Life is living us my teacher used to say you know our heart is beating um on its own we’re breathing normally right on our on its own our autonomic nervous system is humming Along on its own our sensory system is humming Along on its own literally life is sort of propelling us into existence and you know I think most of us get that as a concept but to really stop and feel it is a very deep meditative and even yogic [Music] practice.
Hello and welcome back to the embodied relationship Experience Podcast
00:00:43 my name is John Wineland, today we are going to talk about three kinds of intimacy practice and of course these are intimacy practices that I use that I teach um that I write as foundational intimacy practices is part of the three pillar of sacred intimacy what we’re going to get into today is just kind of drilling down into what it means to have an intimate moment and I’ll get into the depth of each practice one practice is energetic one practice is human to human and one practice is what we would call
00:01:18 say Divine Essence to Divine Essence before we jump in please uh like And subscribe if you’re watching on YouTube that really helps us get the uh content out please leave a comment and a question we’re happy to take comments and questions on YouTube if you’re listening on uh apple or Spotify please rate and review so that’ll also help us get the content out so for those of you who’ve been following my work for a little while you know that I talk about sacred Intimacy in three pillars and the first pillar pillar of sacred intimacy
00:01:52 is the practice of intimacy and that I Define is literally creating um a sameness recognizing a same and removing the distance between you and another now that could be you and a child that could be you and a lover that could be you and a tree that could be you and any space so becoming intimate with something or somebody is something that involves no Sexual Energy at all it’s really about you know human the human to Human Experience and it’s about removing the space between us so that there is a recognition of sameness in
00:02:35 one another the second pillar of sacred intimacy is Devotion to love itself which you know I’ll get into in another very long uh podcast where I’ll break that down into sort of a piece by piece subcategories of what that means and what that practices and the third pillar of sacred intimacy is sexual poity which is the recognition of difference which is the amplification and recognition recognition of you know I have a masculine essence you have a feminine Essence we’re going to amp those up we’re going to amp those
00:03:09 differences up to create an arc of Attraction and again as I’ve said many many times that is not gender specific um it could be switch gender-wise it could be same-sex couples but uh creating this Arc of sexual polarity that’s where the juice of intimacy comes in so we’ve got these three pillars the first one is is intimacy the second one is devotion the third one is sexual polarity and today we’re going to dive into the practice of uh what it means to share intimacy with another so there are three primary ways that I teach to do
00:03:46 that now other people may have other other practices that are totally valid I just you know I’ve I’ve you know narrowed it down to three ways that I think people can practice and again this is a practice this is not something that is just a mental understanding it’s really an embodied and energetic practice to remove the space between you and I and the three ways that I suggest people practice this the first is an energetic intimacy the second is again a human- to human connection heart-to-heart connection you know
00:04:24 sharing our Humanity together and the third is the Divine and me recogniz izes the Divine in you the first thing that’s important to recognize in this practice is that you don’t need both Partners to be practicing now it’s of course nice if both partners are practicing this sort of mutual recognition and mutual removal of distance between uh two parties but it doesn’t need to be that way it’s really quite simple once you kind of attune your body to and and your nervous system to the intricacies and the
00:05:03 nuances and the subtleties of another person’s energetic human and divine experience right so the first approach to this I’m going to call energetic and the practice itself is one of recognizing that there is this kind of hum of Life happening in virtually everything everything has a transmission everything has a frequency so this is true of a great Boulder in the middle of the desert this is true of a tree this is true of a pet this is of course true um in our children this is true in our friends and this is of course true in
00:05:51 our intimate Partners so the capacity to train our bodies to feel that not only the hum of life that is moving through us at any moment but also the hum of life that is moving through another at any moment and to literally sort of merge those um energetic frequencies together so how do we do this well like most practices that I teach it begins with breath so when we slow the breath down and we make our breath low and slow and we literally quiet the Mind deepen the breath get a little more still in
00:06:37 the body doesn’t we don’t have to be rigid but still we can start to pick up on this hum of life that is literally happening automatically it’s quite miraculous when we think about it right this you know life is living us my teacher used to say and you know our heart is beating um on its own we’re breathing normally right on our on its own our autonomic nervous system is humming Along on its own our sensory system is humming Along on its own literally life is sort of propelling us into existence and you know I think most
