April 11, 1991 Thursday Morning Group
Love, Sexuality, Relationship
This talk has been reviewed for posting by I. Mook-Jodouin with Barbara’s permission.
Q talks about a documentary on pornography called, “Not A Love Story.” He shares his feelings and reactions to watching it: feelings of hopelessness and fear, realizations of the seriousness of this problem.
Aaron: My greetings and love to you all. Thank you for sharing this, Q. Beyond anything else, it points out to me the pain and confusion that so many beings have about their sexuality, and how divorced that is from any spiritual aspect to themselves. What could be less spiritual than experiencing sex through sexual arousal, through masturbation while looking through a window at a peep show and putting quarters in a slot every thirty seconds?
And yet, your bodies do have physical sexual needs. The reason such pornography flourishes is because the needs of your body are not met honestly. There’s so much shame about the arising of a physical desire. At times you may feel it inappropriate. You are physical beings in your incarnations. You have bodies. Your bodies have nerve endings and other such paraphernalia that lead to a sexual appetite, let us say.
(Comment from reviewer: It’s unclear what pornography Aaron is referencing when he talks about “such pornography”. Is he talking about all pornography in general or a specific type? Perhaps some clarification on the documentary’s nature/content would make clear if this is a generalization of all pornography or not.)
When you are walking down the street and haven’t had breakfast, and pass a restaurant where good scents are flowing out the door, your mouth waters. You’re aware of the arising of hunger in you. Perhaps it’s a bakery and you’re on a diet and you say, “This food is not appropriate, but I recognize that I’m hungry. I need to find a place where I can find appropriate food.” Perhaps you’ve decided to fast. You still notice the arising of hunger and say, “It’s not appropriate that I eat right now, but still there is hunger. I’m aware of it.” Or perhaps, you’re neither fasting nor dieting and you simply go in and you buy yourself a doughnut or croissant.
Obviously, this is far simpler. Feeding oneself food is a far less spiritual pursuit. And yet, the physical hungers of the body do arise in much the same way. But rather than its being a simple matter of acknowledging that arising of sexual energy, there’s shame and embarrassment and confusion about it. This is what leads to so much of the distortion about sexuality in your society.
In many primitive societies where sexuality is taken much more for granted, where there’s no discomfort over one’s sexuality, pornography simply could not flourish. I’m not suggesting that sexuality should be taken purely as a physical need. And you know I’ve stressed the importance of the harmony between the physical and spiritual. But neither can one suppress that physical need and simply pretend it doesn’t exist. It is not necessary to eat every time one is hungry, but it is necessary to acknowledge that hunger is arising.
Some of you feel disgust at the idea of such pornography and that there are those who do find themselves sexually titillated by that. Certainly there are places where it is a crime against others as in the abuse of children for pornographic purposes. But, nevertheless, I ask you to look at this disgust and try to understand with some compassion the fear and confusion that leads people to express their sexuality in such a distorted manner.
I ask each of you here, privately, to be as honest with yourselves as you can. I ask you to address some sexual fantasy of your own. If you were in an entirely private situation and suddenly in the room in front of you, on the stage in front of you, in the grove in the woods in front of you, however you imagine it, that scene began to play itself, would you not find yourself sexually aroused? Be honest. We’re not talking about spirituality here. We’re talking more about that potato chips ad: “I’ll bet you can’t eat just one!” The appetite is aroused. The body is partly physical.
Let me ask you another question and again, privately, to be honest with yourselves. Picture yourself in a totally private environment, perhaps an island that you’ve boated to, and suddenly there appears on that island a being of either the same or opposite sex, as suits your inclination, who is very attractive. And that being simply walks over and begins to kiss you and touch you in sexual way. There would certainly be resistance, but can you perceive that the mere touching of the body could also lead to sexual arousal? You would be torn, perhaps. There would be shame about such arousal: “I shouldn’t feel arousal like this. I don’t know this person.” But if you had been assured that it was absolutely safe, can you see yourself letting go and allowing this and truly being stimulated by it sexually?
It is very important to recognize, let’s not call it “animal nature” because it feels, although I don’t mean it to be derogatory, it feels derogatory to some of you, the plain physical nature of your bodies. When your bodies are touched in a certain way, they respond. It’s not something the mind is controlling. It’s simply something that happens. Now, on that secluded island, you might be able to allow yourself to experience the sexuality without shame. But for the most part in your lives there is shame when this happens. There’s a sense of “I shouldn’t feel arousal.” What do you do with that?
