He was a well-to-do investment banker and very attractive. He was a man who worked hard and played hard as well. The rest of the world, including his girlfriend, would have concluded that he had it all. Yet, he was in therapy, trying to figure out the meaning of his sexual fetish. For some strange reason, before he could have sex with his girlfriend, he had to masturbate to a video of two woman boxers beating each other up.(1)
What a weirdo you might say, yet his struggles are just a little out of the ordinary. We all have a shadow personality, and the more time we spend searching for the light, the more likely we will find some dark corners in our soul. Shadow work is the willingness to look were few others would. Don't beat yourself up over your shadow and don't lose sleep over how to rid yourself of it. There is a part of the self that simply doesn't want to be dragged into the light. Ask what it wants from you. A spiritual path is a journey towards the light. When you satisfy your shadow's demands in a spiritually kosher way, you will be catapulted towards wholeness and holiness.
We spiritual path travelers perceive the world much differently than the ordinary folks would. Perhaps I can illustrate this observation with a different case study. A manager has a very capable and creative colleague, but her contributions, while useful to the firm they work for, is not essential to the group he is in charge of. So when hard times fall on the company and he is asked to cut personnel costs, he lets her go without blinking an eye. What is wrong with that, you might ask, isn't he just doing what he is asked to do? Well, when you are in charge of someone, know that you have the obligation to take care of this person to the best of your abilities. The manager could have picked up the phone reaching out to other groups. It might have been hard to do, it might not even have led to anything, but when it comes to people no effort should be spared. Sadly, our manager probably had no idea that he injured himself. Just because something is the norm doesn't mean that it is right.
So please don't mind if you have problems that the ordinary folks don't have. You most likely are a step ahead of everyone else. Being "normal" is not something to aspire for, being with God is. A shadow struggle is often the beginning of a spiritual journey. And that's the best thing that could ever happen to you.
Psychotherapy can help you in your soul searching process, but to find peace there has to be the spiritual dimension as well. Consider the case of Gabor Mate (2) who treats addicts professionally, but whenever some pressure is building either at work or at home, he feels the need to go on expensive shopping binges for expensive classical CDs. Given that he is a therapist himself it was not hard for him to figure out what the origins of this irrational drive were, yet he felt as helpless as his patient when it came to the will-power to stop this craving. I remember thinking to myself that he shouldn't make a big deal out of his shopping addiction. It is what it is. What is required is a change in his life - work balance. Don't fight the symptoms of your imbalance, go after the root cause instead. Some longing of his soul must have been unfulfilled. And with that insight a magnificent soul searching journey starts.
Given that this website has found you, you are likely a spiritual traveler who has some "dark secret" like many of us. Well, consider yourself a step ahead of the well-respected manager who may not be able to profess a single dark secret, even though he may have just ill-treated a trusted friend in the name of corporate profitability. Never mind the darkness of your soul. It is just telling you that you are ready for a spiritual rebirth. You will have these dark episodes with as much certainty as the Caribbean is likely to experience a storm season this fall. Don't mind its idiosyncratic expression either. If anything, the weirder your hang-up, the higher your determination to become normal again. Well, in your search to become normal you will likely depart further and further from mainstream thinking. There is only one way to find your balance again and that is to find the Way - the Tao. By living in accordance with the demands of your soul you will take the wind out of the sails for your dark cravings. So never mind the darkness, carry on your journey into the light and your problems will fade naturally.
(1) Case study in Brett Kahr's "Who has been sleeping in your head."
(2) Gabor Mate, "In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts"
Showing posts with label Brett Kahr. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Brett Kahr. Show all posts
Monday, September 30, 2013
Friday, July 12, 2013
Observing the Thrill to Sin
When it comes to fetishes there is no telling
what turns people on. Consider this fantasy, an eighty year old scientist
pictures himself finding the Nobel prize award in his letter box. This thought
fills him with an incredible adrenaline rush and he masturbates to the idea. You
find this result and hundreds of others in Brett Kahr's book "Who has been
sleeping in your head?" You find sexual fantasies as straight-forward ego
outlets. In the case of the retired scientist, the fantasized professional award
is the feeling of power and intellectual recognition that his ego gets excited
about as he masturbates.
Not that there is anything wrong with that. We always say the homecoming process starts with acknowledging and understanding the "I". We already know from Freud that the sex drive is an incredibly strong energy field. If you repress that in the name of spirituality, expect a few Freudian slips along the way. Perhaps we are a little wiser today than a century ago when Freud developed his theories. We probably no longer presume a "normal" when it comes to sex. Actually the survey results in Brett Kahr's book would suggest there is no normal sexual fantasy. The results were all over the place. You have the traditional versions, a woman who just wants to have good sex with someone tall, dark and handsome. You have a few respondents who report they don't have any sexual fantasies, and you have the ones that are a little out of the ordinary, like the fantasy of the European scientist. And then you also find a few that many would find pretty extreme, like rape fantasies or other subjects that are kind of out there.
