Notes for Yogic Lovers

1. Prepare for Death, Plan for Life
2. Stay Active, Go Deep
3. How Can I Deal with Her Demand for Love?
4. My Lover Needs More Sex
5. Should I Stay or Should I Go?

Speaking sexually, your masculine aspect deepens, right now, by knowing death as an ally. And your feminine becomes empowered, in this very moment, by engaging life.

Death, being without form, never changes. You can know a formless, timeless state of being right now. You can be aware of yourself as awareness, and know yourself as the simple sense of “I”. I is always aware of itself as the same unchanging one. Your masculine loves this formless, ever-present awareness.

Life, as all forms are, is love’s churning. Life is everything you hear and feel and see, inside of you and out. The light of your experience is always moving at precisely the speed of love. Your feminine lives as this love, showing as every motion and emotion, shining and growing and disappearing.

Your masculine is at home in dimensionless Death, right now. No change. No time. The same “I” as in childhood. The same “I” who knows experience in a dream. The same “I” without dreams. The I of perfect Peace.

Your feminine is at home in Life, right now. Your life story of passion is undulating as feelings and people, coming and going. Love’s drama is moving you now. Love’s necessities animate you, even in your dreams. Your heart pulses as love. Your body bursts to reach out and care and give—and be seen and known and adored. Your love-offering softens into love’s yearning, which is the hole in your heart filled with vibrant Devotion.

Therefore, always now: Be as no thing. Live as everything. Rest in emptiness. Play in fullness.

Prepare for death, plan for life.

You can learn to exercise your sexual body.  

To start, rather than attending to your vision of outward life, pay attention instead to your inward beauty.

As you move your chosen way, primarily feel the deepest parts of your body, with tender appreciation and exquisite sensitivity.

Notice your spine tingling and undulating.

Pulsate your central soft-channel of throat, heart, and cervix or balls as you breathe. Then, expand the tube of feeling to connect these throbbing hollows, an open channel joining throat, heart, and genitals, pulsing, contracting and expanding gently through any rigidity.

Over time, allow the pulsating experience of your central soft-channel to be known through and through by you, more and more deeply. Take your deep body into your awareness. Claim your whole form in sensitive knowing. Allow the stories buried tightly in your body to slowly trust and surrender open to your feeling presence.

Offer the She of the body to be penetrated by the He of knowing, making love more deeply breath by breath.

If you forget, smile and remember. Make love through thick and thin.

This lovemaking can be performed solo, taking and knowing your own throbbing body in awareness, more deeply breath by breath.

Or, one partner can lovingly resist, testing depth of presence for sensitive trustworthiness, opening in ripples of spontaneous flinch and pleasure. The other partner, while reading these waves of resistance and rapture, can gently enter the soft-channel with utter feeling.  Slowly knowing more deeply into throat, heart, and genitals, slightly deeper than expected.  Sustaining vulnerable trust. Actively attuning to love’s quivering response.

Sexual yoga is She taken by He. The Form of the body pervaded and claimed by Formless knowing. Life fucked to Death born as Love.

While making love, sometimes just relax, stop thinking, and enjoy what is. At other times, expand your capacities by challenging them. Lovingly know your soft-channel, and your partner’s, more deeply than yesterday, with more tender clarity than 5 seconds ago.

Stay active, go deep.

QUESTION:

Hi David,

I wanted to ask a follow-up question as I feel there was a subtle distinction in the practice that I almost caught, but not quite. In the first part of the practice with my wife and I, you had me feel into emptiness and the desire for everything to be over, which was easy to access. From there you had me feel into her body, and her desire for more love and to feel that as her devotion, which was also relatively easy to access. Then you said something along the lines of my experience of giving love to her (e.g. things like saying “I love you” or “you are beautiful”), could feel like a demand for my energy, which definitely resonated. Could you shed some more light on the masculine expression of love? How can I give her the love she needs to feel in a way that is “free” flowing and authentic rather than a way that feels like I’m almost forcing myself to generate some energy because she’s demanding it of me?

—R

ANSWER:

Hi R,

First of all, there is of course nothing wrong with saying, “I love you.” Or sighing, “You are so beautiful.” Or buying her a special gift. Or scooping her into your embrace and off her feet. All are great ways to express love.

But because her devotional capacity (her heart’s yearning, which you might feel as a “demand”) is naturally endless, you will quickly tire and resent her if these are your only ways to give love.

Instead of giving her energy (flowers, words, hugs…), you can emphasize giving her attention.

The main masculine gift is undivided attention, given to her because you love her and you want to know her ever more deeply.

If you are thinking, then your attention is not undivided. If you are using effort, intention, or seeking a goal (like soothing her), then your attention is not undividedly present. So her yearning and demand will escalate because now you are really denying her. She now feels your fear and need more than your love of knowing her.

Anything you can know of her is you knowing your own “experiencing.” If you see her, that image is the light of your experiencing. Sights, sounds, sensations, thoughts, and emotions are all aspects of you knowing experiencing.

Experiencing can be described as a polarity: the knowing part of experiencing is the Masculine, the revealing/showing part is the Feminine.

When you can feel her as the showing part of experiencing, and feel yourself as the Masculine knowingness, unflinchingly knowing her as she unfolds herself as experience of every color and drama, then she feels known by you. Claimed by you. Loved deeply by you. No words or energy-flowers necessary—though still great at times.

Much of the energy you now spend to give her love is in moments when you feel her as separate. Separation always involves fear. Possible loss. So your needy desire to please and get approval and not lose love kicks in, and she just feels a fearful boy, so hates you more.

