Sunday, November 19, 2006

David Deida on Intimacy

Here is this week's Blue Truth from David Deida:

This week's blue truth

The Healthy Exchange of Sexual Gifts

If you want to help your man to learn to be fully present with you—not needily preoccupied with his thoughts and projects—then be relaxed in full radiance with him rather than preoccupied with your neediness to feel desired or cherished. If you have attracted a man whose presence is compromised, who dissociates during sex and abuses the thread of your heart-connection, then you can be pretty sure that your love-radiance is likewise compromised. You have attracted each other to learn the necessary lessons for continued growth.


To help yourselves grow, you can learn to gift each other with what you truly need without catering to each other’s neediness. Your man can honestly admit that he sometimes needs your radiant love to help pull him down from his head into deeper heart-connection with you and with life. You can honestly confess—without guilt or neediness—that you sometimes need his presence, humor, and perspective to help free you from emotional closure into openhearted joy.


While misguidedly trying to 'do it all yourself,' you may fluctuate through cycles of frustration, confusion, emotional frenzy, and the aching closed-heartedness of a protectively independent woman. Before your unmet needs develop into needy cravings, find a way to receive the masculine influence that your feminine essence might require for its balanced health and continued growth. Although there are many ways to do it, intimate relationship is one of the best ways for the masculine and feminine to share their genuine gifts of freedom and love.


~ Excerpt from Finding God through Sex

Emphasis added.


The lesson Deida offers here highlights one of the conflicts many couples experience. Many men are imprisoned in isolation of their heads, as I have often been, and many women are trapped within the cravings of unmet emotional needs. The conflict of differentiation and communion is very common.


True intimacy requires an acknowledgment of these fundamental differences and an honest attempt for each partner to honor the other's needs while respecting their own. When one partner abandons his or her fundamental essence to satisfy the other, intimacy is doomed. I have learned these lessons the hard way -- through loss.


I don't have any answers for how to work through these issues. My challenge is to understand why I seek isolation and avoid the vulnerability of real intimacy. It's an ongoing project.

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