Today’s recording is bonus content from Sensei & Qapel’s audio course Conscious Love. The course explores many aspects of intimate relationships, including the unconscious patterning that influences them and how to turn partnerships into opportunities for deep transformation.
Podcast listeners can download the entire course for free at planetdharma.com/podcastlove.
Podcast Transcription:
Chris: Welcome to this Dharma If You Dare bonus episode. We hope you enjoyed today’s sound bite, a bonus track from Doug Qapel Duncan and Catherine Pawasarat Sensei audio course Conscious Love on the topic of Intentional Celibacy. And stay tuned till the end of the episode to learn how to get the whole course for free.
Sensei: We do, by the way, recommend celibacy as a kind of part of the process and it’s important. Usually when we say that like half the room goes like, “oh yeah, I’ve been celibate”. There’s a difference between intentional celibacy, which has a starting and an end date, right? And just sort of like, oops, I’ve been celibate for 18 months. How did that happen? Right because when you’re committed to celibacy, a number of interesting things happen. First of all, like everybody is interested in you all of a sudden sexually,
Qapel: It’s true,
Sensei: I was available until yesterday You know, everybody just knows
Qapel: This is very typical for monks
Sensei: I mean if you’re not, you haven’t told anybody even, right,
Qapel: That’s right. They, they sense it. Yeah, I have a number of friends and myself who have been monks, right? And like the girls like weren’t interested in you the women, right? And now you’re a celibate monk, wow!
Sensei: Okay, so that’s just the kind of,
Qapel: She’s not talking about lifelong celibacy necessarily. She’s talking about terms.
Sensei: Yeah, like, like I’m gonna do this for six months or a year or something. And the other thing, the interesting thing that happens is when you know that you’re not going to get together with somebody, right? You just see all of the machinations. In a way, all of a sudden it’s all in like three D. Whereas you know, yesterday before I committed to being celibate, all of that same stuff was happening. But somehow I didn’t see it so clearly and it’s very enlightening, it’s very very interesting to both see our own patterns and to see the other patterns. It’s like, wow, humans really do this kind of mating ritual. Like we’re almost sort of, you know, like flapping our wings
Qapel: and wiggling our butts!
Sensei: Yeah. And somehow when we’re in the game we don’t we don’t see that as clearly.
Qapel: One of the other aspects that celibacy is really good for is you because you’re not in the game, you’re like the guy up in the press spot up in the stand that watches the game from above and sees all the strengths and weaknesses of the other team. What do you call that? The spotter? I think they’re called. Right, so you get off the field, and then it’s really fascinating to watch how women do their dance and how men do their dance.
And if again if you’re the same gender orientated it doesn’t change the game, right? The game still got a male-female element in the sense of a back and forth if that makes sense.
Sensei: Oh, and if you do try that for yourself, I recommend you have a little transition period. It’s okay if you have sex at the moment you’re six months and like nothing terrible is going to happen but we don’t really recommend it. It’s better to sort of ease out of it and I hope that’s kind of self-explanatory
Qapel: and it’s a useless waste of time if you don’t use it for conscious study, study, conscious examination of the dialogue of a relationship. If you just kind of go through it, wait for six months and get back out there, you might as well at least get a rest.
Chris: We hope you enjoyed today’s sound bite. Today’s recording is bonus content from Sensei and Qapel’s audio course, Conscious Love. The course explores many aspects of intimate relationships, including the unconscious patterning that influences them and how to turn partnerships into opportunities for deep transformation.