[This post comes from the “Healing with Sexual Relationships” discussion forum on Reddit.]
I’ve always felt really upset with the way people treat one another. I’ve found that love, at the core of existence, wasn’t really treated properly either. It’s as if the most sacred of things (which is how I always viewed love) wasn’t properly attended to and respected.
I always wondered why in school girls and boys weren’t connected on a more “fundamental” level. Or why most couples (both parents and other school-mates) never seemed like the “princes and princesses” in the Disney movies we watched. There was this sort of disconnect. Ideals and reality really never matched. Marriage seemed more about convenience than about the love it professed to “save”.
Also, I am always looking for the “ultimate” and optimal solution for things. I had looked into philosophy, meditation, books, art, human connections, universities, and fulfilling work in which one might thrive. None of these solutions seemed to really work out or be enough to really “be one” with the harmony of existence, the transcendent. Given that we do get glimpses of REAL happiness and connection, yet are confronted with trauma of all kinds along the way, pains and sorrows, I never really adopted thewell accepted view of “highs and lows”. I always knew there was more to life than “going with the flow”. Of “hoping” for better days to come but really being at the mercy of it all.
It’s really as if people get so used to watching a black and white screen that they don’t even imagine that color could be (and will be) possible on it one day. Habit is a tough one.
There is a way to make love lasting, to make true fulfillment the norm.
There is a way to stop being happy with crumbs. I mean, at some point it was seen as “normal” that people only lived up to about 40 years of age and that many women died during childbirth. Modern medicine changed that. At one point war was seen as a natural, albeit miserable state of affairs that needed to recur every now and again, as an unmovable law of nature….
Those things are within our control much more so than we’d like to admit. So, why not the ultimate and absolutely most central and important of all aspects of human life? Falling short in this area and not doing it properly is like not taking care of breathing properly or eating or sleeping or any basic fundamental human needs.. If you don’t have a place to stay and a few other basic needs met, how could anyone ever expect to be a fully functional, thriving person?
Well, our society is on the one hand totally under-sexualized (we act as if we were all asexual for society to run “smoothly” without being reminded that we are loving beings). The other side of the coin is one of excess: porn and sexual excess when finally confronting the topic and the whole taboo that keeps the under- and over-sexualized aspects of this schizophrenic society apart from one another. Thus, we do not see that they are linked.
Karezza is at the fulcrum of all of this.
It is neither over- nor under-sexualized, but just right. The path of the middle. The middle ground for men and women who otherwise are in a constant state of struggle between staying away from one another on the one hand (feminism vs macho-behavior), which, on the other hand, leads to all the more unbridled desire in an animalistic and beast-like manner. In the latter case, we consume rather than love each other. Being so far from our true, loving nature leads to all sorts of sick behaviour.
The child is used to being cuddled, held in a warm embrace, kissed, pampered. Everything *feels* right. As an adult, the world *feels* harsh, mean, uncaring. Nothing has really changed, except how we don’t interact the same way anymore – except with the extra understanding of an adult, which involves adult sexuality in the mix. Less sex overall, and more hyper-sexualisation and society seems to go nuts (no pun intended). It might be linked….
Perhaps we need to learn to tame our own hearts and minds and become familiar with that which is both intimate and yet shared by all living beings, rather than to fear and dismiss it for a later time. No wonder sex is at the center of the Adam and Eve story, which represents the first few steps of humankind in a metaphorical/mythological context. How could it be any different?
The modern world fancies itself as a well-running, smooth machine.
For that, everything needs a sort of uniformity. No individuality, no personality, no love. And for that to work, it needs the dark underbelly of porn, political depravity and entertainment so as to allow for human nature to have some room to be explored nonetheless. The trouble is that it ends up arising in an underhanded, shame-ridden fashion. That isn’t how we are ideally supposed to examine our innermost beings.
I guess we are simply looking at the world in way that is too naive, equating humankind and society with some sort of machine or program and making it an intellectual game of brainy academics, of statistics, of tag prices. Hence the whole counter-culture of wellness, meditation, retreats, online spirituality for 499,99. All promise the safe-havens we once had in our own dreams and collective imagination.
In the midst of all of that chaos and confusion, karezza as such is stable.
It is not so much of a fad or an answer but rather part of human nature itself. I had once something close to the karezza experience, and I knew then and there that I had all my answers. I was “home” in a way none of the other techniques, gurus, or wellness tips could ever make me feel. It is so very simple and the only meaningful way to go about anything. No book, no oh-so-smart statistic to explain current trends, no oh-so-deep thought can reach such depths of truth as such an experience.
And, in a sense, I really like the way it is explained and portrayed in the Youtube movie Sex – The Secret Gate To Eden. That really does it justice.
So, to summarize: there is a deep unease that no sort of external solutions seem to address. Sex and love, being an interesting “me and you”, “inside and outside”, “intimacy, yet connected to the world”, always seemed like the ideal “path of the middle”. It’s where aspects merge and it’s something so very under-appreciated in many ways as well as over-used in others, that there really must be something more under it all than meets the eye.
After all, sacredness can’t be used for the finger that points to the moon. What is the sacred itself apart from its external form? If it isn’t love and its power of creation, of transformation, of renewal, the eternity it opens to, beyond the words and chants all praising transcendence as so many fingers pointing to the moon, then what is it?
Karezza loves without the problems inherent to society.
It confronts the problem, thus the only real problem left to address: to find the way to bring the benefits of this way of connecting to the awareness of any random person trying to go – as Marnia Robinson puts it in the title of her book Cupid’s Poisoned Arrow: “From habit to harmony“.
Let’s be patient and kind with ourselves. This is a big transition in terms of perception and worldview. It transitions us from something quite habitual and ingrained for countless generations into our subconscious ways of operating on so many levels to something harmonious beyond our wildest dreams. 🙂
