MAKING LOVE WITH LIFE
AN INVITATION TO MAKE LOVE WITH LIFE
( THE EROTIC LIFE OF A MYSTIC, PART 2 OF 3 )
“To Make Love with a Lover is to love not only their flesh,
but to love the way Life moves through their whole body and, at the same time,
through our own body, and, at the same time -
with the most ecstatic and expansive intuition -
love that The Life in Them, and The Life in Us, and The Life in Everyone and in All Things, is One.”
From The Preface to ´The Conscious Tribe, A New Extended Family´
“What do you mean that All is One?”“Well, All couldn´t be two or three, could it?”
Srí Srí Rambaba Baba Maharaja
“When it's over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.”
From Mary Oliver´s poem ´When Death Comes´
LOOKING MORE CLOSELY
In The Erotic Life of a Mystic (Part 1) I talk about living in The Unknown, welcoming Not Knowing – and relaxing into The Arms of God, The Goddess, The Tao... I talk about the blissful Erotic Embrace of The Totality - and the Love that flows from us when we feel Loved. I describe a state of awareness.
In this essay (Part 2), and Part 3, I want to look at that state of awareness more closely. And I want to ask how that awareness acts. How do we behave as this state of awareness matures inside us? (Or ´as we mature inside this state of awareness´.) We love – yes. But what does that look like? Does it mean we sit and stare (looking slightly stoned) all day? Does it mean we become all sweetness and light? Does it mean we never get angry? What does it mean ´To Make Love With Life´?
Does it mean we forgo any discrimination? Does it mean we love all action equally? Does it mean we transcend all ecological and political debate? Does living in The Sacred Erotic Embrace affect the way we eat, dress, play – our lifestyle? Do we start to relate differently to the things (inanimate objects) in our life? Do we become promiscuous, or polyamorous? How does living in such pleasure affect our everyday lives?
SACRED-EROTIC AWARENESS
In The Erotic Life of a Mystic (Part 1) I say that, in my opinion, we already are part-of The Great Mystery - we already belong - continuous sacred-eroticism is already our birthright – we are already loved: that there´s nothing we need to achieve. We just need to soften, to let go, to relax, and open – and feel what we already are.
I talk about how people I have guided say that, as they breathe consciously, and bring their attention to their flesh – and let go of obstructive conditioning (like the idea that our relationship with The Totality should be ´pure, spiritual, disembodied´, or ´distant, empty, neutral ´, and so on – and definitely not ´sexy´!) - and give themselves permission to really, really relax, and open, and become receptive ´all the way down´ (from their heads, through their genitals, to their toes) - they feel whole-body arousal – as if they were being penetrated by blessing.
So relaxing into our actual experience (which is always in the present moment), not trying to achieve anything, doing nothing (just feeling), and letting ourselves be what we already are, is actually (paradoxically) a proactive process.
Later on in that first essay I add that as we relax into The Erotic Embrace Of God or The Goddess we observe ´the monkey mind´ distracting us, and unintegrated shame, grief, fear and anger calling for our attention. And I advise that as we let ourselves Fall Into Love, we give generous space and kindness to everything that arises in our bodies, hearts and minds. So that gradually, gently, over time, our attention-capacity strengthens - and we find we are more and more uninterruptedly enjoying The Totality´s Embrace.
All of those words are intended as guidance for opening to The Sacred Erotic Embrace – for softening into that awareness. Now, in Parts 2 and 3, I want to discuss that guidance in finer detail, and hopefully give some useful guidance for living in that awareness.
MAKING LOVE WITH LIFE
To act in the awareness we´re discussing is to Make Love With Life. To Make Love is not to have sex. They are not synonymous. They can coincide, but they are separable. We can Make Love while having sex, but we can have sex without Making Love. They can overlap. But Making Love can overlap with anything. To take some easy examples: we can Make Love with the music while dancing, we can Make Love with the earth and flowers and plants while gardening, we can Make Love with the water while swimming, we can Make Love with our food while eating.
The quote at the beginning, from The Preface to ´The Conscious Tribe, A New Extended Family´ describes Making Love with a Lover. But we can Make Love, in exactly the same way, with everything, at all times. To the extent that we can enter spiritual nakedness (presence devoid of ideas), emotional nakedness (emotion unobstructed by conditioning), and physical nakedness – whether dressed or undressed - (sensation unobstructed by conditioning) we can enter into a loving ´conversation´ with everything. We can Make Love With Life.
And it is not only possible to Make Love With Life, but my experience and assertion is that once we come to rest in The Erotic Spiritual Arms of The Great Mystery – we realise that Making Love With Life is our natural Way of Being.
