Chapter 9: Love what is true#

This chapter is about how to reach the ecstasy through confidence and joy in whole you.

First is confidence, then joy. Confidence is not enough, and joy is the hard part.

Glossary#

This chapter#

Knowing that your genitals are made of the same parts as everyone else’s, organized in a unique way. Knowing about the brakes and accelerator. Knowing about context and about the difference between liking, wanting, and learning. Knowing about arousal non-concordance and responsive desire. Knowing what’s really true, even when it’s not what you were taught “should” be true. Knowing what’s true, even when it’s not what you wish were true.

Loving your genitals, your brakes and accelerator, and the way your brain responds to context. Loving the context itself. Loving arousal non-concordance and responsive desire. Loving what’s true, even when it’s not what you were taught “should” be true. Loving what’s true, even when it’s not what you wish were true.

In other words, non-judging allows you to feel what you feel, whether or not it makes sense to you, whether or not it’s comfortable, whether or not it’s what you believe you should be feeling. Non-judging is neutrally noticing your own internal states. With non-judging, it doesn’t matter how you feel; what matters is how you feel about how you feel. And the most wellness-promoting way to feel is… neutral.

Other chapters#

Stress#

Stress cycle: A stressor (or many) activate your stress response, you experience the stress response until you

In nature the stress situations hit the stressors with high intensity but short, so the stressor is over quickly and is easy to de-stress. But nowadays the stress contexts hit with low intensity but constantly, and it is also socially frowned upon to express your feelings, so we can’t de-stress properly. That is why stress nowadays is a major problem for most people.

Confidence: The map#

Step 1: Analyze your sexuality#

Ask yourself:

Tell yourself that whatever your answer is, you are normal. Your body is also normal.

If you have a partner ask yourself what you think their responses would be. Then ask him/her to answer the questions. Let him/her know what your answers were.

Step 2: Notice the gap#

Your feelings are always true, so notice them. If you have negative feelings experiencing your sexuality probably it’s your little monitor fault, noticing that the expectations you have for your goals are not being met. So close the gap by reality-check.

This also applies to what you feel about your partner sexuality, i.e. you feel your partner should have “more”—Maybe you have spontaneous desire and you think your partner responsive desire as lesser (it’s an opinion not a fact)—sexual desire.

Many our goals, such as spontaneous desire or orgasm with intercourse, are not goals we have chosen consciously for ourselves, but the culture has chosen them for us through sexual scripts. These scripts provide the structure for the beliefs through which we interpret the sexual world. So these scripts act as barriers between us and joy.

Map and terrain metaphor#

What would you say if a map doesn’t match the terrain you are seeing with your own eyes? Which is wrong, the map or the terrain? Everyone would probably say that it is the terrain that is wrong. But what if everyone says the map is right and it’s the terrain you’re looking at which’s wrong?

Our sexual scripts are our the map, and our experiences are our terrain. When our experiences don’t match the map our brains try to make the map true, forcing our experience into the shape of the map. You feel your experiences should match the map, i.e. a gap. That is why the little monitor activates.

The first step toward joy is to recognize a mismatch between the map and the terrain, with the knowledge that the terrain is always right.

Once you recognize this mismatch, you have to draw a new map grounded on science and your own experience.

Why confidence is not enough?#

Because maybe you already know what is true about yourself (and about your partner) but you don’t accept it. So you hit your brakes.

Scripts aren’t about what we intellectually believe is true. They act as a template for our emotional One Ring and for our little monitor to filter and organize information. You can disagree with a script and still find yourself behaving according to it and interpreting your experience in terms of it.

There are some ways that may make you struggle to reach joy:

A reader of my blog learned about responsive desire but commented, I think you’re glossing over the fact that ‘responsive desire’ is a lesser desire than [spontaneous] desire. Most women have “a lesser desire?” Yeowch. The construction of responsive desire as “lesser” is not a “fact,” of course; it’s a value judgment, an opinion.

Solution: Notice that it’s an opinion not a fact.

Solution: Trust you and science, not social messages.

Solution: Don’t lock up those feelings, address them by non-judging. Complete the stress cycle.

Smart women don’t want sex. Smart girls are interested in minds, not bodies; only stupid girls are ruled by their “base animal instincts.”

Solution: Notice you are just playing a role. People are always playing roles (as partner, parent, child, uncle, student, employee, boss, etc.—You even behave differently with different groups of friends). But you are not the role you are playing, you are not even the role you play being alone. Everyone is free; so you don’t have to play a role you have been playing. You probably didn’t consciously chosen that role and it’s just an absurd social message.

