Tag Archives: sex

Chuck’s Place: Thoughts about Shame

February 24, 2012 Chuck Leave a comment

The gift of the movie Shame is the clear and brutal exposition of a path deeply hidden yet commonly taken, the path of sexual addiction.

At its heart, sexual addiction shares with all addictions the expropriation of an instinct, in this case the sexual instinct. Other addictions, such as food and chemical dependency, are more associated with the hunger instinct. Addiction numbs, soothes and keeps at bay the underlying challenges of self-knowledge, self-acceptance, integration, and true intimacy.

The sexual instinct, fully wrestled with and realized in maturity, brings in its wake bonding, union, love and new life. In addiction the sexual instinct is choked into compulsive release, offering little more than deepening alienation under the ever-present shadow of death.

The storyline of the movie gives us little history, but enough to know that life lived must be kept at bay, frozen and unprocessed. Human contact—seemingly at its most intimate in the sexual act—must be completely devoid of connection and feeling. Sex is completely severed from even a hint of love. The slightest hint of feeling renders the phallus flaccid, plunged into yet deeper shame.

And with shame comes the opportunity to be with the pain, to find the tearful circuits to emotional release, to begin to melt the frozen islands of fragmented self. But, as with all paths, sometimes the shock and pain of knowing the truth, and feeling it fully, sends us back into addictive behaviors and release, the wheel of groundhog days. Though this repetitive cycle appears to offer little resolution, in actuality, it allows us to engage in a truly instinctual/spiritual process, as we return to accrue more energy in the form of frustration and discontent, energy that one day will help us awaken and realize that we no longer need to stay on that wheel. We are fully prepared then to step beyond the path of shame into deeper connection and fulfillment.

The movie leaves us hanging, in an unresolved land with some painful truths revealed and many still deeply hidden. It leaves us uncomfortable, confronted with accepting the fact that we all face addiction of some sort in our lives, as well as some sort of shame.

Though addiction comes in many guises, at its core it nonetheless asks us to face the same things within ourselves as the protagonist in Shame is asked to face within himself: the uncomfortable truth.

Can we enter that land of truth? What do we stay addicted to that keeps us from not only facing our deepest pain but from going deeper into where it is instinctually guiding us? Can we allow ourselves to accept that in facing our truths we really will step onto a path of change? Can we bear the tension of that journey of change that seeks to lead us to true union?

Art and Photo by Jan — Jan: Self-portrait at age 18—still asked by spirit to face truths in the light of day

Lift the veil of shame and see what’s beneath it. The ultimate realization is that we’re all on the same path; we’re all beings on our way to dying. Choosing addictions equals choosing attachments. How long do we really need to hold onto them? How long do we need to keep at bay the real truths of who we are, the truths of our lives lived and the truth of our lives yet to be lived? Can we stay open to our fullest potential—fulfillment in a life we can’t hold onto anyway? Because we do have to die.

The real question is: How do we want to live?

And the real crux of sex and love is: Can we allow ourselves to fully open to love in a life that will one day end? Can we join the spirit of love and fully merge with another human being? Can we love someone who may leave us and someone who surely is going to die? If love is spirit and sex is matter—which is transitory—can we allow ourselves to drop all addictions and attachments, and all our shame too, and truly merge the two?

Full union of spirit and matter is letting love in. There is no shame in that.

Chuck, with love and thanks for some expert editing by Jan.

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#701 Chuck’s Place: Love & Sex

July 17, 2010 Chuck Leave a comment

Love is of spirit; sex is of body. Our deepest challenge as human beings is to reconcile our ethereal, eternal spirit —that which precedes and succeeds our current life— with our corporal, animal, instinctual, physical body —that which has a definite beginning and a definite end. Animal/Spirit, Soma/Psyche, Finite/Infinite; these are the oppositions we are forced to suffer if we are to achieve fulfillment and solve the true riddle of life on this plane. Of course, there are those who would argue, with rational stamina and certainty, to the contrary.