00:07:21 of us get that as a concept but to really stop and feel it is a very deep meditative and even yogic practice so the first step in practicing this energetic intimacy is to get intimate with the energy moving through your own body first right to literally feel the hum in your fingertips or the it’s a hum moving up and down the center column of your body the hum that is sort of pumping the blood through your body if you’ve got emotions or Sensations happening in your body if you track down beneath those emotions or Sensations
00:08:02 you’ll feel this sort of hum of life that is giving birth to those Sensations and emotions and this capacity to get sensitive right to bring both awareness our great masculine gift and sensitivity our great feminine gift to a moment that’s happening through us through us is a really beautiful meditation in and of itself so I would recommend that we just start by feeling that sort of River of Life that hum of life that is happening through Us in any moment take a moment and just do that take a few smooth deep breaths try to
00:08:46 Ste your body and let your mind be spacious and empty and feel the hum of life that is happening through you should feel pretty good so once once you have that you sort of recognize that you can spend some time just getting intimate with yourself right like we talk about we talk about intimacy as something that happens usually with another uh we rarely talk about what makes self- intimacy so one of the first practices of getting intimate with another is to first get intimate with oursel so if we’re aware of this hum of
00:09:28 life this stream of life that’s happening through us and we’re aware scanning our body for Sensations tightness um fluctuations um constrictions openness right just so we get aware of what’s happening energetically in our body we can then start to tune our awareness and our sensitivity towards another so from my hum of life I’m going to start to tune in to your hum of life and the way that I do that is through looking into your eyes through breathing matching my breath to yours and in the matching of
00:10:10 my breath to yours I’m beginning to attune my nervous system more and more to your nervous system so we talk about things like eye gazing as a you know as a really beautiful intimacy practice and that is but just ey gazing in and of itself is can be somewhat superficial and it can be filled with thought and distraction and you know awkwardness and all of that stuff but once we start to really tune in to what is making us hum and what is making another hum things deepen the moment deepens together so if I am looking into your
00:10:51 eyes I’m breathing with you I’m aware of this hum of life and the sensations of being alive in my body and I start to breathe with you and I take my sensitivity and I just sort of place it onto yours I’m going to start to feel this sameness right it’s different right like your transmission is different than mine but there’s a sameness to the hum of life that is happening in both of us at the same time and a good way to um play with this is to get close physically and literally start to feel more and more maybe you’re
00:11:33 kneeling right next to each other right in front of each other knees almost touching or maybe you’re standing and you’re just you know a few inches apart from each other you’ll start to feel this pulse you’ll start to feel this you know energetic transmission or signature coming through another and it’s a in doing that in training your breath and becoming aware of their hum of life and your hum of Life you’ll again start to notice the similarities and the sort of beautiful shared experience of having life live us
00:12:13 through us at the same time and in doing so we literally merge our energies and it’s quite a delicious experience to practice now of course if your partner is not practicing with you in the moment that does not mean that you cannot bring this practice to them you could stand behind them for example let’s say your partner is cooking dinner or um you know your partner is you know laying in bed with you right you can obviously kind of snuggle up to them and then do the practice that I just laid out you feel the hum of life in yourself
00:12:57 be aware of the sensations or maybe emot ions moving through your body try to feel deeper into the sort of source of life or hum of life it’s kind of like the force for those of you who are Star Wars fans right um that is moving you and you can start to tune your hum to their hum you might even you start to breathe in a way that invites them to breathe with you and you can kind of impose a little intimacy on them uh most most of the time they’ll feel it most of the time they’ll feel it and unless
00:13:34 there’s something you know some issue going on between you to or something that needs to be cleared it’ll usually be reciprocated eventually what will happen is you can evoke your practice your intimacy practice can actually evoke more energetic openness and Stillness in them and in the doing so we remove the distance and we merge our energies now it doesn’t take a genius to understand that in doing that we are sort of um priming the pump for deeper physical intimacy it’s a really beautiful like
00:14:15 we’ve all had that experience of being sexually intimate with somebody but not being energetically synced up and so taking the time even just a couple of minutes to sync up with their energetic hum and to feel the life that’s moving through them you can see how just right away that would deepen uh physical intimacy and and deepen and nourish sexual intimacy so this first practice of learning to get sensitive to your own energetic pulse and to get intimate with yourself and then from there to bring
00:14:52 that to another is a very simple and beautiful way to practice intimacy now the second form form of intimate practice is what I would call human to human recognition now that is I’m having an experience I’m having an experience of being human here I’ve got a heart I’ve got feelings I’ve got Sensations I’m living life I’m you know dealing with Joys and disappointments and fears and you know my own brand of neurosis and you’re probably doing the same and so when we start to Reve R our shared Humanity to another and we