You’re surrounded by pornography of this sort. You’re surrounded, if not by pornography, by semi-nude bodies. Is there any one among you who, walking down a street, has not seen a body that simply aroused you? Just looking at that being, felt a sense of sexual excitement? Not that you acted on it. But is there any among you that has never felt that? How can you become more at home with your bodies, less condemning to your bodies?
I’m not suggesting here that you go out and act on these physical desires so much as that you let go of the judgment against your body for responding as a body. When your sexuality begins to be more natural to you, there will be far less distortion around it. And when it ceases to be so frightening and uncomfortable to many of you, pornography will no longer be able to flourish because people will acknowledge the arising of sexual impulses and have learned how to put them aside skillfully when they’re inappropriate, and to better harmonize sexuality and spirituality to seek a more loving sexual relationship rather than needing to separate the two.
There is more here that I’d like to speak of, but I believe you have questions. We’ll pause here. That is all.
Q: I’m feeling a lot of confusion about sexuality right now and the last couple of weeks that we’ve been talking about it. I didn’t think I was confused about it before, but suddenly as we’re talking about it I’m now confused about it. Sometimes lovemaking is deeply spiritual as well as sexual, and sometimes it seems only to be sexual. Is that wrong?
Aaron: Is it largely physical because of fear of a deeper intimacy or because at that moment you have simply let yourself go into being in the now of your body, simply experiencing each moment in a physical way and that spirituality has not been part of that moment, although it’s part of the entire relationship? You don’t always need to be thinking about love in spiritual terms to be expressing love through your bodies. But you do need to ask yourself, “What am I expressing? Am I expressing love or anger? Am I simply allowing my body to react to physical stimuli while I withdraw my heart because of fear or anger?”
So, I can’t answer your question except to say that when you say, “Is it wrong?,” I would not use the term “wrong” so much as unskillful. To escape spiritual intimacy through fear is unskillful and may be destructive to both beings involved. To become physically aroused by a partner whom one loves and simply move with that physical arousal without any thought of spirituality is not unskillful. It’s simply being in the moment. Does that answer your question?
Q: When one partner chooses pornography for sexual stimulation and the other partner feels themselves moved from being a loving partner of that relationship being made love to, to an object of pornography, how do we handle that?
Aaron: This is not a question only of one partner’s use of pornography, but of any situation where one partner needs to avoid spiritual intimacy and turn a sexual relationship into a purely physical relationship. When the partner who desires it to be a loving relationship doesn’t feel loved but feels it’s only physical, whether pornography is involved or not, this is a problem.
There is deep pain in this because each of you wants to feel loved, and such love that most deeply combines the spiritual and physical feels to you to be the most total way of expressing your love for another, and feeling another’s love for you expressed. It is a total love that each of you crave.
I would first ask you to look at the partner’s fear here, that the use of pornography or any other escape to the purely physical is precisely that: an escape. So, can you begin to ask yourself, and perhaps your partner, “What is this fear of intimacy?” Can you begin to allow both of you to see that more clearly? The being who is just learning to open to another, to allow the vulnerability of real intimacy, may feel too threatened to express that sexually.
It may be far easier to work up to it gradually, in a sense, to talk about the desire that you both probably have for intimacy, for even the being who fears it also desires it, to allow the partner to see both the desire and the fear of intimacy and allow verbal situations for intimacy or nonsexual physical situations such as simply going for a walk and holding hands, being together in a deeper way. What is needed here is for the partner who is afraid of intimacy to become willing to investigate a bit, if not for themselves then because they see that they’re creating pain for the partner through the withholding of their love.
This is obviously something that must be discussed in very non-blaming terms, not “You do this or that,” but, “When this happens, I don’t feel loved. And I know you love me, but I can’t feel that love when this happens. How can we begin to work around that and allow me to feel that love? How can I help you to feel my love more deeply? What fears do we each have toward allowing the feeling of that love?”
In any such situation there has been, and perhaps still is, some level of co-dependence. The being who has not allowed intimacy, who is frightened of that, has been aided in that non-allowing by the being who now sees that they desire that intimacy, who is moving past the fear. But in the past, in some way, your own acceptance of the lack of intimacy from the other has been protection for you as well.
