"Regardless of gender or sexual orientation, if you want to experience deep spiritual and sexual fulfillment, you must know your natural sexual essence—masculine, feminine, or balanced—and live true to it." Masculine energy is like a ship cutting through a vast ocean. It’s about deciding on a course and navigating in that direction. It's about mission and purpose. Feminine energy is the ocean itself. It’s pure energy that moves in many directions at once. It's about love and intimacy. In order to have successful intimate relationships, masculine and feminine differences should be magnified, not diminished.
"Your sexual essence is your sexual core. If you have a more masculine sexual essence, you would, of course, enjoy staying home and playing with the kids, but deep down, you are driven by a sense of mission. You may not know your mission, but unless you discover this deep purpose and live it fully, your life will feel empty at its core, even if your intimate relationship and family life are full of love. If you have a more feminine sexual essence, your professional life may be incredibly successful, but your core won’t be fulfilled unless love is flowing fully in your family or intimate life."
"Masculine and feminine differences should be magnified, not diminished, in moments of intimacy. When these polarities are lessened due to family and work obligations, sexual attraction is diminished, along with spiritual depth and physical health. Stressing your masculine or feminine essence into a falsely balanced persona affects virtually every part of you."
"Your sexual essence is always attracted to its energetic reciprocal. Masculine men are attracted to feminine women. Feminine men are attracted to masculine women. Balanced men are attracted to balanced women."
"You are always attracted to your sexual reciprocal. So, if you have a more feminine sexual essence, you will be attracted to a more masculine woman. You have probably seen men and women in couples like this. The man is more radiant and lively than the woman. The woman is more committed to her direction in life than the man. The relationship is more important to the man, whereas the woman likes to be left alone much of the time."
"Other men, with more neutral sexual essences, prefer women who are also more neutral, neither particularly masculine nor feminine. This kind of couple can talk about anything, and they like talking about everything. They share hobbies, friends, even career goals. Though equally loving, this kind of couple is usually less sexually passionate than highly polarized couples. It would be unusual to hear about this kind of neutral or balanced couple yelling at each other, throwing pillows, wrestling each other down to the floor, and passionately making love right there and then."
"If you are looking for a woman business partner, you probably want certain qualities in her, such as financial acumen, dependability, and the capacity to persist in the face of difficulties in order to achieve a goal. If you are looking for a woman friend, you probably want honesty, compassion, humor, and respect. If you are looking for a consort, you probably want a woman who freely embodies and expresses feminine energy and love. The more you seek a woman who gives you everything, the less you get of anything."
"Business skills are for the most part masculine skills (in both men and women). Friendship, in itself, is a neutral, nonsexual matter. And sexual passion requires a clear polarity between your masculine core and your woman’s feminine energy."
"If a man prioritizes his relationship over his highest purpose, he weakens himself, disserves the universe, and cheats his woman of an authentic man who can offer her full, undivided presence."
"Your mission is your priority. Unless you know your mission and have aligned your life to it, your core will feel empty. Your presence in the world will be weakened, as will your presence with your intimate partner."
"If a man never discovers his deepest purpose, or if he permanently compromises it and uses his family as an excuse for doing so, then his core becomes weakened and he loses depth and presence. His woman loses trust and sexual polarity with him, even though he may be putting much energy into parenting their children and doing the housework. A man should, of course, be a full participant in caring for children and the household. But if he gives up his deepest purpose to do so, ultimately, everyone suffers."
"Intimate relationship is never the priority in a masculine man's life and always the priority in a feminine woman's life. If a man has a masculine sexual essence, then his priority is his mission, his direction toward greater release, freedom, and consciousness. If a woman has a feminine sexual essence, then her priority is the flow of love in her life, including her relationship with a man whom she can totally trust, in body, emotion, mind, and spirit. Man and woman must support each other in their priorities if the relationship is going to serve them both."
"A woman really wants her man to be totally dedicated to his highest purpose—and also to love her fully. Although she would never admit it, she wants to feel that her man would be willing to sacrifice their relationship for the sake of his highest purpose."
"Most men make the error of thinking that one day it will be done. They think, “If I can work enough, then one day I could rest.” Or, “One day my woman will understand something and then she will stop complaining.” Or, “I’m only doing this now so that one day I can do what I really want with my life.” The masculine error is to think that eventually things will be different in some fundamental way. They won’t. It never ends. As long as life continues, the creative challenge is to tussle, play, and make love with the present moment while giving your unique gift."
