Beliefs collect around sexuality like no other arena, so it is particularly potent to begin the work of dismantling them. Feelings, convictions, and sensations are magnified around sexual arousal, which allows us to distinguish underlying identifications we otherwise could not.
Sooner or later, we will begin to make out patterns. We may notice that whenever we see a man reach for a woman in a sexual way, we feel disgust. The stimulus and our response may be so linked that they seem inseparable, but if we stay in the inquiry for long enough, we can uncover a whole set of perceptions, personality traits, and feelings that play out through our world of power and human connection. We may uncover that we feel a certain disdain for our own expression of power.
What we recognize in that man's actions is the kind of vulnerability we fear would take us out of control. Maybe we faked turn-on when a man touched us like that in the past. Maybe we didn't know how to feel. Maybe we feel a certain terror at being revealed.
We may notice a whole array of memories arise. We may remember how our mother pursed her lips and whispered under her breath when a woman in a short dress passed. We may remember seeing a look in our father's eye toward a woman who was not our mother. We may remember our grandmother telling us what God does to little girls who do those things.
Likely we will feel a swirl of powerlessness as we notice these beliefs and perceptions, often for the first time. Even the positive perceptions. We may see a couple together and notice we think how lucky she is and believe he will make her happy. We may notice we are hoping they get married. These are not life force itself, just the collection of thoughts that have accumulated around it.
The key is to continue to notice and as we do, not get frustrated with the fact that we may feel powerless to do anything about the automatic, patterned responses we've been unconsciously feeding our energy. We have the ability to liberate that energy to power our deeper vision and drive for human connection. It is almost like having an automatic pay- ment we signed up for and forgot about. It keeps withdrawing currency but for something we do not use.
This is how most of us spend our sexual power, dissipating the energy into automated patterns. It is important to remember that it does not matter if we are putting it toward addictive use, repression, or the conditioned and routine lovemaking most relationships suffer from; all three have the same result. All three of these things rob us of our birthright of power by plugging into automated patterns rather than liberating and using it in a generative way.
As we continue our excavation, we will eventually get to a more deep-seated fear, the fear of what it means to truly have power in the world. If in fact we have this force that can cause great harm but also create tremendous good, what does this mean? How would our life change? Who would we have to become? How has our identity been formed around lack of power? What qualities would we have to develop if we had power? What excuses would have to fall away? How would our relationship with the sex impulse have to change?
Very few people make it past this point. Most people have so concretized an identity of wanting to want power that when faced with the reality of having it and the potential for the life they've known dying away, they go back to making do. It's as if we've built our whole life according to our lack, built our house to accommodate it, developed a whole way of thinking and being and loving to adjust and accept this fact. We would have a whole group of friends we had made based on our connection through the same presumed handicap. We perhaps prayed that our handicap be removed. And suddenly, it was.
It sounds wonderful. Initially. But the truth is, the identity we know ourselves to be would die. Therefore, most people choose to not stand up; initially, what this looks like is loss. Those who pick up the cross of their sexuality are hated by those who lack the courage to do so. It is easier to sit on the sidelines and hope or hate than it is to get into the arena and confront.
At the foundation of every question around sex lies a question about what we want our relationship to power to be. Are we going to hope for it and yearn for it? Are we going to judge it and then feel cheated because we do not have it? Are we going to demand it through victimhood? Are we going to sneak it? Are we going to live lifelong suffering because we lack it? Are we going to withdraw from it and rationalize that we are that spiritual? Are we going to persecute it and then secretly get ours? Are we going to let it run riot and not develop the consciousness to be with it? Or, are we going to honor it and commit to a dedicated practice to discover the virtuous expression of it?
These are the questions we ask as we begin to untangle the sex impulse from the projections we have put on it so we can come to know it for what it is, rather than thinking it is what we made it. How we relate to sex is how we relate to power.
