Way of the Superior Man
Way of the Superior Man
by David Deida
Introduction
We are designed to outgrow everything—including our desire to experience and improve the realms of money, sex, and intimacy.
Through the inevitable cycles of breath-taking success and gut wrenching despair, when you have mastered and outgrown the challenges of women, work, and sexual desire, be willing to forget you were ever born. Eventually the way of the superior man renders obsolete everything that can be known or experienced.
Sexual attraction is based on sexual polarity, which is the force of passion that arcs between masculine and feminine poles. All natural forces flow between two poles.
If men and women are clinging to a politically correct sameness even in moments of intimacy, then sexual attraction disappears. I don’t mean just the desire for intercourse, but the juice of the entire relationship begins to dry up. The love may still be strong, the friendship may still be strong, but the sexual polarity fades, unless in moments of intimacy one partner is willing to play the masculine poles and one partner is willing to play the feminine. You have to animate the masculine and feminine differences if you want to play in the field of sexual passion…masculine and feminine differences should be magnified, not diminished, in moments of intimacy. When these polarities are lessened due to family and work obligations, sexual attraction is diminished, along with spiritual depth and physical health.
Love is openness, through and through. And true spirituality is the practice of love, the practice of openness. A person who denies their own essence and hides their true desires is divided and unable to relax into the full openness of love.
PART ONE A Man’s Way
1 Stop Hoping for a Completion of Anything in Your Life
The masculine error is to think that eventually things will be different in some fundamental way. They won’t. It never ends. As long as life continues, the creative challenge is to tussle, play, and make love with the present moment while giving your unique gift.
You can’t escape the tussle with the feminine. Learn to find humor in the unending emotional drama the feminine seems to enjoy so much. The love that you magnify may realign her behavior, but your effort to fix her and your frustration never will.
Men who have lived significant lives are men who never waited: not for money, security, ease, or women. Feel what you want to give most as a gift, to your woman and to the world, and do what you can to give it today. Every moment waited is a moment wasted, and each moment degrades your clarity of purpose.
2 Live With an Open Heart Even If It Hurts
Closing down in the midst of pain is a denial of a man’s true nature. A superior man is free in feeling and action, even amidst great pain and hurt. If necessary, a man should live with a hurting heart rather than a closed one. He should learn to stay in the wound of pain and act with spontaneous skill and love even from that place.’
The superior man practices opening during these times of automatic closure.
Only when the front of your body is relaxed and opened, your breath full and deep, and your gaze unguarded and directly connected with another person’s eyes, can your fullest intelligence manifest spontaneously in the situation. To act as a superior man, a samurai of relationship, you must feel the entire situation with your whole body. A closed body is unable to sense subtle cues and signals, and therefore unable to act with mastery in the situation.
3 Live As If Your Father Were Dead
A man must love his father and yet be free of his father’s expectations and criticism in order to be a free man.
4 Know Your Real Edge and Don’t Fake It
The more a man is playing his real edge, the more valuable he is as good company for other men, the more he can be trusted to be authentic and fully present. Where a man’s edge is located is less important than whether he is actually living his edge in truth, rather than being lazy or deluded.
All men are afraid unless they are perfectly free.
Perhaps you are comfortable with your life, and you fear the lifestyle change that might accompany a change in career, even though the new career will be closer to what you really want to do with your life.
5 Always Hold To Your Deepest Realization
Eternity must be a man’s home, moment by moment. Without it, he is lost, always striving, grasping at puffs of smoke. A man must do anything necessary to glimpse, and then stabilize, this ever-fresh realization, and organize his life around it.
Make your life an ongoing process of being who you are, at your deepest, most easeful levels of being. Everything other than this process is secondary.
…how often was your attention relaxed into its source?
6 Never Change Your Mind Just to Please a Woman
If a woman suggest something that changes a man’s perspective, then he should make a new decision based on his new perspective. But he should never betray his own deepest knowledge and intuition in order to please his woman or “go along” with her. Both she and he will be weakened by such an action. They will grow to resent each other, and the crust of accumulate inauthentic will burden their love, as accumulated inauthenticity will burden their love, as well as their capacity for free action.
7 Your Purpose Must Come Before Your Relationship
Every many knows that his highest purpose in life cannot be reduced to any particular relationship. If a man prioritizes his relationship over his highest purpose, he weakens himself, dissolves the universe, and cheats his woman of an authentic man who can offer her full, undivided presence.
8 Lean Just Beyond Your Edge
In any given moment, a man’s growth is optimized if he leans just beyond his edge, his capacity, his fear. He should not be too lazy, happily stagnating in the zone of security and comfort. Nor should he push far beyond his edge, stressing himself unnecessarily, unable to metabolize his experience. He should lean just slightly beyond the edge of fear and discomfort. Constantly. In everything he does.
9 Do It for Love
The way a man penetrates the world should be the same way he penetrates his woman: not merely for personal gain or pleasure, but to magnify love, openness, and depth.
Your deepest desire in life. Feel why you are doing anything at all in life, and, specifically, why you are uniting with your lover.
When a man gives his true gift of sex to his woman, he penetrates and blooms her beyond all limits to love. It is the same with the world. To bloom woman and world for real takes authenticity, persistence, and courage of heart. A man must know the truth at his core and be willing to give his gifts fully. No holding back. He must be willing to dedicate his sex and his life to magnifying love by penetrating woman and world his true gifts. This willingness is rare.
Very few men are willing to do the deed for real, to use everything they’ve got to liberate their woman and the world into the deepest possible truth, love, and openness. Few men are willing to give their deepest genius, their true endowment, the poetry of their very being, with every thrust of sex and life. Most men are limpened with doubts and uncertainties. Or they hold back their true drive because of fear. So they diddle their woman and the world just enough to extract the pleasure and comfort they need to assuage their nagging sense of falsity and incompleteness.
You can ravish your woman so deeply that her surrender breaks your heart into light. You can press yourself into the world with such enduring love that the world opens and receives your deepest gifts. There is no essential difference between entering your woman’s feminine heart and entering fully into the world. Both forms of intercourse, sexual and worldly, require sensitivity, spontaneity, and a strong connection to deep truth in order to penetrate chaos and closure in a way that love prevails.
Neither woman nor wold are predictable. They will often seem to resist your gifts and test your capacity to persist. And, just as surely, they will tenderly respond to the authenticity of your relaxed ministrations, the freedom expressed in your humor, and the invasion of your adamant love. They will open in love and receive you fully—only to resist and test you again, moments or days later. Neither woman nor world can be second-guessed, or fooled. They know when you are just picking around. They know when you are just dicking around. They want to receive you for real.
There are two ways to deal with woman and world without compromising your true gifts or dribbling away the force of your deep being. One way is to renounce sexual intimacy and worldliness, totally dedicating yourself without distraction or compromise to the path you choose to pursue, free of the seemingly constant demands of woman and world.
The other way is to “fuck” both to smithereens, to ravish them with your love unsheathed, to give your true gifts despite the constant tussle of woman and world, to smelt your authentic gifts in this friction of opposition and surrender, to thrust love from the freedom of your deep being even as your body and mind die blissfully through a crucifixion of inevitable pleasure and pain, attraction and repulsion, gain and loss. No gifts left ungiven. No limit to the depth of being. Only openness, freedom, and love as the legacy of your intercourse with woman and world.
