Book Excerpts
Introduction
The Fertile Darkness
The Naked Heart
First Impressions
Faces in the Mirror
Dismantling Negative Patterns
Shakti
Union
Sexual Communion
The Essence

Articles
- The Secret of the Sexual Dance

Chapter 2 

The Naked Heart

For the raindrop, joy is in entering the river-
Unbearable pain becomes its own cure.
-Ghalib

Genuine intimacy is akin to a process of becoming naked.  We drop our socially adapted masks and slowly open to the revelation of our hearts. But the path of intimacy can be challenging. As our hearts open wider, the wounds, negative beliefs and shame from our past rise to the surface—and we are called upon to investigate them. Intimacy is a window into ourselves.

During the first year of our marriage, some twenty-five years ago, my (David’s) heart suddenly encountered a profound state of vulnerability.  We were exploring techniques of extended lovemaking.  By taking the emphasis off the typical goal of climaxing, we learned to relax deeper into the rapture and bliss of the moment.  We discovered that sex, when engaged in from a quieter, meditative perspective, could be a delightful doorway into the sacred, into deep spiritual communion.
 
At the end of this one occasion, lying in each other's warm, sweaty arms, I was suddenly hit with a rush of intense fear.  Terror is perhaps a better word.  I found myself literally shaking like a leaf inside and struggled to stay in control.  I wanted to hide, but fortunately, there was nowhere to go.  The more I tried to resist the feelings the more intense they became.  A
force far more powerful than my conscious mind had taken over. Resistance was futile. My breathing became rapid, and I began to shake as if attempting to get free from some unknown internal restriction. What was this fear?  Why was I afraid to be seen?
 
The fear, in part, was the initial vulnerability of a closed heart starting to open to the unknown; it was the terror of having gone deep together, of sharing much, of being stripped both physically and emotionally before the unclouded eyes of my beloved.  My defenses rioted.  What if she judges me?  What if I’m rejected?  What if I can’t let go?  This fear was the death cry of my ego that wanted to be in control as our boundaries dissolved and the sense of I merged into a We.  Suddenly, like countless lovers and mystics before us, the duality of self and other was collapsing.  As I finally relaxed—and felt into the fear—the shaking subsided and we found ourselves entering a profound level of intimacy.  We had caught a glimmer of the naked heart.  But it was only a beginning. The experience, which would repeat itself countless times in different ways over the years, had much to teach us.

How is it that love brings up fear?  As long as we base our sense of being loved on an other, we will inevitably find ourselves caught in the painful grips of contraction and expansion.  Our loving—and the need to be loved—will be tinged, however subtly, with the fear of loss. The way of intimacy is not to renounce or deny need, but to accept it as part of the opening and listen for where it leads. It is a facet of what we encounter in the undressing of the heart.

Love and vulnerability are often intertwined.  Old hurts, traumas and memories get reenergized the deeper we open to one another.  There is risk. A spiritual partnership can be frightening—and transformative—because real intimacy dissolves barriers, at times reflecting whatever unmet needs stand in the way of wholeness.  As we open to each other we are challenged each step of the way to first embrace, then look beyond our neediness to the
deeper truth of the heart.  When we listen to our hearts, this truth chants a silent, unending, verse:  I am the Beloved.  The Beloved is mine.  The presence of love we feel with our partner is a reflection of that which resides within us.

For such authentic love to flower, we need to investigate our fear. At the deepest level it arises from the primal thought of a separate me.  It forms with the development of the ego and a movement away from the heart.  Painful experiences early on further reinforce this duality.

For example, a child quietly reading a book is suddenly the target of verbal or physical abuse by her enraged mother.  Terrified, she runs into her bedroom, separating physically from the experience.  However, she is still frightened inside.  When the situation calms down the child sneaks into the kitchen looking for a snack, not because she needs food, but because she is still frightened and feels the need to also separate emotionally from the experience. Before long her awareness is no longer connected to the original feeling. On the surface she feels more at ease.  But deep inside, her basic sense of separateness—along with the accompanying fear—has been reinforced.  The primary need for love has been obscured by a secondary need for food. Years later she ponders the cause of her eating disorder and why she craves—yet  runs from—intimacy.  Deep within resides the unresolved pain associated with her mother and the root feeling of being unloved.

But does everyone carry such a primal wound?   What about those of us who came from more nurturing, caring environments?  Even in such circumstances, when we investigate deeply into the nature of the mind, we find a basic knot of unhappiness, a feeling that we are somehow not whole or fully loved.  This primal sense of being unloved arises with the development of the ego, and the perception that we are separate from life as a whole.  There is a poignant verse in the Upanishads from India that points to this predicament.  It states simply that fear arising from duality is the cause of suffering.  This duality—self  versus other—kicks in around age two as we begin the awkward process of differentiating from our environment.  Psychology labels this stage “the terrible twos,” because our egos are developing and we begin to show preferences, make judgments, and strive for independence.  The price for developing our individuality and defining our boundaries is that we feel increasingly separate from the whole of life, and a subtle suffering arises.  Our separateness and suffering grow together and are reinforced in childhood by painful, frightening, or overwhelming events. 

It is natural to want to remove ourselves—separate—from anything (a thought, feeling, person, or event) perceived as threatening.  In the above example, the child naturally tried to separate from the pain associated with the mother.  But in doing so, her ego’s basic sense of separateness was reinforced, generating yet more fear and consequently more suffering. 

It is in the context of such experiences that core beliefs come into play.  Our thoughts crystallize around powerful emotional experiences, reinforcing and defining ourselves as separate entities.  Depending on our unique set of experiences, thoughts like: I can never get enough, Life is not safe,  The people I love abandon me,  I have to fight to survive,  Feeling this pain will kill me,  I’m special and nobody appreciates me,  I cannot trust anyone,  If I fully accept myself, he (she) will leave, I must stay in control to be safe get etched into the nervous system and act as lenses through which we interpret, create, and reinforce our sense of duality.  All such limiting concepts (and corresponding emotional imprints) hinge on the core sense of being separate.  Defensive emotional patterns like blame, denial, and chronic anger form around our core beliefs in an attempt to further distance ourselves and avoid the undischarged pain of the original situation.  As a result, we learn to look outside ourselves to others (always without fulfillment) for love and acceptance, even though we fear the exposure of deep intimacy. 

As a spiritual partnership unfolds, deeper layers of the ego and its various core beliefs and reactive emotional patterns arise. In learning to trust our experience, to open into it no matter how painful (a theme that we will explore repeatedly in the following pages), our underlying sense of separateness and accompanying fear gradually gets dissolved.  This is the gift of intimate caring.  As defenses drop and the heart gradually opens again, we begin to love with fewer conditions; we see beyond the persona into the pristine essence of our deeper spiritual character.  At this core (soul) level everyone shines immaculate.  But to live this understanding requires that we take the full journey.  At times we are led into the dark, yet we must reach the point in our growth where we fully accept the invitation to heal.

On the journey of spiritual partnership, most of us will spiral through three distinct phases from romance, through disillusionment, to acceptance.