Joy: The hard part#

You sense, that sensations generate a feeling, then you judge that feeling based on your beliefs and expectations—that’s your little monitor.

Step 3: How you feel about how you feel?#

Once you have confidence and you had drawn a new map, how do you feel about what your map (your sexuality) is like? You may have negative feelings about it.

Negative feelings hurts, so people usually lock them deep inside themselves, without completing the stress cycle and not healing themselves.

Whenever you notice a negative feeling ask yourself (don’t lock it):

Do reality-check and heal that feeling by completing the stress cycle.

Step 4: How to non-judge?#

The definition is above.

What is the non-judging for? Non-judging can help in:

Non-judging is so good because helps to completing the stress cycle.

I used to think that it was the awareness of your internal state that mattered, but in study after study, “observation” of internal state is not a significant predictor of wellbeing. Instead, the most important variable is “non-judging”.

Non-judge#

Feelings that happen for “no good reason”#

You have stress about something you can’t do anything about—A bad new you see on TV, your favorite character of the book you are reading dies, something that reminds you of something bad from the past, etc.—so you can’t complete the stress cycle easily fleeing or fighting, because you are not there.

Let you feel your feeling by non-judging and tell yourself “It’s ok, I can’t do anything about it, so don’t make sense to feel that way”.

When we have feelings we can’t really do anything about, and we don’t know how to let ourselves simply feel without doing anything, our brains will look for some situation it can do something about, and it will try to impose the feelings on that situation.

I.e. You feel angry with the result of the football match so you yell at your son at the slightest thing you can scold him about.

Healing a trauma#

A trauma is a wound in your mind. And like a wound in the body, it causes pain, but emotional pain, not physical pain. The pain is part of the healing process. But if you numb your physical pain, healing can still happen. Alas, if we try to “numb” your emotional pain, we get a break from the pain… but the healing is put on pause.

For healing a trauma you have to let yourself feel what you feel without lock those feelings. This usually implies suffering and patience, maybe months.

Someone described this process like:

“It’s like… I’m sitting with a stunned bird in the palm of my hand. If I get tense and try to hurry it, it will just stay frozen. But if I’m still and patient long enough, the bird will wake up and fly away.”

Resolving pain#

First you need to know: Pain is not normal. ¡Never!

All pain is created in the brain, in response to the body’s signals that there is some kind of threat.

Pain is a signal that your brain perceives a threat, and you might need help. If you use your own internal experience, rather than culturally imposed criterion velocities, as your most accurate source of knowledge about sex, you’ll be able to hear your brain’s signal that you need help, and you’ll take it seriously.

Many people don’t take pain seriously, and this is mainly due to social messages like:

Any unwanted pain is not normal.

Our willingness to tolerate greater effort—in this case, pain—is learned. And it can be changed, simply by becoming aware of it and allowing the possibility that it could be different.

Be aware that you feel pain and tell yourself “Pain is not normal. I don’t have to deal with pain. There are solutions. I will seek for a solution”.

This is as literal as it gets: It’s not how you feel (pain). It’s how you feel (tolerant or not) about how you feel. Non-judging doesn’t mean resignation. It means turning toward what’s true with kindness, without self-criticism. With non-judging, you can ask for help.

See pain causes.

Increasing pleasure#

Pleasure is the hardest part, because there are many social messages about it, and they are laden with “shoulds” and negative feelings.

Many of us have been taught that pleasure is selfish, sinful, a waste of time, or something to be ashamed of. How dare we attend to what feels good, when we ought to be attending to other people’s needs or our partner or making sure we meet other people’s expectations?

Too many people make their choices based not on what they like, but on what they believe their partner likes or what they’ve been told they “should” like.

So how can I allow myself to enjoy the pleasure? Practice non-judging when you feel pleasure and tell yourself:

Someone said:

“I can’t be a source of joy in the lives of the people I love if I can’t even be a source of joy for myself.”

By not judging, you allow yourself to experience pleasure and enhance it, leading you straight to ecstasy.

This is a strange truth about non-judgment. When you turn toward suffering with non-judgment, the suffering diminishes as wounds heal. When you turn toward pleasure with non-judgment, it expands to all the space judgment once filled.

That happens because you brain has a processing capacity. If you spend part of it judging, you can’t devote all your capacity to healing or pleasure.