10 Enjoy Your Friends’ Criticism
A man’s capacity to receive another man’s direct criticism is a measure of his capacity to receive masculine energy. If he doesn’t have a good relationship to masculine energy (e.g., his father), then he will act like a woman and be hurt or defensive rather than make us of other men’s criticism.
11 If You Don’t Know Your Purpose, Discover It, Now
Without a conscious life-purpose a man is totally lost, drifting, adapting to event rather than creating events. Without knowing his life-purpose a man lives a weakened, impotent existence, perhaps eventually becoming even sexually important, or prone to mechanical and disinterested sex.
Everything in your life, from your diet to your career, must be aligned with your purpose if you are to act with coherence and integrity in the world. If you know your purpose, your deepest desire, then the secret of success if to disciple your life so that you support your deepest purpose and minimize distractions and detours.
12 Be Willing To Chang Everything in Your Life
A man must be prepared to give 100% to his purpose, fulfill his karma or dissolve it, and then let go of that specific form of living. He must be capable of not knowing what to do with his life, entering a period of unknowingness and waiting for a vision or a new form of purpose to emerge. These cycles of strong specific action followed by periods of not knowing what the hell is going on are natural for a man who is shedding layers of karma in his relaxation into truth.
If your deepest purpose is to meditate and realize God, you might find that before you can totally dedicate yourself to this practice you must work your way through the concentric circles of playing with sexual partners, using drugs, getting married, raising children, developing a career, and finally, having dissolved your fascination and need to do all of that, getting down to the business of full-time meditation.
You probably are not living your deepest purpose yet. You probably need to burn off the karma, or fulfill the need, of the present purpose by which you are fascinated and distracted.
Each purpose, each mission, is meant to be fully lived to the point where it becomes empty, boring, and useless. Then it should be discarded. This is a sign of growth, but you may mistake it for a sign of failure.
You stay open to a vision of your deeper purpose by not filling your time with distractions.
13 Don’t Use Your Family As an Excuse
If a man discovers his deepest purpose, or if he permanently compromises it and uses his family as an excuse for doing so, then his core becomes weakened and he loses depth and presence. His woman loses trust and sexual polarity with him, even though he may be putting much energy into parenting their children and doing the housework. A man should, of course, be a full participant in caring for children and the household. But if he gives up his deepest purpose to do so, ultimately, everyone suffers.
Self-resignation will communicate itself to your woman and your children. They will feel your weakness. Your woman will begin to take charge more than she really wants…
Try as you might, once you have neglected your own deep purpose, your household will become a place where everybody tests your capacity to stand your ground, and you will lose.
The priority of the feminine, in men and women, is the flow of love in relationship. The priority of the masculine, in men and women, is the mission which leads to freedom. Ultimately, true freedom and true love are the same. However, the journey of the masculine and feminine to this unity of love and freedom is very different.
A short period of time with a father who is absolutely present, full in love, undivided inside, and sure of his mission in life, will affect your children much more positively than if they spend lots of time with a father who is ambiguous in his intent and has lost tough with his deepest purpose, no matter how much he loves his children.
Just as you did with your father, your children will unconsciously replicate or react to the emotional taste they absorb from you. Your essential emotional tone…becomes part of your children’s home.
14 Don’t Get Lost in Tasks and Duties
Whatever the specifics of a man’s purpose, he must always refresh the transcendental element of his life through regular meditation and retreat. A man should never get lost in the details of his life and forget that, ultimately and in truth, life amounts to nothing other than what is the deepest truth of this present moment.
The test of your fullness in every moment is your capacity to die in free and moving surrender, knowing you’ve done everything you could do while alive to give your gift and know the truth of being.
Tasks are important, but no amount of duties adds up to love, freedom, or full consciousness.
When you do your tasks in the right way, they liberate your life energy so that you can attend to what really matters—the investigation, realization, and embodiment of true freedom.
To help you remember the triviality of your daily tasks, interrupt your schedule with refreshers. These refreshers should cut to your core and strip the fat off the moment. Consider your own death. Behold an image of the most enlightened being you know. Contemplate the mystery of existence. Relax into the deepest and most profound loving of which you are capable. In your own way, remember the infinite, and then return to the task at hand. This way, you will never lose perspective and begin to think that life is a matter of tasks. You are not a drone. You are the unbounded mystery of love. Be so, without forgetting your tasks.
15 Stop Hoping for Your Woman to Get Easier
A woman often seems to test her man’s capacity to remain unperturbed in his truth and purpose. She tests him to feel his freedom and depth of love, to know that he is trustable. Her tests may come in the form of complaint, challenging him, changing her mind, doubting him, distracting him, or even undermining his purpose in a subtle or not so subtle way. A man should never think his woman’s testing is going to end and his life will get easier. Rather, he should appreciate that she does these things to feel his strength, integrity, and openness. Her desire is for his deepest truth and love. As he grows, so will her testing.
The most erotic moment for a woman is the feeling that you are Shiva, the divine masculine: imperturbable, totally loving, fully present, and all-pervading. She cannot move you, because you already are what you are, with or without her.
If you are a man who is living his fullest, willing to play his edge and grow through difficulties, then you will want her to test you. You may not like it. But you don’t want her to settle for some bozo who depends on his woman’s response to be happy.
Your woman doesn’t want you to need mommy. In fact, it sickens her.
If she is a good woman, a strong woman, she won’t tolerate your childish needs for a pat on the head, collecting bigger toys, and being king of the mountain.
If you remain full and strong, humors and happy your truth unperturbed by her testing, then you pass the test.
PART TWO Dealing With Women
16 Woman Are Not Liars
“Keeping your word” is a masculine trait, in men or women. A person with a feminine essence may not keep her word, yet it is not exactly “lying.” In the feminine reality, words and facts take a second place to emotions and the shifting moods of relationship. When she says, “I hate you,” or “I’ll never more to Texas,” or “I don’t want to go to the movies,” it is often more a reflection of a transient feeling-wave than a well considered stance with respect to events and experience. On the other hand, the masculine means what it says. A man’s word is his honor. The feminine says what it feels. A woman’s word is her true expression in the moment.
The you listen to your woman, listen to her as you would the ocean, or the wind in the leaves. The sounds you hear from her are sounds of the motion of her feeling-energy. Her feminine speech is far more like poetry than like a clearcut agenda for action.
For the feminine, truth is a thin concept compared to the thickness of her flow of feelings. The “truth” of the feminine is whatever she is really feeling, in this present moment.
17 Praise Her
The masculine grows by challenge, but the feminine grows by praise. A man must be unabashed and expressed in his appreciation for his woman. Praise her freely.
Praise is literal medicine for feminine qualities.
It is a difficult practice for most men to learn, but you must learn to praise the very quality you feel are not yet praiseworthy in order for them to become so. In other words, praise the tiny quality that you want to grow.
18 Tolerating Her Leads to Resenting Her
A man gets resentful and frustrated with his woman when he is too afraid, weak, or unskilled to penetrate her moods and tests into love. He wishes she were easier to deal with. But it is not entirely her fault that she is bitchy and complaining. It is also a reflection of her lack of being penetrated by love. When a man simply tolerates his woman’s self-destructive moods, it is a sign of his weakness. His attitude has become one of wanting to escape women and the world into love. A man shouldn’t tolerate bitchy and complaining moodiness in his woman, but he should serve her and love her with every ounce of his skill and perseverance. Then, if she cannot or will not open in love, he might decide to end his relationship with her, harboring no anger or resentment, because he knows he has done everything he could.
