Performing Sex?| Mark Whitwell on Restoring Real Intimacy
Mark Whitwell | Heart of Yoga
Sex (perhaps the most creative act of all) is often the one place in our lives where we can abandon social strategy and relax from the habit trying to behave according to an imposed ideal. In the regenerative power of love-relationship, and from our prior sense of connection to the wild of Mother Nature, we become confident that genuine behavior will naturally arise…whatever that is and whatever that looks like, however plain, strange, peaceful, blissful, or dramatic.
Obviously, the abandonment of any kind of performance during Sex requires a relationship of love and trust. If we want to move with our spontaneous, creative, poetic, and undefended feeling, we must have a partner who can accept and hold us as we really are.
A nice idea! The problem however is that since a very young age we have been exposed to countless ideas and images that set up a ridiculous, vulgar, and impersonal standard of sexual connection. The unrestricted erotic flow of feeling between intimates should be the guiding force, yet we have been made obsessed with body image, Sex as exaggeration, and the attempt to mett the socially contrived ‘desires’ of another.
We have been literally trained to repress and lose trust in our natural instincts in exchange for becoming acceptable to another. Our sexual energy becomes blocked with these social barriers and real feeling becomes harder and harder to find.
I am feeling a great sympathy for everyOne who is suffering the degraded sexual culture that is now practically universal. We are brave enough to acknowledge that such unrefined, loveless, and depleting activity is no longer wanted in our lives. Real intimacy, unburdened from the need to perform anything, is our birthright.
Everybody wants intimacy; everybody wants to feel; everybody wants to step out of the bullshit.
Sex is the Natural State
The first step is to acknowledge the simple fact that our whole body is the wild of Mother Nature. As I wrote in my book God and Sex:
“Our bodies are nature, and nature is a sublime intelligence, beyond anything we can artificially approximate. The sexual current flowing through us, as us, is the intelligence of nature, and she has her own nurturing agenda for our lives and healing….But humanity has been programmed only to ‘get’ the feminine, not to receive, within and without. At worst, he seeks to control and even to own her for his access. Because we are all male-female, this is an issue within each one of us — the dominance of the dissociative mind trying to control the intelligence of the body. In practice, it looks like trying to control the life current, rather than moving with it (whether in our own bodies or in relation to someone else’s).”
In order to soften and release the mind’s fearful grip on the erotic flow of the whole body, we need a way to participate directly in that flow, to surrender the mind to that flow in our daily life, before we try to surrender to it during Sex. Your daily practice of Hatha Yoga, as it was brought forth from the indigenous wisdom traditions of India and Tibet by Tirumalai Krishnamacharya (1888–1989) is your personal means to do this, to sink into the erotic flow of Mother Nature that is your whole body.
The gentleness and steadiness of your daily practice releases the mind’s fear of the body’s spontaneous energy flows. Gradually and suddenly, we develop trust in the intelligence and creativity of our life. The mind surrenders into the sexual current of life. We learn to, “receive and abide in the feminine…to ride the pleasure of intimacy like riding a wave. You can’t be too demanding; rather, adapt yourself to the changing flow of the wave.” — God and Sex
If you can be intimate yourself in this way, and you can because it is natural, then this intimacy automatically extends to your partner in sexual intimacy. You learn to be connected to one another in a sublime way, neither one performing from a socially contrived script, but moving together as one in the way that Mother Nature intends.
About the Author:
Mark Whitwell has taught yoga for over three decades across the globe, and is the founder of the Heart of Yoga foundation, and the Heart of Yoga Peace Project. Mark Whitwell is interested in developing an authentic yoga practice for the individual, based on the teachings of T. Krishnamacharya (1888–1989) and his son TKV Desikachar (1938–2016), with whom he enjoyed a relationship for more than twenty years. Mark Whitwell is the author of four books: ‘Yoga of Heart,’ ‘The Promise,’ ‘The Hridayasutra,’ and, ‘God and Sex: now we get both.’ He also edited and contributed to his TKV Desikachar’s classic yoga text, ‘The Heart of Yoga.’ Mark Whitwell is a father of three and a grandfather. He now resides between New Zealand and Fiji and continues to write, teach, and speak.
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