Brett Kahr is a psychoanalyst and he does a good job in explaining where some of these sexual fantasies are coming from. One theme became pretty clear in his book, for people who have suffered sexual abuse or have experienced other traumas in their childhood, sexual fantasies can become a way to work through these painful events. That of course begs the question, can we actually look down on any of these so-called sexual perversions. If they are just a psychological outlet to come clean with the past, they can be welcomed as a part of the recovery process instead.
We have come a long way in tolerating all kind of sexual desires. Not to long ago homosexuality was called a perversion whereas today few would. BDSM is perhaps still considered by many as extreme, but with a little help of the romantic novels "50 Shades of Grey", even that lifestyle has become somewhat of a household name. So what if we have the desire to be bound and spanked a little. If you see your ego in action played out in a sexual fantasy you perhaps have a much better chance to be mindful of it.
We are spiritual writers, not psychoanalysts or sex researchers. So we would say that it is a fine line acknowledging and expressing the demands of the "I" without being taken on yet another ego trip in the name of sexual liberation. But then, who exactly determines whether sexual drives are consistent with our spiritual path or not. If we look down on our sexual fantasies, it's probably still the ego talking, only dressed up in holy clothes beating up our "darker" desires. Perhaps this ego bashing is actually not helpful for us at all. Perhaps the guilt is standing in the way of expressing some repressed sexual energy that simply wants to come to the surface. So back and forth goes the war inside without ever resolving anything in the name of spirituality.
We advice you to be mindful of everything you are thinking, feeling and doing; listen to all the voices in your head, and let all the emotions pop up without judgement and you will know what works for your spiritual path and what not. Listening to your fantasies, perhaps even expressing some of them physically might certainly be part of your self- discovery process.
The "hunger for more" can certainly be part of our sex life, you probably have already experienced it for yourself. Expressing this drive is a road to nowhere and the sooner you jump of this train, the better off you will be. Our spiritual community has written about this restlessness already many millennia ago. The hunger for more can be found everywhere: more money, more status, more lovers, more extreme sexual experiences; you fill in the blanks. Just as we are able to observe a divine origin in us, the ability to love, a state of innocence, the ability to be absolutely still, the experience of connectedness and peace, we can observe the opposite force as well.
In fact, there is a "thrill" of going in the opposite direction of spirituality, especially when it comes to sex. The time when you zoom into body parts not people. Getting a high from watching or expressing erotic anger, or pushing the boundaries of what others would consider normal and sane. The spiritual community reminds us what you probably already know: stillness and love can be experienced and enjoyed forever, but lust will never be satisfied, no matter what we do. Reading some of the more extreme responses in the surveys you definitely wonder whether Robert J. Stoller was onto something when he developed the idea of the " thrill to sin" in "Observing the Erotic Imagination". He claimed that in sexual perversion the excitement really comes from the notion of sinning. So the "perverse mind" gets a kick out of imagining or practicing stuff that others consider taboo.
When you think about it, it is very hard to tell what exactly is sexually arousing. Your blood is rushing through your veins, your heart is beating fast, the hormones are circulating. The chemicals in your brain go into overdrive. Could the initial kick be stress related, but you mistake the physical symptoms as sexual arousal? The initial stress is related to push the boundaries, in doing something others would find revolting. But you cannot tell what is cause and what is effect. And in the end you don't care, either, all you know us that you are turned on and that you like the thrill ride.
There actually was an interesting psychological study done to illustrate this point. An attractive reporter interviewed two groups of men in a city as well as on a small bridge in a high altitude and gave them afterwards her phone number with the interaction to call her with any follow-up questions. It turned out that a significantly larger number of men did the follow-up call of the group interviewed in high altitude. Apparently they mistook their fear of heights with sexual arousal!
So where does that leave us with? Walking the Tao is never about right or wrong, it is about studying the yin and yang that lies behind everything. Who can say what sex practices and fantasies are healthy outlets of our whole being and which ones are knocking us off our spiritual path. Each spiritual path traveler has to make that call for herself. Perhaps one signpost could be stability, the absence of restlessness. The above quoted European scientist claimed that he had masturbated to the same fantasy for decades, so chances are one day he will just grow tired of it. In the "thrill to sin" the boundaries always have to stretched otherwise the experience will get boring. It is also highly addictive because that is how the hunger for more always works. When you observe this restlessness inside there is really only one practical solution: get off the treadmill and there will be peace.