The whole point of an intimacy is to serve each other in growth and love, hopefully in better ways than we can serve ourselves. Otherwise, why engage in intimacy if your growth and love are served more by living alone? Intimacy is about growing more than you could by yourself, through the art of mutual gifting.
The feminine part of your woman is either opening in loving surrender (easy moments) or closing in what ends up being an emotional test of your capacity to open her (difficult moments). This cycle of the feminine is like all cycles in nature: it never ends. The sooner you learn to embrace and dance with these moods of closure, the sooner both of you will grow beyond the psychodrama and see the humor of the play.
Instead of tolerating your woman’s moods of closure and complaint, open her moods with your skillful loving. It is your gift to give. Both of you will grow more by your giving than by your tolerating. A superior man sees his woman’s moods not as a curse, but as a challenge and an amusement.
You can only develop your skill in serving your woman into openness. It never ends though, even if you are passionate, fearless, loving and humorous with her. The weather continually cycles through rainy and dry spells, night and day cycle in their turn, and your woman will continually cycle through openness and closure, even when her life and relationship with you seem great.
Don’t tolerate her mood. And don’t talk about it with her. Participate in it. Bloom her into fullness. Move her body with your body. Open her heart with your humor. Penetrate her closure with your fearless presence. Open her heart again and again and again.
19 Don’t Analyze Your Woman
The feminine’s mood and opinions are like weather patterns. They are constantly changing, severe and gentle, and they have no single source. No analysis will work. There is no linear chain of cause and effect that can lead to the kernel of the “problem.” There is no problem, only a storm, a breeze, a sudden change in weather. And the bases of these storms are the high and low pressure systems of love. When a woman feels love flowing deeply, her mood can instantly evaporate into joy, regardless of the supposed reason for the mood.
The next time your woman is in a bad mood, try this: Assume she is not feeling loved. Simply assume it, even if it seems that it can’t be that simple, that there must be some underlying reason for her upsetness, a reason that you could fix. Assume she is more like a flower that needs watering than an engine that needs a carburetor adjustment. Don’t assume anything is wrong at all. Assume that she wants love from you, in a deep, strong, steady and sensitive way.
20 Don’t Suggest That a Woman Fix Her Own Emotional Problem
Asking a woman to analyze or try to fix her own emotions is a negation of the feminine core, which is pure energy in motion, like the ocean. She can learn to surrender her mood to God, she can learn to open her heart in the midst of closure, she can learn to relax her edges and trust in love, but she will never “fix” anything by analyzing her “problem.”
Like the ocean, the native state of the feminine is to flow with great power and no single direction. The masculine builds canals, dams, and boats to unite with the power of the feminine ocean and go from point A to point B. But the feminine moves in many direction at once.
Any time you try to force your woman to be more like a ship than an ocean you are negating her feminine energy.
Most men have made their women into swimming pools by continually treating them like men, talking with them about their feelings as if they can be analyzed to the point of “fixing” them.
21 Stay With Her Intensity—To a Point
When a women gets emotionally intense, a mediocre man wants to clam her down and discuss it, or leave and come back later when she is “sane.” A superior man penetrates her mood with imperturbable love and unwavering consciousness. If she still refuses to live more fully in love, after a time, he lets her go.
One of the deepest feminine pleasures is when a man stand full, present and unreactive to the midst of his woman’s emotional storms. When he stays present with her, and loves her through the layers of wildness and closure, then she feels his trustability, and she can relax.
The way you relate to your woman’s chaos reflects the way you react to the chaos of the world.
You can train yourself to master the world by learning how to be free and loving in the chaos of your woman’s emotions. And you do so by standing your ground and loving so strongly that only love prevails…Like wrestling a steer or surfing ocean waves, mastering involves blending with your woman’s powerful energy and feeling the rise and fall of the moment, without lapsing in presence for a second. You’re going to get stamped on by the steer, you’re going to get swamped by the ocean, and you’re going to get hurt by your woman. This is how you learn. You get up, dust yourself off, swim to shore, and turn and face your woman again. The only options are fear or mastery.
Keep your breath full. Keep your body strong. Keep your attention present. No matter what your woman says or does, give her love. Press your belly into her. Smile. Scream and then lick her face. Do whatever it takes to crack the shell of her closure, get your love inside that crack, and touch her heart. Learn to enjoy her anger, her tears, her silent hardness. The world will give you the same at times. The game of life is to find each situation workable, to transform each occasion through the magnification of love, to give your fullest gift in every moment, and to have no attachments to the outcome, knowing it’s all going to rise and fall and rise again. You have mastered women and the world when no desire either to avoid or attain sways your loving or limits your freedom.
22 Don’t Force the Feminine to Make Decisions
A man abandons responsibility by expecting that his woman will always maker her own decisions and then be accountable for the results. This expectation is a withholding of his masculine gift. It puts a woman in the position of magnifying her own masculine. It is good for some women to learn to animate their masculine capacity to make a decision and stick with it. But if a man abnegates his responsibility to provide his woman with the gift of masculine clarity and decisiveness, then she will become chronically sharp, angular, and distrustful of his love. She will cease surrendering in love with him, cease trusting his masculine capacity, and, instead, become her own man.
PART THREE Working With Polarity and Energy
23 Your Attraction to the Feminine is Inevitable
Masculine men are attracted to forms of feminine energy: radiant women, beer, music, nature, etc. If a man tries to hide his attraction, it reveals some degree of shame with respect to his own sexual core.
Your sexual energy is always attracted to its energetic reciprocal.
Your desire for a woman is an aspect of your desire for pleasurable oneness. Your confession of desire is a confession of your desire to embrace life. To relax into oneness so that all opposites, including masculine and feminine, find their unity in love, is to be spiritually free. Eventually you will recognize that all desire is an aspect of your native impulse to give love. From beginning to end, your attraction to women can be seen as the essential gesture of your heart, your desire for love and unity.
24 Choose a Woman Who Is Your Complementary Opposite
If a man is very masculine by nature, then he will be attracted to a very feminine woman, who will complement his energy. The more neutral or balanced he is, the more balanced he will prefer his woman. And, if a man is more feminine by nature, his energy will be complemented by the strong direction and purposiveness of a more masculine woman. By understanding their own needs, men can learn to accept the “whole package” of a woman. For instance, a more masculine man can expect that any woman who really turns him on and enlivens him will also be relatively wild, undisciplined, “bonkers,” chaotic, prone to changing her mind and “lying.” Still, from an energetic perspective, this kind of woman will be much more healing and inspiring to him than a more balanced or neutral woman who is steady, reasonable, “trustworthy,” and able to say what she means in a way he can understand.
The false neutralization, or depolarization, of relationships is one of the main reasons that couples break up.
And this is highly valued by most men; to behold a woman free in her expression of bodily ecstasy is one of the most awesome visions most men have had.
For such a woman, there is no disconnection between sex and spirit.
The fullest of such occasions is completely sexual and completely spiritual at the same time.
25 Know What Is Important in Your Woman
The feminine is the force of life. The more masculine a man is, the more his woman’s feminine energy (as opposed to other qualities) will be important to him.
