Deep Intimacy #01 ~ Delight

☕️ Reading time 8 minutes

“Babe, we need to talk…”

…

What happens when you imagine hearing these words?

Do you get tense? Does your breath constrict? 😬

Perhaps you start to have a sinking feeling, heaviness.

Bracing, body tight, anticipating something unpleasant is about to unfold.

The anxious is freaking out, worst case scenarios come crashing forward into this moment. Are we breaking up? Getting ready to plead a thousand reasons why we should be together.

(Or maybe the anxious is the one saying it, trying to get their partner to commit to something more serious)

Whilst the avoidant is getting ready to run… nope, no way are we going to get sucked into something too heavy. Let’s keep it light. Chill baby. We are having fun, why mess that up?

(Or maybe they are the ones saying it, ready with a litany of “it’s not you, it’s me” reasons why things need to change)

We know that things don’t feel good when they get too serious, and yet we are also compelled to think about things seriously.

What’s that about!?

Let’s dive in to our inaugural issue…
The journey from Seriousness to Delight to Ecstasy 💫💗

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The Deep Intimacy Newsletter is dedicated to exploring the mysterious world of intimacy and romantic relating.

Usually you will be receiving this on a Friday, but due to the flood of emails we sent you in the warm up sequence, we decided to delay it a couple of days.

In this issue:

• Pragmatic Explorations with Damien
• Mystical Musings with Katie
• Gravity & Levity guided practice 

Whimsy vs Serious: A tale of two shadows

We have to be serious sometimes, right?

Serious relationships.
Serious jobs.
Serious life.

“When are you going to take us seriously?”
“When are you going to take things seriously?”
“When will you take life seriously!?”

If we aren’t serious, then everything will fall apart, right?

Whimsy and seriousness represent the two sides of this shadow.
Even though they look different, the root is the same.

On one side we have pure hedonism.
Pleasure-seeking selfish indulgence.
Nothing is serious.

Never committing to anything, relationships discarded as soon as they don’t feel good.

New age flow boys and pleasure girls indulging in the feel good of the moment.
Jumping from one relationship to another, as soon as it gets difficult in any way.
A whole string of disappointed hearts.
Speaking of depth, but never really staying long enough to go deep.

Years rolling by, one whimsical experience after another.

It can be fun, but for how long?

And then the voice in your head, or your partner, or your friends, or your parents, or that person that finally had you fall says…

Grow up!

And with a heavy whack, we find ourselves… on the other side: Seriousness.

Serious dating (I‘m serious about getting in a relationship)
Serious relationship (I’m serious about getting married)
Serious marriage (I’m serious about having kids)
Serious parenting (I’m serious about having a house)
2.5 cars, mortgage, 9-5 grind grind grind.
Bills. Taxes. Diapers. School drop offs and pickups.

No time to stop and smell the roses.
Stop messing around.
Life passing by in a blur of ‘it’s all oh so important’.

Adulting so hard you forget what it’s like to enjoy life.
Rushing all the way to retirement like it’s a race.

Does it have to be one or the other?

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Gravity & Levity: The Mechanics of Delight

That heavy feeling, the one you feel when they say “we need to talk”, is a clue to unravelling this whole delicate mystery.

We feel heaviness because of this fascinating force called gravity.

And we also say stuff like “the gravity of the matter”.
When things are important, we need to take them seriously.

What’s the opposite of gravity?

Yep, levity.

How do we feel when we experience levity?

Light… of lightness… delight.

To be in delight is an experience of simultaneously acknowledging the importance of something, while holding it lightly.

“We need to talk”
OR
“I’d really love to share something with you”

“Our relationship needs to get more serious”
OR
“I’m enjoying life with you so much, I want to go deeper!”

Delight is a somatic perceptual shift.

It takes us out of the heavy seriousness (of the matter) without the naive avoidance of whimsy, by rooting in how beautiful it is that something matters to us.

