Heart of Tantric Sex (27 page)

Take every opportunity for greater expansion

When feelings arise, the mind can become a co-conspirator as it talks you out of sharing your feelings in order to avoid vulnerability. Once, ecstatically consumed by love, I wanted to say a simple, profound "I love you," but I could not bring myself to utter the words. I forcefully swallowed them. It was too intimate, too much in that moment or so my mind convinced me. It was not wise to reveal my love, vulnerability, or dependence. A few seconds later I felt my body begin to shrink, my presence collapsed, I was totally overcome with sadness. I wept, feeling my sexual energy and sensitivity slowly dwindle away. Shrunken and contracted I lay there flooded with all the accumulated memories of past moments when I had not expressed my love. In that excruciating pain of withholding, I saw how many opportunities I had missed that were doorways to greater expansion in body, heart, and spirit. Now, I use those precious gifts, and the heart soars on the wings of love.

On the journey from our personality to our being we will encounter layers of defense and protection and pain, which function to keep us away from our essence. These we have to meet and release as we take steps inward toward the core.

The following is a reliable guide to the different qualities of emotion and feeling, although some people admit to finding themselves in an ongoing low-grade emotional state, and these shifts are not detectable.

• In emotion you will experience separation; in feeling you will experience closeness.
  
• Emotions are an unconscious expression; feelings are a conscious expression.
  
• Emotions usually refer to the past; feelings are experienced in the present.
  
• Emotion blames and projects: "you alwayslnever ..."; feeling acknowledges: "I feelheed.. . "
  
• Emotion will repeat or use the same words year after year; feeling is expressed freshly.
  
• Emotion has exhausting effects; feelings expressed give vigor and life.
  
• Emotions represent the ego while feelings represent the heart.
  
• Emotions hang around for days; feelings expressed move on quickly.
  

 W 
OMEN ARE WELL-KNOWN for their seemingly overwhelming emotions. The fact that emotions continually come to the surface even when everything seems to be going so well will often drive a man to despair. How can he love and understand a woman when harmony takes a sudden nosedive into depression, or flares up in a fight for no apparent reason? Women's irrational moods, arguing and nagging, questions and provocation, are a nightmare. It is as if the woman whom he loves so well is from time to time possessed.

The reasons for these emotional fluctuations lie in sex. Tantra teaches us that the emotional qualities that a man finds most disturbing in a woman are something that he himself actually creates through his insistence on excitement and orgasm. A woman is kept at the lowest level of her sexual expression and obstructed from fulfilling her true female potential. For centuries she has been used as a sexual object, the source of men's gratification. This saddens and enrages her. Over time her untapped divine energies become increasingly dormant and stagnant, while a deep dissatisfaction, disappointment, and lack of love pervades every cell in her body, making her emotionally unstable. Conventional sex, hot, frenzied, and focused on self-gratification, whips up these emotions within, and this triggers sexual excitement, interfering with her ability to be receptive.

Emotional sex and instability

Excitement deposits a residual tension in her body that affects both physical and psychological states, making her explosive and volatile with an instability, explaining why shortly after sex, couples can easily get into intense arguments. The sexual tension will be discharged sooner or later, like static electricity, and difficulties in relating will follow. Indeed, most relationship problems have their root in sexual dissatisfaction.

While emotional sex, as it is sometimes called, might be extremely pleasurable, it lasts only seconds, and ultimately has a depleting effect on the life energies. It can create dissatisfaction and a sense of separation where you no longer feel interested in your lover. Deep down we know we have used each other, not made love, and are saddened by it. This adds to our emotional store, rendering us unable to share love in the present as we live in the shadow of the past.