00:15:34 start to really tune in to each other’s fears um each other’s desires each other’s experience of being human and we begin to recognize our own experience of being human through another that is a another beautiful form of intimacy so similarly to the way that we would be begin that first practice we start in the same way we get intimate with ourselves and we start to scan and track again deepening the breath letting our body ground letting our body get a little more still and becoming aware of what is the human experience
00:16:17 that I’m in right now am I angry am I sad am I um am I having you know crazy thoughts am I uh turned on is my um heart activated or is it closed am I being defended or am I being open and to continue to just really scan what is happening in my heart and in my body um just as a human being living The Human Experience in this moment so it’s a little more particular to me as a human as a personality as you know someone who is you know first the experiences of life and then it’s me turning that self intimacy towards you
00:17:06 and creating space to see to witness to experience your Human Experience in this moment as well so again we start with becoming intimate with ourselves what am I feeling what am I thinking what am I sensing you know what am I bringing to uh my humanness how is my humanness being expressed in this moment and then from that place of being with my own heart literally feeling the weight of my own heart feeling the texture of my own heart is it hard is it soft does it feel full um are there emotions moving
00:17:52 through me that that I should recognize uh and then creating space for you to have that experience so what this might look like in a practice now this usually requires words whereas the first intimacy practice I laid out doesn’t necessarily and probably shouldn’t have any words should be silent this requires words and a classic version of this is um to share fears right and this is really beautiful experience for uh two intimate partners and what what it might look like is first me getting intimate with my own
00:18:32 experience and then asking you do you have any fears that you want to share with me and then while I’m staying intimate with myself I’m also making space to receive whatever fears you have to share so I might just give you I don’t know two three four minutes to just talk about what you’re afraid of right and in doing so what I’m trying to what I’m trying to accomplish is I’m trying to feel that tender part of your heart what the Buddhists would call bodhichitta through the tender part of my heart right so this second uh
00:19:15 practice of intimacy really involves being aware of the tenderness within and then also recognizing the tenderness within another and in doing so the Buddhists have have presented this as as a a bit of a spiritual practice as a bit of a meditation I’m sensing this tender vulnerable part of your heart um through the tender vulnerable part of my heart and in this practice of sharing fears I’m hearing you through the tender and vulnerable part of my heart so I’m listening to your fears I’m acknowledging your fears with a yes um a
00:19:56 nod a smile a thank you and I’m really keeping that tender part of my heart open to receive the part of your heart that is tender another way to work with this sort of practice is just asking you to share you know things that you’re making up about us or about me um to clear projections right like we all as humans have projections going through our mind over and over and over and over all day long we’re making up stuff about other people and you know about the world all day long so another way to sort of share
00:20:39 our humanity is to share our projections so that might look like you know share with me what you’re making up about our relationship or what you’re making up about me and then your partner might say well I’m I’m making up that you are really annoyed with me and don’t actually want to do X Y and Z with me or I’m making up that when I do this certain thing you get angry with me or I’m making up that you are not as attracted to me as you were again listening to their projections from the tender part of your
00:21:17 heart from your own bodhicitta and feeling the tender part of them as they reveal this you know these projections these beliefs the things we make up you know which are often not helpful and many times not true so that’s another way of getting to know your partner’s Humanity through your own humanity and really making space for both of you to share fears to share projections another beautiful way to do this is to share things like desires or expectations so for example one of my favorite practices is you know
00:21:58 please share are your expectations about you know this next period of time together like what are you expecting from me as your partner right and then your partner would share what their expectations are well I expect you to talk to me kindly I expect for you to contribute in these ways to our household I expect you to um you know to show up as an intimate partner and um and then because I have expectations too I can relate to my partner’s expectations from the part of me that also has expectations and then a little
00:22:33 bit of a deeper cut here is okay well those are your expectations but tell me your heart’s desires as well like what would your if your heart could have anything it wanted what would your heart’s desire be around our relationship or around our sex or around our parenting or around our lifestyle right and then you get to listen again from the part of you that has expectations the part of you that has heart’s desires you listen to your partner’s heart’s desires and expectations and they may reveal some