"It’s never going to be over, so stop waiting for the good stuff. As of now, spend a minimum of one hour a day doing whatever you are waiting to do until your finances are more secure, or until the children have grown and left home, or until you have finished your obligations and you feel free to do what you really want to do. Don’t wait any longer. Don’t believe in the myth of “one day when everything will be different.” Do what you love to do, what you are waiting to do, what you’ve been born to do, now. Spend at least one hour a day doing whatever you simply love to do—what you deeply feel you need to do, in your heart—in spite of the daily duties that seem to constrain you. However, be forewarned: you may discover that you don’t, or can’t, do it; that in fact, your fantasy of your future life is simply a fantasy. Most postponements are excuses for a lack of creative discipline. Limited money and family obligations have never stopped a man who really wanted to do something, although they provide excuses for a man who is not really up to the creative challenge in the first place."
"If you were absolutely fearless, would you be earning a living in exactly the same way as you are now? Your edge is where you stop short, or where you compromise your fullest gift, and, instead, cater to your fears."
"Every moment of your life is either a test or a celebration. The same is true about every moment with your woman, only doubly so. Not only is her simple existence a test for you, but one of her deepest pleasures in intimacy is testing you, and then feeling you are not moved off course by her challenge. The most erotic moment for a woman is feeling that you are Shiva, the divine masculine: unperturbable, totally loving, fully present, and all-pervading. She cannot move you, because you already are what you are, with or without her. She cannot scare you away, because you already penetrate her in fearless love, pervading her heart and body. She cannot distract you, because your one-pointed commitment to truth will not bend to her will."
"If you are aligned with your mission, you are essentially happy, even though times cycle between difficult and easy. You don’t need your woman’s strokes to fulfill your mission. It still feels good when she strokes you, but you don’t need mommy anymore, telling you what a good boy you are. And your woman doesn’t want you to need mommy. In fact, it sickens her."
"One of the deepest feminine desires in intimacy (though not in business or simple friendship) is to be able to relax and surrender, knowing that her man is taking care of everything. Then, she can simply enjoy without having to plan it all herself and tell her man what to do. She can be pure energy, pure motion, pure love, without having to analyze all the options and decide which ones are best. She can enjoy her man taking responsibility for the direction, so she can be what the feminine is: pure energy. Like the ocean, the native state of the feminine is to flow with great power and no single direction. The masculine builds canals, dams, and boats to unite with the power of the feminine ocean and go from point A to point B. But the feminine moves in many directions at once. The masculine chooses a single goal and moves in that direction. Like a ship cutting through a vast ocean, the masculine decides on a course and navigates the direction: the feminine energy itself is undirected but immense, like the wind and deep currents of the ocean, ever changing, beautiful, destructive, and the source of life. This same principle applies to problems in intimacy. Any time you try to force your woman to be more like a ship than an ocean, you are negating her feminine energy."
"A woman must be able to trust you to take charge if she relaxes her own masculine edge. This is true financially, sexually, emotionally, and spiritually. The man doesn’t have to actually do all the work, but he must be able to steer the course if his woman is going to relax into her feminine without fear."
"Much of the modern men's movement has concentrated on men reclaiming their inner feminine energy. If you want to revitalize your own feminine energy, then you can do pretty much the same as women do to revitalize their feminine energy. You can go out into the woods and sing and dance and laugh with your friends. For men who have become rigidly stuck in their masculine direction, without allowing the flow of joy and sharing in their lives, this is good medicine."
"But for men who have lost their sense of purpose, who don't know what their life is about, or who have trouble aligning their life with their truth, singing and dancing aren't the remedy. The cure for lack of purpose is to be challenged to live at your edge, since you have lost the capacity to live there by yourself."
"Austerity means to eliminate the comforts and cushions in your life that you have learned to snuggle into and lose wakefulness."
"Unadorned suffering is the bedmate of masculine growth. Only by staying intimate with your personal suffering can you feel through it to its source."
"The other means, besides austerity, for rediscovering your masculine core is through challenge. The more superficial forms of challenge include activities like mountain climbing, ropes courses, competitive sports, and boot camp. These forms of physical challenge instantly enliven the masculine sense of purpose and direction, in men and women."
"Deeper forms of challenge involve directly giving your gift in ways that have been blocked by your fear. If you have always been afraid of public speaking, you can take on the challenge of speaking in public once a week for three months. If you fail and miss an appointment one week, the following week you must give three talks. If you have always wanted to write a novel, but could never finish one, you tell your friends that you are going to complete one chapter a week (or a month) for the next year. Every time you don't complete your weekly goal, you owe your friends $100. If you don't complete your yearly goal, you owe them $10,000."
