P H O T O B Y S I B Y L L A H E R B R I C H
The conscious sex movement MY YOUNGER BROTHER, who is 35 and has been married for nearly a decade, once asked me, "Why, after you marry a woman, does she stop wanting to have sex with you?" It was terribly poignant, and I felt abashed that I had no clear answer. During my 12-year marriage, I, too, was less interested than my husband after the first passionate year, less ready to drop everything to make love. When I bring up the topic with my heterosexual male friends, they all tell the same joke: "How do you make a Jewish girl stop fucking?" And the answer (although who knows why the girl is supposed to be Jewish; I'd have made her Catholic, like me) is "Marry her." Women with children say they have no energy left for passion at the end of the day. Women with or without children talk about feeling fat, feeling old, feeling distant, feeling tired, feeling not (as they say) in the mood. John Welwood, a Mill Valley, Calif., therapist and author of "Love and Awakening: Discovering the Sacred Path of Intimate Relationship," says he finds in his practice that men have just as much trouble with longtime monogamy, with marital sex, as women. "Everyone out there is working so hard, it's very difficult to come home and shift gears. And there is something in the male temperament that seems to need variety, so men constantly have fantasies about younger women or beautiful women they see in the street, and sometimes they feel trapped with one person." Which is another reason women might lose touch with whatever it is that feeds their desire. So much of romance, especially for women, is about feeling desired and desirable, and it's much more difficult to feel that way if men really are so promiscuous in their fantasies, if they are prey to ubiquitous images of feminine sexiness, all so very much more perfect, physically, than you. A Zen teacher friend says, thoughtfully, that marriage does not seem to be about sex. And there is some truth to this, I think. For marriage is about securing love and loyalty, and sexual passion is intrinsically volatile, impossible to secure. Which is why safe sex is, for so many of us, an oxymoron. How often is a new sexual encounter an act of pure prudence? And aren't we often disappointed when an old love takes us only where we already expected to go? Welwood believes that to keep long-term relationships sexually alive, relationship itself has to be redefined. Couples have felt a bit lost since the women's movement — and to a lesser degree, the men's movement — undercut old expectations and justifications for marriage. "The 1960s were the peak of the sexual revolution," he says, "with everyone experimenting and rebelling against commitment and fidelity and marriage. But over the last couple of decades people have been trying to find a way to have committed relationships, and the question has become, 'How do you keep them from going dead? How do you keep some kind of energy alive?'" Therapy has become our traditional panacea in matters of the heart. But I don't know anyone who has found couples therapy helpful in rekindling desire. In the case of my marriage, it did improve our communication skills, but it did nothing for our sex life. Our couples therapist gave us "homework": games to play and exercises to perform that made us feel hopelessly awkward, and made sex seem more problematic than it already was. What marital therapy didn't provide was a reason to have sex, just as psychotherapy doesn't address the reason for existence. And perhaps this is justifiable, since the reasons for sex and existence are, to many people, self-evident. But they aren't obvious to everyone all of the time. And just as our secularly educated and analyzed generation has, during the past decade, developed a tremendous new interest in faith — flocking to churches to pray and to Buddhist retreats to meditate — couples have become interested in the possibility that spirituality might restore vitality and meaning to their sex lives. Recent books on sex as a spiritual practice, or conscious sexuality, are legion. There are the lavishly and erotically illustrated sexual recipe books: Charles and Caroline Muir's classic "Tantra: The Art of Conscious Loving," Margo Anand's bestselling "The Art of Sexual Ecstasy" and "The Art of Sexual Magic," Caroline Aldred's intelligently written "Divine Sex: The Tantric and Taoist Arts of Conscious Loving," and a charming little book by Richard Craze, "The Spiritual Traditions of Sex: A Unique Look at Sex as a Spiritual Experience." There is "The Multi-Orgasmic Man," an introduction by the Korean Taoist master Mantak Chia to traditional Taoist sexual techniques, with an emphasis on male retention of the sperm during orgasm and the circulation of sexual energy throughout the body to produce a more generalized bliss — and, perhaps, higher states of consciousness. More philosophical approaches advocate a general sacrilization of everyday life, including the intricacies of relationship. They include Thomas Moore, whose book "Soul Mates" spent nearly six months on the bestseller lists in 1994, and Stephen and Ondrea Levine, well known for their work with dying people and authors of "Embracing the Beloved: Relationship as a Path of Awakening." The Levines see their work on both dying and relationship as part of the same "inquiry into self." And each of these writers believes that romantic partners can be seen, most constructively, as spiritual partners. We can use the more difficult