At a recent dinner party, in a somewhat instigative and provocative mood, I posed the question: “What do you think happens when you die?” I got a quick: “Nothing, lights out!” I turned to another: “Lights out!” With this, I just let it rest. My reason wasn’t up to the argument. Lights out is simply a deus ex machina that doesn’t do justice to the paradox of a life fully lived.

I begin with the following paradox: Why, so often, are so many people so sexually dissatisfied with the person they are most secure and compatible with—spiritually in tune with? I suggest that this fragmentation of our spirit and animal selves begins with our birth into family. The family is the matrix we are born into and which ultimately forms the foundation of what we strive for: love and fulfillment. However, the incest taboo creates an impenetrable barrier to the animal that we are: sexual feelings for family members are strictly verboten. The place where we begin our lives, hopefully in unconditional love and security, does not welcome our animal, sexual selves.

I already sense a growing anxiety in my reader at this point, even the mere mention of sex and family can be alarming, such is the power of the incest taboo. Let me assure all, I am a firm upholder of the value and necessity of the incest taboo. The incest taboo is universal, a part of human culture from time immemorial. Some suggest it to be the humanizing instinct, a powerful archetype governing the behavior of the human animal. My focus here is examining its impact on splitting the psyche, the bearer of love, from the body, the bearer of sexuality. This universal fragmentation is a necessary consequence of being human, a wound that haunts the individual in acceptance of his or her instinctual nature. The consequence for relationship is the challenge of bringing love and sex together in relation to one person.

I stress that I am writing about the incest taboo and not incest. I have spent much of my professional life helping clients traumatized by familial violations of this taboo. My purpose here is to point out the inevitable consequence of the taboo: the splitting of love and sex. The incest taboo demands that family, as our first and often deepest experience of love, completely disallow our animal, instinctive, sexual selves from attaching to the same object of our deepest love. This most primal experience of love, rejects, denies, and repels the animal, which must be repressed, ignored, sentenced to the darkness and reserved for some future expression elsewhere, beyond the family. The byproduct of this most necessary separation of sexuality from family is the experience that love and sex are incompatible. This is the indelible primal imprint that we all take forward into adult life.

This is the incest taboo wound, the archetypal fall that we all suffer. Once man stole consciousness, that is, spirit, he was thrown out of the paradisal garden of instinctual freedom. In life, we strive desperately to return to the garden but are saddled with the split between our spirit and our body. We cannot return to the garden as full human beings —psyche and soma— if we cannot merge love and sex in a relationship with one person. We are granted respites in the garden when we mysteriously fall in love. In this bewitching time of falling in love, we reenter the garden, fully united in spirit and body: paradox resolved, psyche and soma as one. Our animal selves are fully released as we unite with our lover in carnal and spiritual bliss.

Unfortunately, the spell of falling in love is time-limited and soon we must return to the barrenness of life outside the garden, as we discover mother, father, sister, brother, in the eyes and behaviors of our lover. Once our lover becomes too familiar, the incest taboo is stirred, with the necessary consequence of the lifting of romance, as we return to the primal dilemma of the incompatibility of love and sex. Sex becomes labored, uncomfortable, avoided, or routine; the animal wants out of this incestuous cage, perhaps through secret fantasy or secret affair. Perhaps bliss can be extended until the arrival of a child in a family. With the addition of child, lovers must contend with a new role in their own relationship. They are now parents as well as lovers, which triggers the prohibitions of the incest taboo in their own relationship and can severely impact a return to a loving sexual relationship.

It was Freud’s bleak view that the achievement we call Civilization, with all its Discontents, is the sublimated byproduct of the incest taboo. Essentially, for him, ego, or spirit, is the psychic humanizing factor that substitutes civilization for its forsaken instinctive, unrealized, incestuous desires.

Jung, from a more positive perspective, viewed the frustrated libido as the birth of the imagination, which offers a venue for the human animal to reconcile psyche and soma, love and sex, and achieve wholeness.