00:23:11 really true and beautiful desires that they have some of which you can you know fulfill some of which you might not be able to but the point of this exercise is not finding out what you can and cannot fulfill but it’s about honoring that you both have these things you both have heart’s desires you both have um expectations of each other you both have this sort of human experience in relationship and your first focus is to give space for them to be able to share those with you and in doing so you guys
00:23:52 get to share your humanity and when our humanity is shared our fears are desires our expectations um you know our crazy thinking right when our humanity is shared in an open and loving way and received in an open and loving way this space between us dissipates right we can we can just be humans together we can be crazy wild loving desirous fearful human beings navigating The Human Experience together and that is another form of intimacy that I think really creates a foundation of trust right so intimacy practice is
00:24:40 is not just about removing space it’s about creating trust right because the more we experience the sameness that we have together the safer we’re going to feel because you’re just like me like you are having this beautiful experience of life happening through you just like me you have all of these experiences and feelings and emotions and fears and desires just like me and we can remove the space that often gets built up in relationship and we can now see each other human to human so the first
00:25:18 intimacy practice is energetic the second intimacy practice is this sort of receiving and revealing of of each other’s shared humanity and then the Third third intimacy practice is a bit deeper and it is feeling into your partner’s Divine Essence through your own Divine Essence now this takes a little bit more spiritual practice takes a little more meditative practice it’s a little more woow woo but I think you all kind of get the drift here right that at the core of your partner is an Essence right is you
00:25:58 could call it a soul you could call it uh the divine feminine you could call it the Divine masculine you could call it God you could call it goddess you can call it whatever you want but there is this part of them that is the Divine which is unchanging and much wider and deeper than them as a human being and so in the recognition of each other’s Divine Essence we again remove the space between and we now get to experience each other as the Divine we get to have a sort of sacred Union practice as let’s
00:26:41 call it a Divine masculine Essence and a divine feminine Essence and we get to recognize the deepest part of our partners the most uh core and foundational part of their being and in doing so we get to Revel in their infinite and ancient being right so this Soul recognition one might call it this capacity to recognize the deepest Essence within our partners is also a practice that can be developed and deepened so the way that I like to teach this is through eye gazing right and the practice that I’m actually
00:27:24 writing about in my in my book that’s coming up called the art of sacred intimacy is that you’ll sit in front of your partner you’ll begin to match breath with each other inhaling and exhaling together you’ll allow the bodies to still a little bit right and then you’ll begin to gaze into each other’s eyes now the first layer of eye gazing is the layer of recognizing just the personality the the human in front of you uh the the name individual in front of you and all of their you know quirks and eccentricities
00:28:05 and you know amazingness right the uniqueness of this individual so when you’re looking into somebody’s eyes that first layer of recognition is one of the person right if you gaze a little bit deeper beyond the person and deeper into their eyes you’ll recognize their heart right you’ll start to feel their heart and their heart is obviously the deeper part of them the part of them that again has emotions and longings and um you know yearnings and all of those things and so you can spend a little bit of time
00:28:46 gazing heart tohe heart and in that practice you try to see their heart Through The Eyes of your own heart right so if you imagine that your eyes were directly linked to your heart and your heart was looking deep into their eyes and into their heart a sort of again sameness develops a a kind of a removal of the distance you’re just love loving love right Hearts recognizing hearts and then there is a deeper place so if you looked beyond the heart into their very essence let’s call it the like a third layer of depth you’ll feel
00:29:29 the part of them that is infinite and expansive you can feel the part of them that has this kind of inner Universe existing this Purity this depth right and so this kind of again this ancient Soul so as we move a little deeper into eye gazing and into this practice of removing this distance once again trying to keep the breath matched and keep our bodies open in the front like very open and receptive soft in the front and we’re gazing deep into each other’s Souls that’s where we can really begin
00:30:14 to experience sameness right or you know shared experience of being Divine beings having a human experience and we get to recognize that and we can things can get very um still and very deep and very um I what’s the word to put I don’t know just both juicy and um still right I’m trying to put words into an experience that is very hard to name and it should be it’ll become very still and silent and in this recognition of the deepest most Divine and ancient parts of each other um virtually all distance
