Embracing the Masculine

Last night my husband and I listened to a discussion Elizabeth Debold of What is Enlightenment? Magazine had with Jenny Wade in preparation for WIE’s edition devoted to what the new enlightened man would look like. Elizabeth’s article on Danish men and the suppression of the masculine in service of the feminine was great. Jenny Wade’s depiction of the sensitive spiritual wimp or the narcissistic spiritual jerk captured a real aspect of the challenge facing spiritually sophisticated men. Dr. Wade then launched into a description of the most spiritually evolved man she knew who had shocked her and devastated his wife of many years – a couple she felt embodied the most awake approach to relationship she’d ever seen, when he had a clandestine affair with another woman when his wife was sick, a situation that eventually led to the end of the relationship.

 

This story, like the numerous examples of spiritual masters having less than enlightened sexual encounters with students brought up for Elizabeth Debold and Dr. Wade one more example of just how challenging it is to practice awakened spirituality AND awakened sexuality. The tone of their remarks indicated that the guys just needed to get it together.

 

This particular topic is near and dear to us because we’ve been consciously exploring what it means to go deeper into the sexual and spiritual aspects of being masculine and feminine. Through this practice we deepen to find in each other an opening into the divine that pushes past our constricted ways of being more powerfully than anything either of us could experience on our own.

 

This exploration has gone on for thirty-three years and has been through every phase of relationship imaginable, including my over expression of the masculine and my husband’s spiritually sensitive over identification with the feminine. Encouraged and abetted by David Deida’s clear and to the point descriptions of growing past these more artificial gender explorations to a truer awareness of who we actually are, we’ve engaged in a much more authentic and powerful approach to sexuality that has revitalized our relationship, our work life and especially our capacity to experience unimaginable bliss and unconditional love, for each other and for everyone who enters or touches our lives – amazing stuff.

 

One really powerful ingredient that we both feel might be missing for most people in the spirituality/sexuality discussion is a deep appreciation for how important it is to actually see and own the true power of your sexuality, especially the “darker” less acceptable aspects, the parts you don’t want to admit to your partner are there.

 

From my perspective, the incredible force of masculine desire, the force that is virtually unable to ignore the attraction of a beautiful woman (no matter where or who), the masculine drive to connect, to join, to feel that flood of passion and power is a profoundly beautiful thing. Encouraging my partner to fully inhabit and share all aspects of his energy with me – even when it’s not about me, has profoundly expanded my respect for his freedom.   It has called forth my real feminine power to meet his energy and allow it to push me past my own boundaries into a place beyond us both.

 

A spiritual life that has labeled it so wrong to still feel these strong impulses even when your wife is sick would necessarily put a “spiritually evolved” guy into a serious quandary. If he admits to the intensity of this pull, a pull which in our experience only increases as the flow of spiritual energy increases, he is going to have to face being non pc in the spiritual arena, not a conversation he’s willing to have with his poor sick wife and one’s she’s not likely to encourage because he’s too “awake” for that. This means it’s not a conversation he’s even likely to have with himself, which means that however this energy manifests , it’s more likely to be in a shadow way that bypasses conscious and clear evaluation of how those actions arising out of that energy affect other people and even his own personal choices.

 

Being able to honor, appreciate and recognize masculine energy and force in my husband allows me to recognize that confining his experience of his sexual energy to our relationship is not only impossible for him, but also represents a real loss to me.  While uninhibited sexual action in the world is clearly unethical and non-useful, the uninhibited exploration and understanding of everything arising is incredibly powerful.  When I can enjoy his appreciation of a beautiful woman, the flow of his energy in making things happen at work, or the flow of his sexual energy toward me when I’m tired, sick, or otherwise “not in the mood,” it frees him to drop the guilt about feeling the way he feels. It teaches me to revel in the feminine, available and open to what is. This availability, this embrace of the masculine in whatever form it arises, expands and stretches me, opening me to a capacity for ecstatic bliss, expanding love that no amount of judgment or restriction could ever allow. I am so grateful for his ever renewing, insuppressible flow of energy.

 

When this energy is allowed to be – when he is allowed to have it and express it and I allow it to be, with total love and acceptance, then how it manifests in action can be talked about, laughed about, argued about, embraced or ignored – with love and deep respect for how every action, every thought, every interaction affects every other being involved. Sex with another woman may be appropriate, it may not. In actuality, given an honest evaluation of how everyone involved would be served, it hasn’t happened yet, but there are no rules. Letting what is be fully present in the conversation dramatically increases the chances that the actions we choose truly serve both ourselves and others.

 

Avoiding the deep reality of sexuality is to ignore a fundamental spiritual force in the universe. It tends to have a way of “pushing the issues.” This is one of the reasons that it always comes up – any powerful human endeavor demands a conscious integration of sexual energy. Failure to integrate manifests in the never ending litany of sexual “transgressions” indulged in by male political and spiritual leaders. 

 

Personally, I love this energy. I would love to see it consciously manifest in the world. As a woman, I hope I can expand and grow until I can joyfully and powerfully embrace the masculine, learning to expand and take it in instead of trying to contain or control it. I would love to bring to conscious union masculine and feminine, consciousness and light, formlessness and form.