For the seers of ancient Mexico, the resolution of this dilemma never went beyond the body, as they do not recognize a separation of psyche and soma. As I quoted Carlos Castaneda, last week, from The Wheel of Time (p. 199): “All the faculties, possibilities, and accomplishments of shamanism, from the simplest to the most astounding, are in the human body itself.” The seers’ path is to discover the body as solid and as energy, one in the same. For those seers, achieving the fluidity to alternate between these two states —one finite, the other infinite— solves the riddle of life on this plane.

For those engaged in relationship as a path to wholeness, I encourage containment and openness. For a detailed description of this process I refer the reader to The Book of Us, in particular to chapter three, A Jamaican Retreat, Our Alchemical Oven, where Jeanne and I undertook such a journey in this world. By containment, I mean commitment to a process within a sealed relationship. Interestingly, as I was preparing this essay, I opened the latest Psychotherapy Networker magazine. The picture on the cover is of a wedding cake with a bride flanked by two grooms. The title article is called: The New Monogamy, can we have our cake and eat it too? I quote from the article:

“Within the new notion of monogamy, each partner assumes that the other is, and will remain, the main attachment, but that outside attachments of one kind or another are allowed—as long as they don’t threaten the primary connection.” (July/August 2010 p. 23)

This direction in marriage essentially maintains the fragmentation of psyche and soma, as they remain unrealized and un-united in an individual’s relation to one other person. It’s simply another form of triangulation, where the tension of combining love and sex is dispersed, allowing for fragmentary visits to the garden in separate relationships.

With the container sealed there must be openness. By openness, I mean a gradual, but ultimately full revelation of all the truths of the self, including the deepest somatic fears and desires of the animal. This is the healing of the incest taboo wound, as we push beyond its taboos and allow for ultimate spiritual intimacy and animal sexuality to come together with our lover.

The riddle of psyche and soma, the core paradox and challenge of life on this plane can be resolved through many paths: a journey within the self, a journey of relationship, or a shamanic journey. The essential tools in all of these journeys to wholeness are containment of the opposing forces within the self and openness to all the truths of the self inherent in these forces.

If you wish to correspond, please feel free to post a comment below.

Until we meet again,
Chuck

The books mentioned, The Wheel of Time under the Shamanism category and The Book of Us are available in our Store.

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#669 Chuck’s Place: Ecstasy

March 27, 2010 Chuck Leave a comment

First, a Chuck-ku:

Wind blows, seeds disperse.
Earth softens, flowers emerge.
Divine Ecstasy!

We work very hard each day to stay on top of our responsibilities, to sleep well, to get up on time, perhaps to exercise, to stay abreast of world events, or keep them at safe bay so as not to infiltrate the calm, to be prepared for the day, to show up on time, or quietly sneak away. At the end of the day we want to feel good about our accomplishments, our challenges met, as we plan for tomorrow’s activities or weekend’s repose. These are all efforts of consciousness: decision making, planning, will power, efforts to create structure in our lives. But where’s the juice?!

Where is the joy, the electricity, the experiences that transport us beyond our hard earned structures to a deeper communion with life, a true experience of rapture, wholeness and union with the divine? We all crave this experience, this melding of consciousness with the divine instinctual energy that lies at the depths of our being. This experience we seek, to complete our day in wholeness, is the experience of ecstasy.

The Greek roots of the word ecstasy are ex meaning out of or to stand apart from, and stasis meaning stationary or stagnant. Thus, ecstasy is the experience outside the box of our hard earned ego structures. To get there we must loosen or dissolve the rigid static structures of our egos, stand outside our rules, our strict rationality, our thinking processes, to encounter the energetic fluidity and unpredictability of our deeper emotional divine selves. The challenge is to step outside the box and yet remain fully conscious and present, flowing with this intense ecstatic energy.

The tendency of the ego is to either repress the divine impulse due to its intensity and fear of loss of control or for the ego to volitionally check out, as for example in a drunken binge where ecstatic energy overtakes consciousness in a frenzied reverie. In either case, there is no union, and no true experience of wholeness and divine rapture.

