Category: The Spiritual Side Of Sexuality

As I continue to heal and work on practicing forgiveness with my partner over his infidelity, I have been thinking a lot about the other party involved in his indiscretion. Through several of our discussions, my partner told me that he had informed those he was about to cheat with that he was in a relationship and monogamous. Now I know it might seem ludicrous that my partner said those words prior to committing the act of cheating, but I believe there was a spiritual reason for him saying those words in those moments. Nevertheless, it was the actions of the other party upon them hearing those words that reminded me so much of my past.

Many years ago when I met a man through the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous, I was single and felt a pretty serious attraction to him. Within a short period of time of getting to know him, he informed me he had been married for a very long time but also was extremely attracted to me. He also told me that he had committed many acts of indiscretion on the side with other men while his wife was oblivious to it all. In that moment, a person living with spiritual love and light in their lives and following a higher calling, would have taken a much higher road than the one I took. But sadly, I wasn’t filled back then with much love and light in my life nor was I allowing myself to heed any type of higher calling. The result was me beginning a serious engagement in regular sexual relations with this married man, which was no different than those who participated in my partner’s infidelity.

I want to provide you with a simple fact about infidelity. Whether it’s the one doing the act of cheating or the one on the sexual receiving end of it, there is no love and light involved in the act for either. It’s just pure lust. I remember those moments quite clearly still to this day when that man from the AA meeting looked at me and said he was married. I know I had a tremendous amount of lust in my eyes then and it didn’t matter to me that he was saying those words. Today, I am convinced that him telling me his marital status was his soul’s last ditch attempt to prevent the act from occurring. But neither of us were living with much love and light in our lives so the inevitable happened between us.

Most people on the sexual receiving end of those that are cheating often tell themselves that it’s ok to be engaging in the act solely because their ego tells them it’s ok. Back when that married man told me he wanted to be with me sexually, I allowed my ego to tell me just that because I was single. I also made the excuse in my brain that it was the married man who was making the poor decision and not me. The reality was that we both were but this wouldn’t be true for me today. If I were single right now and someone I found extremely attractive approached me with a desire to be with me sexually and told me beforehand that they weren’t single, I wouldn’t do anything with them. That’s only because I am living by a higher calling now and am not willing to engage in any lustrous behavior. I know now that doing so would compromise my spiritual position in life and only add more darkness to that other person engaging in it with me.

I feel sad for the couple my partner engaged in this sexual connection with because it’s clear to me that they are living in the same darkness like I once was. They ignored my partner’s last ditch attempt at maintaining his monogamy and proceeded to use him sexually for their own self gratification. There was no love involved in what happened in this indiscretion and while my partner is now living with shame and guilt because of it, they have moved on to anyone else willing to be an orifice for their sexual satisfaction.

While I know my partner did try to make that last ditch attempt at stopping himself from going through his act of cheating, it was already too late for him at that point as his lust and ego had full control. For those on the sexual receiving end of it, they too had the ability to stop it from ever happening, but they didn’t because their lust and ego had just as much of control over them as well. I know all too well what that feels like and what it did to me in the long run when I kept doing it. I also realize now how I was just as much of a sick person as that married man from AA I once was regularly being sexual with.

The bottom line for all those who are on the sexual receiving end of those that are cheating on their partners is that they are no different than the ones doing the cheating. They have every ability to stop it and yet they don’t because their lust and ego drives them to keep doing it. The only solution I have ever found to preventing myself from either cheating or being on the sexual receiving end of someone cheating is to draw closer to my Higher Power. Through that, I have been able to see the ugliness that comes from those types of low vibration sexual acts where very little love and light, if any at all, is ever present in them.

