For most of my life, I understood sexual energy in the most obvious way. You are attracted to someone, the body responds, desire appears, and almost immediately the mind begins constructing a story around the person who seems to have caused it. I want him. I miss him. There is chemistry between us. Something should happen. We are remarkably quick to turn a sensation inside our own body into a conclusion about another human being. Lately I have been wondering whether we make a fundamental mistake right there. What if sexual energy and the person who awakens it are not necessarily the same subject? What if another person can activate something in me without automatically becoming the destination of what has been activated?

This became unexpectedly physical for me in Cambodia. I found myself attracted to Kru, a Cambodian hermit who did not resemble the kind of man I consciously considered my type at all. My mind had a fairly established opinion about what attracts me. Apparently my body had not signed the agreement. It responded before I could categorize him, explain him, approve him, or construct a reasonable story about why I should be responding at all. I remember finding this both fascinating and funny. Apparently even my desire had been living with an approved vendor list, and suddenly somebody had bypassed procurement. 

Underneath the humor was something important. My body was producing information that my conscious identity had not produced. The immediate temptation would have been to make that information about him! and ME! Maybe there was some extraordinary connection between us. LOL Maybe my attraction meant something about him, about us, about another lifetime, about masculine and feminine energy, about destiny. The mind is exceptionally talented at taking a physical experience and immediately writing mythology around it. But there is another possibility that interests me much more now. Maybe desire is first of all information about the person who is desiring.

Jung's understanding of libido was much broader than the modern sexual meaning of the word. Libido could be understood as psychic energy, the intensity that moves through the psyche and seeks expression. Sexuality is one of its expressions, but it does not exhaust its meaning. I find this useful because it changes the question. Instead of immediately asking, Why do I want this person? I can also ask what became alive in me in his presence? With Kru, there was something else I found deeply attractive. He had a glow about him and an extraordinarily open heart. He seemed genuinely happy living in a cave with bats, owning almost nothing. That fascinated me. Who can live this way? What does he know that I don't? What makes a human being that free? It is contagious! There was mystery in him, and mystery itself can be intensely attractive. Maybe sometimes the body feels that pull before the mind understands what it is responding to. We experience the charge as sexual because sexuality is one of the languages the body has for saying: there is something here I want to move closer to. But wanting to come closer to a mystery is not necessarily the same thing as wanting the person sexually. Sometimes what attracts us in a person is not the person we want to possess, but a way of being we want to understand.

Sometimes another human being awakens sensuality. Sometimes courage, aggression, creativity, playfulness, hunger, competitiveness, tenderness, audacity, beauty, power, or the desire to be seen. Sometimes we meet someone and suddenly feel more alive in our own skin. Because the activation occurs in relation to that person, we can easily conclude that the aliveness belongs to them. Then the possibility of losing the person becomes frightening because somewhere underneath it is another fear: perhaps I will also lose access to the version of myself that appeared around them.

I think this is one reason sexual attraction can become so psychologically powerful. We may believe we are longing exclusively for another person while also longing for who we become in their presence. That does not make the attraction false. Quite the opposite. The body may be telling the truth before the conscious mind understands what the truth is about. But a truthful sensation does not automatically provide instructions for what should happen next. I have come back several times to a sentence that became important to me in Cambodia: desire is information, not instruction.

Our culture tends to give us two crude ways of dealing with sexual desire. We obey it or suppress it, indulge it or behave ourselves. Even spiritual traditions and modern spiritual language can reproduce the same split in more attractive vocabulary: sexual energy becomes either something lower that must be mastered or something sacred that must be liberated. I am increasingly interested in what exists between those two positions. I can feel desire completely without promising it an outcome. I can let my body respond without immediately constructing a relationship around the response. I can be curious about attraction without pretending it is meaningless and without declaring it destiny. I can allow sexual energy to exist inside me without immediately assigning another human being responsibility for resolving it.

When desire appears, it is tempting to locate its source outside ourselves: You make me feel this way. There is some truth in that because human beings affect one another profoundly. Certain people really do open doors in us that others never touch. But the electricity is still moving through my nervous system, my imagination, my body, my psyche. Another person may have struck the match. The fire is happening here. And fire can do many things besides consume the object that ignited it. It can make us create, move, dance, work, change, care about beauty again, return to our bodies after years of living primarily in our heads. Sometimes the arrival of desire exposes how little vitality we had been allowing ourselves before it appeared.

This becomes particularly interesting to me as a woman in my age now. There is still a cultural story that female sexuality should gradually become quieter, less disruptive, less visible, perhaps more dignified with age. LOL I find almost the opposite question more interesting: what happens when a mature woman stops being frightened by the amount of life still moving through her? She does not have to prove it by sleeping with anyone, and she does not have to suppress it to prove maturity. She can become capable of carrying the charge.

That, to me, is much more interesting than turning sexual energy into another grand metaphysical theory. I don't need to claim that the force moving through my body is the same force that spins galaxies. My own body is mysterious enough. I know what it feels like when I am barely alive inside myself, and I know what it feels like when something switches on. The difference is enormous.

There is also a shadow side to all of this. Sexual energy can become an extraordinary projector. The stronger the charge, the easier it becomes to attribute qualities to the person carrying the projection. He becomes more beautiful, more important, more spiritually significant, more irreplaceable. A charged encounter can become evidence of compatibility. Chemistry can become evidence of love. Desire can become evidence of destiny. We can even spend years protecting the story because the story gives us continued access to the charge. Then the question becomes much more uncomfortable: what happens if I take my energy back without denying the experience that awakened it?

I understood something about this only after Cambodia. A person can live in the body for years as a kind of orientation. There can be an almost invisible waiting underneath ordinary life: tension, anticipation, a readiness for the next encounter, the next message, the next movement. Consciously, you may have stopped waiting long ago. You may understand the situation perfectly, make decisions, continue living, even believe that you have released it. And still, somewhere deeper, the body remains turned in that direction. Then one day I noticed that mine wasn't anymore. There was no dramatic decision behind it. I had not erased the past, stopped loving, or decided that what I had experienced was unimportant. The memory was still there. Tenderness was still there. What had disappeared was the tension around them. My body was no longer waiting for anything to happen. I find that distinction extraordinary because I could never have produced it by telling myself to let go. It had simply happened. Someone can remain in your heart and no longer occupy your horizon. The memory remained. The waiting didn't.

Maybe this, too, is what it means for sexual energy to become your own again. It does not require withdrawing love, becoming cynical, or rewriting the past so that another person never mattered. Someone may have awakened something enormous in me and remain important precisely because of that. But I no longer need their presence in order to have access to what became alive in me. The energy does not have to keep circling the person through whom I first recognized it.

This is where the question becomes much larger than sex. Maybe someone awakened my sexuality, and I can become more embodied. Maybe someone awakened my courage, and I can use it somewhere beyond that relationship. Maybe someone awakened my hunger for beauty, and I can make my life more beautiful. Maybe someone awakened a woman in me who had been waiting for permission to be sensual, ridiculous, flirtatious, hungry, playful, powerful, or fully alive. I do not necessarily need permanent access to that person in order to keep access to her.

There is something profoundly adult to me about becoming capable of wanting without immediately having to solve the wanting. I can feel my body become electric and remain curious. I can notice fantasy without confusing it with reality, recognize projection without humiliating desire, enjoy attraction without making promises it never made, and allow another person to matter without making them responsible for the life they awakened inside me. Sexual maturity may have less to do with mastering desire than with becoming capable of holding its complexity.

Sometimes desire wants another body and sometimes it wants intimacy. Sometimes it wants to be seen and sometimes it may be grief wearing heat. Sometimes it is creativity with nowhere to go... Sometimes it is the psyche reaching toward a quality we have not yet claimed as our own. And sometimes, of course, it simply wants sex. The interesting part is learning not to decide too quickly, because sexual energy may arrive through another person, but that does not mean it belongs to them.

Sometimes the person is the destination. Sometimes the person is the doorway. And part of becoming conscious is learning the difference... and stop waiting.

And yet, after saying all of this, I don't want to reduce sexual energy to psychology either. There is another dimension of it that I know less about, but recognize when I touch it. 

When desire is met with reverence, it can become something very different from appetite. Two bodies meet, but something larger than the bodies can begin to move between them. There is giving and receiving, tension and surrender, breath meeting breath, two separate nervous systems entering a rhythm neither could create alone. Sometimes, for a moment, the ordinary boundaries of the self become less important. What remains is energy itself, difficult to call masculine or feminine, mine or yours. Two people are still there, and yet the experience can feel larger than either of them.

Human beings have been trying to describe this for a very long time. Alchemy gave us the image of the sacred union, the union of opposites. Tantric traditions developed their own understanding of sexual energy, the body, breath, consciousness, and the awakening of dormant power. Mystics used different languages, but again and again we find the same intuition: sexuality can be more than release. Under certain conditions, it can become a real threshold.

I don't think the answer is to shame this energy or to obey it every time it appears. Both are surprisingly unconscious responses. What interests me is the possibility of staying with the charge long enough to discover what else it can become. To breathe with it. To let it move through the body without immediately demanding discharge. To bring awareness into it. Then the body can become something like an altar, breath becomes part of the practice, and pleasure itself can become a form of attention.

And when two people can meet there without armor, without performance, without trying to possess each other or use the other to escape themselves, sexuality can become profoundly mysterious. For a moment, the question of who is giving and who is receiving can disappear. The energy no longer feels as though it belongs entirely to either person. Both are participating in something that exists only because they have met.

Maybe this is why sex has carried sacred meaning in so many human traditions. Through the body, separation can briefly become porous. Through another person, we can encounter something that feels larger than the personality we normally inhabit. I don't know that I need to explain that experience by saying the Universe created bodies so infinity could feel its own fire. But I understand why someone would write it that way. Because sometimes that is exactly what it feels like. The fire is ours, and somehow it is larger than us. Sexual energy and sex are not always the same thing. But sometimes, when they truly meet, they become very difficult to separate.