Not that there is anything wrong with that. We always say the homecoming process starts with acknowledging and understanding the "I". We already know from Freud that the sex drive is an incredibly strong energy field. If you repress that in the name of spirituality, expect a few Freudian slips along the way. Perhaps we are a little wiser today than a century ago when Freud developed his theories. We probably no longer presume a "normal" when it comes to sex. Actually the survey results in Brett Kahr's book would suggest there is no normal sexual fantasy. The results were all over the place. You have the traditional versions, a woman who just wants to have good sex with someone tall, dark and handsome. You have a few respondents who report they don't have any sexual fantasies, and you have the ones that are a little out of the ordinary, like the fantasy of the European scientist. And then you also find a few that many would find pretty extreme, like rape fantasies or other subjects that are kind of out there.
Brett Kahr is a psychoanalyst and he does a good job in explaining where some of these sexual fantasies are coming from. One theme became pretty clear in his book, for people who have suffered sexual abuse or have experienced other traumas in their childhood, sexual fantasies can become a way to work through these painful events. That of course begs the question, can we actually look down on any of these so-called sexual perversions. If they are just a psychological outlet to come clean with the past, they can be welcomed as a part of the recovery process instead.
We have come a long way in tolerating all kind of sexual desires. Not to long ago homosexuality was called a perversion whereas today few would. BDSM is perhaps still considered by many as extreme, but with a little help of the romantic novels "50 Shades of Grey", even that lifestyle has become somewhat of a household name. So what if we have the desire to be bound and spanked a little. If you see your ego in action played out in a sexual fantasy you perhaps have a much better chance to be mindful of it.
We are spiritual writers, not psychoanalysts or sex researchers. So we would say that it is a fine line acknowledging and expressing the demands of the "I" without being taken on yet another ego trip in the name of sexual liberation. But then, who exactly determines whether sexual drives are consistent with our spiritual path or not. If we look down on our sexual fantasies, it's probably still the ego talking, only dressed up in holy clothes beating up our "darker" desires. Perhaps this ego bashing is actually not helpful for us at all. Perhaps the guilt is standing in the way of expressing some repressed sexual energy that simply wants to come to the surface. So back and forth goes the war inside without ever resolving anything in the name of spirituality.
We advice you to be mindful of everything you are thinking, feeling and doing; listen to all the voices in your head, and let all the emotions pop up without judgement and you will know what works for your spiritual path and what not. Listening to your fantasies, perhaps even expressing some of them physically might certainly be part of your self- discovery process.
The "hunger for more" can certainly be part of our sex life, you probably have already experienced it for yourself. Expressing this drive is a road to nowhere and the sooner you jump of this train, the better off you will be. Our spiritual community has written about this restlessness already many millennia ago. The hunger for more can be found everywhere: more money, more status, more lovers, more extreme sexual experiences; you fill in the blanks. Just as we are able to observe a divine origin in us, the ability to love, a state of innocence, the ability to be absolutely still, the experience of connectedness and peace, we can observe the opposite force as well.
In fact, there is a "thrill" of going in the opposite direction of spirituality, especially when it comes to sex. The time when you zoom into body parts not people. Getting a high from watching or expressing erotic anger, or pushing the boundaries of what others would consider normal and sane. The spiritual community reminds us what you probably already know: stillness and love can be experienced and enjoyed forever, but lust will never be satisfied, no matter what we do. Reading some of the more extreme responses in the surveys you definitely wonder whether Robert J. Stoller was onto something when he developed the idea of the " thrill to sin" in "Observing the Erotic Imagination". He claimed that in sexual perversion the excitement really comes from the notion of sinning. So the "perverse mind" gets a kick out of imagining or practicing stuff that others consider taboo.
When you think about it, it is very hard to tell what exactly is sexually arousing. Your blood is rushing through your veins, your heart is beating fast, the hormones are circulating. The chemicals in your brain go into overdrive. Could the initial kick be stress related, but you mistake the physical symptoms as sexual arousal? The initial stress is related to push the boundaries, in doing something others would find revolting. But you cannot tell what is cause and what is effect. And in the end you don't care, either, all you know us that you are turned on and that you like the thrill ride.
There actually was an interesting psychological study done to illustrate this point. An attractive reporter interviewed two groups of men in a city as well as on a small bridge in a high altitude and gave them afterwards her phone number with the interaction to call her with any follow-up questions. It turned out that a significantly larger number of men did the follow-up call of the group interviewed in high altitude. Apparently they mistook their fear of heights with sexual arousal!
So where does that leave us with? Walking the Tao is never about right or wrong, it is about studying the yin and yang that lies behind everything. Who can say what sex practices and fantasies are healthy outlets of our whole being and which ones are knocking us off our spiritual path. Each spiritual path traveler has to make that call for herself. Perhaps one signpost could be stability, the absence of restlessness. The above quoted European scientist claimed that he had masturbated to the same fantasy for decades, so chances are one day he will just grow tired of it. In the "thrill to sin" the boundaries always have to stretched otherwise the experience will get boring. It is also highly addictive because that is how the hunger for more always works. When you observe this restlessness inside there is really only one practical solution: get off the treadmill and there will be peace.
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