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The Be Fully Alive Podcast On Patreon
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"We all carry the potential to realize, in real time, that the vibrant energy we experience
when we feel truly loved, seen and met, is who we actually are." Dawn Cartwright
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Episode 333 . The Secret Intelligence of Longing
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The Be Fully Alive Podcast
I keep returning to Amara's story. The way she touched her own body the way her lovers had touched her — never once tuning in to what was really truly present inside her.
This is what longing does when we don't turn toward it. It borrows someone else's shape.
We call it loneliness. We call it exhaustion. We schedule it for someday — when the kids are older, when the project launches, when we finally have space in our lives to feel what we actually feel.
Longing isn't a problem waiting to be solved. Longing is intelligence. Our body's oldest language, calling out to us. To be heard rather than pushed into silence.
Ceremonial lovemaking isn't a technique. It isn't candles or scripts or the right partner. It's a willingness — to feel the ache instead of fixing it or distracting ourselves away from it. To turn toward ourselves rather than away.
Rumi, the great Sufi once said, "Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love. It will not lead you astray."
This week's episodes are a living exploration of this invitation.
Enjoy.
Dawn
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"Liminality may perhaps be regarded as the Nay to all positive structural assertions, but is in some sense the source of them all, and, more than that, as a realm of pure possibility whence novel configurations of ideas and relations may arise."
— Victor Turner . Cultural Anthropologist
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 | Episode 334 . The Absorption Practice
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The Be Fully Alive Podcast
This week, no technique. No destination.
Just the surface of our bodies. Skin, edges, the places sensation lives. Breath, stretching into the inner space, revealing our edges. Filling our senses.
The body as a verb instead of a noun.
Dissolving the hard lines between hearing and feeling, tasting and touching.
Embodied longing. Not a longing for someday, for someone, for permission. A longing to be absorbed.
Like the longing my body naturally felt when I buried my face in my new lover's belly in the middle of the night — and let myself be filled.
This is where ceremonial lovemaking actually begins. Not as enactment. As sensation, felt and followed to the depths of our being.
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 | Episode 335 . Paul's Longing
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The Be Fully Alive Podcast
Paul teaches architectural history. He has friends, good work, a cherry tree outside his office window that blooms for ten days every spring.
Most evenings, he calls what he feels loneliness.
It isn't.
Loneliness looks outward, for what's missing. Paul's experience looks inward, pulling him toward what's present in him — and he's been mistaking one for the other his entire adult life.
One Saturday, spending the evening alone, he stops reaching for his phone. He puts his hand on his chest instead.
What he finds there isn't absence. It's a longing to be touched by his own life — fully, without rushing past it toward something else.
Paul doesn't transform that evening. He just stops missing what's already inside him.
A story for anyone who's ever filled the quiet with anything other than the meeting of what's actually within it.
Episode 335 . Paul's Longing
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 | The Secret Intelligence of Longing LIVE Workshop . July 7th
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The Be Fully Alive Podcast Zoom Workshops
Many of us defer our own longing.
Someday when the kids are older. When this project is finished. When things settle down. When we've lost the weight or found the partner or cleared enough space in our lives so that we can finally, finally, be present to what we actually desire.
Psychologists call this anticipatory deferment — the chronic postponement of our own desire, our own pleasure, to an imagined future that is always just out of reach.
We do it in our professional lives. We do it in our relationships. We do it, perhaps most of all, in our erotic lives.
Somatic researchers have studied what happens to us when longing is repeatedly deferred — our shoulders brace slightly forward, our jaw tightens, our breathing gets shallow, our belly contracts and our pelvic floor — the seat of our erotic aliveness — becomes locked.
Because we are, quite literally, bracing ourselves against our own desire.
So.
What if the exhaustion we feel isn't tiredness in the regular sense? What if our exhaustion is caused by all the effort it takes to brace against our own longing?
What if.
