Stop and think for a moment-
Connection, love, pleasure, passion, contentment, peace, ease, power, excitement, energy, orgasm, ecstasy, oneness and more are a big part of what we long for in intimate relationship.
And these are all feelings!
Yet in relationship we also get to experience more challenging feelings that are less desirable, such as frustration, anger, anxiety, uncertainty, sadness, hurt, rejection, loneliness and abandonment and many more. All of these feelings are perfectly normal when two unique individuals get together. In fact, intimate relationship is ALL about feelings and emotions, it’s the one place in life they’re unavoidable. Yet we so often make so called ‘negative’ feelings wrong and want only the ‘positive’ ones.
The reality of feelings is that we either feel, or we don’t.
Feelings exist in our bodies as energy (we live near Byron Bay so we can use the ‘energy’ word!), they’re like water running through a hose; if we kink off the hose to one, we do so to all of them. Therefore, if we attempt to close off any one of our ‘negative’ emotions such as anger down, we close our ‘positive’ ones down as well.
We can’t feel pleasure and not feel our anger, we can’t feel joy without feeling our sadness or love without fear. We might think we’re feeling, but these feelings are a mere shadow of what we’re capable of, they’re just a little bit of water leaking around the kink in the hose. This applies to blissful orgasms as well!
Therefore, learning how to do great relationship (with mind blowing sex) is about re learning how to feel.
Obviously we don’t need everyone dumping their feelings all over the place, instead we learn to be emotionally intelligent.
Emotional Intelligence, or EQ (often valued more, even in business, than our IQ!) is the ability to perceive, understand, interpret, respond to, express and control our emotions, using them as a guide to our thoughts and actions, increasing our level of self awareness and enhancing our ability to communicate. EQ is also about growing our ability to perceive, understand and empathize with feelings in others, an obvious plus in creating intimacy. At Oztantra we expand this to include not only our emotions but all of our feelings, including our sexual, sensory and subtle body ones, creating a total mind/body connection.
Perhaps we should call it Om Q!
It is easy to feel the pleasurable feelings and emotions that occur at the beginning of our relationship when the excitement is new and fresh, and when we seem to have so much in common. Yet the intense and painful feelings that arise when differences emerge between us, or when we’re not having important needs or desires met can leave us believing our relationship is going down the toilet. We haven’t so much fallen out of love but have simply let our emotional fog get in the way.
These feelings are normal and a very important aspect of our work is simply supporting and guiding couples in learning the emotional skills to stay connected in their rough patches and to go deeper within them. This also is empowering for us as individuals, as in it we’re learning about ourselves in a way that will impact on every area of our lives.
It is vital to learn how we CAN FEEL and be IN CONTROL in a way that works FOR us, rather than limits us as feeling intelligently allows us to be heart open and available for relationship.
Not to mention some steamy, very pleasurable sex…
In intimate relationship feeling our emotions, in fact all of our feelings, is a non negotiable skill set. It’s the one place in life where we can’t totally deny or avoid our feelings. Especially since we can only feel connected with another to the degree we have connected with, or felt ourselves.
- Take a moment to feel right now.
- Take your attention to body (where feelings happen),
- Notice what is present there,
- Take a few deep breaths,
- Notice your body as you’re sitting,
- Have a stretch,
- Feel relaxation happening;,
- Bring your attention to more subtle sensations in your belly, chest, throat, genitals.
- What do you discover?
- Even discovering nothing is something…
For those of us searching for the real juice, power, magic, mystery or even the divine in life, then awakening to our feelings in intimacy, heart connection and sex is the pathway. The more you go there the more benefits you will find.
Finally, in our work we have come to appreciate how men and women are different in the way they feel and express their feelings. Why this is so is a subject for another day. Here we simply acknowledge that both masculine and feminine ways have positive and negative aspects to them and that understanding these differences will allow us to hear and respect ourselves more clearly and each other more fully.
Now that you can see the importance of feelings we’re hope you’re excited to learn more!
