Monday, 21 March 2011 14:32 Written by Nirmala
Someone wrote sharing how their sexual desires are interfering with their work and disrupting their connection with their spouse. Here is my response:
Thank you for writing and sharing your experience. I hear you about the intensity of sexuality. It is one of the most powerful energies that we experience through the body. And so if it is not explored and experienced fully, it can be very disruptive in our life.
I would offer the following suggestions. You might consider continuing the bioenergetic therapy since it was helping. You also might consider some kind of couples therapy or counseling with your spouse. Most often when there is something that is not working sexually, there is something else that is also not working in the relationship. Therapy does not take the place of satsang or meditation. Instead, they can both support each other. So I would also invite you to continue with your spiritual practices.
Finally, there is something very simple you can do when the sexual energy is so strong. Let the energy be bigger than your body. The problem with such big and strong energy is when we assume we have to hold it within our body. This creates a pressure that then wants to explode out into action.... including through orgasm!
But if you let the energy be bigger than your body, then this relieves the pressure. In this way you can feel even more sexual energy without necessarily having to act on it. When there is less pressure inside, then it is possible to also explore the sexual desire itself. Since you do not need to act on it so immediately, you can explore it in more depth. How do you know you want sex? What are the actual sensations of desire? Are these bad sensations? Or are they just particular sensations? Even if you then move on to being sexual, you can find out more about that experience also.
Reducing the pressure, and exploring your experience very directly in this way can also allow you to then question what is true for you in the bigger context of your marriage and the possibility of having other sexual relationships. There is no ultimate right or wrong, but there is the question, "What do you really want?" Do you really want to leave or damage your marriage? Or do you really want to find a deeper intimacy within your marriage?
If you take this question, "What do you really want?" all of the way, you may find out what this is really about. Often we try to experience more love and connection through our relationships and our sexuality. But what if you could just go directly to experiencing more love? What if the love was always available whether you are being sexual or not, or even whether you are in a relationship or not? It might matter a lot less whether you are being sexual or not if you were able to experience the love and intimacy in every moment. Then sexuality can be an expression of this love and connection with life, rather than seeming like it is the source of connection and satisfaction. There are two articles on this site that explore this possibility of being filled with love by giving love to anything and everything:
Love Is For Giving
Loving Through the Senses
I hope this helps.
Tuesday, 08 March 2011 17:42 Written by Nirmala
Someone contacted me with the following questions:
Can or does God answer prayers? If we ask, will we receive? Also, you have mentioned 'many lives'. If you don't actually 'know', as you said in the blog about What happens when we die', then where does the theory of many lives come from? Thank you.
Here is my response:
Thanks for your very good questions.
There is no simple formula as anything is possible. Your prayers and requests may be answered or they may not. Although in a sense, you always do receive an answer even if it is something different than what you wanted. My sense is that the divine intelligence or God takes into account what you ask for and what you want, but then uses all of its infinite wisdom and perspective to determine what you will get.
It is similar to the way we might care for our children or pets. Ideally we would never neglect their actual needs, but when it comes to their specific wants and desires we may or may not give them what they want. Responding in the most loving way would mean taking into account their desires and of course when it is possible and healthy and appropriate to sometimes give them what they want. But it will also be part of loving them appropriately to sometimes delay or deny their wishes. The child does not always like or understand the bigger perspective that the parent is using to decide. While growing up, I never was very happy when my mother would not let me eat ice cream just before dinner, but there was actually a good reason for it!
As for what happens when we die, I hold all perspectives lightly. The biggest truth is that I do not know (and by the way that applies to everything I say). That being said, within that big mystery of not-knowing, there are many possible perspectives on what happens when we die. My own sense is that they all have some truth to them including the idea of reincarnation. However, no perspective holds all of the truth. The idea of reincarnation raises as many questions as it answers. Who or what reincarnates? Where are we in between reincarnations? Can you "remember" future lives as well as past lives?
This possibility of holding perspectives lightly can even allow you to not know and to know something at the same time. You do not need to hold onto either knowing or not-knowing. And you do not need to limit yourself to one way of knowing versus another. Why limit yourself to one perspective or another? Why take a permanent position about anything, including the fixed position "I don't know"? Life itself does not seem to limit itself to the ideas and beliefs we have, and does not even limit itself to the known or to the unknown. It dances in and out of all of these experiences.