The more you seek a woman who gives you everything, the less you get of anything.
You can share many aspects of intimacy—business, friendship, parenting, and sexual passion—only if you choose a single priority to the relationship and allow all the other activities to align themselves around your main purpose for being together.
Because you expect your intimate relationship to serve so many purposes, it begins to veer towards the utilitarian. By constantly talking about finances, work, household, and children, you turn your woman into a neutral companion. You become so familiar with each other that the mystery of sexual enchantment becomes standardized into the ritual mechanics of kiss, stroke, lick, pump, spurt, and snore. You begin to long for the depth of desire you once felt with your woman. Domestically replaces mystery, and talk replaces tumble.
If you decide, however, that the purpose of your intimacy is the passionate transmission of love, the rejuvenate healing of sexual energy, and the cultivation of heart through your mutual commitment to spiritual awakening, then be careful. Don’t force your woman to be your on-call accountant.
Don’t squash the fullness of her feminine energy into merely functional roles.
If you want your woman to be your spiritual and sexual consort, not just your housemate, you must skillfully maintain your household and livelihoods so that the potency of your union is not diminished. She can be the mother of your children as well as your business partner, as long as these functions do not cut into the primacy of your purpose: to serve one another’s enlightenment through your unwavering commitment to love, and to enliven one another’s core by the bodily transmission of love via sexual polarity.
26 You Will Often Want More Than One Woman
Any man with a masculine essence will desire sexual variety. Even if he loves his intimate partner and is completely committed to her, he will naturally want sexual occasions with other woman besides his chosen intimate partner. How a man deals with his desire for other women is up to him. He should know, however, that there is no way to avoid such desires. He should also know that acting on such desires, though temporarily enlivening and exhilarating, often ends up complicating his life far more than the occasion itself is worth.
27 Young Women Offer You a Special Energy
In general, youth in a woman bespeaks radiant, unobstructed, and refreshing feminine energy. A young woman tends to be less compromised by masculine layers of functional protection built up over years of need. Traditionally, young women were understood to offer a man a particularly rejuvenate quality of energy. Older women may maintain, or even increase, the freshness and radiance of their energy, but it is rare.
You might have nothing in common. But that doesn’t matter. It is her energy that delights and inspires you.
As women get older, they typically take on more and more masculine tasks and responsibilities in our culture, so their radiance begins to decrease.
Our culture reduces this youthful energy to a sexual thing, whereas it is actually a whole body transmission of energy, affecting the heart as much as or more than the genitals.
As a man, it is your responsibility to honor the heart-rejuvenating gift of a young woman, without violating this honor of imposing your sexual desire on her.
Use the energy she has given you in your own service to others, passing the gifts of heightened aliveness and passionate heart into all of your relationships, so that all beings may benefit by the delight you have received from this woman, who, for now, manifests the youthful gifts of uncompromised radiance and life force.
28 Each Woman Has a “Temperature” That Can Heal or Irritate You
Some women are hotter, some are cooler. Even though a man might choose to remain in a committed intimacy with one woman, his needs for different temperatures of feminine energy may change over time. A hot woman who aroused his passion several years ago may irritate him now. A cooler woman who soothed his heart several years ago may seem tiresome to him now. By understand how different temperatures of feminine energy may affect him, a man could make more skillful life choices without confusion.
PART FOUR What Women Really Want
29 Choose a Woman Who Chooses You
If a man wants a woman who doesn’t want him, he cannot win. His neediness will undermine any possible relationship, and his woman will never be able to trust him. A man must determine whether a woman really wants him but is playing hard to get, or whether she really doesn’t want him. If she doesn’t want him, he should immediately cease pursuing her and deal with his pain by himself.
Once she feels your neediness, once she feels that you need her more than she needs you, she will never trust your masculine core.
30 What She Wants Is Not What She Says
Sometimes a woman will make a request to her man in plain English, not to get him to do something, but to see if he is so weak that he will do it. In other words, she is testing his capacity to do what is right, not what she is asking for. In such cases, if the man does what his woman asks, she will be disappointed and angry. The man will have no idea why she is so angry or what could possibly please her. He must remember that her trust is engendered not by him fulfilling her requests, but by him magnifying love, consciousness, and success in their lives, in spite of her requests.
Her ultimate desire is to feel your full consciousness, your trustable integrity, your unshakable love, and your confidence in your mission. Yet she will rarely ask you directly for these things. She would rather try to distract you from your truth, and then feel that she cannot—that you hold fast to your truth while you continue to love her.
The divine masculine is consciousness. A superior man practices maintaining full consciousness in all situations.
Your woman is a form of the goddess, taunting you, seducing you, ready to chop your head off with her wrath if you are weak and ambiguous in your truth, and ready to surrender to the force of your loving if you are steady and brilliant in your loving consciousness. Know that your woman is always pleased most by your strength in love, freedom, and consciousness.
If she is disappointed by your deepest truth, you shouldn’t be with her.
31 Her Complaint Is Content-Free
A man should hear his woman’s complaints like warning bells, and then do his best to align his life with his truth and purpose. However, if he believes in the literal content of her complaint, he will immediately go off course, for the content reflects the present mood more than a careful observation of his tendencies over time. Her complaint should be valued as a reminder to “get it together,”…more often than not, the specific of her complaint do not describe the real, underlying action or tendency that needs to be changed.
The deeper issue is that you didn’t do what you said you would. You gave her your word, and you didn’t follow through. She can’t trust what you say. And this hurts her, deeply.
Your word is a demonstration of your purpose, of your masculine core. When you don’t follow through with what you say you are going to do, she feels that your masculine core is weak. She feels let down. Over time, she will begin to build up her own masculine protection against your lack of integrity. She will begin to guard herself against the hurt that your lack of carry-through causes. She will harden herself, becoming angular and tense. To you, the garage seems trivial. To her, you have failed at your word. She can’t trust you.
It’s very much as if your woman were to become slovenly. The core of the feminine is energy or radiance. If she stops taking care of herself, if she becomes dull and drab, always tired and worn out, then she is unable to give you the feminine energy you desire in intimacy. You might still love her, but you will begin to look elsewhere for feminine energy.
You must listen to your woman more as an oracle than as an advisor.
If she can’t trust you with living your life from your deepest wisdom and fullest capacity, she can’t trust you with her life. She can’t trust your masculine impeccability, so she naturally will compensate by overdeveloping her own. She is not only being masculine for herself, now she’s being masculine for you. Her body will begin to show it. She will becomes less radiant and less relaxed in her feminine power and glory because she has to compensate for your failure.
32 She Doesn’t Really Want to Be Number One
A woman sometimes seems to want to be the most important thing in her man’s life. However, if she is the most important thing, then she feels her man has made her the number one priority and is not fully dedicated or directed to divine growth and service. She will feel her man’s dependence on her for his happiness, and this will make her feel smothered by his neediness and clinging. A woman really wants her man to be totally dedicated to his highest purpose—and also to love her fully. Although she would never admit it, she wants to feel that her man would be willing to sacrifice their relationship for the sake of his highest purpose.
Although your woman seems to want to be the most important thing in your life, she actually can trust and love you more if she is not.
