Part of orienting yourself to spirituality in your sexual practices, is learning about some mystical, meditative or psychic aspects of lovemaking.
To attain transcendent experiences during lovemaking the ancient Taoist, Buddhist and Tantri literature recommends that the mind become quiet. This guidance is often misconstrued to mean that all mental activity must come to a halt. But what is actually being suggested is that you stop a particular type of thinking: the verbal, judgmental, conceptual, theoretical, labeling, evaluative, representational, running-internal-commentary-to-oneself type of thinking.
This is the kind of thinking in which every experience, perception, or sensation is sub-vocally identified in words, given a positive or negative philosophical valence, explaining your experience to yourself according to some theory, affixed with a name, and linked with other concepts by an abstract system of verbal rules of language called logic. It can happen in a flash, but the narrative is very noisy. This is the type of busyness in the mind that doesn’t harmonize with mystical experiences.
As the process of verbal thinking slows and quiets, awareness of your experience is immediately heightened. The ancients suggest that from a quiet mind you can fully, directly experience and actively, creatively participate during lovemaking. When the judging mind is resting, you have the opportunity to be awake, aware, involved and absorbed – but without the need to describe every part of the experience to yourself in words as it’s going on.
When intercourse is approached with a quieted mind you are, ironically, more mentally aware, more right-brain aware, and able to concentrate on sensation and feeling; the direct perception of what is happening is no longer passing through the filter of comparison and contrast that dominates the rational mind.
Sacred sexuality focuses more on direct experience . . . Your own experience . . . and prioritizes the placement of attention on your own body without needing to describe every sensation to yourself. You don’t have to evaluate: “Oh, that is good!” You don’t have to get regular feedback from your partner about whether you are performing well for them, or not. You just feel the physical sensations that are occurring in your body and responsibly act according to your experience. You are able to communicate with your partner if you want something different or more but are in control of your direct experience.
Sacred sexuality . . . or mystical lovemaking . . . means that partners are open to sensation and feeling in their own bodies, perceiving their personal, individual, autonomous experience, without evaluating it, and without evaluating each other.
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