aspects of love — the fears and aversions our lovers inspire — to see ourselves more clearly, to deepen our awareness of "our own true nature," as the Buddhists say. And then there are the more esoteric, rigorous books about traditional tantric and Taoist sexual practices, which really have nothing to do with monogamy, and less to do with sex than with enlightenment. According to Miranda Shaw, assistant professor of religion at the University of Richmond and author of "Passionate Enlightenment: Women in Tantric Buddhism," tantra flourished in India during the Pala period, the eighth through 12th centuries. It developed as a kind of protest against the elite, male monastic tradition in mainstream Buddhism. "The Tantrics believed that self-mastery was to be tested amidst family life, the tumult of town and marketplace, the awesome spectacles of a cremation ground and the dangers of isolated wilderness areas," she writes. "The new breed of Buddhists also insisted that desire, passion, and ecstasy should be embraced on the religious path." Unlike their monastic counterparts, tantric Buddhists ate meat, drank wine and made love. According to Shaw, the founding gurus included women, and the tantras (as the sacred texts are known) advocate the worship of the female partner as a deity by the male initiate ("yogi") and meditation by the female partner ("yogini") on her own divine nature. The yogi and yogini were spiritual adepts; tantra was an advanced practice, as it is today in Tibetan Buddhism. It is not sex with abandon, but sex as a deep and subtle meditation practice, each partner sensitive to both his or her own flow of energy and the energy of the other. In fact, in his book, "The World of Tibetan Buddhism," the Dalai Lama outlines a daunting course of meditation and mental mastery, including an intimate awareness of the "80,000 channels" in the human body and the energies that flow through them. All this before the tantric Buddhist is ready to "seek further impetus on the path by engaging in sexual union with a consort." So there is something almost comic about the authors of the more popular manuals — with their sleek, air-brushed couples engaging in the various postures of the Indian Kama Sutra, or the Taoist "pillow books" — claiming tantra as their inspiration. But there is also a lovely unity to these responses to our conflicted yearnings for both security and passion. If sex is a sacred act, a meditative practice, it no longer has anything to do with emotional distance, mood or physical imperfection. Our paradigm of romance, of being swept away by outside forces — our partner's magnetism among them — seems so young, so feckless, by comparison. Not being in the mood to make love is no more relevant than not being in the mood to pray or to exercise or to change a baby's diaper. Meditation and prayer are about, among other things, overcoming negative conditioning. For women especially, the practice of meditating upon our own sexual divinity is a way of countering the nearly overwhelming conditioned belief that only young, perfectly sleek and relatively passive women are sexy. "There are many ways of being conscious," says Lily Pond, editor of Yellow Silk, a magazine of literary erotica, and author of "Seven Hundred Kisses," to be published this spring by HarperSanFrancisco. "Loving is about the 'flaws' being extraneous. It's about bathing the woman with one breast and loving HER. She is the one you love, and part of her is one-breastedness. She is not 'no longer young with good boobs.' She is HER. And he is not, 'Oh, he's gone bald.' He is HIM. What in our hearts has not learned how to love and be loved?" Love, from this point of view, is less about how our partner makes us feel and more about how we allow ourselves to feel. "We are put on earth a little space/That we may learn to bear the beams of love," wrote Blake. Or, as Welwood puts it, "We often don't see that how we relate to another inevitably follows from how we relate to ourselves, that our outer relationships are but an extension of our inner life, that we can only be as open and present with another as we are with ourselves." Pond says she believes that "the body goes to orgasm kind of naturally. It's not scared. Orgasm is the automatic response. I've read about studies finding that at certain points while they're nursing, infant girls get vaginal lubrications and boys get hard-ons. It's not that it's sexual except for the fact that ALL of it is sexual, and that gets stopped at some point. "It's such a complicated question and one I've thought about so much over these last 15 years. I don't know that this is conclusive in any way, but what I've come up with is that we have a kind of collective agreement to be in control. We create a picture of what the world is like. We all know it's not anything like that, but in order to keep ourselves calm and secure we maintain that picture. There is something about the wildness of passion. You know that feeling, when you're going out into the country and you have a moment of panic — I mean there are WILD things out there — and you have to change gears and maybe feel a bit of the fear to get past it? That's what sexual passion is like, and we — who are always trying to convince ourselves that we are civilized beings — are doing a lot of work to keep things under control."
Feb. 4, 1997 Joan Smith is a regular contributor to Salon. Would adding a spiritual dimension to your sex life make it more satisfying? Express yourself in Table Talk. |