Be careful not to substitute default responsibilities for true purpose. It is easy to fill your day with chores and obligations, coming up for air only long enough to watch some TV or have quick sex. It’s also easy to give up entirely to watch some TV or have quick sex. It’s also easy to give up entirely on living a life of absolute commitment to truth, settling for the common life of absolute commitment to work, family, intimacy, and friends.
She wants you to know the center of your life so she can trust you.
33 Your Excellent Track Record is Meaningless to Her
A man’s track record means nothing to the feminine. A man could be perfect for ten years, but if he’s an asshole for 30 seconds his woman acts like he’s always been one. The feminine responds to the moment of energy, forgetting her man’s history of past behavior. A man’s past behavior is irrelevant to his woman’s feeling in the moment.
Remember, history is irrelevant to the feminine, so your mistake is as easily forgotten as your successes. As soon as you see she’s upset, immediately assume happiness. Shock her with your love. Make her smile and laugh with your humor. Lick her neck, or lift her off the ground and pretend you’re King Kong. Surprise her in some loving way, and the emotional slate will be wiped clean.
34 She Wants to Relax in the Demonstration of Your Direction
A woman must be able to trust you to take charge if she relaxes her own masculine edge. This is true financially, sexually, emotionally, and spiritually. The man doesn’t have to actually do all the work, but he must be able to steer the course if his woman is going to relax into her feminine without fear.
Even more important is your spiritual direction. Where is your relationship going? What are your lives about? What does it all add up to? How will the two of you continue to grow without getting stuck in the ruts of mediocrity? If your woman feels that you have lost your spiritual direction, she will seek direction herself and attempt to impose it on you, since you don’t seem to have any yourself.
How can you tell if your woman’s self-direction is healthy for her? If she becomes more and more full and happy as she pursues her direction, then it is good for her. If she becomes more and more stressful, taut, and emotionally angular, then she is animating excess masculine direction.
How can you be more responsible? Not necessarily by doing more work. You become more responsible by knowing your deepest purpose, and then arranging your finances and spiritual life from that knowingness.
PART FIVE Your Dark Side
34 You Are Always Searching for Freedom
The essential masculine ecstasy is in the moment of release from constraint. This could occur when facing death and living through it, succeeding in (and thus being released from) your purpose, and in competition (which is ritual threat of death). The masculine is always seeking release from constraint into freedom. The feminine often doesn’t understand these masculine ways and needs.
The attachment to comfort and security is what limits most men in their capacity to make a spiritual touchdown. To be free is to die to your need to be a separate self.
The feminine, on the other hand, is not seeking freedom, but love. A woman’s bliss is not in emptiness, but in fullness. Her means is not release, but surrender.
36 Own Your Darkest Desires
If a man disowns his dark masculine desire for freedom, then he kinks the hose of his masculine force. His energy will not flow freely, and his attention will be bound by unfulfilled yearnings. Most importantly, if his hose is kinked in this way, he weakens his masculine capacity to stand fearless in the death that is conscious life. He will not be able to face the unknown, the groundless ground of being, and still function form his heart in love.
Your relationship to ravishment reveals your relationship to life altogether.
You must be as fearless with your sexual desire as you are with your spiritual desire. The essential masculine fear is loss of self—which is also the essential masculine desire.
Feel into her so deeply that you become unaware of yourself and totally aware of her.
Feel through not only your boundaries, but also her boundaries, so that you are both dissolved in the immense force of your loving. Relax into the force of love so completely that only love remains.
…you will also re-own your spiritual guts…you will cultivate your capacity to “die” into love, with no need to hold onto your self.
Over time, as this force moves through you more freely, you will discover a naturally enhanced capacity to yield into spiritual “death,” or the dissolution of your sense of separate self in the freedom of unboundedness. Rather than gripping onto yourself, you will be able to ease yourself more fully into the consciousness who you truly are, and in doing so you will recognize the Great One, with no boundaries, who is living you now, and who is no other than you. But to let go of your sense of individual separate self takes guts. And you won’t have them if you don’t even have the daring to let go of the sense of separation between you and your woman while making love.
To truly ravish your woman in love, you must yield yourself in the worship and trust of her heart, which, in truth, is your heart. Such fearlessness will prepare you for and perhaps even initiate you into the worship and trust of consciousness itself, such that you will find greater and greater capacity to yield into and as the boundless One who you truly are.
37 She Wants the “Killer” in You
Fearlessness, or the capacity to transcend the fear of death for the sake of love, is a quintessential form of the ultimate muscling gift.
She doesn’t want you to be a killer, but she does want to feel that you are capable of facing death if necessary.
The dark masculine energy of the warrior, the one who could face death and kill when necessary, is an essential part of you. Today’s current fashion is to suppress both the dark masculine and the dark feminine, so we have a large population of simple men and polite women. But beneath the nice veneer of most women lives the wrathful goddess who would chop the head off of every mediocre “new age” man. And beneath the patient smile of most men lies the warrior of love who would ravish his woman into bliss rather than listen to her chat in pointless emotional circles.
She wants to feel this dark masculine capacity not simply because she wants to be ravished, but because it is a sign of your overall capacity to face and know death, your own and others. And it is this capacity that makes you trustable as a man, both as a human warrior and a spiritual warrior.
The “killer” your woman wants is the one who knows that life is a process of dying through to that which cannot be lost. Only in this sacrifice of fear can your heart remain unguarded. Facing the potential burglar at night is only a sign to your woman that you are willing to lose everything into love.
38 She Needs Your Consciousness to Match Her Energy
A man must be able to meet his woman with consciousness equivalent to her energy. The feminine destructress must be met by the masculine destroyer. The goddess of devotion must be met by the god of all-pervading love. Dark or light, a man can’t be stuck in, or avoid, any areas of his masculine capacity or his woman will test him there. These areas of testing are usually first on the dark side. Only after trust is established there, only when the dark feminine lover knows she will be met by the dark masculine lover, will testing proceed toward the light.
As you probably know, your woman is capable of being a witch, a sex slave, an Amazon, a goddess of light, a nurturing mother, a demoness, a luscious lover, a wise teacher, a wild animal, and everything in between. As a general rule, she will keep returning to the energy that you cannot match. For instance, if you are particularly turned off by her anger, she will seem to return, again and again, to the energy of anger. If you are unable to embrace her anger in the ferocity of your loving, transforming her anger into passion, she will continue to test your capacity to do so. Any of her energies that you are unable to transform into love through the force, clarity, and humor of your consciousness will return for you to face, again and again.
A lesser man might decide, “Well, she’s going to have to deal with it herself.” But she would not be in relationship with you if she wanted to deal with it herself. She wants your consciousness—clear, strong, and free—as much as you want her radiance. If you are not penetrating her moods, she can’t feel your free consciousness. The secret is to match her energy with consciousness demonstrated through your body.
Your body, tone of voice, and the look in your eyes mean a lot more to her than anything you could say.
Your body must meet hers full of relaxation, power, and trust.
She will never trust your “lighter” masculine capacities until you have proven your “darker” masculine capacities.
Whatever energy she offers you, you can be sure the world will offer it to you as well. If you have ever tried to increase your income, or magnify your spiritual clarity, you know that the world will test you. [Sexual Transmutation]
She knows the degree of mediocrity you will settle for.
