celibacy -- no sex, no porn, no masturbation. How would this impact your life? Would these even be possible for you, and if not, why not?
- Write out a pros and cons list. What are the pros for abstaining from sexual activity for a month, and what are the cons?
Meditation 3: Sexual Energy
"Someday, after mastering the winds, tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of sexual love. Then, for the second time in history, we shall have discovered fire!" -- Teilhard de Chardin
A lot of people use sex to feel better about their sexual energy -- the life-making energy that we all give and receive from the world. But we can feel better about our sexual energy all the time; it's not a matter of whether we're having sex or not. Where exactly does sex start and sex end? Is it the moment you take your clothes off? Is it the moment you perform one of your favorite sex acts? Is it penetration -- is that sex? Does it end at climax? We all have a sexual energy within that interacts with our world. To exist is to touch life and to experience the glow of that interaction.
Many people experience deprivation when it comes to healthy sexual energy. Even if people are over-sexed, there's still deprivation because they're often thinking "I want sex now -- the way I want it." Whether or not we're having sex is not the real question. If we are an honest person, then we are honest even when we're not actually in the act of telling the truth. We get to coast on our actions of honesty. There are times where we are graced, where we can actually verbally tell the truth, and at other times we are graced by the knowing that we are truthful. Try to see sex in these terms: There are times when we are graced with relational sex with another, and there are other times where we may feel content that we are healthy sexual people, we are fulfilled.
Daily healthy sex acts
- What would it be like to think you just had the greatest sex right now? What is that energy like for you? Carry yourself with the real result of this thought in your body and emotions today.
- Cultivate this feeling of both healthy and abundant sexual energy all the time. Sex comes in many colors, shapes, and sizes and at many levels. Know that -- regardless of past or present circumstances -- the deepest part of you is a healthy sexual being.
For more by Alexandra Katehakis, M.F.T., click here.
For more on conscious relationships, click here.