The moment you actually feel, see, hear, and know her as experience showing—like a dream, very real from inside it, with an apparent you and her desiring love while looking out of two separate dream-bodies—recognizing her form as your deepest realization appearing, feeling her voice and your resentment appearing to be experienced, knowing it all without recoiling from it, then she feels you knowing her as she is. More deeply than she is knowing herself. Loved by you more steadily than she can love herself.

So your effortless recognition of who she is, and then the full embodiment of that in breath, posture, touch, voice, sex, money, etc.— which requires a lifetime of practice if you want to make love as art—is the next step from giving her energy-flowers or saying “I love you,” and instead knowing her more deeply than she knows herself.

Practice your sexual and speech skills from there, as she seems to challenge your recognition ongoingly.

—David Deida, from The Way of the Superior Man Online Training

QUESTION:

My husband has a significantly higher sex drive than I do. We are completely in love with each other and want to practice sexual yoga with each other’s support. However, he is experiencing sexual frustration and lack of fulfillment. I have a demanding job, and I feel unable to meet him. This creates tension in our relationship. What can I do?

ANSWER:

It’s difficult to savor the subtleties and depth of flavor of a delicious dish if you are starving for food or too distracted.

Similarly, if you are sexually starving or uninterested, you are not yet prepared for the depth and subtleties of yogic sex.

A basic sense of relaxed sexual aliveness and non-neediness is a prerequisite for enjoying fruitful yogic practice with a partner.

While practicing sexual yoga, your husband shouldn’t be having sex with you if he still needs it. Dealing with his sense of sexual starvation is his personal responsibility. He can outgrow sexual neediness and dependency on you through the relaxed fullness of solo yogic practice, or, in the way many men reduce their sexual desire, by ejaculating as necessary. On his own, he must first achieve sexually alive equilibrium and self-sufficiency.

In any case, you should not think that your husband’s sexual neediness is your problem. You deserve a non-needy man before feeling inspired to sexually gift to him, in yogic reciprocity, what he can’t give himself.

Perhaps, in your perception, your husband is too sexually needy to deeply turn you on. His neediness may be evoking some of your disinterest.

Of course, if sex is actually less interesting to you than everything else in your life, you just shouldn’t have sex. Not everyone is very sexual.  

However, it’s possible you are using your energy and attention throughout the day for tracking the more superficial and external events of everyday life. Unless you schedule a little solo time every day to intentionally feel and experiment with your core sexual relaxation and exquisite responsiveness to deep self-attention, your body will remain un-fucked by your own loving, and thus be unable to respond to his.

You are describing a sexual neediness and disinterest that many couples know.  To outgrow this difference in apparent sexual desire between partners, you and your husband can first independently practice to achieve solo sexual fullness and sufficiency—deeply sensually alive, throbbing, open, and responsive.  

Then, if interested, you can engage as a loving couple in yogic sexual practices together, which are irrelevant until your bodies are less tense and more heart-tender, breath-vulnerable, sexually full, and free of neediness.  

If you don’t want to make time for such practices, then you should see that this sexual dimension of skill is not your priority, which is fine. You should enjoy cultivating your true priorities in love!

QUESTION:

In your book Blue Truth, you write about openness and also a “child-like cramp of neediness.” My specific question comes to dealing with a woman who I love who I’m no longer in a relationship with. There’s some back and forth happening, so how do I reconcile some of my ideas of childish neediness with being open with her? I think I have conflated the feeling of being ‘open’ with proactively reaching out and sharing. And I think I might be confusing the idea of not being needy with not reaching out to her, being aloof, restricting myself, and staying closed. My internal voices of “let her go and shut it down” versus “stay open and stay with her” seem like they’re at odds. Where do I go when I seem to be getting pulled in two directions?

ANSWER:

Let’s look at three perspectives of openness to answer your question, and then create a simple practice.

1. Being open as a spiritual practice means being present with what is, as it is.  

2. Choosing to open and communicate with an old girlfriend is a question of your deepest heart-purpose.  

3. Unpacking childhood neediness is a matter of lovingly opening with your past wounds, possibly via skillful therapy.

You can apply these three perspectives to your situation.  

1. When the thought arises, “Should I call her?”, be aware of that thought. Be the openness where the thought comes and goes. Lovingly feel your body, breath, and emotions, just as they are. No resistance. Know the whole moment through and through. This is being open with experience. 

2. As to whether to talk with her or see her, that would be based on your heart’s specific purpose for doing so. Hopefully you love many people; that’s not a reason to be sexually intimate with all of them, or to call them and ask them out.

Know your heart’s most critical purpose. What do you most want to give and get from an intimacy? Of the many exciting reasons to commit in intimate relationship, what is your single main priority? To raise a family? To surrender to god? To enjoy and share life’s pleasures? 

Your reasons may be many, but once you understand your deepest, single most important purpose for choosing intimacy at this point in your life, then you can use that as a guiding principle. “Is being with this woman aligned with my deepest purpose for being in a relationship?” Steer from there.

3. No matter who you choose, the residual tensions and wounds of neediness stored in your body from unmet childhood love may arise in any and all of your intimate relationships. You can allow them to surface and unkink in your gentle yet persistent feeling-awareness. 

Your current suffering in intimacy—how you feel unloved as an adult—is often contracted in the same tension-shape you recoiled in as a child when feeling unloved or threatened by your parents.

Over a lifetime of self-contracting in heart-protection, these shapes become our underlying habits. Our true heart-motive can become obscured in the clench of our residual fear. 

But these stored efforts at self-survival that now shape your intimate suffering can be released, either through skillful therapy or by re-trusting your heart’s inherent self-love.  

Love slowly melts through history.

Weaving together these three perspectives into a practice for you:

Relax open with your experience of this moment, while choosing communication based on alignment with your deepest heart-purpose, as residual wounds and tensions are allowed to surface, uncoil, and heal in the conscious warmth of love’s regard.