I pray that my partner truly realizes just how much he allowed himself to be used by that other party who engaged in the indiscretion with him. For that other party’s sake, I also pray that they may one day realize how spiritually sick they are. I was once both in their shoes as well as my partner’s and it’s a very dark place to be in. Thankfully, my Higher Power has completely freed me from having the desire for any of that behavior. And I know that as long as I keep that connection close to my Higher Power, I’ll never go back to those dark lustrous and ego based actions ever again…

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

It’s been almost a week now since I discovered my partner cheated on me and only a few days since I wrote about it in here where I came to the conclusion that I needed to give my partner a second chance. While I’ve had a little more time to clear my head and have really tried to start moving on from this, I’m finding doing so is proving to be extremely difficult. Having felt betrayed and my trust broken by him, has left me feeling like a wounded bird who keeps re-injuring itself over and over again through its own actions.

One may think, how is that actually possible?

In my case, it comes down to one simple thing. I have been spending vast amounts of time interrogating my partner about every littlest detail of this whole infidelity experience from the beginning of how it started to the end of when I caught him. What I am beginning to realize though in doing this is that it’s not only causing me more pain each time I do so, it’s also causing him more of that as well. And while my ego seems to get some sense of satisfaction out of that, my spirit has been showing me that neither of us are ever going to heal and move on from this if I keep doing that behavior.

The simple fact is that this infidelity experience occurred, but it’s now done and over with…hopefully and God willing. Rehashing any of the minute details of the whole thing has been doing nothing more than raising my anxiety, causing me to feel sick to my stomach, and reliving it over and over again. I’m not sure if it would ever even be possible to grasp why my partner did this as there are any number of reasons as to why he was led to doing it. I’m not him, I don’t have his thinking processes, nor the old tapes that play in his brain. So none of his explanations that he might offer me, nor having him tell me any more details of the experience, will help me in the least bit. Instead, it just makes me more frustrated and more angry to where I lash back out again at him.

While my ego might like the lashing bit because it wants my partner to know the pain I feel, my spirit does not. Doing so is not practicing forgiveness and beginning the movement towards healing and acceptance. It seems as if each time I probe my partner for more and more data trying to wrap my brain around what happened, I grow more sad, frustrated, and angry. In turn, he goes into deeper levels of guilt and shame and having any more of those feelings is not going to help him heal from this either. Thankfully, he’s taken some steps to find a therapist to help in his own process of healing as I know my partner feels terrible about what he’s done. If I’m truly going to practice forgiveness, I must, at all costs, drop my interrogation and berating to allow him to heal.

I know there’s a part of my partner that has been wounded ever since his childhood when he molested at around the same age that I was. Like it did for me for years and years, I believe being molested has prevented him from ever being able to fully receive unconditional love from anyone. While it will be his therapist’s job to help him figure this out, I can see clearly how my partner was trying to self-sabotage the deep intimacy and closeness we had been experiencing prior to his indiscretion because it was totally foreign to him.

The bottom line is that if I want my partner or myself to heal and move on from this experience, I need to let it go. That means not talking about it and rehashing all of its details. That means not berating my partner when I feel some of the pain surface from within me about it. That means waiting patiently for him to share with me anything that may come up during his own healing process. And that means going to my Higher Power through prayer and meditation to trust that I will heal from it as well.

I think it’s a normal reaction to want to know every little detail on a partner’s indiscretion, especially when so much love and trust is broken from it. I also believe it’s a normal reaction to lash out at the partner who cheated because of feeling betrayed. But to become a spiritual person filled with love and light and to give my partner a second chance, I know I must let all of those behaviors go and trust that God will guide the two of us through our own healing processes in our own way.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

An interesting thing I’ve learned from being in intimate relationships over the years is that I once lived in a constant pattern of chasing after someone and then running away from them once I knew I had caught them. Within this constant pattern was a set of unhealthy behaviors that consisted of me doing nothing more than continuously pushing the person away that I loved and then pulling them back over and over again.