PART SIX Feminine Attractiveness
39 The Feminine is Abundant
There is never a shortage of women or feminine energy. If a man feels that there aren’t enough women, or that life isn’t giving him what he wants, he is simply negating his relationship to the feminine. This sense of starvation—“life is not sustaining me” or “there are no good women”—is usually rooted in a man’s early childhood relationship with his mother. Life itself is the feminine. There is never a shortage of feminine energy, only a resistance to receiving, trusting, and embracing it.
Feminine energy is filling your body with life, beating your heart, and breathing your breath.
Whenever you are feeling isolated and weary, feel the present moment as if it were a woman. Feel like you are embracing a woman, physically. Feel the front of your body as if it were pressed against the front of a woman’s naked body, being filled with the delight of her feminine softness and liveliness.
Relax your body and feel the ocean of feminine energy around you. Feel your surroundings as her form, the sounds around you as her moans and laughter, and the light around you as her smile. Actually relax with the moment as you would relax with your lover, not metaphorically but literally, bodily, with full intention and presence.
40 Allow Older Women Their Magic
Men should support older women in their wisdom, power, and intuitive and healing capacities. Men should not degrade older women by demanding or desiring them to be like young women. There should be no such comparison. Each age of women has its own value, and the transition from superficial shine to deep radiance is inevitable.
Youthful sexual attractiveness is a temporary aspect of a much deeper and more fundamental quality of feminine energy: radiance.
A woman’s true radiance reveals the degree to which she is open, trusting, connected and loving. Her capacity to love, in turn, allows her body to be moved by the power of life force itself.
Even amongst young women there are those who are pretty just on the outside, and those whose beauty springs from their depths…it is this deep beauty that you find most attractive even in young women. There is a difference between your knee-jerk response to a cute babe and the open-hearted awe and mindless swoon you feel in the company of a woman who moves, breathes, smiles, and shines radiant feminine energy like a goddess.
The natural sexiness of a young woman will always give you energy. You never need to deny this. But the awesome beauty and radiant ease of a deep woman can stop your mind, widen your heart, and suspend your body in the mystery of feminine grace, al in an instant, with a single gaze or touch, regardless of her body’s age. And in relationship with such a woman, there are no bounds to the rapture which may resonate through your union. Boundless feminine love-radiance and temporary physical sexiness are both blessings; you must decide, moment by moment, and year by year, which qualities you will invoke and venerate with your attention, praise, and union.
As a woman grows older with wisdom, her “psychic weight” increases. She becomes a “bigger” woman, able to influence her surroundings with stronger magic than a less developed woman. She is able to read the signs of nature with great accuracy, as well as sway events with almost shocking reign. A superior man honors and appreciates this kind of magic, and knows that it complements his masculine style of accomplishment.
An older woman will also tolerate less of your bullshit than a younger woman…If your purpose is to become ever more free of your self-burdens and give your true gift to the world, then a spiritually mature woman—who won’t let you slather in your comfy habits of security and distraction—may be an excellent ally for your journey.
41 Turn Your Lust Into Gifts
When a man sees a beautiful woman it is natural for him to feel energy in his body, which he usually interprets as sexual desire. Rather than dispersion this energy in mental fantasy, a man should learn to circulate his heightened energy. He should breathe fully, circulating the energy fully throughout his body. He should treat his heightened energy as a gift which could heal and rejuvenate his body, and, through his service, heal the world. Through these means, his desire is converted into fullness of heart. His lust is converted into service. His desire is not converted by denying sexual attraction, but by enjoying it fully, circulating it through his body (without allowing it to stagnate as mental fantasy), and returning it to the world, from his heart.
Your head and genitals, however, are just the north and south poles of the whole body. A superior man circulates the energy of arousal throughout the body, taking particular care not to let it stagnate in swollen fantasies or appendages.
The purpose of sexual desire is creation. Reproduction is but the biological aspect of creation. As a man, you probably have much more to give the world than your children.
If you are a man, you probably found yourself inspired at some time or another by a woman. Such inspiration is usually temporary, because most men don’t know how to cultivate their relationship to the feminine. They tend to be inspired, and then spurt it out, through spasms of thought an ejaculation. Then they seek inspiration again, through more women, or through other feminine sources, such as alcohol, drugs, or nature.
But if you learn to discipline your habits of building up and releasing mental and sexual tension, you can continually cultivate and magnify your inspiration. You can wean yourself from the addictive cycles of sexuality and intoxication. You can make use of the native force of sexual desire, for your woman and for other women, and convert your tendency toward fantasy and lust into the force of inspiration.
Feel lust. Feel what it really is, in its totality. Your lust reveals your real desire to unite with the feminine, to penetrate as deeply as possible, to receive her delicious light as radiant food for your masculine soul, and to give her your entirety, losing yourself in the giving, so that you are both liberated beyond your selves in the explosion of your gifts.
This explosion of gifting could be the basis of your life, not just a moment of sexual yielding. When you feel sexual lust or desire for any woman, breathe deeply, and allow the feeling of desire to magnify. And allow it to magnify more. Don’t let the energy become lodged in your head or genitals, but circulate it throughout your body. Using your breath as the instrument of circulation, bathe every cell in the stimulated energy. Inhale it into your heart, and then feel outward from your heart, feeling the world as if it were your lover. With an exhale, move into the world and penetrate it, skillfully and spontaneously, opening it into love. Through these means, allow women’s sexiness to help you discover and give your gift, rather than beguile you into cycles of stimulation and depletion.
42 Never Allow Your Desire to Become Suppressed or Depolarized
Any woman toward whom a man becomes depolarized will feel his rejection, disgust, and turning away. In response, she will become angry and destructive. Her “unhusbanded” energy will begin to move chaotically, becoming even self-destruct. A man has no excuse; he must cultivate a polarize relationship to his woman and his world if he is to remain in relationship with them.
You’ve probably seen the face of your woman when you’ve gotten to the point of “putting up” with her, rather than permeating her. She begins to look haggard and drawn. Her long face bespeaks a heart and body unravished by the clarity and force of your masculine loving. She never seem really happy.
A superior man always assumes complete responsibility, knowing that, ultimately, he has no control at all and everything is out of his hands. He acts with impeccable courage and persistence, expecting nothing but the inherent feeling of completeness he enjoys in the fullest giving of his gift.
When your woman is looking withdrawn, dark, or downright ugly, she is a goddess and needs your divine invasion of her heart and body. Notice your incipient feeling of disgust for her dark mood, and take utter responsibility for her transformation.
Her mood is your challenge.
Can you invade her body and heart with so much love and humor that she laughs, relaxes. and brightens, in spite of herself? Can you bring out the consort in her by treating her with the same teasing and sexually pregnant touch and gaze as you would your mistress?
When you are depolarized, the last thing you want to do is get it up for that potato. And yet, this is exactly what a superior man does, with his woman and his world. He knows that when thing get dreary it is how own doing. He knows that he is only truly happy when giving his gift, fully and to the last drop. He knows that depolarization is a sign that he has ceased giving fully of himself, and so the world and his woman have ceased responding in fullness.
It only takes a moment of meeting a real challenge to bring a man back to full purpose, an emergency or a threat that demands his best. And it only take a moment of praise and deep appreciation to re-evoke a woman’s radiance.
It’s up to your freedom and strength of transmission whether she drain your energy, bitEs your nimbly head off, or surrenders to your fearless passion.
