Secret: The Transcendent Kiss
One way of looking at kissing is as a communication. It’s not a teeth-crunching event nor an attempt to eat your lover nor an attempt to over-whelm your lover. It’s not a way to show your passion. It’s a way of meeting your lover. It’s a two-way communication -- the feeling of kissing and of being kissed back. The passion is not a demonstration for show; it’s a build-up of the passion between you and your lover, communion.
A kiss may last a long time -- five minutes or longer. It may be
punctuated by quick, soft kisses that tease and build attraction or it may be continuous. It may be on the lips or around the mouth, on the eyes or all over the face, in progressive lines of feeling all over the body, or on erogenous places. Above all, it is a soft meeting, not a hard one; hard meetings desensi-tize. Even when there’s pressure, it’s not about crushing pressure or about wild gyrations unless that’s what both you and your lover are into. If you can’t feel your lover’s response to your kiss, you’re probably kissing too hard or too wildly and not paying enough attention to your lover’s responses -- too much doing and not enough feeling.
The kind of kiss often shown in the movies, the open-mouth kiss, is only a surface appearance. It may seem to portray desire and passion -- but usually the way it is shown -- as a plunge -- misses the essence of “kiss” -- the mag-netic attraction that pulls us toward our lover. At best, it can only imply it.
That magnetic attraction is intensified by moments of suspense, in which we are poised at just that point when we are close, face to face, eyes to eyes, drawn together but before we dive in. It’s not contrived; it’s atten-tive.
That moment of suspense was shown beautifully in the movies, Down with Love, with Renée Zellweger and Ewan McGregor, and in Top Gun, with Tom Cruise and Kelly McGillis (the elevator scene). In both cases, the charac-ters were close to each other and the kiss, seemingly inevitable, the suspense, palpable, and even though a kiss didn’t happen in some of those scenes, the magnetic attraction did. That kind of suspense may last and intensify over
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seconds or over many minutes or hours.This magnetic attraction is only the first moment that draws us in. The touch and press of lips is but the beginning of a deeper fulfillment, as we merge in an absorption in which only intensifies as we feel the passion of our partner and surrender to it in an emotional surge of desire and commitment to kiss.
That’s not as far as a kiss can go. For as we kiss more deeply, we can feel more than our own passion; we feel our partner, his or her essence. In our love, we feel more deeply into her or him, we feel his or her being. We dive in, not only physically, but in our feeling-attention, body and soul.
If we dive deeply, enough, we can feel that the sense of her or of him is merged with our sense of ourselves, or more exactly, that we cannot tell where we end and they begin. We can deliberately feel that feeling and explore it. Now, don’t expect words to be able to describe or explain it beyond that. You’ll have to pay attention during your next kiss. It’s a feeling.
Once you have recognized it, you can go further. You can explore that feeling with your loving intuition. Feel into it and expand your attention in some direction and then in all directions. Soon, you’ll recognize that it has a shape, size, and boundary. And what is beyond that boundary, what
encloses it, is beyond self, even the merged self of you and your partner in kissing. It is the transcendent mystery that encloses us and exists outside of our sense of all life. In some sense, it is the mystery that contains the entire
universe.
It is the same mystery that we may intuit in ourselves, as the place from which our consciousness mysteriously comes, even the place from which we came when we were born, if your mind and imagination are absorbed in the kissing, itself, deeply.
The Transcendent Kiss is as deep as a kiss can go, as large as it can go, and it discloses to us a mystery that penetrates deeper than our mind, our feelings, our egos, our sense of ourselves as individuals, to the unnameable,
ineffable essence of the mystery of what we are.
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
for the ends of Being and ideal Grace...
~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning
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Move slowly enough to notice the first sensation of effort, in an easygoing, feeling way.
Never force or cause yourself to cringe. If a movement hurts, use less effort.
Freeing Your Groin
FOR PUSHING TOGETHER
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