For the longest time, I liked the chase of trying to court a new person and develop an intimate relationship with them, much more so than the long-term relationship part which came later. I really enjoyed meeting someone new and giving them all that gushiness and touchy-feely stuff while trying to sweep them off their feet. I was quite fond of all that romance, candles, special dinners for two and all those other things that come when one is courting another. But unfortunately, when a day came where it appeared I had finally caught the other person, where they began to show how much they loved me unconditionally, I had the tendency to run in the opposite direction.

I started noticing this pattern primarily in my previous relationship to the one I’m in now. It commenced in the same way all my others had begun by me showering a man I was chasing after with much love and affection. Initially he played hard to get and I got a high off of each moment he succumbed to my romantic advances. This, by the way, is what I am referring to when I speak of that pulling behavior and I continued it until the day came when he began to express all that same gushiness and touchy-feely stuff back at me on a regular basis. It was then that I started feeling extremely uncomfortable and no longer had the desire to pull him in closer to me. Instead, I felt like doing the exact opposite, so I began pushing him back and running away.

What I mean by pushing him back and running away is that I stopped doing all those things that led to that man falling in love with me in the first place. Instead of sitting next to him on a couch and holding hands while watching television or movies, I’d sit on the floor or in another chair on the other side of the room. I stopped winking at him at all those odd moments I used to do and didn’t stare at him with those longingly gazes anymore either. I no longer wanted to cuddle real close in bed during any part of the night and instead started keeping my space. All in all, I essentially started halting all of my romantic courting behaviors and began to feel irritated at each of his loving advances. I’d tell him that I was feeling smothered and needed some space, which of course led to many arguments. During them, I projected my own fears and insecurities onto him until he got so frustrated he began to pull away. At that precise moment, when he created more distance, the chase was back on and I started trying to pull him back in again.

Round and round this went until I finally realized just how crazy this behavior was. After much therapeutic work surrounding this, I discovered I really didn’t know how to be on the receiving end of unconditional love. In each of my intimate relationships, I had no problem chasing after another man, showering them with affection, and doing my best to love them unconditionally. But as soon as they became smitten with me and started loving me the same in return, I would freak out. The biggest discovery though was the realization that all of that chasing and running away and pushing and pulling stemmed back to me being molested around the age of 12.

Sadly, my being molested became the first intimate experience I had with anyone in life. While I had been attracted to that adult male in his 40’s prior to his molestation of me, the ramifications of that experience led me to not being able to receive unconditional love. You see, that man did not truly love me. He was a sick man who used me and it established a pattern that created an extremely uncomfortable feeling within me anytime someone who truly loved me, started being touchy-feely and giving me all that gushiness. Those things did nothing more then trigger the pain I got from being molested.

So as I grew older, I went from relationship to relationship chasing after men I was attracted to. I’d shower them with my love and affection and did everything I could to pull them in. But as soon as they began loving me deeply, I started to run away by pushing them back on a daily basis. And all of that was due to never healing from that molestation because each man that tried to love me only reminded me of that molester when they touched me even though they weren’t that sick man.

Thankfully, my Higher Power has helped me to find the healing I needed to work through all of this. I learned I had to walk through those fears of intimacy by allowing a loving partner to do things such as touch me, hold me, cuddle with me, clasp my hand within his, and gaze at me longingly, even when I wanted to run away. The more I forced myself through those uncomfortable moments, the easier it became to allowing them to happen. And the more I allowed them to happen, the more I became able to receive unconditional love. And the more I became able to receive unconditional love, the more I stopped wanting to push and pull or chase and run away from that loving partner. And the more I stopped wanting to push and pull or chase and run away from a loving partner, the more I actually became happy in being in a long-term relationship.

So if you happen to be someone like I once was, who likes the chase but runs away after you catch the person or who does a lot of pushing and pulling to the person you love, I encourage you to take a moment, breathe, and realize you probably don’t know how to truly receive unconditional love or deep intimacy. If you really want to have a long-lasting relationship, you’ll need to start walking through any fear that arises during intimate moments coming from your partner. You will find in doing so, that it will get easier and easier, until you no longer are afraid of receiving the love you so deserve…

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson