Where the Mystic and the Hedonist meet

I am a woman who chooses her partners and I do so with forethought and an overriding awareness not only of what I want, but what is healthy for me. I do not just fall into bed with people, anymore. The interpersonal and emotional fallout are rarely worth it, and the sexual pleasure, while often heightened by the adrenaline rush that accompanies 'newness', is rarely deeply satisfying.

I am not a passive person. I try to actively make myself available my partners in every way possible. I have two attitudes toward sex: hedonistic and mystic.

The Hedonist in me loves sex the way a horse loves to run. I was born and bred for it, for the sheer joy of it. I do not want or need to experience a bit and saddle in order to be fully present in a sexual forum. If I want to run, to feel my heart pound and the wind in my hair and the sweat of my exertion on my skin, I will do so, with or without a partner--but if I invite my partner along for the ride, he or she is going to ride me with hands fisted in my hair and knees pressed to my ribs--or they will run alongside me. Because, while I may allow another to direct or steer me, to urge me on, attempts to truly control me in any fashion make be contrary. Push me past contrary, I will try to throw them off, or failing that, I will get the bit in my teeth and run, and no amount of cropping will change my determination. It is a pattern set in me from childhood, one which has made me psychologically indomitable.

The Mystic in me sees the giving and the receiving of pleasure as a form of worship. I was dabbling in tantric sex long before I knew there was such a thing--all I knew was that the cyclic exchange of sexual energy was a mind-blowing, orgasmic high for me. When I learned that the Tibetan Buddhist model for the awakened mind was an orgasm, I had an 'ah-ha' moment--I understood, immediately and intuitively, what that meant. There is a beauty to the flow of erotic energy between people, especially when it is accompanied by mental intimacy. Deep down, we humans want do know others, really know them and share ourselves with them, and sex is a vehicle for it, an urgent alternating current of penetration and openness that occupies our carnal lizard-brains, freeing the higher self to seek, without fear or inhibition, a coupling of mental awareness in an intimate dance conducted to the beat of the flesh.

And, having tasted of the fruit of real sexual intimacy, knowing abandonment of self and the dropping of ego barriers, I am consciously aware of the many levels and layers of sexual expression available to us. Sex as a form of physical release is nothing to be sneered at--it is wonderfully freeing between people who all agree that it is that which they seek, and nothing more. And situational constructs like D/s and role-play, they are exciting, but they are constructs, props--they can be tools for achieving intimacy, or a distraction from it. But the truly erotic intimacy of unscripted, unconstrained spontaneous sexual sharing... ah, now that satisfies the soul, as well as the body.