Meditation as an intimate path

The practice of meditation and the capacities therein are directly related to our ability to establish, deepen and sustain intimacy in our lives. What is more essential to authentic relationship than tuning into our own heart, listening more deeply to our own voice and intuition, cultivating a peaceful surrender and developing our capacity to witness our own and another's true nature?

Turning our consciousness inwards is a basic ingredient in being able to listen, hold, respect and attend to another. Intimate relating can falter on the rocks of not being able to stay in tune with, and "hold onto", oneself. Feeling trapped, suffocated or overwhelmed by the other's intensity reflects an incapacity to hold energy, to ground one's own being, to listen objectively and to speak intersubjectively.

As I quiet my mind and find a greater calm within the chaordic turbulence of life's ebb and flow, I develop an ability to listen deeply to what is, to ground myself in my own sensate experience, to ask deeper questions and and find insight into who i am and what my purposes and intentions are. This is essential to being intimate with another. Gnosis: self-knowing. How else can we possibly attend to another without losing oneself and in an authentic way?

I can then listen to another as a vessel, as an openness, as a container that can behold the similarities and resonances between us while respecting the differences. I can then speak from a place of knowing rather than guessing. I can speak with a sensitivity to the other's capacities for taking in my self-revealing, sensing into the way my revelations are "landing" in the other, an experience of inter-subjective, I-Thou, relatedness.

Intimacy is so much more than sex: tho' sex is a great way to experience and express and deepen intimacy, it can also be an avoidance on some levels of true vulnerability and soulful contact. The two, sex and intimacy, are not exactly the same... more on this in another blog...

your thoughts currently on intimacy??