Yoga of the Heart

SEX, CELIBACY, RELIGION, AND SOCIETY

Our culture is pervaded by contradictory views of sex and celibacy. Sex is both celebrated as the source of life itself and degraded as evil and sinful. Celibacy is usually associated with religious disciplines, and is often presented as the only way to become "pure" enough for spiritual experience. At the same time, it is presented as a hardship and a severe discipline.

Celibacy has been presented by the church as a vow of separation from the strongest force of life: sexuality. It is a vow taken for life, never to be changed — a feat that is, in fact, impossible, because it insults the primitive quality of life itself. In demanding celibacy, the church implies that the only pure love is love for God, and that love has nothing to do with sex. Consider the "purity paddles" that young seminary students are given to tuck in their shirttails so as to avoid touching their genitals with their hands.

The logical conclusion is that loneliness, denial, and suffering are ultimately good for you, and that God wants that product through you, because if you live through it and can stand it long enough you will become — not divine, perhaps, but nearer to God. The church has a perfect right to say what it wishes in constructing its creed, of course. And for some people — a very few, I would guess — it may work. But most of us are much more body-oriented and attuned to our natural instincts.

It is unfortunate that celibacy has been given such a negative aura in this way. Religion has no ownership of the use of celibacy, but religion has realized the power that can be obtained from individuals willing to allow this pilfering of personal strength. Celibacy, which could be such a valuable product for American society, is being ignored, lost to us, secreted away like the Dead Sea Scrolls to be revealed only selectively. Sexuality lies within us, ready to flow and show its hand in all its beauty and even speak its poetry and song, but it is held back by the cork of fear and guilt, cheating society of the full impact of using whole, strong persons to express it.

While I was in Yogic training with Rama in the jungle above Haridwar in the mid-1960s, I often saw people who had retreated to the area to perform harsh penances to "purify" themselves, as they said, in order to reach God — as if God were separate from them, only appearing in suffering.
Our compound was situated on the bank of the Ganges River. One day I was horrified to see a man taking his stand in the river to pray, raising his arms to the sun. I saw blood running down his legs into the freezing water. At first I thought that he had been injured and ran toward him to help him. He retreated rapidly, stumbling over the stones in the river, trying to get away from me. I stopped as I realized that he was avoiding me because I was a woman, the very source of sin from which he was trying to escape. He had wrapped brambles around his genitals and legs so that the slightest erection would cause bleeding and pain. I remember Rama laughing and saying, "These people have the wrong idea. God is not separate from anything."

A common social and religious outlook says that the only way to approach God is through self-denial; this attitude can result in terrible suffering as both men and women feel the pressure to continually give and give, sacrificing their own lives for community or church with no time for family or self-renewal. Basing your entire life on experiences of loss results in a life that soon becomes empty and unfulfilling. I believe that life should be lived with an attitude of replenishment, with time and energy to observe the joy and beauty that lies around us. To become strong and powerful individuals, we must maintain our well-being. We must learn how to repair our losses. Small periods of Celibacy are a way to do this.

Many people believe that celibacy is a type of loss so horrible that they cannot even consider it. One of the many translators of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras says in his commentary, "Of all the virtues enjoined in Yama-Niyama, [Celibacy] appears to be the most forbidding, and many earnest students who are deeply interested in Yogic philosophy fight shy of its practical application in their life because they ar afraid they will have to give up the pleasures of sex-indulgence." You can see that the specter of sex is linked to fear, loss, and "giving up."

Fear of loss is rampant in our world. "Use it or lose it" was the watchword of the fifties and sixties. So many people I know have had to deal with problems of impotence — men and women alike — all based on fear of loss. Fear of loss can only occur when you think you own something, an attitude which, as I explained in Chapter 1, is a function of the false ego. If you can become aware of who you are and what you are and the power that you have, fear of loss does not imprison you. The spiritual body supplies an unlimited supply of what you need.

Sexuality in Yoga

As a Yogi trained in the Shaivite tradition, I am interested in connecting with my innate spiritual nature. I think this magnificent, primitive treasure of sexuality in ourselves is not only often ignored but in fact openly disdained. I firmly believe that a powerful individual is of much more use to religion and society than a suffering dependant.

In Yoga, and especially the tradition of Kashmir Shaivism in which I have been trained, sex and Celibacy are presented in an entirely opposite manner from the societal attitude of shame and aversion. Shaivism considers sexuality and Celibacy as the main source of strength in one’s personality. Sexuality can never be denied, and its beautiful qualities are often described incorrectly. There is no judgmental quality of sexuality in Yogic philosophy, only appreciation and awareness of its power. As the Yoga student becomes more and more aware of the force of sexuality, he or she can begin to realize its constant strength and support.

