Real Moments for Lovers

1
Why Lovers Need Real Moments
 
This book is for lovers. It is for lovers who have already found their beloved, and are traveling the path of relationship together. It is for lovers who no longer feel like lovers, and want to rediscover their passionate connection again. And it is for lovers who are alone, waiting to live as the lovers they are meant to be until they meet their heart’s true companion.
 
When you have a lover in your life, you are richly blessed. You have been given the gift of another person who has chosen to walk beside you. He or she will share your days and your nights, your bed and your burdens. He will see secret parts of you that no one else sees. He will touch places on your body that no one else touches. He will seek you out where you have been hiding and create a safe haven for you within his arms.
Your lover offers you an abundance of miracles every day. He has the power to delight you with his smile, his voice, the scent of his neck, the way he moves. He has the power to banish your loneliness. He has the power to turn the ordinary into the sublime. He is your doorway to Heaven here on Earth.
 
 
What does it mean to be a lover? It is more than just being married to someone or making love to him or her. Millions of people are married, millions of people have sex, but few are real lovers.
 
To be a real lover you must
commit to and participate in a
perpetual dance
of intimacy with your partner.
 
 You are a lover when you appreciate the gift that your partner is, and celebrate that gift every day.
 
 You are a lover when you remember that your partner does not belong to you—he or she is on ban from the universe, and if you do not take good care of him, you will lose him—he will leave you emotionally, and maybe even physically.
 
 You are a lover when you realize that nothing that happens between you will be insignificant, that everything you say in the relationship has the potential to cause your beloved joy or sorrow, and everything you do will either strengthen your connection or weaken it.
 
 You are a lover when you understand all this, and thus wake up each morning filled with gratitude that you have another day in which to love and enjoy your partner.
 
When you and your mate forget that your relationship is a gift, when you don’t remember to cherish one another, that’s when you cease being lovers.
 
I think there’s nothing worse than being in a relationship but no longer feeling like lovers. One day, you look at your partner and realize, with a sinking feeling, that “I love him, but I’m not in love anymore.” The sacred bridge between your hearts has disappeared, and in its place, you are left with a gnawing emptiness. You may still share a bed, a home, even a family, but you don’t share that ecstatic bond that true lovers share. You have become roommates.
 
Falling out of love and losing that magnetic attraction you once had does not happen overnight. It is simply the inevitable result that occurs when one or both of you take the gift of your partner for granted, when you stop thinking and behaving like lovers.
 
 
Why aren’t more people lovers, rather than merely husband and wife? Because they don’t try hard enough in their relationship to be kind, because they don’t remember to look for the true beauty of their partner’s spirit, and most of all, because they don’t experience enough real moments together.
In order to remain lovers,
you need real moments in your
relationship.
 
Real moments occur when you and your partner are totally focused on one another and the love between you in the moment, when you are fully experiencing whatever is happening, when you allow your hearts to connect and the feelings to flow freely. You can have a real moment when you’re making love, or making breakfast. It’s not what you’re doing that matters—it’s how you pay attention to what you’re doing that makes it into a real moment.
 
Being a true lover requires that you pay attention to your partner, to the relationship, and to yourself. The problem is that many of us live our emotional lives mindlessly, without thinking, without feeling, automatically and unconsciously. You talk, you embrace, you have sex, but often without paying full attention to what you are doing. You are worrying about the errands you have to run, or remembering the phone calls you haven’t returned, or pondering a problem with one of your children, everything but what you should be focused on—loving your partner.
 
When you don’t pay attention to the person you’re loving while you’re loving him or her, you are somewhere other than in the moment. You’re remembering the past or worrying about the future, but you’re not right here, right now. When you’re not here, you can’t truly connect with your lover. He won’t be able to feel you. You won’t be able to feel you. And when you can’t feel yourself fully in the moment, it will be impossible to feel “in love.”
 
To feel “in love,” you and your partner must both be in the state of love
within yourselves. Only then can you see love in one another.
 
When lovers don’t share enough real moments with one another, they starve the soul of their relationship. You can spend every minute in each other’s presence, but unless you are experiencing some real moments, you won’t ever truly be together.
 
Real moments will teach you how to pay attention with your heart, to start being right here, right now. And it is those real moments that will ultimately give depth and meaning to your relationship, and keep you feeling eternally in love.
 
Real Moments and Sexual Love
 
When you have a lover, you share one thing with him or her that, hopefully, you share with no one else, and that is the act of sexual union. Each time you and your beloved unite, you penetrate each other’s physical boundaries, and merge not just your hearts but your bodies in the most intimate way possible. I believe, as did many ancient spiritual traditions, that sex is a sacred force, for it is through sex that all life begins. Sexual energy, then, is simply the energy of life expressing itself through your body. And when you learn to use that force as a celebration of life and of your relationship, you can turn what is usually mere physical pleasure into physical and emotional ecstasy.
 
Sex is a sacred sharing—
it is the way your spirit
and the spirit of your beloved
can dance together in the flesh.
 
Sex is a physical celebration of the spiritual, a form of meditation on your partner, on the miracle of life and the miracle of love.
 
Our culture has very little understanding of sexuality and its true role, and we are suffering because of it. America’s moral roots lie in the Puritanism of those who originally settled this continent, and thus we live in a society that has separated sexuality from life, disconnected it from the heart, and polluted it with guilt. Sex is the most basic instinct we have as human beings, and yet many of us learn about it only through awkward and often painful experience. To make matters worse, we are brought up not to talk about it, and find it difficult to be sexually honest even with our husbands or wives, and often, with ourselves. For many Americans, sex is still in the closet.
 
The result is a population that is sexually unconscious, and when we’re unconscious about something, we become repressed, obsessed, depressed, and dysfunctional. Rather than a source of joy, sex becomes a source of shame and frustration, or a weapon with which to punish our mate, or an addiction we use to numb ourselves to pain, or perhaps a substitute for love. And when we are sexually unconscious, we can’t experience real moments in our lovemaking.
 
Some of the most powerful and significant moments you and your lover can share will happen when you introduce real moments into your sexual relationship, moments in which you aren’t trying to achieve anything, or get it over with, moments when you are mindfully in the present, celebrating the body, heart, and soul of your beloved. Later in this book, I’ll offer you some techniques for kissing, touching, and uniting that will help you reinvent your sexuality so you can use your sexual play not as an end in itself but as a starting point for a deepening of your love and intimacy. Then you will really be making love.