In my intimacy coaching work, one of the main principles I emphasize is using your relationship as a vehicle for growth. The combined power of emotional openness, love, and sexual abandon is potent stuff. You can harness it to fuel your personal evolution. Here’s how:
1) Declare it. We all have our wounds. Our life’s journey is about uncovering, healing and transforming them into strengths. Our intimate relationship is going to trigger those deep-seated hurts and insecurities and bring them to the surface.
Instead of running from them and trying to pretend they don’t exist, we welcome them. We allow them into the space, and look at them as pieces of ourselves that need illumination.
As partners, we agree to help each other do this. All is welcome into the collective space: our fears, demons and human parts so that we can look at them clearly—with the help of our lover and their love—and integrate them.
2) Into-me-see. This means a commitment to radical honesty and sharing. You keep the space between you clear and unobstructed by constantly expressing your deepest feelings and desires.
This week I was working with a couple and the husband said he felt afraid to share certain things with his wife because he didn’t want to hurt her feelings. Yet, all of this unresolved stuff hangs in the space between them, obscuring them from truly seeing each other.
Open, let down your guard and keep it down. It’s in this space that you get to shed the layers of who you think you are, and discover who you really are.
Once you get to that space of naked revelation, you tap into a massive power source. Paradoxically, the more vulnerable you are with each other, the stronger you become as a unit and as individuals out in the world. You self-actualize.
3) Detachment. “Issues” are inevitable. When something comes up that needs to be addressed, instead of looking at it like something that is broken and needs to be fixed, see it as committing to a life of growth. Wherever you are, there is always another step to go, one more level to transcend.
When you have the overarching framework of a spiritual relationship, you don’t see issues as symptomatic of ongoing problems—so long as you are both committed to examining then.
Instead, these are opportunities to dissolve blocks between you and once you get through them, deepen your connection. When you do, that heightens your sexual desire for each other. Which leads us to:
4) Use sex to help you. In ancient times, sex was considered medicinal and spiritual. Even though Dr. Oz is onboard with me on the medical front, most people are still quite divided when it comes to the sexual being able to expand the spiritual. I love this quote from Shiva:
“Sex has the power of both illusion and liberation, depending on the participants’ degree of conscious awareness. When a person accepts a sexual act as a gift, exchanges take place on several different levels simultaneously.
There is a physical exchange and blending of secretions, a psychological exchange of life energies and polarities, a psychological exchange of attitudes, a Karmic exchange through a convergence of destinies—and there is a spiritual exchange, a communion between spirits.On the highest level, all these exchanges add to the quality of the couple.During high acts of Tantric sex, Karmas and unresolved personality conflicts can be totally transcended.”
Sex is the ultimate catalyst, fire-starter and amplifier. Use it. Daily. Or several times a week. The immense power of sex, combined with love, is superfuel. It can blast through stuck pattern and blocks.
As I’ve said, it’s the best superfood going.
What are other techniques you use to spiritualize your relationship?
Kim Anami is a sex and relationship coach, writer and speaker. Her musings on love, life and sex have graced the pages of Playboy, Elle, Glamour, Marie Claire and CNN.