Then: just as we feel The Pulse of Life in our own body when we Make Love with a Lover - we feel the sacred-erotic pulse in our body at all times, everywhere. And just as when Making Love with a Lover we feel The Pulse of Life in our Lover´s body - we feel the sacred-erotic pulse inside everything, everywhere.
When we rest in the Loving Embrace of The God or The Goddess, when we let that deliciousness, that grace, filter thrugh the cells of our body, not only (as I said in Part 1) does everything look look more beautiful, but we intuit that:
“everything is ´made out of´ The Great Mystery. Everything therefore is The Great Mystery. Everything is therefore sacred. Matter is sacred. The material is not the opposite of the spiritual. As theistic traditions of self-knowledge would put it: The World is The Face of God.”
The Conscious Tribe, A New Extended Family, Chapter 1
And just as we touch the face of a Lover with great tenderness – we touch everything with deep respect and care. The Face of God is everything – and we touch that face with tenderness.
The quote at the beginning descibes a Love Making with a Lover in which our Individuality dances with our Oneness. In the same way, we enter ´a dance with life´: we feel our own, unique, undefinable, physical-spiritual energy – and we feel the undefinable, spiritual-physical energy pulsing though everything – through every other person, through every living creature, through every stone, through every human-made thing, through the air, through the daytime and the nightime – and inexplicably, somehow, through every situation. We feel the moment. We respond to it. The moment feels us and responds. We feel its response. We respond to its response - and it responds to us once again. A subtle, erotic-not-sexual, energetic dance takes place, a back and forth – a Love Making – between Ourselves and Others and Things and Situations - between Ourselves and Everything.
The idea that the moment responds to us, or an inanimate object responds to us might sound odd. But let´s look at it through the eyes of Heraclitus´s famous phrase “you cannot visit the same river twice” (because the river will have changed). To which we could also add “you cannot visit the same river twice” (because, moment to moment, you are changing). So, for example: we are experiencing a situation as noisy, disturbing, and overwhelming – that´s the way it´s ´speaking to us´. Nevertheless, we feel it. We feel it fully. We feel it with our whole body. We feel the Undefinable Pulse of Life in it. And in ourselves. And as we feel, we Breathe Consciously. Until - perhaps only ten seconds later - having opened to the situation (not tried to repress it), not only do we not experience it as overwhelming, but we perceive its divinity. Then: we experience it for a second time. It ´speaks to us´ differently now - and we respond differently. And so ´the dialogue´, the relationship, The Love Making, continues – whether with a situation, an object, a tree, another animal, or another person.
This for most of us is a completely new way-of-being: Making Love while washing up, while driving, at a meeting, in the shower, in a restaurant, in a bar, in a field, recycling, watching the stars... We begin to feel what its like to live in The Sacred Erotic Loving Embrace – to be both ´in spirit´ and in the body. To be feeling (not thinking) the moment. To not be walking a straight line towards our objectives, but to be caught up in a dance we don´t control.
Finally – before we go on to discuss The Path of Making Love With Life – the perhaps never-ending, deepening, opening ´unlearning´ path of shedding layers of conditioned constriction – I just want to say that this essay is about understanding and experiencing Sacred Erotic Action (Making Love With Life). It is not about the ecological, social or political conesquences of such action. But it does have consequences in those areas. In fact, it has consequences in every area in which we relate. And politics are about how we relate. Commerce is about how we relate. Industrialisation and urbanisation are about how we relate. Ecology is about how we relate. Digitalisation is about how we relate. Is there any area of human interest that is not about how we relate?! Learning to Make Love with Life will affect everything we do. In essence (in every area of human interaction): it will moves us, organically, away from the desacralised, de-eroticised*, insensitive, unfeeling, synthetic environment and way-of-life - towards a more natural, appreciative, heart-open, sovereign and communal way-of-life.
PREPARATION
In Neo-Tantra (the modern cultural appropriation of the ancient Hindu/Buddhist/Taoist Tantric Path of Awakening, usually principally focused on our sexual healing), people talk about ´edging´ - by which they mean prolonging sexual pleasure by deliberately staying on the edge of orgasm.
As we relax into Erotic Embodied Spiritual Awareness and learn to Make Love With Life we enter a state of pleasure that has moments of greater and lesser intensity, but which is not aiming at, or even on a journey towards, an orgasm of total understanding or illumination. It is a state of erotic blessedness without end.