I hope this helps make it clearer why I sometimes contradict myself. Putting anything into words immediately limits and distorts the actual truth. Sometimes then, in order to speak more of the truth you have to contradict what you just said. If you can hold all of it lightly, then you can benefit from all of it without being trapped by any words or beliefs.
Wednesday, 02 March 2011 17:43 Written by Nirmala
Someone wrote to me and asked about the teachings of the Law of Attraction and how to reconcile them with the teachings in non-dual satsangs. They wondered if involvement with the mind by trying to create a different reality would interfere with the deepest recognition of their true nature. I responded as follows:
My own sense is that there are many levels of truth and that they all exist at the same time. On one level it is true that you can manifest and create your reality, at least to some extent. However, it is also true on a deeper level that there is a divine intelligence that is unfolding everything from a bigger perspective. And it seems this deeper truth can override the smaller truth offered in books like the Secret, which may partly explain why it does not always work out as we want it to when we work to create something.
Then there is an even bigger truth that all of this is an illusion (even you are an illusion!) and it does not matter what happens. When we experience this even bigger truth, then there is naturally a deep relaxation of effort and struggle. It is all fine no matter what happens.
You asked about reconciling these different levels of truth. I would suggest that there is not a better level, there are just different levels of truth. And they do not really contradict each other, they actually complement each other. To me the ideal is not to get to the biggest truth and somehow stay there. The ideal is a kind of complete flexibility to try on different perspectives, and the ability to play freely on all of the different levels of truth.
For this ideal, it is not necessary to reconcile the different levels of truth as they are already reconciled. They all co-exist quite naturally and easily without any need to do anything to change anything about any of them. You can just play however you wish with your own perspective. You could spend your mornings playing with manifesting your desires, your afternoons surrendering to the divine plan and your evenings penetrating all illusions and dissolving the sense of a separate self that could do anything about any of this.
There is no right way or wrong way to play in this life. And it does seem that this human experience here on Earth is designed as a place where all of these levels interact and to some degree affect each other. It is like this planet is a one room school where there are infants in day care, children in kindergarten and elementary grades, teenagers in high school and college, and adults working towards a masters or doctorate all in the same classroom. In such a classroom, the adults would naturally find more to talk about with the other adults, but they might also enjoy playing with the infants, children or teenagers. They may even find they learn a lot from them. And you could see how the younger students would also benefit from contact with the older students.
Even within each of us individually, these different levels interact and exist simultaneously. Our own psyche and soul is really a one room classroom where all levels of our being exist simultaneously. There is not a right way or a wrong way, just different ways of experiencing this multi-faceted being that you are.
It is true that in order to experience the biggest truths of your pure nature as awake, empty space, the mind needs to be silent. And yet that does not make the moments when the mind is active and the illusion is capturing our attention wrong or bad. And it is not even black or white as there are many levels in between a dissolving into the source of existence and the experience of full identification with the body and mind within the illusion. Why not find out about all of them? Especially since it is not really up to you when the mind falls silent or not. That is not something you do, it is more like something that happens to you. Or more accurately, the silence is something that is always here and yet we pay attention to and identify with all of the other levels and so do not always recognize it.
What you can "do" is to be very curious about all of the different levels and experiences you have each and every day. If the ideal is a kind of flexibility to move between levels, then experiencing every level fully and with deep curiosity can naturally develop more ease in shifting and dissolving the various boundaries and attachments that keep us from being completely flexible.
However, ultimately every experience is an expression of an even bigger flexibility. Consciousness seems to love getting stuck in various experiences, at least for a while. But it always gets unstuck sooner or later. It is so flexible that it even allows itself to get stuck! So this is not really a prescription for how to become more flexible in your awareness, but instead a description of how amazingly flexible your awareness has always been. By being curious about the endlessly different experiences that show up, you may simply recognize more and more deeply how beautiful and mysterious your existence is and has always been. This can lead to not only a realization of the deepest truth of your nature, but also to a fuller realization of all of the infinite capacities and dimensions of your nature.
I hope this is helpful.
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