But here is the truth: Pleasure is a gateway to accessing your fullest, truest personhood. Pleasure is where you find a no-holds-barred connection with yourself and with those you love most. Why? Because pleasure only happens in a context where your brain feels safe enough to be completely and entirely you, without shame or social performance or “shoulds.” Ecstasy comes to us when we leave behind everything that doesn’t delight us or spark our curiosity. Ecstasy comes when we surrender to pleasure without reservation. You are allowed to like pleasure.

Mourning the “shoulds”#

For some people knowing what is true (confidence) is enough to set them free from the myths of social messages. Others also need to notice their judgmental feelings, so they can release those social messages by non-judging. But for others (the worst case) notice their judgmental feelings is not enough to free themselves from those social messages. Why?

Many of our goals (the “shoulds”) in lives, have been imposed on us through the social messages—especially in sexuality because it is so taboo—, so release those myths from social messages is to say to your little monitor “Hey, I’m sorry but I give up, it’s impossible”. And you already know how your little monitor reacts to this, with awful feelings (the worst of the negative feelings), it’s the ultimate disappointment for the little monitor, you feel like a complete failure. You have given up what you were taught was the right map.

Many of these social messages are so deep in our minds that we had built our personalities based on them. That’s why reach joy becomes so difficult for many people, because free themselves from those social messages implies a failure and leave behind part of his personality.

You are pulling up all the weeds (poisonous goals and beliefs) from your mental garden (your mind), which happened to be most of the plants, leaving it almost deserted. It hurts so much.

The way to get through is to stay very still, to notice all the aspects of your identity that were tied to the lies you were told, to notice all the grief you feel in letting go of the self you spent your life trying to be. Notice, too, the anger you feel at having been lied to for so long. Notice all of these with non-judgment. Allow them to be true.

Emotions are tunnels: You have to go through the darkness to get to the light at the end. Sometimes that’s fairly easy, but sometimes it hurts like hell. Sometimes letting go of a particular goal feels like you have to let go of your entire identity. It’s not an easy process; parts of it are downright uncomfortable. But it’s so, so worth it, because at the end of the tunnel is the ultimate reward: you.

To feel normal#

You belongs#

What do you think your goal is? Is it pleasure? Connection with her partner? Self-discovery?

For most people the main goal is to feel “normal” (the social meaning). But there is no such a thing like “normal”, because we all are normal (the real meaning).

What people really aim by being “normal” is to feel that they belong, we are social beings. If you feel that you don’t belong you feel lost, what implies risk and insecurity.

We want to know that we are safe within the bounds of shared human experience, that what’s on our map is the same as what is on other people’s maps.

When people ask me, “Am I normal?” they’re asking, “Do I belong?”
 The answer is yes. You belong in your body. You belong in the world. You’ve belonged since the day you were born, this is your home. You don’t have to earn it by conforming to some externally imposed sexual standard.
 If you change your goal from “normal” to “wherever I belong,” then you’re always successful because you’re already there.

This is it#

You are as you are now, this is it.

For many years, I kept a small comic taped to my office door. It shows an old Buddhist monk sitting next to a young Buddhist monk. The older monk is saying, “Nothing happens next. This is it.”
 Being more nerd than nun, I see it as a commentary on the discrepancy-reducing feedback loop and criterion velocity, on the importance of training your little monitor to enjoy the present rather than constantly push toward the future. What if… this is a radical idea, but just go with me: What if you felt that way—“This is it”—about your sexual functioning? What if the sexuality you have right now is the sexuality you get? What if this is it?

If you have negative feeling noticing that “this is it”, you are feeling the gap between your goal of “normal” (social meaning) and how you are. But remember that you are already normal (the real meaning). See Mourning the “shoulds”

Not your fault but your responsibility#

Culture has planted weeds in our mental garden with social messages from a young age, shaping what we believe to be “normal” (social meaning). So it is our job to pull out the weeds. Even though it is not our fault, is your responsibility. You are already normal (real meaning).

The day you were born, the world had a choice about what to teach you about your body. It could have taught you to live with confidence and joy inside your body. It could have taught you that your body and your sexuality are beautiful gifts. But instead, the world taught you to feel critical of and dissatisfied with your sexuality and your body. You were taught to value and expect something from your sexuality that does not match what your sexuality actually is. You were told a story about what would happen in your sexual life, and that story was false. You were lied to.