Let’s move to that for a moment because it is easier to start with yourself. Let’s use this given example for illustrative purposes: The partner finds sexual stimulation through pornography in lovemaking. The person who has raised the question feels unloved and feels herself to be simply a sex object. The partner has chosen this course because of a fear of intimacy. The one asking the question then needs to ask herself, “In what ways has his lack of intimacy protected me? In what ways have I ever nurtured that? In what ways does his intimacy feel threatening to me?”
This is true not only of the one who voiced this question today, but of many of you are dealing with this issue. In what ways is it safer to allow that in your partner and avoid the intimacy? What pain is there when that full sexual and spiritual intimacy is allowed? Can you begin to see how vulnerable that makes you? Is there any one of you who has not suffered some pain from a primary sexual partner and feels some need to protect yourself against the possibility of future pain through building some shielding to protect yourself from full intimacy?
So, this is one place to start: looking at this in yourself and opening the way of communication with your partner, just beginning to talk about it, not in a “You do this” sense but in a “I do this” sense, “I see my own fear of intimacy and I’m working to get past that. Do you see your fear of intimacy? How can we work together to get past that, so our relationship can become much more deeply loving and spiritually satisfying?”
Moving on then to what you do with this partner, what you do with the feelings when you’re making love and feel yourself to be a sex object. Perhaps you have tried to talk about this question of intimacy and find that the partner simply isn’t ready to hear that, that you’ve moved ahead of your partner a bit and your needs are different.
There are none of you here today who are involved in a sexual relationship where there is not some degree of love. Therefore, even if the partner’s needs are different, that partner still has enough love for you to want to consider your needs. You must also have enough love for them to respect that they are where they are and not where you wish they were, and to try to respect their needs. If another being has such fear that he’s retreated into this tunnel and pulled the strands across (that we’ve described), do you have the right to go in and cut those out and simply say, “Don’t be afraid”?
Can you begin to see then that that being’s use of pornography is not a statement of his lack of love for you, but a statement of his own fear? This will depersonalize it a bit. It may allow you to help him fulfill his fantasy while you simultaneously remind him, “I also need to know that I’m loved.”
Compromise is possible. But communication must precede compromise. And this is such a sensitive area about which to try to communicate. It must be done without blame and with respect for both people’s needs. In other words, you especially must be careful not to try to shame him or blame him for needing to put these strands across his tunnel, for needing to create a separation. But instead begin to work in nonsexual areas in establishing deeper trust to help him to lower the strands, to establish communication.
I remind you, painful as it may be, that this is part of your work. This is part of what you’re here for: to learn a deeper compassion, to let go of judgment of yourself and others, to allow both yourself and those around you to bring more light into themselves.
There is one more thing I would say here. You must be aware of the degree of anger that arises in you when you feel yourself moved from a beloved sexual and spiritual partner to simply a sex object. There’s that anger that arises and then, immediately, that in you that says, “No, I shouldn’t judge,” to all that judgment that comes through and all that self-criticism. You have a right to be loved. Why shouldn’t you feel angry when the person to whom you look for a primacy source of love can’t give you that?
Anger and compassion are not mutually exclusive, and you can feel compassion for his fear and his situation and still feel anger at your own deprivation. Acknowledging that anger is the only way not to bury it and have it fester. You can’t be honest until you can acknowledge that anger to yourself. It may not be skillful to share that anger with your partner. You will have to decide that, each of you, depending on your situation.
At times it may not be skillful to deprive your partner of the full communication of all you’re feeling. He or she may need to know that you’re angry and hurt. We come here to something I’d like to talk about at length another week, and that is the very subtle line between co-dependency and compassion. For now, let me close here and see if you have questions about what I’ve said. That is all.
Q: I was talking to my partner this morning about realizing the attraction in me toward deeper intimacy that I have become aware of through these talks. I was saying that I know my biggest pull is toward learning love and moving toward God. And I hope that that will happen, partly through our marriage and increasing intimacy with him. I said that I know it is a want. I was acknowledging that the desire to connect with him is a strong want, not a need, because I will continue the growth in any case. I was also mentioning the fear that I experience that he won’t want to work on that with me, and that he will simply choose to find an equilibrium and a “slightly closer distance” and not choose to continue working on this issue.