How can we build a solid bridge capable of safely channeling such powerful energy? To construct this bridge, we must engage all the powers of ego and consciousness. Without consciousness the experience of the divine energy is a tsunami that overtakes all structures or simply passes over without notice. How do we build a solid foundation for our bridge? One stone at a time.

One stone is to recognize the stirrings of emotion within as we move through our daily lives. Perhaps we might experience an impulse, a feeling of warmth, of appreciation, of love, of excruciating tenderness in an interaction with another. Can we allow ourselves to stretch and feel the full energy of this emotion? Perhaps we feel quite vulnerable, overly sensitive, seeking to automatically shut down, cut off, and move away from feeling the energy of our experience. Beyond the self, might we stretch ourselves, allowing our egos to lay down a stone by actually expressing out loud our feeling to another? To allow the self to withstand and be reshaped by the energetic aftermath of this wave of emotion is bridge building.

In another instance, we might find ourselves moved by a divine impulse to dance, to sing, to be playful, or silly. Can we lay another welcome stone to this divine energy by stretching our rigid egos to be moved to action by this impulse?

Perhaps we partake of a sip of wine. Dionysus, the personification of divine ecstasy, is also the Greek god of wine. Even the Christian mass includes a sip of wine as a channel to divine communion with God. That sip of wine immediately invites the experience of another world. Boundaries disappear and the experience of everything as energetically interconnected emerges. However, can we stop at one sip, at one glass? Can we retain our consciousness and experience interconnectedness in a modest way? This challenge is certainly another brick in the foundation of our bridge to ecstasy. Too often the craving for more divine contact, so deeply desired, results in inviting too much energy to travel on an incomplete structure ending in oblivion or divine madness.

Ecstasy is its own crucible, its own alchemical oven, its own cross. Pushing the confines of the structure, which can ultimately increase one’s joy, is a painful and lengthy process. Take, for example, love and sex, a very challenging combination, a cornerstone of our bridge to ecstasy. In the beginning of relationship, when nature provides us with an unearned “in love” experience, we are afforded the divine rapture of ecstasy as the boundaries of our individual egos are stretched to merge with our “soul mate.” In this time, love and sexual energy flow freely. If this divine spark acquires duration and becomes a true relationship we are ultimately expelled from the garden. The gift of ecstasy must now be earned through the building of a bridge of conscious relationship. The more we get to know our partner, the more familiar they become, often, the more difficult sex becomes.

Love is a product of consciousness. Love takes work, hard work. Encountering and accepting the truth of our “human” soul mate, as well as revealing our own most vulnerable selves, is an extremely challenging process. Meanwhile, familiarity often drives sexual energy underground. Love and familiarity bring a lot of bright light to a relationship. The spontaneous, unpredictable flow of primal sexual energy seeks the darkness, where play, connection, and abandon are spared watchful, judgmental eyes and a thinking mind. To be conscious and present in abandon, without thought, is the crucible of love and sex. To merge the familiar and the spontaneous, the divine and the earthy, the spirit and the flesh, is a powerful, ecstatic moment. This is definitely possible if there is commitment, but it is often a painful, vulnerable, and frustrating process where the energies seek to escape the containment required for ultimate transformation and ecstatic union.

Stretching and softening the boundaries of the ego to accommodate and join with the divine spontaneous impulse is the essence of ecstasy. Yes, to be able to stand, which is to hold onto consciousness, outside the static structure of the ego, is to open to the flow of divine energy, true ex-stasis. In this piece, I selected the metaphor of a sturdy bridge built stone by stone to represent the place of standing amidst divine energy. The opportunities to lay these stones offer themselves daily in a myriad of ordinary life circumstances where the spark of divine impulse is felt subtly or profoundly within the heart.

Jung chose a different metaphor, that of a cork floating on the ocean. The cork being the place of standing, or consciousness floating upon the boundless, infinite flux. Despite the disparity in size of cork to ocean, Jung would argue that without consciousness there is no wholeness, there is no divine ecstasy. Rumor has it that Jung’s final words, spoken to Marie-Louise von Franz, were: “Let’s have a really good red wine tonight!” Wine or no wine, I suggest that you make your experience di-vine!