 The
Lover Within: Opening to Energy in Sexual Practice by Julie
Henderson
What a title, huh? Henderson's book introduced
me to energy, and now I'm fascinated by it. One of the exercises
in Levine's
trauma book was to squeeze, and find, and follow
the muscles in your body with your hands. And I realized I never
do that. It's unfamilar territory. So now I want to understand
anatomy and how it corresponds with energy. Bill's a massage therapist
and a Reiki practitioner, and he loaned me Carmine
Clemente's Anatomy: A Regional Atlas of Human Anatomy.
I've been quizzing him about the muscular system, energy meridians,
and how provable the concept of energy is. I plan to study this
stuff in the next few weeks, if I continue to be curious about
it. I mean, how can I get to know my body without understanding
at least rudimentarily how it works.
Anyway, I didn't do any of Henderson's exercises
yet, but I plan to do them soon. There are 63 of them in all.
The book isn't so much about sex as it is about energy, and how
to push it and play with it. How energy affects relationships
and our relationship to the world.
On page 12, Henderson says, "People. don't
know if they have a preference for being separate or for being
merged, or the preference of their partner; but they may spend
their whole lives suffering the results. Usually, because of
conditioning, there is a cultural preference on the part of males
for being separate energetically. They are often frightened of
the union, of feeling soft, melting and merged... Women. are
often encouraged to be in a state of perpetual energetic merger
with a partner (and to feel that there's something wrong when
that's not happening). It helps them to be attentive and aware
of another's feelings. But
if you are in a relationship with a person who has only the skills
of separation and is frightened of merger, and you yourself have
a preference for merging and don't really know how to separate,
both of you can get into some phenomenally sticky situations,
with both people feeling unloved and either abandoned or trapped.
The goddamn story of my life isbeing
attracted to men who are unavailable, and moving toward them
while they crab walk away in terror from me. Replaying the
drama of my dead (and quite unavailable) father? I
don't know, except my friend Maurie lost her dad when she was
two, and she and I have similar feelings, and similar relationships
with men.
It's like I have a constant need,
desire, hunger, and I'm not even sure I noticed it, until I reread
the stuff I wrote at
the coffeeshop in Mansfield about desire. When I was typing
it, I went
to the Thesaurus and found synonyms for desire- appetite, ardor,
craze, fervor, frenzy, greed, hunger, itch, longing, lust, mania,
need, passion, rapture, ravenous, thirst, urge, yearning. That's
something I need to work with. Desire. I'm filled with desire
- for love, sex, friends, food, alcohol, weed, learning, challenge,
excitement, screaming, laughing, pain...
Bill
said in an email the other week:
"...there's a deeper need in you that has yet to be addressed...
that need is perhaps the need for a parent. A real storybook
parent who is solid and strong and smart and capable of infinite
love and compassion and providing protection from the big,
scary world. The kind of parent your mom and grandparents were
never capable of being. The hard part is understanding
at the level of your soul that the time for expectations that
a parent will magically appear on the horizon has passed. Your
dad is not coming home. Your mom will always be just who
she is. Your
friends and lovers will never fill that hole in your soul, no
matter how you try to squeeze and shape them. I can love
you and support you but I can't fill that void either. Only
understanding this truth, feeling the pain and having compassion
for yourself will start to heal the scars, and ameliorate some
of the hurt."
My throat tightens just reading it, and you're
right, Bill, it frightens me to imagine going there. But I think
we all feel that way. That deep pool, scar, pit of need we all
carry somewhere inside.
On page 13, Henderson says, "As people
learn to unite with themselves within, to allow themselves
that pleasure in their own being, when they do unite with someone
else, they can do it out of respectful desire rather than a
sense of starvation." That sounds good to me, and
I know I gotta do these exercises.
Henderson also talks about dissociation. This
is on
page 27 - "When
you say, 'I am feeling my feet,' where are you? Where is the
awareness that speaks in you coming from? Most times people answer
this question by saying they hear the voice in their heads. Is
that where "you" live? To put yourself
in your head creates an arbitrary boundary - a decision has been made that 'you'
live up there in your skull. That boundary at the neck cuts you off from the
greater part of your experience, your feelings, your perceptions, even your
mind. This leaves a lot of you uninhabited and unconsidered. A lot of your life
is not conscious in you. Still others are anywhere but in their heads. All of these are learned
boundaries. Each of the exercises we do here is an invitation to own the
whole space, to inhabit your whole body, to rearrange your learned and limiting
boundaries so that you have more space to be - an invitation to occupy all of
you."
Boy, do I ever know about that. I really need
to carve out some time - nightime feels best to me. Why is that...?
I dunno. There's less street noise then andI think I need darkness
to hold me and make me feel safer. Candles, music, a sense of
endless time. Daytime feels like time when I should be doing
laundry or paying bills.
If you can learn to expand your energy,
even in a situation you don't like, you can learn
to feel good in that situation anyway. Your feelings can be
independent of the event. A contraction is an unspoken objection. Something
happens that we find threatening, and we want to move away
from it. If we felt free to, we would move away physically - out
of the room, out of the relationship, out of town. Sometimes
we can't leave. More often we have been taught we mustn't leave.
We have learned to do something else instead. We learned to
leave energetically. We learned to contract away from the event
even though our bodies are still present. Energetically, we
are then more or less absent. It is of great value to learn
to object to what's happening without contracting, energetically
or physically."
I learned to check out when I was a kid.
I just kind of looked hard and sharply to the right, but with
my mind, when things got too chaotic, and my scary thoughts would
disappear. If they reappeared, I'd do it again, and again, until
the scary thought, the feeling of helplessness was banished.
Great when you're 12. Not so great when you're 25.
So I want to learn more about energy, and this,
from
Henderson's Appendix B: The Inner Courtship, seems
like a terrific energy primer:
"My own experience of the process
of energetic "courtship" goes
this way:
1. First, energy is flowing around
us more than through us (becuase of the quality of the boundaries
we have made). Energy within the boundaries is more in
statis than in movement. Also we are not very conscious of
this life energy, inside or outside. Many people are subliminally
aware of energy currents, exchanges, and flavours and
rely very heavily on these perceptions. Usually that don't
reveal that they do, through lack of either vocabulary or
validation for their perceptions. Such things are "not talked
about" - until someone talks about them.
2. Then, given opportunity through exercises
or other guidance, energy begins to flow in the body in certain
limited areas, the first that are willing to open. There
is visible vibration, often quite jerky. Sometimes the person
feels nervous about this "loss of control" or "weakness".
3. Gradually, as more areas open, energy
moves through the whole body but tends to remain large-scale
and near the surface. During this same period, the vibration
and trembling begin to get finer. This is the beginning of
that "higher frequency
vibration" all of those esoteric manuals talk about.
4. Gradually the vibration reaches fineness
throughout the body (or most of it) and begins to touch deeper
tissues.
5. Vibration becomes flow.
6. Pulsation begins to arise.
7. The pulsation becomes finer and finer
and reaches deeper and deeper. into the tissues of the
body until it touches and re-enlivens individual cells. This
is the luminous life of childhood. This time we are conscious;
indeed the cells are conscious. Being is consciousness.
8. The energy of this pulsation radiates as
light. We experience the energy of life directly, as both personal
and nonpersonal."
|