He was saying, “Do you see how your want creates your fear?” Yes, I can see that. But I was saying that there is also a pull out of love and a vision of what is possible. He kept insisting that any want was a distortion. I know he has fear of intimacy and sees how “wanting mind” works. He is very determined not to serve ego wants. The question is about the difference here between seeing the possibilities and creating an attachment to an idea of intimacy.
Comment: I can really relate to all that you just said. I just wanted to say that when you talked about the wanting creating a fear, for me it feels like my fears have created the wanting.
Aaron: Both of your questions are understood. I believe it was with this group that I spoke about perfectionism coming from both love and fear. Am I correct? (Yes, see 3-7-91 transcript.) Can you see that it’s much the same thing, that the desire for deeper intimacy comes from both of these same places, from love and from fear?
The places where it arises from love are from a recognition of the depth of love that is possible between two beings, that there will always be some sense of separation, perhaps, but that you have chosen to be here together to support each other in growing beyond fear. And one of the ways you can do this is through the expression of your love through your bodies, and the expression of the love of your souls, both through your eyes and words, and through your bodies.
It raises you to a higher vibrational frequency. It allows you to fulfill the true potential of your humanity, which is the use of the physical form to express love. Seeing that, there is a desire for that which has nothing to do with ego want, but simply is love, comes from God and reaches out to God. That which you love is that of God in each other, in both spiritual and physical ways.
And then, of course, there is the other side: the voice of fear. “I feel separation. I’m afraid of this separation. I want to cut all the strands that separate us. I’m afraid of aloneness. I want to move past that aloneness by feeling the connection with the other.” This is the self becoming solider and solider, “I want, I’m afraid.” There’s nothing wrong with that fear. But your partner is right: to indulge that fear is to solidify the self. And the person who commented is right that the voice of wanting at times is the voice of fear. You can learn to separate the two, simply to see when fear is arising when it’s a voice of ego and when it’s a voice of love.
So, what do you do with this voice of fear when it comes up? How do you deal with it? How do you separate them for yourself, and how can you help your partner understand that there are both voices, and that the fact that he’s hearing only the voice of fear comes from his own fear of intimacy, that he’s not allowing the voice of love through? I believe that you can communicate that skillfully and allow him to begin to open to his own fears of intimacy.
Wanting is a very strange thing. I believe it’s very important that you said that you don’t need this intimacy, but you want it. At the point where you need it, there’s attachment, there’s fear. At the point where you want it, you are simply open to allowing it.
In your most natural form, where there’s no fear of any sort, you are completely open. There are no barriers. It’s the state that I’ve described to you that we reach when we’re past the limits of the physical and emotional bodies, where there’s total telepathic communication. There is nothing I hold back from another with whom I’m in such telepathic contact because of embarrassment or shame. There is total sharing.
It’s almost impossible for there to be that kind of total sharing while you are incarnate in a body. And yet, your soul understands, your higher self understands, that such sharing is indeed possible. Thus, what your higher self asks of the physical body is to begin to allow that sharing through a deeper recognition of whatever fear there is to allow it. This is where you come into not wanting it so much as allowing it.
It might be helpful to express this to your partner, that it is not a wanting, in terms of the egocentric self reaching out and craving, so much as an allowing of that which is there to unfold because all the obstacles have been moved out of its path, (those obstacles being the ego and all of the ramifications of the ego). Do you wish me to speak further on this or has this answered your question?
Q: (Not on tape.)
Aaron: My dear one, this has nothing to do with your husband who had nothing to do with the sexual abuse of your children. Understanding that, it is important that you begin to see how much anger there is against yourself still because you feel you did not protect your children, that you in some way allowed this to happen. You are correct, there is a correlation here in that it has limited your trust. But it’s not mistrust of your husband, it’s mistrust of yourself. And it would seem to me that you’re misdirecting this anger at yourself toward him because it’s so painful to see how angry you are, not just at yourself but at those who abused the children.
You say it (forgiveness work?) has helped you with the hatred. There’s a difference between hatred and anger, and there is still a great intensity of anger toward both them and yourself. There’s also a good deal of anger at your children, which you know is totally irrational because they didn’t allow this to happen. But, nevertheless, there’s anger. And it’s so very hard to allow that anger because there’s so much judgment against it because your rational mind knows that your children did not cause the situation and are innocent of blame there.