SOME EXPERIENCES OF STUDENTS

Several months ago I started having a recurrent vision. Just before dropping off to sleep, a giant male hand would reach down and pick me up by the crotch just as if my body were a suitcase. I would have this feeling of being lifted slightly off my bed, hips higher than the rest of my body, and only then would I go to sleep. This happens several time a week. I began to get the idea that my life was out of control in this area.
About a week before this class, I decided I could not practice Yoga or pursue anything more until I took care of a rampant desire in me to be with a male counterpart. Then of course I found out that your class was on — what else — Celibacy. I became hysterical. I cried. And so did all the friends that I told when they realized the irony of the situation.
I find my life to be relatively worthless without this play between the sexes. Not just physical sex, but the mental, emotional joining and the talking and the fun and most of all, I have this ideal picture of this perfectly balanced joined couple in total harmony with one another.

This primitive vision of perfect harmony between male and female is the very picture of the experience of Yoga when the female principle of action joins with the male principle of support; this joining, as you already know, is called the Universal Body, of God consciousness. This can only exist within you. Whether you are man or woman, the perfectly harmonious picture of a love relationship that is facing you is a picture created by your own fantasy.

Fantasy has never been looked upon as an important tool for our lives; in fact, many times people are scolded because their relationships to their fantasies seem to take them away from the reality of their lives. Ethical behavior can protect you from this type of potentially destructive fantasy.

If fantasy does not take form and remains privately hidden in the mind, it can never be shared. It takes courage to be yourself. Bringing your fantasy into form shows the other person who you really are, not just how you look. In other words, your deepest feelings about love can be easily displayed in your personality. This creates a very different kind of relationship from impulsive physical attractions which end up with both partners realizing that they do not know the other person at all. Bringing fantasy into form constructively means that you can be your whole self; you can act out your fantasy safely, guided by the ethical practice of small periods of Celibacy.

So do you only need one relationship? Can you see how you could walk around looking at everyone and being extremely happy sexually? If you make love with someone, fine. And if you don’t, fine. That is how Krishna functioned. He had no fear of losing anything because he was perfectly aware that love was there with or without his involvement. This is an entirely different outlook from "someday my prince will come." In other words, you are not depending upon happiness to be provided to you from outside sources.

Try practicing Celibacy. You will become very sensitive to feelings which up until now you may have ignored, and you will realize that those powerful feelings do not depend on anyone else. By becoming more and more connected with your source of feelings (which is your spiritual body), and following this ethical guideline, you will eventually realize yourself as extremely powerful, and I doubt that you would have to prove your sexuality or power to anyone.

The idea of the practice of Celibacy is not to be in need but to enjoy the observation of sexuality so much that physical involvement becomes a secondary issue. This takes subtlety. If you went to a party you could have a terrific time because you could enjoy the sexuality of everyone there without any physical involvement by yourself or anyone else. You would simply enjoy the beauty and power of it.

After resuming an active sexual life in a love relationship, I found my appreciation for sex was greater, although my need was relatively decreased. It seems now I have less of a tendency to lose myself during a sexual encounter. I think this is a by-product of Celibacy.

Absolutely not! When you are involved in a great love affair, are you thinking about how you feel in that love affair all the time? If you are, you cannot call it a love affair; you should call it an ego affair. In a real love affair, you are thinking about the other person. You have lost all thought of yourself. That is why a love affair is so great. You have lost all thought of yourself and what you need and what you’re doing in the complete enjoyment of this union. Obviously this student has an incorrect view, because the practice of Celibacy would allow complete enjoyment in the other person’s actions without any loss to yourself. The bottom line appears to be that the love affair that this person is involved in is obviously not satisfying. What do you think about when you’re making love?

When my wife was pregnant, several months went by when we didn’t have any sex because the doctor advised against it, so it was a sort of "enforced" Celibacy. I found these waves of sexual desire would hit me, and at first caused me a lot of grief. One night I was watching TV and sexual desire just came over me. It was so overpowering I could hardly stand it. And then I realized I really didn’t have to do anything about it. For the first time in my life I just sat there and enjoyed the feeling. And it was the most incredible experience that I’ve ever had in my whole life.

When the sexual feeling came over this man, he was able to observe it and enjoy it without owning it. There was no feeling of loss, deprivation, pain, or demand — simply an enjoyable experience.

