We have slipped so far down as humanity that we hardly remember how it feels and what it means to experience real intimacy. Intimacy requires a sincere, open-minded interest and reveals itself in the space between you and the other. In that in-between meeting place, the splendor of contact arises, which is life itself. Yet you can only perceive this when you open up to that deeper layer of feeling where the world can really touch you.
The dictator in your head
We mostly spend our days bowing to the dictator in our head who drives us along with his thousand and one judgments, like a slave driver, at the cost of our vitality and happiness. On the other side is your body, that wonderful instrument with its refined senses. Your body wants to be your guide from moment to moment, to intimately connect with the people and the world around you. Meditation and relaxation can help you sink into that. Just by embracing yourself tenderly even while all that thinking is going on, you can already create a bit more space.
Eye contact
It can already be found in something as simple as eye contact. There you can rest in the other person, coming home to that moment. There you fall silent and experience depth and feel seen. The space between your and the other person’s eyes is where it happens, where the aliveness can enter, where the intimacy of life can reveal itself. It is where appreciation and gratitude arise naturally.
We all long for this intimate connection, and yet we have strayed so far from it. We hardly even notice that we are doing things on automatic pilot, like sleepwalkers, in a world where we only pay attention to the rat race.
Intimacy in many gradations
Even something as intimate as making love can become a mechanic routine. The glory of seeing and being seen disappears. We often don’t even realize that we skip the sense of intimacy or hardly allow room for it. Yet it does make us ill.
But intimacy is not limited to our sexual expression, or even to our partner. There is also intimacy in meetings with friends and colleagues, with our children, pets, the plants and trees and stones surrounding us. Every landscape in Nature breathes intimacy and communicates with us, but all too often we shut ourselves off behind a wall of rusty beliefs, materialistic thinking and planning.
Pleasure as the highest good
Larger wars are a reflection of the smaller wars in relationships and families. And eventually it is about the war in ourselves, between head, heart and body. It is the dictator in our head who curtails and suppresses our vital life force. That is why the art of enjoying pleasure is the highest ethics.
Only by learning to open up to pleasure again, celebrating your life in full, you can give your best. Only when we discover again that we live in a field of intimacy, tenderly embracing the beauty of life, only then can we allow ourselves to be really touched by all the pain in the world and do our part, contributing our gifts. And that is why we are here, each in his or her own way.
Learn more about my vision of sex and Eros in my free e-book, ‘Five Principles for lasting fulfilment in your (love) life’. Download it HERE !
For more information about my work: www.reconnect-to-eros.com.
