Two questions for today’s post—but exactly the same (deeper) theme:
- ‘How does a lover of women resist that urge to stare at a woman’s curves?’
And, secondly, a far more insidious question. Something men never post in our group, but never fail to ask me away from the prying crowd, when we meet in person or at a conference:
- ‘I get lots of women, and the sex starts off great. But after a few dates my interest wanes, and her drama starts to pick up. How the hell do you find a good woman you actually want to have a relationship with? Maybe I should leave xyz country, and go [to where the grass is greener].’
This question goes to the heart of it.
Sure, we’d all like to know that women enjoy the energy of our gaze more than the gaze of the next man in line. No-one wants to be a lech. But the pain of knowing you’re attractive to women—and yet none of your relationships ever satisfy—is like a puzzle with no resolution.
In my last entry we talked a little about early-stage trauma: where you either leave your body, freeze your body, or fawn over women you’d rather keep your cool around. Today we’re looking at later-stage trauma and boyhood conditioning: where healthy, strong, expressive young children pick up harmful defences, or cut themselves off from their bodily intelligence, so that they become a rigid picture of social success.
But first, a story:
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Eyes Wide Shut x MDMA
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Many times throughout my Amorati adventures, I took my one travel bag and perched myself amidst a city where I might find the perfect note, an alabaster girl, and the source of—though I wouldn’t have used this word at the time—healing.
Not long after arriving one spring in Boulder, Colorado, I was offered a series of sessions in ’sexological bodywork’. Sexological. Not just a one-off, mind. A series.
‘They’d be free,’ the woman told me. ‘I’m finalising my practitioner training’.
‘It’s a highly specific therapeutic practice where you lay down, and I massage your genitals, and you simply explore the flow of energy in your body.’
She needed no more words to sign me up.
Initially I was a little trepidatious, not quite sure of the rules and the boundaries, and caught off-guard by the way that, in the midst of an erotic moment, I wasn’t expected to do anything or perform. Over the course of a few weeks, I essentially became an electric current, enjoying my cock become ever-more sensitive, spending my Tuesday afternoons in the cool daylight of the massage table.
Interestingly, each session ended with the trainee moving my sexual energy up to my heart, and finishing, in a meditation, with one of her hands over my relaxing penis, and her other hand over my heart. Integrating the energies.
Anyway, a few weeks passed and another offer came my way.
‘My supervisor is in town next week, and she wants to see how I’m doing. I understand this might be a little uncomfortable for you, to be witnessed by a more experienced woman, and so we wondered how you would feel about receiving a four-handed session of the bodywork?
My jaw dropped. ‘You think I would ever say no to that?’ I’m sure all my ‘energies’ had traveled up to my face at that point, and turned it red.
It didn’t take long, as we began the four-handed session, until I dropped into a deep feeling of bliss. You feel the experience of expert hands in every flutter of their touch, and you can let go immediately into their control. It wasn’t just the sensation of the four hands that took me deeper, but some magnetic field of love, or maybe the rapt attention of two women, moving and fondling me beyond any need I ever realised I had. As the session reached its close, and I drifted back from the galaxies and into the moment, as four hands now pressed upon my cock and my heart.
The bodywork sessions, while I didn’t understand them, I was happy to let them flow without the need to ask questions. The thing with the hands on the heart, though, I did inquire about.
‘Many of us have a heart-sex split,’ the supervisor started. ‘This manifests in our lives as sleeping with partners we don’t feel love for, and falling in love with those we cannot obtain. Many men spend years unable to feel love and lust with the same woman, at the same time. This, of course, goes back to childhood trauma, is propagated in pornography, and runs through the adult body as energy patterns—or energy limitations. The healing work can be done by consciously re-routing your sexual energy, and dissolving any blockages that dissociates the more pelvis-based sexual passion, from your more chest-based sweetness and vulnerability.
Some people have a whole host of shame and trauma come up, just when they place attention of their pelvic and genital regions—and especially when they receive a conscious hand. For others, the vulnerability of feeling their heart in the midst of full-bodied arousal is just too tender to bear.’
A few more weeks passed, and after arriving through the green lanes of Boulder in the Colorado mid-summer, a third invitation came my way.
The trainee lingered at the doorway in a flowing, black dress. ‘We’ve been invited to showcase our work publicly,’ she purred.
‘This means we’ll give a public demonstration of the four-handed bodywork.’
The supervisor came out of the kitchen, now dressed in white.
‘We need a female body for the demonstration, and we have a beautiful woman joining us. We’re now just looking for the male model.’
Within moments I was ushered into the back room with the massage bed. My pants were soon down. All four eyes, and all four hands, were pointed at me.