But how is this state sustained? Of the “thousands of ways to kneel and kiss the ground” (Rumi) - the thousands of techniques that could support us in continuously Making Love With Life - I am going to suggest Conscious Breathing – because that is what I have found (for myself, and for the people I guide) to be the simplest, most accessible and most powerful of all techniques. And I am going to recommend specific breathing patterns – that we can practice both in meditation and as we go about our everyday lives – that can keep us on that edge where the spiritual and the material meet.
But before talking about how we stay on that blissful edge, I feel we have to ask how we get onto the edge in the first place! And that is not easy or quick. The Conscious Breathing is the easy part! 90% of The Path to Making Love With Life is getting onto the edge. Staying there by breathing consciously is just the last 10%!
How do we get onto the edge? (1) By cultivating a direct, personal, felt experience of Spirit, Consciousness, God, The Great Mystery, (2) by cultivating an intricate, vulnerable familiarity with the woundings and tendencies of our own, conditioned psyche and personality, and (3) by cultivating an intimate awareness of how that conditioning lives and moves subtly within our body. And yes – this cultivation usually takes years. Not because it´s so complicated, but because almost all of us have been severely disassociated from ourselves. The proof of this being, for me – that we´re not in our natural state: we´re not (everywhere and always) Making Love With Life.
Cultivation of these three aspects of our perceiving is like opening irrigation channels in our perceptual apparatus. We can then release our Conscious Breath along these channels – and connect both with The Great Mystery and with our embodied experience.
For example: I experienced a lot of shame around my sexuality. And I held tension in my stomach that didn´t allow The Grace of God, The Blessings of The Goddess, The Timeless Bliss of Oneness to percolate down through the cells of my body, all the way into my genitals – and infuse my sexuality with divinity.
So (1) I had to cultivate a strong felt-connection with God, (2) admit and understand my shame, and bring a non-judgmental, healing tenderness to that shame, and (3) recognise the rising and falling of the tension in my stomach, and learn to not resist it – until it relaxed and settled of its own accord.
That is an example in relation to my sexuality. But the blockages can be anywhere in our bodies, and related to any facet of our lives. We might have had a negative experience of religion (for example), and dismissed spirituality – and be blocked in our connection with Great Mystery. Or we might be burdened by feelings of inferiority (or superiority) towards other people, and crumple (or bloat) in their presence – thus blocking the smooth flow of Sacred Energy through our hearts. Or we might be burdened by great fear, or stress - and hold our bodies stiffly and tightly. Or be burdened by grief, or depression – and hold our bodies weakly, sloppily. My point being – that our psychological and emotional conditioning blocks the flow of Sacred Erotic Energy through our bodies – and that (to return to the metaphor of irrigation systems) we need to connect to The Water Source (which, I´d say, is everywhere), and heal our personal mind-heart-body blockages – in order to be able to ´get onto the spirtual-material, sacred-erotic edge´ of Making Love With Life. Then we´re 90% there! Then we just need to breathe!
Then all we need to do is stay there...
EDGING FOREVER
As I said, I recommend Conscious Breathing (as recommended by countless teachers in a wide range of traditions) as the most obvious choice of technique for maintining our balance on the ecstatic tightrope along which the glittering, sparkling currents of matter and spirit run both ways.
How exactly do I recommend breathing consciously? There are two complimentary patterns I recommend – a vertical pattern and a horizontal pattern.** But the horizontal pattern depends upon previous practice of the vertical pattern. So first, the vertical pattern: Breathing on The Vertical Axis.
(1) Inhale through the heart. Hold. Exhale up, out and around – into Everything, The Totality, The Great Sacred Mytery of Life. (2) Then as you inhale again, pull that breath back down to the heart. Hold it for a few seconds. Then release it again, but now: in and down – through your belly and penis/vagina, down your legs – into the ground. (3) Then as you inhale again, pull that breath back up to the heart. Hold it for a few seconds. Then release it up, out and around again. And repeat and repeat and repeat.
Be aware of your spine. Let The Blessings of The Totality shower down through you (chakra by chakra, down your spine) saturating your sexuality. Let God, Goddess, Great Mystery rain blessings upon your wild, free, animal nature – upon your incarnation, your individuality, the Unique Expression of The Great Mystery that you are.
Let the Earth Energies concentrated in your penis/vagina rise up through your body (chakra by chakra, up your spine - up and out through the top of your head) like an Offering to The Infinite Sacred Mystery. As you have received blessing, now offer yourself – offer everything you are – with gratitude, with no conditions attached, with no thought – shamelessly letting blessing fall upon your love and your lust, your tenderness and your ferocity, your freedom and your fear, your joy, your hatred, your pain, your wisdom, your confusion. Know that everything about you is sacred. Everything. Let God see you! Hide nothing! As the breath descends – be blessed. As the breath ascends – be an offering. This is the Vertical Axis Conscious Breathing Pattern I recommend.