I believe what you’re seeing is that all of this anger is something that might be seen through with deeper intimacy. And so a part of you does desire this intimacy. Another part of you needs to push it away. And thus, you enter into this area of co-dependency, of allowing his escape of intimacy because it’s safer for yourself. Do you wish me to speak more on this or has this answered your question?
Q: How do I work with this?
Aaron: Awareness and forgiveness, and more awareness and more forgiveness. But beyond that, beginning to nurture whatever small fragile seeds of love and trust there are, asking yourself to allow yourself to trust, especially yourself. The awareness in itself will help you, but isn’t healing. See the strength in you, the love, the trust, the ability to communicate that trust even if it’s just the tenderest sprout having barely broken the surface. Nurture that with your love.
In practical terms, nurture any bit of deep intimacy between the two of you. Notice it. Rejoice in it, as small as it seems. Allow it. Allow the sunshine of your love to shine on it. Notice how threatening that little tiny sprout is, how you tend to want to shut it out at the same time as you want to open to it, so that you won’t allow yourself to shut it out. Notice whatever resistance there is to watching it grow. Begin to communicate to your partner both your fear of that intimacy, of watching that grow, and your rejoicing in that. And ask him to begin to communicate both his fear and his joy. Do you have questions? (No.)
You all have both within you: this loving desire for greater intimacy, not from ego space, but from a space of joy and love, and the fear of that intimacy. There is more confusion over this than in any other part of your lives: how that intimacy is best expressed, in what terms can it most lovingly be spoken? There is not one among you who doesn’t feel some deep shame over some type of sexual feeling or another. There is perhaps deeper shame there than in any other aspect of your lives.
You’re better able to allow that at times there is such intense anger that you’d like to kill someone, to let that feeling come in without strong judgment against it and know that you would not kill, but that that intensity of anger can at times be there, or has been there at some time. You can allow that better than you can allow the shame over some of your sexual feelings which seem inappropriate in one way or another.
I ask each of you to begin to look at these in the same way that I’ve asked you to look at your anger, to see that it is simply phenomena arising from conditions. There need be no deep sense of guilt or shame because of the responses of your body, but you also don’t need to be a slave to those physical responses any more than you need to be a slave to your anger or your jealousy. As you learn both deeper awareness and non-judgmentalism of all of these forces within you, you will move to a deeper sense of your own true spiritual nature, to a deeper comfort with yourself and an acceptance of others.
Most of you responded with strong aversion or disgust to the subject of pornography that Q brought up at the beginning of our discussion today. You would find it easier to forgive a murderer than to forgive one who sexually abuses a child in pornography. Can you begin to look at that in yourselves? Because the level of your inability to forgive that being comes from the place within you where you have not yet forgiven yourself for any distortion in your sexuality.
I believe enough has been said today and if there is time I would suggest either a very brief guided meditation or simply joining hands and sitting in silence for a few minutes and sharing each other’s love and support. That is all.
(We sit in a circle with hands joined.)
Try to feel the love and trust that flows around this group. When I speak of these sexual issues that are very painful and difficult for some of you, it pulls you away from feeling yourselves to be spirits and more into the issues of the physical. Please remember that you are spirits housed in these bodies, and that these are not physical issues but spiritual issues, and the learning offered involves the harmonization of both mind and body.
Come back for a moment now to the body. Sit up straight, if you will, to allow a clearer flow of energy. Visualize or feel the light shining down from above that touches this whole room, feeling yourselves all sitting in this cylinder of light. No long meditation here. Just breathe in this light. Feel yourself sending it out to those whose hands you hold and receiving it from them. We’re not going to send it around in one direction today, just an equal giving and receiving so that it’s not “your” light or energy but the light and energy of the whole group moving through all of you. Allow that of God in each of you to be cherished and shared.
There is nothing within any of you that is not sacred, including all the feelings of the body, physical and emotional. This body is perfect for the work it has been given. Learn to trust that, and trust your humanness. And cherish that humanness in yourself and in others. Trust the love that is offered you by those closest to you in your lives, even when there is a fear of offering that love, and by those such as myself on the spirit plane, and by God.
Whenever you are ready, drop your hands. There is no rush. That is all.