The public demonstration happened on a Friday night, at something like 11pm. It was in a local cultural centre—lots was going on—and there was a distinct Burning Man vibe. The session was to happen in the basement, in a darkened room with red-painted walls, and more than thirty-five people crowded into this tiny space, too see four female hands manipulate this fresh-plucked. When no-one else fit into the room, the door locked. If the first four-handed massages weren’t already overwhelming, the feeling was a hundred-fold magnified by the awareness of onlookers huddled together in the basement—some of whom were men, but of whom the vast majority were women.
So I removed my shirt, my trousers, and finally, I stepped out of my underpants. I was the only one naked there, hidden only by the oils, scented candles, the perfume of the audience. I was ushered onto the massage table. As I looked up I could see the room’s red walls, and immense shadows of black. I remember so many women standing with their lips moist and parted, and their eyes dilating with compassion, and before long I was arching and moaning, in such a state I could no longer tell if my eyes were closed open or wide shut.
I simmered there for almost an hour. As the session reached its climax, and waves took me to where my mouth opened in a series of silent screams, I felt the supervisor come between my long-splayed frog legs, and, let’s just say, after checking with me, a brief meeting of eye and eye, I gave my acquiescence, and she applied the crowning masterpiece of her work, slipping just a half-nail tip of one finger into a place where, in the context of a male body, a finger shouldn’t go. A crack of thunder ripped through the room. I was bathed in love and taken, by an overwhelming force. As if I’d taken six doses of MDMA.
After the session finished, I took a few moments of downtime, picked up my clothes, and joined the rest of the festival. For hours I had people—well, dozens of women—approach me with beaming eyes, thanking me for my bravery, and the ‘healing’ treat they’d just witnessed. I was so wired up with sexual energy I made out with at least six of these women: I leaped at them, like a teenager in a high-school party, pulling them deeply into me. And it wasn’t just sexual energy that wired me, a radical empathy crept in, too. ‘I know what it’s like to be penetrated,’ I said to myself, ‘and gaze-raped by the thirsty eye!’
As that summer solstice passed, I got my Tuesday afternoons back, and I moved on with my life.
But something happened during the rest of that summer, and it continues until this day. It was as if my sex and my heart, my love and my lust, all started to come together. I’d start falling for the women I slept with, especially in the moments we made love. Then, I’d want to sleep with the women I was emotionally touched by, and give all of myself to in a full-blooded way. The world had become vibrant. Everyone and everything seduced me… I no longer hunted in order to get off. It was an overwhelming shift.
The witches had accomplished their work.
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Back to today’s questions:
Yes, in both cases, the answer is to resolve the energetic split between your sex and your heart.
1] Integrating the ‘Male Gaze’
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When you open the channels of your body, you can feel sexual lust coarse through you, but feel the enchantment of an innocent boy, all at the same time. Zan talks about this in a metaphorical way, but you can see it like electricity in a tube: your arousal current and your heart current can meet and entwine… as long as there’s no material build-up between them.
The good news is that, for integration, you don’t need exotic four-handed therapy sessions. You can do this yourself. Instead of vacating your body to porn, become conscious as you pleasure yourself. Some tips:
- When you fantasise, no matter how your fantasy begins, make sure that, as the scene climaxes, you imagine the woman of your fantasies orgasming so deeply that both her and you dissolve into pure, ecstatic light.
- When you touch yourself, see how long you can keep the simmer of pleasure going for, without release. I dare you to make half and hour.
- Then, start to touch your heart with one hand as you masturbate. This will move erotic energy up from your pelvis and link it to your heart. You will train that electrical channel to work in permanent tandem.
Many men ask us, how do I link my lower and my upper energy together? This is a very practical way in which you can do it. You might need another practice to release any blockages that come up, but this is a stable way of undergoing a ‘re-wiring’.
Back to your question:
You can’t really do some quick, behavioural thing to fix your ‘male gaze’. Because the quality of your gaze is determined by the integration (and freedom) of different energies in your body. And yet, gazing upon her is an essential part of attraction. You need to witness her, be enlivened by her, and to be seen by her as you witness her. This is the very process of attraction.
Now, if you have a great integration of sex and heart energy, and this integration is just part of your ongoing internal reality, then every time you smile at a woman, she will feel your sweetness and your power, combined. There is no need to avert your gaze from women’s curves if your heart is in this way involved.
On the other side of things, if women don’t seem to enjoy your gaze—they clench up at some predatory or shame-filled quality within your smile—you will need to undergo a little (or, let’s be honest, some substantial) re-wiring.
So that your lust be flavoured with compassion and delight.