43 Use Her Attractiveness as a Slingshot Through Appearance
A good woman is a source of inspiration and attraction into the world for a man. He must never forget that neither the world nor his woman is the purpose of his existence. His practice is always to feel through women and the world, without suppression or disdain, into their source or very nature. A man’s attraction to women must be converted from attraction to women into attraction through women. He must feel his desire without suppression and then feel through his desire into the source-energy of desire. He must feel through her beauty, into the very delight of which her beauty is but a ripple and reminder. His whole relation to appearance is epitomized in his relation to women, either as obsession, distraction, or revelation.
Women can attract you, heal you, and inspire your gifts, but they will never satisfy you absolutely. Never.
You are deceived by the mirage of your own desire. You are deluded by your own excitement. Women are not to blame. They are to be cherished.
You are least unhappy when you are relieved of the need to get anything at all from appearance. Just driving in your car, wanting nothing, watching the trees go by, can be an epiphany of perfection. Deep sleep, orgasm, a day of fishing, looking into an infant’s eyes, these occasions can relax you from your search long enough to realize that you already have what you seek, that what appearances promise is a revelation of your own deep and inherently blissful nature. [Satchitananda]
You are chasing your own tail, and much of the time that tail looks suspiciously like a woman. But you need not stop chasing. Instead, chase. Allow yourself to feel how badly you want her. Feel how deep is the itch you want scratched.
Your ultimate desire is for the union of consciousness with its own luminosity, wherein all appearance is recognized as your deep, blissful nature, and there is only One. Your desire for union with a woman is a stepped-down version of this ultimate spiritual need.
Sustain it with full-breath, relaxed body, and open heart.
Desire can be a doorway to deep oneness. Sexual union is a fractal, or stepped-down, reflection of the ever-present wedding of consciousness and its inherent luminosity. The superior man embraces his woman as his own form. The revelation of deep oneness is love.
PART SEVEN Body Practices
44 Ejaculation Should be Converted or Consciously Chosen
When a man ejaculates easily, he creates ongoing distrust in his woman. At a subtle level, she feels he cannot be trusted. She, and the world, can deplete and depolarize him easily. This subtle distrust will pervade the relationship. She will not only doubt him, but actually act to undermine his actions in the world. By undermining him she demonstrates and tests his weakness, but she also hopes that through such tests he can learn to remain full.
In a subtle way, excess ejaculations will diminish your courage to take risks, professionally and spiritually. You will settle for doing enough to get by, to be comfortable, but you will find that you would rather watch TV than write your novel, meditate, or make that important phone call. You will have enough motivation to live a decent life, but ejaculations drain you of the “cutting through” energy that is necessary to pierce your own wall of lethargy and slice through the obstructions that arise in the world. Your gift will remain largely ungiven.
The main penetration she feels is your yielding into her…
If she waits for your deepest gifts, as you lie feebly in the bed of undesired, so might the world.
Your masculine sexual gift is to coax, humor, shock, and caress her love into melting through her layers of fear. Without imposing your own needs on her, let your love penetrate to the deep part of her that is totally open to love, that is love itself, and coax it to the fore. Do this slowly, over time, not through conversation, but through the bodily communicated presence, care, consciousness, and the liquid loving of sexual intermingling. When she feels the absolutely trustable nature of your loving—that you are truly with her, committed to loving, and you’re not going to get lost in the self-enclosed spasm of your own pleasuring—she will begin to trust you with her most vulnerable core.
A superior man is dedicated to the magnification of love through sexuality. He does not settle for less than the total surrender of his woman’s heart, as well as his own, into the fullness of divine union.
The bottom line is this: If ejaculation is not completely a matter of conscious choice for you, your woman knows she controls you sexually. And as long as she knows she’s in charge, she won’t trust you enough to relax fully in the force of your loving.
Your addiction to cycles of release will stop you short of full conscious dissolution in your deepest source, and so your true gifts will not emerge.
45 Breathe Down the Front
All men tend to have blocks in the front of their body, along an imaginary line that runs from the top of the head, through the tongue, throat, heart, solar plexus, navel, and genitals down to the perineum. The principle bodily key to mastering the world and woman is maintaining a full and open front of the body at all times. The best method is through full and relaxed breathing, drawing energy down the front, and freeing attention from neurotic self-concern.
When you get nervous, your stomach tightens. When you are saddened, a lump forms in your throat. When you are threatened, your solar plexus feels queasy. When you think hard, your forehead wrinkles. When you consider the unsure future, you tense your jaw. For much of the day, you are tightening, tensing, and contracting the front of your body, from the top of your head, through your chest, and all the way down past your gut.
Your belly and lower abdomen are special places of power. If your breath does now reach these areas, you can’t recharge your batteries.
Throughout the day, practice this kind of breathing in random moments. Pay special attention to any part of your body that seems particularly tense or closed. For instance, if the area around your navel seems tight, then inhale into that area. Literally inhale right into that area and open it with the force of your inhaled breath. Like filling a balloon, you can stretch open the entire front of your body with your inhale. In this way, you counter the effects of accumulated fear and anxiety stored in your body, which diminish your presence and force in the world. Throughout the day, as soon as you feel tension in the front of your body, inhale into that area and open it.
The main way you generate bodily tension is by turning your attention back on yourself in self-concern, curling into yourself so tightly you feel all knotted up. Therefore, the main cure is to give yourself to others.
46 Ejaculate Up the Spine
The superior man’s orgasm often explodes up his spine and into his brain, from there raining down through his body like an ambrosial bliss of rejuvenation. The technique for converting depletive orgasms into rejuvenate orgasms involves contracting the pelvic floor near the genitals and drawing energy upward along the spine, through the use of breath, feeling, and intention.
What matters is not when you ejaculate, but how deeply you are able to commune in love, with no boundaries, through the form of sexual embrace. If your ejaculation signs the end to your session of loving before both you and your woman have fully opened yourselves, then your ejaculation is premature.
Sex has becomes a road toward ejaculation, a road paved with internal imagery, self-enclosure, and the desire to release tension. To realize the full potential of sex, you must learn how to recondition your body and nervous system. You must learn how to unhabitualized the mechanics of your ejaculation, and convert your orgasm into a massive profusion of energy which deepens, not ends, the lovemaking session.
The first step is undoing the habits you learned while masturbating as a teenager. Instead of tensing your muscles as you become sexually stimulated, learn to relax them. When you notice your face squinting up, relax it. When you notice your breath getting fast and shallow, slow it down and deepen it. When you notice your belly tight and your chest hard, open your belly and soften the area around your heart.
The next step is to redirect your attention. Learn to feel your partner more than your own sensations during sex. Rather than curling attention into yourself and feeling the pleasures moving in your own body, feel outward, into, and through your partner. Feel your partner more than you feel yourself. Feel her movement, her moans, and her internal energy.
Eventually, with practice, you will be able to feel through your partner, as if your partner’s body were a doorway into a vast open space of energy, light, and awareness. This unobstructed feeling is the basis for true lovemaking. Extend your love out beyond yourself and, in time, through and beyond your woman. This takes practice, since there is a strong tendency to focus on your own physical sensations, especially during times of intense sexual stimulation. Counteract this tendency by practicing to feel beyond yourself and through your partner as if there were no obstructions to your loving at all.
