Body and Sexuality

Sexuality centered on the genital organs, however common it may be, risks exhaustion. What if the entire body became the source of a deeper pleasure, of a true embodied spirituality? Sexuality is not limited to the genital organs. It inhabits every part of the conscious body, every movement that connects us to something greater than ourselves.

The paradox of focused sexuality

Our common experience tends to center sexuality on the genital organs, the penis and vulva. This focus is based on a physiological reality: these areas, endowed with an exceptional density of nerve sensors, promise pleasure of immediate intensity. Because their sensitivity is extreme, the pleasure they provide seems to be, by nature, the heart of the sexual act. The quest for strong sensations logically guides us toward these territories whose reactivity is most obvious, whether we are alone or accompanied.

However, this is where a paradox emerges. By concentrating all our attention on these organs alone, we risk, without even realizing it, gradually diminishing their sensitivity. This exclusive concentration on the genital zones risks reducing the spiritual fulfillment that sexuality can offer us. For sexuality possesses this power of transformation, this capacity to make us grow and modify our perception of the world. As Georges Bataille wrote in Eroticism, sexuality opens us to an experience of the sacred, provided we do not reduce it to its purely mechanical dimension.

Pleasure, though quickly attainable, can see its nuances dulled with repetition. A race for stimulation then begins, which often confuses orgasm with the purpose of sexuality. Yet, while orgasm is one of the powerful incarnations of pleasure, it is not the ultimate goal. Orgasm is but one of the possible incarnations of pleasure, one occurrence among others of this connection to something greater than ourselves. The true objective, it seems to me, is the deepening of a form of spirituality, this connection to something greater than oneself that surrender allows.

The mountain metaphor

When orgasm becomes the only summit to reach, the path to get there loses its richness. When we focus exclusively on the sexual organ to obtain pleasure then orgasm, the path that allows for spiritual growth is short-circuited. It’s as if we wanted to climb a mountain to appreciate its grandeur, but chose to arrive directly at the summit by helicopter.

In this shortcut, we lose the essential: we will not have felt the grandeur of the mountain under our feet, we will not have contemplated this natural wonder from a thousand angles and in a thousand different lights. We will not have embraced it through the very movement of our body traversing it. In matters of sexuality, this too-rapid ascent, this focus on the goal, deprives us of the transformative experience, of the power that the erotic journey has to make us grow and see the world differently.

Beyond the symbol, the body as primary territory

When a feeling of lack sets in, even though everything initially seemed to be in place, we often seek to enrich the experience through external stimulation. Sophisticated eroticism, power games, domination, submission, various stagings are all explored paths. These elements, almost all external to the sexual organs themselves, become symbols that we add to the experience. As cultural beings, we are indeed cultural animals, bathed in our representations. We invest our experiences with representations, we see and live the world through the prism of what we have learned, a prism that we can fortunately expand, develop, question, deconstruct to reconstruct what corresponds to us more, exercise our freedom, in short.

Playing with these symbols certainly constitutes a path of opening and exploration for sexuality. Yet another path, perhaps more fundamental, also exists: the path of the body as a whole. A glance, a touch, an anticipation, a message, a letter, a garment, a memory, all of this nourishes a sexuality that remains fundamentally connected to emotions. The texture of a garment or the strength of a memory can nourish desire with incredible power.

Pure love and the courage of the moment

Even those who practice a sexuality they call “raw,” distinct from emotional engagement, are in reality never outside of this engagement. Simply, they experience emotions free from possessive attachments, emotions in letting go.

Even with a stranger, we can experience very strong emotions, not purely sexual, but loving, completely detached from possession. The exchange can be of deep loving intensity, precisely because it is courageously anchored in the uniqueness of the moment, without expecting anything more. What some call “pure sexuality,” I prefer to call “pure love”: the courage to know that life is unique in this moment and not to expect more from the embodied encounter. As Michel Foucault analyzed in his History of Sexuality, pleasure can be a practice of freedom, an ethics of self that is not reduced to social codes of possession.

This truth is magnificently staged in Stanley Kubrick’s film Barry Lyndon (1975), in that scene where all the loving, sensual and sexual engagement plays out solely in the exchanged glances between the two future lovers, in a collective space, through minute inflections of the body, head, and breath. Everything plays out there: the loving engagement, the sensual promise, the carnal desire. Everything passes through minute inflections of the body, an inclination of the head, a rhythm of breathing. The body, well beyond the sexual organs, becomes the vibrant theater of the encounter. Sexuality reveals itself there in all its subtlety, well beyond the genital act.