“I really need you and this relationship” (Seriousness)
OR
“Let’s just relax and see where things go” (Whimsy)
VS
“I love the experience of deepening we are having here” (Delight)

When we delight in our dating and relationships, things bother us less, even though they are still just as important.

We find the possibility of levity in any moment, the way anything can be made lighter, simply by opening our heart to it.

This delighted lightness creates such a magnetic quality that as it amplifies we cannot help but feel more ecstatic…

Ecstasy is immensely magnetic and holds a reciprocal polarity to Devotion.

Delight more in what is actually right here, right now and you’ll find that commitment is easier.

The fear of commitment is just as heavy as the attachment to it.

To commit to something is to weight it with importance, but without the levity of delight it will remain heavy and a burden.

As we practice the Delight of Commitment… naturally it will evolve into Ecstatic Devotion.

Can you imagine the experience of ecstasy and devotion intertwining?

Maya, a fundamental concept of Hindu philosophy states that what we experience as real is but a great cosmic illusion.

A magnificent playground of sensual delight seeking to be fully, deeply intoxicatingly experienced.

Gravity is a force that makes this grand play possible.. for a stretched moment it bonds our infinite self to this finite world of form.

It facilitates the slowing down of energy enough that the transience can be experienced as solid, in time.

Without it we are untethered, overly whimsical. Too much and we are trapped, overly attached.

When we are in right relationship with gravity in our lives, in our relationships we are moving IN the world but not OF it. From this orientation life is profoundly meaningful as we hold each precious moment for what it is, something that has never been or will never be again.

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Shadow

The universe is always in a state of flux.

Seriousness arises when we challenge that by simultaneously holding a belief in and resistance to the reality we’re experiencing, which traps the energy like a song on repeat.

If it continues to stagnate, this energy starts to calcify imprinting on our body and psyche as true. We get attached to it’s realness, this is the only song that exists.

The once transient playlist becomes a distant memory and this song, this story, this dynamic, this circumstance is the only truth. We tighten, time compresses as we attempt to get away from it, experience narrows.

Now it feels unthinkable to imagine that this pattern, this dynamic, this relationship could ever change. But it can and all it requires is the light of our awareness.

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Gift

To delight is to be of the light, when we bring something into the light of our attention without attachment or judgement it lets go of us, we rise up and contact the bigger us.

We then remember we are the one that created the playlist, not the one living inside the high stakes drama of a toxic love song. We can then immerse ourselves in the music knowing we can skip the song or enjoy the exploration.

The choice however is ours.

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Siddhi

The delicious thing about ecstasy is it is actually always here in the body waiting to be felt. It emerges in response to our willingness to open and be fully present to receive life.

This requires inhabiting the body, the now moment.

If our awareness is running forward into time, travelling backwards into the past or up and out, we are not really here.

If we aren’t here, we can’t feel life, we can’t truly feel or experience anything.

Ecstasy lives in the depth of a moment. Here time is slow and space is expanded.

The slower we move, the more present we can be, the deeper we can receive and be touched, the more ecstatic current can be felt moving through us.

We can experience life in a state of perpetual turn on, our senses deeply engaged. The touch, taste, sound, sight, sense, smell of the moment taking us to our edge.

To touch this current is so simple it’s almost painful.. slowing down enough to not want to get anywhere but lengthen this moment through our savouring as if this now is all there was.

What if that was how we met our lover? Our children? Our life?

Gravity & Levity: Guided Meditation

Thank you so much for reading, it is our absolute delight to share with you!

This week we are deep in moving house land. Packing up, cleaning, getting ready for a big move. We are super excited as we have been living in transitional places (furnished houses) for the past year and are finally moving into the house that we intended to move into more than 6 months ago!

Somewhere we can settle in for a couple of years (and get a puppy 🐶 a kitten 🐱 some chickens 🐓 and get into the garden 🌱).

We can’t wait.

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In Love and Service,