00:31:08 disappears and so if we put all of these practices together and we work with recognizing the energetic experience of being alive and then we recognize and and become witness to and become intim inate with the human experience of being alive and then finally we recognize and become intimate with the Divine experience of being alive so there is an energetic experience of being alive there’s a human experience of being alive and then there is the Divine experience of being alive all of that is happening inside us
00:31:49 at all times and so the practices of intimacy are meant to help us recognize that these practices of intimacy which could go on for five minutes or 5 hours are meant to celebrate that and to practice that and the beauty of this kind of consistent practice is that it tends to transcend the human drama I mean it recognizes it you know in the second piece but it also transcends it it doesn’t stop there it allows us to recognize that there is something deeper going on than our personal life drama and you know in the in our daily lives
00:32:31 and in the world and how busy we are and kids and businesses and you know everything going on it’s crucial to be able to stop and recognize the deeper experience is happening that is what depth is and when we talk about depth we’re really talking about getting ATT tuned to not just what’s happening on the surface of a moment not not just what’s happening on the surface of another human being or not just what’s happening on the surface of ourselves but we’re literally training our awareness and training our nervous
00:33:08 systems and our capacity to recognize the deepest experiences going on at any time so as I said in the beginning these practices can also be in a forest by yourself or in a desert by yourself or sitting in a dark room by yourself the possibility of feeling a moment or feeling a space or feeling another or feeling ourselves deeper is always available so just being able to tune yourself to the infinite sameness of the moment we then start to merge with that moment or we start to merge with another
00:33:56 or we start to merge with a place and we are creating this beautiful recognized sameness with a person place or thing you know there’s a way that I I’ve always practiced this out in nature which is to you know get close to I Love Rocks it’s one of my weird things like I’ve just fallen in love with rocks you know spend enough time in yosity and you know that those things are alive or in Sedona you know that those things are alive and so I will literally kind of cozy up to a rock put my hands on it and
00:34:33 begin to you know feel the energetic hum of that rock I’ll then feeling the energetic hum Within Myself I’ll sort of merge I’ll practice merging and feeling the the the energetic sort of exchange happening between us and it’s often quite beautiful there’s often you know information that will come back from certain spots of nature uh you could of course do something similar with a pet I I challenge you to try this with your dog or with your cat right just to really stop and feel deeper than the surface don’t just pet your cat like
00:35:18 take some time put your hand on there get everything still and feel into it this is so beautiful to do with a child I remember I used to practice this you know with my daughter where she would be asleep and I would kind of snuggle up to her and I’d you know feel the not just the Halm of her body living and breathing not just her heart but feeling into the deepest essence of her and in doing so I get to merge so this capacity that we have to get intimate with a moment or with another or with a place
00:35:55 or with a thing is really one of the most most under practiced um meditative superpowers we have and what it does is it does drop our nervous systems it does regulate our nervous systems I challenge you to practice it like go practice this with a tree or a rock or a pet or Jesus just yourself let alone a lover or an intimate partner and notice what happens to your nervous system as you begin to slow down enough cuz slowing down is required and I I challenge you to to practice noticing what happens when you
00:36:33 slow down and you can get intimate with a moment or with yourself or with another so those are the three practices of intimacy and uh feel free to ask me any questions in the comments below or um make any comments that you like see if there’s something else that you guys want me to dive into a little bit more deeply but I would suggest that you begin to try to just bring some of these practices to your daily life to your home and if you want to go deeper in these kinds of practices we have tons of
00:37:07 them on the embodied relationship experience platform there’s a link below you can sign up and get a free trial it’s a it’s a really beautiful community of practitioners from around the world and we get into not only this kind of intimacy practice but we get into practices of working with sexual polarity and we get into many practices of of uh doing repair work and working on the Devotion to love pillar that I’ll that I’ll get into again at another time but uh if you really are feeling called to deepen your practice the embodied
00:37:40 relationship experience platform is awesome for that final piece of business that I’ll leave you with is that we are launching our yearly uh men’s training program it’s called the embodied Men’s Leadership training I’ve been doing this now for eight years there’s usually about 60 or 70 guys we go out into the desert we go up into the mountains we go deep for you know six plus months together and it’s it’s one of my favorite programs I really um I really am proud of what we’ve created this sort of Band of Brothers many guys are are
00:38:13 you know staying the program for you know three four five years and we’re launching that now it’ll start at the beginning of the year so if you’re interested in that there’ll be a link below for you to apply and learn more so that does it for this episode of the embodied relationship experience thank you for joining me and we’ll see you next time
