Contemplating Four Thoughts and Sexual Desire

Take some time to reflect on each of the following thoughts. While you are thinking of these thoughts, bring to mind your ideas about your sexual desire (or lack of desire). Now I want you to hold those images, ideas, and perceptions in your mind and hold your awareness of that desire while contemplating the following:

Your heart is beating, your lungs are breathing, you have five senses with which to perceive your life and a mind to process the inner and outer information. In this moment, realize the preciousness of each of these functions. Bring to the surface whatever sexual desire you have stirring and mingle this with how invaluable and delicate your life is. Direct that sensation of desire and the idea of your precious life into the center of your chest. Breath with this sensation for a few moments.

Next, think of how you’ve had moments in life where your sexual desire would arise and drift, arise and drift, as well as even lack any quality of aliveliness. Think about those sexual experiences and maybe how you’ve been attempting to keep recreating it, sometimes you can, and other times, you feel a sense of disappointment. But nonetheless, you want to somehow capture that desire and keep the cycle going. But you can’t, as the nature of desire is impermanent. It changes. It comes, it goes. Whatever begins to emerge from the center of your chest as you contemplate this, just add some breathe there and let it be.

What I know may arise for many patients while contemplating the transient nature of desire is a sense of sadness, anxiety, frustration, or numbness. Hold whatever sensation and feeling emerges with breathe. It is here where certain patterns and conditions manifest. So as we are very skilled at doing, we “figure out” ways to make our sexual desire more solid, more permanent, continuous. Through the striving and seeking and desperation to capture it, we feel more and more of the same frustration and anxiety. This is a very painful cycle, which makes us suffer and takes us away from truly enjoying our lives. 

Because the conditions of this cycle are being weaved, we produce consequences to them. Examine how you have set up certain conditions in your sexual life and the consequences it has produced. Just notice what comes and let go, breathe. Whether it’s the man hooked on pornography that has now led to erectile dysfunction or a woman trying to avoid a sexual advance from her lover that leads to her acquiescing and experiencing no pleasure.  

Practice looking at your sexual desire in this way without any judgment or criticism. Next time you find yourself curious about why your sex life is showing up the way it is (and really you could do this exercise with anything going on in your life), contemplate the above reminders and see what the wisdom of your own mind can show you.  The wonderful gift in this is that once you tap into your patterns and see how your sexual experiences might not be as enriching as you’d like, you can change the pattern.  In the words of Lao Tzu, “If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.”