In regards to monogamy and nonmonogamy, we tend to act as if the form itself could deliver a result. We try to make wholesale prescriptions instead of asking, "What do I need to discover? What condition needs to be removed in order for me to have full access?" When inside of the Erotic Room, we can explore the forms of monogamy and nonmonogamy.
In our culture, women tend to look to monogamy, thinking within it she will find the promises of safety, security, love, and connection. Her tendency is to want to fasten her Erotic energy to one person, which actually results in killing it. She would, therefore, do well to explore nonmonogamy.
Men tend to want to spread Erotic energy out, which results in a dissipation of its potency. He would do well to explore monogamy. In exploring what they are culturally trained to avoid, she will find that safety, security, love, and connection rest inside of herself, and he will learn to find these inside of a sustained connection.
Both have a challenging time increasing their capacity to hold ever more potent energy within themselves. Monogamy and nonmonogamy are simply complementary means of dumping Erotic energy.
Most women find it challenging to open the nonmonogamy channel. As she begins to open it, tremendous energy will be liberated and if she is not unbelievably diligent, the ego will simply see it as more energy to be employed in reinforcing her identity as dependent on a partner. This will grow into an obsessive drive to possess.
That drive will be the ego's command to restore homeostasis. Few women can make it all the way through the opening of this channel and come out having opened it to the same degree as any other channel. It's wise for a woman to open this channel in connection with other women who will remind her that her intention is to get free, not to secure a partner. As the energy heightens, so does the instinct to return to homeostasis. Friends who know what she is up to can serve as an external reminder of her initial intention.
Though women seek comfort or grounding with a partner, this is actually sloth and torpor, something to cover the crackle of electricity that is her Erotic body. What she really wants is the Erotic version of these, which requires turning up that electric crackle. Both men and women have been heavily conditioned to turn that electricity down in her, calling it protection and love when it is anything but; it is the insurance that neither will ever have to face her power.
For men, the challenge is to develop a laser-like focus that can open within one woman the archetypes of all women. Men have a program of "more" rather than "deeper," and so rarely discover the depth of what is possible.
He is either locked in dutiful, suffocating monogamy or else is attempting to feed his hunger for various archetypes with multiple partners—all, of course, while his partners are driving for monogamy.
To be monogamous can put him in the position where he must develop the capacity to truly penetrate in order to liberate his partner from behind the tumescent wall. When he does this, there is more than enough of the other for him.
Even as he dissipates his attention with multiple partners, most are aware of this truth. They think, You have not opened the one you already have. You could not handle what is here, so why go there? This is the challenge of male conditioning as a whole, this attention deficit that tends to go from one thing to the next, never anchoring in and discovering what is available in the depths. The invitation for him in monogamy is to develop this laser focus.
As both men and women open these channels, whole other worlds arise. She likely discovers that the appetite she has condemned in him with her virtuous monogamy exists also in her. When a woman has more fear of monogamy than openness, she has opened this channel.
In this time of radical discovery, she sees what she looks like undomesticated, with a drive and hunger. What she has most condemned in men, what she has felt disgusted, repulsed, and violated by, she is now seeing in herself. This part of her set free confers such a sense of joy and freedom. It no longer makes sense to put it in the cage of monogamy.
At the same time, he is likely discovering the depths and the beauty and richness of returning day in and day out to the same person's body as if it were a monastery where he is presented with the various and endless expressions of the other.
He is brought to his knees by the beauty of his partner and feels a deep sense of regret for not having previously seen it. He understands now why anyone would want to commit at this level.
He wants to only give himself to his partner and he wants the same from his partner. What he judged as clinging, desperate, and cloying—even suffocating—now all makes sense as the endless expanse of the room opens. Why would we ever leave something so beautiful outside the sanctuary of love and attention?
If they stay with the practice, they will be instructed in endless other permutations to open and explore, and as a result, to understand the ever-present beauty of "other" from the inside.