The Yoga of Intimacy: Weaving a Relationship with Ourselves, Others, and Life

The well-known Buddhist meditation teacher and author, Jack Kornfield, once said, “Enlightenment is intimacy with everything.” In other words, the path of the heart is about turning toward the self, moving deeper into relationship with ourselves, others, and all that is. For this to happen we must face our fears.

Tantra, which means loom (as in a weaver’s loom), to pull or tie together, also means intimacy. A great question for us as practicing yogis is, how well are we weaving ourselves with the world?

Weaving the Self with the World

A good metric for this has to do with how often we experience the feeling of contentment, fulfillment, centeredness, inner peace, and ultimately, joy. The yogi who weaves herself well with the world, has an open and curious heart and a strong backbone, knowing who she is, knowing her purpose, and knowing what she needs. She recognizes her wholeness, even during times of insecurity, sadness, fear, and any other negative emotion, all of which she embraces.

In Tantra we want to weave ourselves together with threads of bliss that have the elasticity to embrace the full shadow, including highs and lows, and that maintain a healthy balance of laxity and stability, freedom and boundary.

When our threads are too tight, usually caused by fear, our heart closes down. We become rigid and overly dependent on others, or severely independent and isolated. When our threads are too loose, we lose the wider perspective. We lose our center, our grounding, and we drift with the wind that pulls us off course.

The place in the middle, between laxity and stability, the madhya, is the place of true transformation. It’s a place that is characterized by spacious luminosity, wisdom, and inner peace. In terms of the gunas (the qualities of nature), this is sattva (the guna of purity, clarity, and spaciousness)

Intimacy Beyond the Personal

Stereotypically, the word “intimacy” tends to be associated with sexual intimacy only. But in the Tantric tradition, intimacy is much broader. It is how we live, breathe, think, and relate to ourselves, others and life. There are many features of intimacy we should become aware of, including for example, the value of acceptance and safety. Acceptance and safety are, in fact, the gateposts for intimacy.

To achieve a greater connection with ourselves and the world, we need to walk through acceptance and safety. Judgment, self-doubt, inner harshness, and self-criticism all lock the gate of intimacy. However, these negative emotions can become the doorway to deeper self-knowledge when we can embrace and accept them as parts of ourselves. Unless and until we can look at our own darkness, our lesser evolved parts, our wounded parts, there will continue to be a limit on how much intimacy we’ll allow.

Intimacy is the paradox of freedom. The deeper we connect, the freer we become. But it’s a freedom based on setting healthy self-boundaries. Douglas Brooks describes this as the dance between permission and prohibition. Yes, please come closer (permission), but not that close! (prohibition). In the presence of safety and acceptance, however, the boundary of intimacy deepens.

What does intimacy mean to you? How does it show up in your life? Are you moving toward yourself to establish a deeper connection, a deeper understanding of your wants and needs? Or are you running away from yourself or from life in general? How might you embrace the discomfort and pain that comes with living an authentic life from the heart? How might you be turning away from the pain, avoiding and denying your suffering, because it’s just too much to bear?

The Courage to Stay Open

To live with an open and vulnerable heart there is pain. To live with a closed heart there’s also pain. But the pain that comes from a closed heart increases the pain, while the pain from living with an open heart is the pain that heals the pain.

Yoga is the practice and means of reconnecting to ourself so we can embrace our limited self with love and acceptance the way a mother would embrace her child. Yoga returns us home to the heart where there’s space for us to be who we are, space to grow and develop into who we wish to be, and space to practice the boundaries necessary to achieve a greater intimacy and enlightenment with everything!