Is it always possible with this intensity? While driving? In the supermarket? Of course not. It is only natural, when we focus on something (looking up at a roadsign, selecting a product from the shop shelf, and so on) that we remove our focus from our breathing, at least to some extent. But however gently, however quietly (in a business meeting, in class, in the train...) – I suggest returning to this pattern again and again, and letting it hold you steady. Letting it become the backbone of your Sacred Erotic Life. Practice resting in the Arms of Great Mystery – as if Great Mystery was your Lover. Practice resting peacefully and contentedly in Your Lover´s Erotic Embrace.
Live this breathing pattern – practice it in stillness, as a meditation – and practice it all day long: integrate it into your everyday life. When you practice it as a meditation you can sit (Buddhist meditation style), or stand and accompany your breathing with arm movements (Qigong style), or stand and move spontaneously (Expressive Dance style) – and in any of these styles you can also make noise! Releasing sound as you exhale, I have found, can be extremely liberating.
Breathing on The Vertical Axis can open us into a relationship (an ´Inner Love Making´) with God, The Goddess, The Tao, The Great Mystery. We taked about ´never being able to visit the same river twice´ - about how the world is always changing, and we are always changing, and how we can experience an ´Outer Love Making´ when we stay present to the energetic ´conversation´ between the perceiver and the perceived.
Similarly, internally, every time we exhale up-and-around we meet God anew. Our meeting has a new texture. And that new texture then inhabits our exhalation in-and-down through our bellies and genitals. When the energies in our bellies and gentials then receive this new energy-texture from God – they metamorphose, like clouds changing shape in the sky. They are transformed. And as we exhale up-and-around again, our exhalation carries that new, transformed, physical-erotic energy-texture into Arms of God...
This is how Conscious Vertical Axis Breathing can take us into a continuous experience of Inner Love Making – which becomes the foundation of our Outer Love Making, our Making Love With Life.
I say ´the foundation´ because learning to breathe on The Horizontal Axis is what then stabilises us in Making Love With Life. But I´ll leave it here for now. And we can discuss the Horizontal Axis in part 3. I feel there is already a lot to contemplate in all we have discussed – and a lot to practice!
The Path of Making Love With Life will no doubt be a new approach for many people. It is not Judeo-Christian. It is not Buddhist. It is not traditional Tantra (focused on enlightenment and the transcendence of birth and death), or Neo-Tantra (focused on sexual healing). It has no end goal. It is about how we travel through life, not about where we´re going, or what we´re trying to achieve. It is not about belief. It is about Not Knowing – and feeling. It is based on the intuition of interconnection – the intuition that everything is connected to everything, and that therefore everything is relating with everything - and that the most complete and beautiful way to participate in this cosmic interrelating is to Make Love With Life!
***
* When I describe the dominant global culture as ´de-eroticised´ I don´t mean it´s not sexualised. Of course it´s sexualised – hyper-sexualised. But that pornographic, objectifying, consuming sexuality (even with a sprinkling of tantrism or fetishism on top) has nothing whatsoever to do with the natural, spriritual eroticism of Making Love with Life we´re discussing. The dominant post-judeo-christian, materialistic culture is ´de-eroticised´ because it has alienated us from nature, taught us to dominate, control and train our bodies rather than how to follow them, taught us to objectify, standardise, evaluate, praise, shame and modify our bodies, and (as in Gerorge Orwell´s Doublespeak in his book ´1984´), removed the very concept of the innate, natural, physical-spiritual Pleasure of Being from the collective psyche.
** Both of these breathing patterns can be practiced within the Conscious Relating Meditation – a meditation practice that one does together with another person (or a group) that includes both silence and dialogue. It is described in the free, short book ´The Conscious Tribes Manual: Concept & Method´. There are free Guided Meditation Tapes available on The Support Page of the Conscious Tribes website to guide you through it. And the practice is discussed in much greater detail in the longer book ´The Conscious Tribe: A New Extended Family´. Both books are available as free ebooks on the biligual Conscious Tribes website: www.conscious-tribes.org / www.tribusconscientes.com
Mark Josephs,
Aragon, Spain,
Summer 2026
Mark initiated The Conscious Tribes Movement.
His articles, stories and poems attempt to convey not only the concept of Conscious Tribes (Tribes of Awakening Through Relating), but the feeling behind them.
TRIBES OF AWAKENING THROUGH RELATING
Presence, Intimacy, Nature, Sovereignty "The Path of Making Love With Life" Combining Personal & Social Transformation
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