Monk and the Master Part 2: Zen and Sex

As the second part of a three part series for HereistheCity, the website asked me to do a piece on sex, and so in a longer interview Genpo Roshi kindly gave me his views. Loving relationships really are something I'm interested in, partly from Monk-like curiousity and partly due to feeling like I'm on a constant learning curve myself with regards to them. It's a subject I'm sure I'll come back to, I think the Big Mind process and Zen have more to give the West in this area. But for now, here's the article. Enjoy.

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In the next instalment of Monk and The Master, the topic is sex, and how it relates to love and the many facets of ourselves.

The Monk

A therapist friend recently joked with me that everyone outside a relationship is hoping to get in one, and everyone in a relationship is either trying to change his or her partner and/or get out completely. Sex and relationships are no different from any other aspect of our lives in that it's all about how we deal with what is presented to us. To be truly happy - and like anything else at which we want to excel - it requires practice, patience, and maturity. And a lot of mistakes made as sincerely as possible.

The Master

When our walls are down, we are more in touch with our feelings and our emotions, and because we as individuals are based more in trust than in fear, everything is heightened. We are able to be open and vulnerable, having dropped our defenses or barriers, and true intimacy becomes possible. Our sexual life, our ability to communicate and relate is improved. We are in touch with our true self, it’s more tantric, it’s being there with the other person, in a sensitive way. But it’s also being true to ourselves and who we are. It’s a more conscious, awakened state of being, where we are able to use our emotions in a very positive way that gives a richness and fullness to our life. Instead of fearing or suppressing our emotions, we actually use them as the petrol for our life.

In the Eightfold Path in Buddhism, the first is ‘right understanding’ or ‘right view’ and the second is ‘right perception’ or ‘right attitude'. It’s absolutely true that when you have the right view and right perception in a relationship, it’s way beyond being just about sexual satisfaction. Then you are really in a relationship as partners, and it is all about growth - spiritual, mental, emotional, physical. It’s all about both parties doing well because you are attuned to one another, and your sensual and sexual relationship often improves because of the enhanced intimacy.

It’s all about coming from the apex, rather than from a self-centred place in the relationship, from the egocentric corner of the triangle. When you include Big Mind, the other, egoless side of the triangle, then you reach an understanding of both the personal and the impersonal, and you are coming from unconditional compassion as an integrated sexual human being. From here you look at a relationship in terms of how you are supporting one another in growth, maturation, and feelings of love. It’s a much deeper, much more profound place than where we normally come from.

But this doesn’t mean we disown the more sensual, sexual, physical side of ourselves, otherwise it just becomes another disowned voice. So we want to embrace our immature as well as our more mature aspects, and transcend them, which means to include and go beyond both. The moment I knowingly speak from an immature place, I start to acknowledge and recognise my immaturity, and I can see how I can be more mature. We don’t want to disown the immature though, because very often the immature aspect of any voice offers a vitality that may not be found in the more mature. We don’t want to lose this energy. We want to embrace it for what it is, and go beyond.

Zen Master Genpo Roshi will be at the Big Mind Big Heart Weekend Workshop with guest Paul McKenna at the Copthorne Tara Hotel in London on the 24th and 25th of January.

Zen, Warren Buffet, Green and the Credit Crunch

Been itching to post something else all day, and the credit crunch is at the front of my mind at the minute. It's only the big businesses going under that hit the press, but there must be smaller businesses, shops, restaurants, cafes, bars etc all feeling it hard now, and having been a full time barman in a previous life, I know how quiet and low on custom January is, sometimes into February too. Anyway, I'll be writing more on the crunch in the future, but here's the piece I did back in November for HereistheCity:
http://life.hereisthecity.com/the_soul_clinic/at_work/771.cntns

Many thanks to Genpo Roshi for his assistance and inspiration.

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'Life is suffering' is the first noble truth in Buddhism, but it’s a slightly misleading translation of the word 'dukkha' in Sanskrit, which might be better translated as 'stuck-ness'. Imagine a wheel stuck, with an axle that cannot rotate. That’s the state of mind the Buddha was referring to.

It won’t have escaped your attention that the world economy appears to be in a state of stuck-ness at the minute. As usual much of the media is doing their bit to intensify the gloom, and over the past few months, the markets and we have moved from a global economy in crisis to talks of desperation and recession. To a large extent, that is where we are all collectively stuck
Picture:Craig Jewell
Step forward in the last week or so to Sir Phillip Green and Warren Buffet. Green, the greatest force in British high street fashion, announcing a 40% drop in profits, told people to cheer up." We need people to write the world isn’t closing down."

Warren Buffet is an entrepreneur and philanthropist with an approximate net worth of $60 billion. Although admitting he has no idea which way the markets will go, Buffet has a track record that suggests he has more of an idea than most of us on the planet. His recent comment:


“Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful", was an interesting one, but he used history to back him up. The Dow hit its low of 41 in July 1932, the pit of the great depression. By March ’33 when FDR took office, it was up 30%.

So why are these two bucking the trend? They may both be billionaires, and perhaps not feeling a pinch let alone a crunch like the rest of us, but they speak with conviction and a track record that suggests they are worth listening to.

Zen Master Genpo Merzel illustrates states of mind in his book Big Mind, Big Heart: Finding Your Way by way of a triangle. These triangles can be created for almost any scenario, but the one here illustrates what I will call ‘The Crunch Mind’. There’s always a balance to be had - a light with the dark - and then a state that ‘goes beyond’ the two. On your left is the ‘human’ part of us, the part prone to fear. On your right, the ‘being’ part, the infinite. The apex of the triangle is always the perfect combination of the two; it includes each polarity and transcends them, goes beyond. It is the fully integrated ‘human’ and ‘being', free-flowing and ‘unstuck’.

So sit for a minute and experience the fear. To do this you simply become that voice within yourself. Say to yourself “I am fear” and see what comes up. Feel it, and take a few deep breaths. Next simply shift your body slightly, tell yourself “I am no fear” and sit with that. Notice how different that feels. Notice how big you feel, how big you become. And then without getting stuck there, shift your body again and say ‘I am the transcendent’. And feel what that is like.

That’s where we all need to go next, neither stuck in one state or the other, just free-flowing. That is where the wheel is no longer stuck, and we all become Zen masters of the markets.