Working with sexual energy

Sexual desire is a powerful energetic force in your body, and a powerful driver of action. Sexuality by itself doesn’t have morals, or any higher purpose other then the release of the energy. Your sexual drive doesn’t care about your higher purpose. Admittedly, this is written from a masculine perspective. According to a well known author I respect, men have testosterone, which makes them want to ‘fuck it or kill it’. If you happen to go through a process of liberating your sexuality, you will eventually reach a point where you face the sexual drive in its raw, primitive form. In this form, your sexuality is no different from an animals. From the egoic perspective, you are driven to move away from pain and towards pleasure, and sex for most men is an extremely pleasurable activity. The ego wants to keep on going back to where things feel good, so a liberated sexual drive is going to keep on reminding you that there are more woman and more sexual adventures out there. So, how can you work with this energy, both honoring it, yet using to support your higher purpose, without letting it control you and spin you in endless cycles of repetitive desire? The first step is to bring awareness to the sexual desire. Your attraction to other people is often sexual, and so just notice that. The awareness that notices the sexual desire is itself free of desire. Usually, people don’t notice their sexual desire arising. Instead, they lose themselves in the feeling, and then get lost in fantasies about sex, or start to think of ways to get sex, or feel frustrated that they are not having sex, or they repress the energy because they are tired of the conflict between their sexuality and their ‘higher morals’, or ‘higher purpose’. So, usually one of two things happens. Either consciousness identifies with the sexual desire, and then you get lost in stories and actions and behaviour leading to a satisfaction of the desire, or you fragment yourself splitting off or judging or repressing your behavior. These two reactions perpetuate suffering within you, through the consolidation of your ‘non-sexual’ egoic identity, or through the compulsive addiction to the sex drive. The way out of this is to befriend the energy, and start to breath it up through your body. To return to an earlier point, the first step is to notice the energy, and then, as soon as that happens, let it be okay for the energy to be there. Then, instead of being lost in the story of sex, or repressing the desire, simply breathe the energy up through your body to the top of your head, and then allow it to move back down through your head to your heart, and then out into the world as compassion or love. Alternatively, you breathe the sexual energy up, and then use it to say some intention or affirmation that supports your higher purpose. In this way, you work with the energy, and redirect it towards your higher values. Practice is important; it took me a long time to learn to move energy through my body, and now its almost as effortless as breathing. I do this simple practice continually throughout the day. It took some time to develop the moment by moment awareness required to be able to work with myself, and I need willpower and determination to work with the habitual conditioning attached to sexuality. As I persist with the practice, it becomes easier and easier to redirect the energy, instead of being lost inside it.