If your breathing becomes too shallow, the life force cannot be conducted through your body. Instead, this force builds up, usually in your head or in your genitals. If it boils in your head, you will begin to spend more and more time fantasizing about sex and women. If it builds up in your genitals, you will feel the need to ejaculate, either through sex or masturbation.
If you have not breathed fully during the day, by the time you approach your sexual partner you will be filled with fantasies and ejaculative urge. So, a large part of avoiding premature ejaculation is to breathe fully, deeply, and with great force, throughout the day.
Love is the governor of energy. More and more, you must practice being love in the form of sexual coupling. Regardless of how tough your day has been, regardless of the burdens you face in your life, sexing should be a time of practicing love. Like meditation or prayer, sex should be a special time of practicing opening your heart and giving love fully, into and through your partner, and in communion with that which you hold most sacred.
If your heart is closed, your energy will be obstructed, and you will never be able to convert your spurt to a lightning bolt of love. If you don’t practice love, your sexual energy will be governed by old habits of body and emotion, which are all about the tiny commotion of ejaculation…remember that your emotional disposition is far more important than the technical exercises themselves.
PART EIGHT Men’s and Women’s Yoga of Intimacy
47 Take into Account the Primary Asymmetry
Intimate relationship is never the priority in a masculine man’s life and always the priority in a feminine woman’s life. If a man has a masculine sexual essence, then his priority is his mission, his direction toward greater release, freedom, and consciousness. If a woman has a feminine sexual essence, then her priority is the flow of love in her life, including her relationship with a man whom she can totally trust, in body, emotion, mind, and spirit. Man and woman must support each other in their priorities if the relationship is going to serve them both.
Although you and your woman are equal beings, you are very different creatures.
For most men, their woman is replaceable. Harsh, but true. If you are like most men, you know, deep down, that if you were to lose your present woman, you would deeply grieve, but you could eventually find another. Many times, in fact, you have probably fantasized about finding another woman even before you lose the one you have. Because a man’s priority is his mission, he will always gravitate to a woman whom he feels would most support his mission. If he feels another woman would enliven him and give him more energy for his work, he might desire her as an intimate partner.
However, you are lodged in the heart of your woman. She feels you all day. She senses where you are at. Feeling-threads from her heart are connected to your heart, day and night. You are not replaceable in her perception. She does not frequently consider other options, as you probably do. Whereas you live in a world of relational possibility, she lives in a world of relational actuality. Your relationship with her is not only at the core of her life, but is also the main determinant of her mood.
If she has a feminine essence, she must honor herself by owning her deep desire for the flow of love in her heart, just as a person with a masculine essence must honor his or her direction in order to be truly happy. Our culture has become so anti feminine that many women are trying to deny their feminine core desires and adopt the masculine way of dedication to mission. By denying their feminine essence, such women are predisposing themselves to emptiness of heart, depression and bodily symptoms of disease.
While it is common sense that she should live a fulfilling and engaging life outside of your relationship, it is sexual wisdom to understand that her feminine essence will always hold the flow of love at its center. That’s just the way it is. This flow of love could be in direct relationship with the divine, although it is usually in relationship with a man. The desire for intimate loving is as central to your woman’s life as the mission toward freedom—financial, psychological, and spiritual—is to yours.
Your woman could be a corporate executive and you could be a househusband. That’s fine, as long as you are living your highest purpose and her life is devoted to love. Honor this primary asymmetry, in yourself and in your woman. Only when you are willing to support each other’s core desires will the intimacy give each of you what you want, and then perhaps bring you beyond even that, into the utter joy of being, of which your relationship is only a hope.
48 You Are Responsible for the Growth in Intimacy
There are masculine and feminine gifts in intimacy, and each gift comes with its own responsibility. The direction of growth of a relationship is primarily the man’s responsibility. The energy of an intimacy—pleasure, sexual flow, and vitality—is primarily the woman’s responsibility. A simplified way of saying this is that the man is responsible for the woman’s depth of love, or openness of mood, and the woman is responsible for the man’s “erection” or energy in the body.
Beyond self-responsibility lies the responsibility to give your gift. It is important to grow beyond dependence on your intimate partner for your own happiness. But it’s equally important to grow beyond simple independence and autonomy.
The point is not to be her therapist, but to be her wake-up call, her heart-opener, her reminder of the primacy of love.
Your masculine gift is to know where you are, where you want to be, and what you need to do to get there. If you don’t know one of these, then you need to discover it by any means necessary. This vision is, essentially, the basic gift you have to offer your woman, as well as the world. If you have no higher vision than the day-to-day grind of housework, job, childcare, TV, and vacations, you are failing your birthright. Your woman will feel cheated and ungifted by you, as will the world. And they will both give you less of their gifts in return.
Your main gift in intimacy is to guide her, moment by moment, out of her moods and into the oneness of loving. And then, day by day, to guide her life into greater degrees of divine love, even beyond the relationship, so that her life becomes primarily communion, gifting, and celebration.
To offer this masculine gift, you must cultivate your sense of daily practice. Like a musician practicing his art, you must practice, daily, the art of feeling through your fear, feeling to your edge; and then living just beyond your edge, neither slinking into private consolation nor pushing so hard you disconnect from your source. The source that is your deepest truth must become more and more the impulse of your life.
49 Insist on Practice and Growth
Direction in life is a masculine priority, even in intimate relationship. A less spiritually mature man may say to his woman, “My way or the highway!” A man in the process of growing will often soften his direction and seek a compromise with his woman, playing Mr. Nice Guy. But a superior man will not settle for less than the fullest incarnation of love of which he and his woman are capable. With compassion, he slices through all bullshit and demands authenticity and humor. It’s as if he were saying to his woman, “The divine way or the highway!” It’s the same masculine insistence on direction that a weaker man will demand. But rather than wanting his woman to follow his personal direction, a superior man wants her to move in the direction that most serves her growth in love and happiness. He will settle for nothing less.
If you don’t know your direction in life, you certainly will stand on shaky ground offering your woman direction. So the first step is to align your own life so that, at least in this present moment, you are living at your edge, fully aligned with your sense of purpose.
50 Restore Your Purpose in Solitude and with Other Men
A man rediscovers and fine tunes his purpose in solitude, in challenging situations, and in the company of other men who won’t settle for his bullshit. But women strengthen their feminine radiance best in the company of other women in mutual celebration and play. A man must arrange for both forms of restoration: his own solitude and men’s gatherings, and his woman’s time with other women.
If you spend too much time with your woman, you will rub off on each other in the worst way.
The goddess and the warrior will become neutralized householders sharing only the mildest play of sexual polarity.
The two ways to bring you right to your masculine edge of power are austerity and challenge.
Unadorned suffering is the bedmate of masculine growth. Only by staying intimate with your personal suffering can you feel through it to its source.
Feel your suffering, rest with it, embrace it, make love with it.
The fact remains. You were born as a sacrifice. And you can either participate in the sacrifice, dissolving in the giving of your gift, or you can resist it, which is your suffering.
The other means, besides austerity, for rediscovering your masculine core is through challenge.
You must instill consequences throughout the rest of your life, unless you want to cling to the safety net of superficial pleasures.
The most potent forms of masculine realignment involve both austerity and challenge.
51 Practice Dissolving
Die in the giving of your gift, so you don’t even notice you have stopped holding onto yourself. Fear is your final excuse. Don’t fight it. Love through it.
