By Barry Kerr and Kristine Gay

How’s your sex life? For most of us, this question, and the answer to it, can at times dominate our day-to-day self-awareness and sense of happiness or discontent. The urge to merge is one of the most driving forces in human nature. When your sex life is going well, there’s nothing quite like it. But when sex, or its absence, is a problem, it can seem to diminish your enjoyment of the other dimensions of your life.

Or is it the other way around? Rather, does how you experience the other dimensions of your life affect how well your sex life is going? It’s an important question to consider, especially if you have a relationship that is floundering or a history of relationships that don’t last.

The energy of sexuality and erotic sensual attraction is a physical expression of the sacred energy of love, the urge for union, the intimate communion of our energies at every level of our being. It is the most active and obvious expression of your soul’s longing to return you to the wholeness of spiritual oneness. Without it, your ego might easily rest in solitude, perhaps feeling alone, but more importantly, feeling safe and in control from the apparent fears that this illusionary time/space physical world of separateness presents to you.

In a way, sexual desire has been created to “trick” our egos into intimate, bonded relationships. Despite your ego’s best efforts to remain autonomous and in control, you find yourself opening up to others, revealing your naked self, and putting your body in the most vulnerable of positions. When you do it well, the rewards are heavenly and immediate. Your body and brain chemistry create the physical and emotional sensations of connected bliss, a feeling that lingers and begins the subliminal process of bonding to and further desiring your sexual partner.

At the beginning of new romantic relationships, this sexual bliss can easily dominate your experience, providing the positive juices for further mutual attraction. Continued love-making typically leads to broader and deeper intimacies, emotional, mental, financial, and spiritual. And that’s the point. That’s what your soul wants your ego to do, because it is in this merging of self with other, on every level, that you come face-to-face with your ego, reflected in and by the other. By revealing your true nakedness, that of your ego, you invite the possibility for an intimacy that builds a dynamic of synergy in the relationship, an ongoing possibility for personal growth and transformation which builds upon sexual excitement and sustains a lasting bliss throughout other facets of the relationship.

Sex eventually becomes shallow and unsatisfying when divorced from this deeper intimacy of heart, mind, and spirit. For lack of deeper connection, the ego typically seeks intensely exciting or thrilling sexual and erotic sensations and activities as a way of generating a greater sense of joyful vitality, beauty, and grandeur. However, these artificially contrived or controlled erotic techniques remain rather superficial, and therefore, inevitably become stale, desensitizing, deadening, and unsatisfying. What is left, is the stark feeling of non-connection and separateness, within which the neglected soul’s determined quest for wholeness once more stirs the ego into a renewed and discontented longing for connection. You may reach out for another relationship, hoping for better, or you might re-assert your autonomy, hoping to at least shore up what parts of your self you can, into some semblance of wholeness.

Typically, when couples reach out for help from coaches or therapists, unsatisfying sex is one of the complaints. As their relationship is examined, it becomes apparent that they have lost their sense of connection, in general, if they ever had it at all. For those who had at one time established a broader and deeper intimacy and a resulting contentment, the process of recovery is for each partner to re-discover or re-claim the self, to strengthen the ego’s authenticity and integrity. From there, partners can re-enter relationship, willing to reveal their current selves and negotiate the reflective dance between egos, letting the possibility for energy and synergy to arise again between them. For some, it’s a true rebirth of romance. For others, it brings clarity and strength to move on.

Barry Kerr, a certified life and relationship coach, and Kristine Gay, a licensed psychotherapist, own Choose Conscious Living in Madison. Both have extensive training in soul-guided healing of mind, body, heart and spiritual systems. They offer healing, coaching, therapy, mindfulness and astrology services for singles, couples and groups. For more information, visit http://www.ChooseConsciousLiving.com.