Bodily awakening as a spiritual path

The body that carries our sexual organs constitutes their terrain of existence, their soil, their setting. It is through the entire body, well beyond the genital zones, that sexuality can truly unfold. In the consciousness of our hands and fingers, of our feet, our belly, our buttocks, our neck, our skull, our nose, in the consciousness of all parts of the body, lies an immense sexual and spiritual potential.

This is not about postponing the “real” act with the sexual organs, nor establishing a hierarchy, relegating the union of sexes to later or limiting ourselves to “preliminaries” before the act deemed principal or the sacrosanct penetration. No, it’s about nurturing sensations in territories other than the eye of the storm, creating a dance where the entire body, in the multiplicity of its sensitivities, participates in the rise of pleasure. In this dance of the entire body, all organs increase their sensitivity, and sexuality emerges transformed. The goal is no longer the simple stimulation of sex, but making love, with oneself or with others. Making love: what a magnificent expression! It’s putting love into action, this contact with something greater than ourselves.

This idea of carnal consciousness echoes the thought of philosophers like Maurice Merleau-Ponty, for whom we do not possess a body, but we are our body. He affirmed: “The body is our general vehicle for being in the world”. Applying it to sexuality, one could say that the body is our general vehicle for being in love. As Wilhelm Reich suggested in The Function of the Orgasm, sexual energy circulates throughout the body, and its free circulation is essential to our fulfillment. The sexual organs are part of it, of course, but the entire body participates in this energetic circulation.

If we consider sexuality at the level of the body as a whole, the potentialities for spiritual pleasure become virtually infinite. Boredom becomes impossible, while we know well that genital sexuality, from a certain point, can represent a certain repetition, something that is no longer as fascinating as on the first day.

The culture of the conscious body

The path toward a truly living sexual life, life being movement itself, the beating heart, the world that passes through us, goes through the discovery of one’s own body and, thereby, the body of the other. Bodies can meet on an infinity of planes: an elbow can touch a shoulder, the palm or back of a hand can brush a foot, an ear can rest on a belly. The combinations are infinite, each carrying its own poetry.

This consciousness of the body, this presence of the body to ourselves, is cultivated in gestures that seem a priori to have nothing to do with sexuality: walking, stretching, yoga, dance, all the movements that world cultures offer us in their infinite variety. Each of these movements constitutes a spark of life that awakens to consciousness a part of us. Setting a part of the body in motion brings awareness of its existence and its sensitivity. By feeling a thigh muscle we were unaware of, certain muscles whose existence we didn’t even know suddenly reveal themselves to us in movement. Our body exists more and more intensely to our consciousness, to our sensations, and therefore to our sexuality, to our erotic potential.

We can enjoy the pleasure of a thigh muscle tensing, a wink, vibrating lips, a foot placing itself on the ground. Again, this is not about setting aside the sexual organs, but offering them the most beautiful setting possible: our conscious body. Through the discovery of our own body through the movements we offer it, it is life itself that we restore to a higher level of energy.

Making love at every moment

By cultivating this presence to self, this practice of bodily consciousness can be exercised at any moment. Even sitting on a chair, we can explore muscles of our body by gently setting them in motion. In doing so, we prepare ourselves to make love, not in the sense of preparation for the sexual act, but in the sense of a permanent availability to love, a way of already being in love. Each movement, even minimal, becomes a preparation.

It then becomes possible to become aware of the dimension of love present in each small movement, in each tension or release of our body. As Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in his Letters to a Young Poet, “There is only one important thing: to be ready at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become.” This permanent transformation also passes through the body and its expanded consciousness.

By offering our sexual organs the most beautiful setting that is a conscious and living body, we elevate our level of vital energy. Making love will perhaps no longer be solely circumscribed to the time of the sexual act itself, but will become a much more permanent quality of presence in our life. Sexuality ceases to be an activity confined to specific moments to become an energy that infuses daily life, which it perhaps fundamentally is: not a simple act, but a permanent spiritual engagement with life itself. A life conscious of the sexuality that founds it and maintains it at a high level of energy by cultivating it at every moment. Not an obsession, but a joyful and serene consciousness of this vital force that passes through us and connects us to the world, to others, and to ourselves in our deepest dimension.