MY EXPERIENCE WITH CELIBACY

My sex education consisted entirely of my mother saying, "Sex is a big thing." No one talked to me about love, but it bloomed in me from within, so I dreamed on. I took it for granted that if I married someone, both love and sex would be mine. I think perhaps I left home to find love. I was young, only eighteen, when I married.

I probably would still be moving within the whirlwind of need and loneliness around me, but in my mid-twenties, my husband left me. I was a young mother with two sons. I don’t mean that he left me by walking out; he left me by turning his attention to other women. It was the same old American ailment, the double standard of existence: feel one way, act another. We continued to "act as if" we were still a couple, going to parties, doing the same things we did before, but how difficult it was to maintain that outward facade!

I didn’t know what to do. I was faced with difficult questions. "What about the children? Can I make it alone? I’ve never had a job. I am uneducated. Who would hire me? Maybe this will blow over" — and on and on.

I realized I had a choice. I could self-destruct, turning to alcohol or drugs to quiet my broken heart, or I could turn to something that would give me the strength to live through this situation and protect my children and myself from the consequences of my grief. The power of my grief was so overwhelming that it could have destroyed us all.

I had been practicing Yoga for five or six years by that time. I was hardly an expert, but I could not help noticing all the references to Celibacy in some of the books I was reading. I had never felt that that part of Yoga was for me. I was an American, after all, and I believed that my needs and relationships had no connection with those old texts from an Eastern world, written so long ago. But it was true that I was faced not only with the grief of my partner’s turning away from me, but also my own sexual needs. I realized that here again I had two choices: to suffer and self-destruct or to transform my experience into something with meaning.

I had to do something, because my constant inner conversation was haunting me. Whenever I tried to rest my mind by getting away from it, it became more furious. I was a complete failure. What saved me was that I could not believe that this was really love and that love could cause me such pain. All my life I had dreamed of loving and being loved. I refused to blame love for my condition. Actually, my own inborn fantasy of love saved me, because it had taken form and refused to die.

Instead of suffering, therefore, I decided to try for transformation.

I realized that I really did not know or understand love at all. I thought I had, but obviously I was wrong. It was not love’s fault that my marriage was falling apart. I decided to get to know love instead of blaming or cursing love. I began to fantasize about the principle of love in a way that allowed the form of love to step away from the emotional, egotistical form that I had given it and take on a form of its own, free of all manipulation; a great, golden form of love alone. In other words, I gave up personal ownership of love.

I did not want to react to my situation like the television melodramas — "Well if you don’t love me, I’ll go and find someone who will!" — and in so doing simply repeat the same old formula of broken hearts that swirls around us all. I decided to stop all mental and physical involvement with sex and love as I had known it and try to get to know and feel and recognize love in ways I had never known before. I began to practice Celibacy. No one ever knew it. It was a totally private affair.

I was following all the same rituals and routines of my life, but my approach was different. At first I was so lonely. I longed for sex, but the alternatives didn’t suit me. So I went to parties as a beginner in the practice of Celibacy, and gradually I was able to enjoy the beauty of sex in everything around me. The glances, the clothes, the food, the interplay of conversations, even body movement became my classroom of learning new approaches to love. I tried to learn joy in love observed. I tried to feel it in myself.

I had a long talk with myself. Who, I asked, is the person responsible for the only sexual-love relationship in my life? If I am so lonely, who can I ask for relief? I realized that I alone was responsible to know love in my life. No reactionary dependence on anyone else would do. Love was there to be supremely enjoyed, and it was not subject to demand. It was always there, and the choice to enjoy it was totally mine. I was alone with love.

It was obvious to me that I had no ownership of Nature’s procreative plan. I was a simple tool in that design. I had tried to call love my own, reveling in its beauty as I liked and resting on it in a fantasy of thinking it was always mine and that I had a right to it. This indeed was true. I made my mistake both in demanding that this could be provided for me by someone else and in thinking that it could be removed from me according to someone else’s whim — meaning that I could lose love at any time. So I had to say to myself, "Wait a minute. Love can’t be lost." So, instead of continuing long, painful, inner conversations with myself about my sadness or loss, I began to practice conversing with love as a separate being.

I began to look for love in everything. I was an observer of sex and love’s play, and I saw that love was the unseen support of everything. Love never demands ownership of anything. It exists with or without all our various manipulations. It is the whole show, and it knows it. And Celibacy welcomes you into its presence.