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There are a few people in the world who can live solitary lives, who can live without loving another human being, these people can live alone and are content. Then there are some priests, monks, or gurus who claim to love humanity in general with an equal love for all members of the species. Most of us, however, need enduring close relationships, we need to love and be loved by a particular individual. It is easy to proclaim a love for humanity but every day love requires an understanding that is based on an intimate experience of another. You can not love someone you do not know, unless you dilute the definition of the word love so much that it has no meaning at all. Further, it is impossible to love another unless you can first love yourself, so the cultivation of self love is a necessary preamble to loving another and to loving life itself.

To love someone genuinely you must appreciate how that person differs from yourself and from others, and you must also keep a loving focus on that person in your mind. Love is a mental and emotional concentration, an intense focus on the beloved's characteristics and aspects, an exquisite tuning in on the others uniqueness, if you will. With love even those characteristics which could be considered faults or short comings take on a loving significance, they become accepted because they are among the attributes of the beloved and so are redeemed. In this way love is a deep meditation on the beloved who becomes the exclusive subject of worship and adoration and by means of this meditation the beloved gains prominence over all others.

It is quite natural to express love through sex but it is not natural to express love only through sex. Love can and should also find expression through caring and helpful acts, through commitment, devotion, playfulness, tender touching and passionate embracing. Love should not be confined to sexual expression only, nor should there be specific rules given as to how often adult human beings should engage in sex.

In any culture where sex and love have become artificially divided or antagonistic, many psychological problems will be seen to arise, some of these problems may become quite pernicious. Permanent relationships will become most difficult to achieve under such conditions and sex which is one of the most natural places for love's expression may become just another thrill seeking devise. When people come to feel that sex is the only legitimate expression of love they become obsessed with their performance and the quantity of sex within their relationships, as a result love may become inhibited unless it can find expression in sex.

The similar distortion of loves expression also occurs when love itself seems wrong if it can not for any reason be expressed sexually, as for instance when a man or a woman feels love for their child but are then unable to demonstrate this love because they have been programed to believe that sex is the only legitimate way they can express love. Common affection, tender touching and kissing out of love is suppressed because it may be interpreted as a sexual overture. Touching has come to be considered so fundamentally sexual that touching any part another persons body is potentially dangerous and charged with sexual energy. In this way loves energy has become corrupted and artificially confined to sex.

There are also those who do not desire sex and so the natural affection and love they may feel towards the another person becomes sublimated or denied because it can not find a sexual outlet.

All of these psychological problems then are the result of the artificial divisions made between sex and love. This division may in many cases lead to sexual obsession. Evidence of sexually obsession occurs when people proclaim that sex is, debasing, evil, or animalistic and so put excessively tight bans on its expression both in themselves and others. On the other hand when people proclaim its merits in an exaggerated fashion and then put unrealistic standards of performances on themselves and others then this is also evidence of the same obsessiveness.

The sex drive is a very potent energy force created by Nature to override man's equally strong intellectual and emotional drives because without the imperative of instinct Nature had to be assured that procreation would take place, so employed the use of extremely potent sex hormones to do the job. Despite this fact, some of you may not be particularly sexually oriented, but this does not mean that you are necessarily inhibiting your sexual desire nor are you denying your real nature, and it is absurd for you to believe that you must have intercourse frequently to be normal or to be loving. You are an individual first and a sexual individual second.

Sex was not created by Nature for the purposes of procreation alone or else each and every sexual encounter would result in a pregnancy, sex is also an expression of pure exuberance and physical joy. It is natural and good to express love through sexual acts, however, it is not natural, and it is not good, to only express love through sexual acts. Love can also be expressed through charity, creativity, play, religion and art.

Love is both a biological and a psychological necessity without which sex as such could not exist. The artificial division and separation of love and sex is indicative of a psychologically repressive culture. All life is sustained by love and sex is no exception, love also implies a willing offering up of one's attention, loyalty and commitment, even in the context of sex. The force of love provides all creatures small or large with a psychic hold on life without which nothing and no one would desire to be.

The emotion of love brings you the closest you can come to understanding the true nature of God. Love naturally incites commitment, dedication, and devotion and it revels in the unique characteristics and attributes of the beloved. Human love resembles God love most when it specifies. You can not therefore honestly insist that you love humanity and all people equally if you have never loved one other human being.

So again, all love is not sexually oriented, yet love naturally seeks expression and one such expression is through sex. By practicing Yoga and Meditation you can come to know the Love which is naturally within you and you can learn to express that Love towards another. The word Yoga means to bind back, to reunite, to bring together that which has been divided. Through Yoga you can learn to reunite Sex with Love so that you can begin to experience a deeper more loving and joyful union with your beloved and through that love you can come to experience the love of God.

OM

Namaste Ava

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