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2] All Women are Drama Queens, and I’m Never Satisfied
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If you identify with the second question today, and you’re typically the subject of your woman’s complaining, and you struggle to find satisfaction in love, consider this:
It is your sex-drive that takes you to her. But since you struggle to open your heart when your sex is leading the way, she will be opening to you, yet you remain unavailable. It is no wonder she complains. And no wonder, then, that you pull away. Which has her complain all the more.
Where I get interested is in the sex itself. If you slow down the next time you have sex, and feel what is going on in your body, what do you find? Is there any discernible emotional texture in you? Do you feel your heart? Is there actually a subtle constriction in your abdomen or diaphragm? Or your neck or your face? The musculature that protects your heart from the swirling erotic energy will be in action, and if you’re precise enough, you can feel it. But then, if your goal is to come in some explosive way—or you slide further into some extreme form of fucking as a compensation for your lack of feeling—you’ll miss the subtlety of awareness you’ll need to understand your sexual truth.
To resolve this dynamic, your work is to heal your heart-sex split. This means looking straight into the eye of your shadow, and asking yourself very honestly:
- Do you secretly have some pejorative beliefs around women, such as seeing women as inferior to you?
- How tight is the closure of your emotional life? Do you sometimes use aggression as a mask over more vulnerable feelings?
- Do you call up (seduce) women the most when you feel some inner angst or loneliness? Do you have an addiction, then, to use women (instead of, say, beer or marijuana) as an antidote to your craving?
The real (and challenging) antidote here is to practice not having sex until your heart truly opens to someone. Please note: I am not shaming men for engaging in this kind of sex. I have lived there. Many of the women I’ve loved have used me for such reasons, too!
- What is the real motivation for you to seduce women? Particularly, are you motivated from the validation you get from other men? Or that you get off when celebrated as a playboy?
- What is your trust like in women? Perhaps you love women, but your trust is roll-paper thin. Perhaps something happened as a child that had you conclude: I can’t trust anybody, and have to take care of myself.
- Thinking of the emotional (mainly non-sexual) women partners (or friends) in your life, can you be honest enough to identify the needs these women take care of? And what it is like if these needs are not met?
If a painful experience happened in any of these themes, your body will carry a wound, which contributes to the heart-sex split.
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Making it Practical
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We form conclusions about women in our boyhood, and these conclusions show up in our bodies, saving us from predicted bad outcomes, but restricting our energy flow. When I consider the six questions above, I’ve had wounding and unconsciousness in every section, which I discover—and work through—bit by bit.
To heal this heart-sex split, one needs to get beneath these experiences, remember them, feel them, and process the inner, painful memories, that came to shape your adult life.
How does one go about this healing?
Therapeutic shadow work. Journalling. Daily practice—awareness and embodiment. A healthy adult relationship, where you share your closures with someone you love. ‘Psychedelics’ are a popular answer today… although I recommend you don’t outsource your inner work to a plant: chip away at it first with your own curiosity.
Practice wiring your energetic circuitry: the closer you come to orgasm, and the more you feel your heart, the more likely old wounding can come up. And when pain comes up to be healed during sex… wow. Marvin Gaye was right: there’s such a thing as true sexual healing.
What we’re talking about here, with the heart-sex split, is overcoming the dichotomy of the Madonna and the Whore. Many men keep a wife and a lover: they can’t seem to get the totality of woman in one woman.
And so we often fantasise, that one day we’ll stumble upon a reference experience—an imprint—of a woman of such grace and spirit that she embodies both Madonna and Whore in your presence. A veritable Alabaster Girl!
Sure, you can travail around the world and chase down this magical creature. You might even seek out two sex-bod practitioners and red-hot underground room. Or, you can do something entirely within your control: you can practice embodiment daily, exploring yourself, sinking ever deeper into awareness.
Here’s the secret to overcoming the Madonna-Whore complex: the more integrated you become on the inside, the more you’ll be able to draw both archetypes out from the same woman. In many cases, you will create the fullness of woman that you desire. Your presence will evoke it from even the most normal girl! The more your inner energy flow is integrated, that is, and resolved.
My hope for you is that you don’t undergo a sex-life with women you don’t love…
Or that you’re hampered by an aversion, or inability, to have meaningful sex with women you’re emotionally connected to.
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Where Next?
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Yeah, Ars Amorata is known for ease and delight, to be an ‘escape’ from the toils of the world.
But there is no journey without tackling this darker terrain, and any work I’m involved with here will always nudge you towards exploring your body and psyche, and the deep truth of your motivation with women.
Want to discuss this further? Talk to me.
Want in-depth instruction so you can explore these ‘re-wiring’ practices at home?
These, and many other secrets, are revealed in LOTM.
Thanks for reading,
~ Jordan
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P.S, If you’ve been on the fence for LOTM for a while, I encourage you to join today…
The price will increase at 11:59pm, Pacific time, on Jan 4th.
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