When we turn toward our longing instead of deferring it, exhaustion begins to lift. The disconnect — which was never from another person, but from ourselves — begins to ease.
- Abraham Maslow, who spent his career studying peak experiences — those moments of profound aliveness and transcendence available to anyone willing to be fully present — found that we treat our deepest needs as luxuries. Things we'll get to eventually, after the basics are handled.
- Barbara Fredrickson's research on positive emotional states shows that erotic aliveness doesn't just feel good. It literally expands our cognitive capacity, deepens our social bonds, increases our resilience. Longing that is met rather than suppressed energizes us.
In this workshop we'll dive into the absorption practice — a deep sensory immersion in which our bodies stop being a noun and become a verb.
- We'll map where longing lives in the body, feel what it's actually asking for.
- We'll explore the quality of presence that ceremonial lovemaking emerges from beyond technique.
- Not as something we do when the conditions are right — an orientation toward everything that is available right now in this moment.
For those of us with partners, we'll practice co-regulation and the art of meeting each other from a place of genuine presence rather than managed performance. For those on the solo path, we'll discover — that the most intimate encounter is the encounter with the sensations of longing in our bodies.
The Secret Intelligence of Longing
LIVE Zoom Workshop
Tuesday . July 7th . 11:45am-12:45pm PT
Available to all EMBODY & EVOLVE tier members
Sign Up Here
What time is the workshop in my city?
We'll explore . . .
- Anticipatory deferment — what it costs us, and what we have access to when we no longer defer our desires
- The absorption practice — the body as verb, the senses as a bridge
- Longing as intelligence — turning toward desire with receptivity, being led and inspired by our own desire
- Ceremonial lovemaking — an innate communion with love
Join Our Monthly Practice Community
Monthly live practice sessions are one of the most intimate and transformative ways to deepen our NeoTantra practice. Every first Tuesday of the month, we gather live on Zoom for 60 minutes of guided practice, community, and connection.
Available for EMODY and EVOLVE tier members. A recording will be available.
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| New 8-Week Series: Ceremonial Lovemaking
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The Be Fully Alive Podcast . 8-Week Series
A living exploration of the ceremony that naturally emerges when we allow ourselves to be fully absorbed in the sensory sunrise that is sex.
Monday we explore the concepts — science, poetry, psychology, and the personal story that connects them.
Wednesday we practice — embodied NeoTantra practices that bring the week's teaching directly into the body.
Friday we meet a real-life character whose inner world carries the week's discovery into lived, recognizable, human experience.
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NEW 8-WEEK SERIES . CEREMONIAL LOVEMAKING
WEEK 1 . THE LONGING — Discovering the secrets of longing
So many of us are waiting. Waiting for the right moment, the right era in our lives. Longing for the time, space, permission to be ourselves. As lovers.
WEEK 2 . THE ATMOSPHERE — Attuning to our needs
We put a lot of pressure on ourselves to be intimate. Without first tuning in to what we need. Down-time. Rest. Space in our busy days. A time to feel ourselves.
WEEK 3 . SENSING & FEELING — Shifting from mind to body
Most of us are accustomed to working hard to get results. Even when it comes to our relationships. What happens when we shift from working hard — to sensing and feeling — who we are as lovers.
WEEK 4 . IN & OUT OF THE BEDROOM — Sex that never ends
Sex doesn't begin or end in the bedroom. Everything we do is an expression of who we are as men and women who crave connection. And pleasure. And closeness.
WEEK 5 . SELF-PRACTICE — Ecstasy drills
Mapping the body for ecstasy and connection is a practice that never ends. Our capacity for intimacy is infinite. And it begins with our relationship with our body. Our pleasure. Our exhaustion. Our stability.
WEEK 6 . ATTRACTION — Torching our preferences
The world tells us that attraction is something we seek — a very draining proposition. What if attraction is something we radiate, instead.
WEEK 7 . THE MEETING — Down-to-earth connecting
There are so many ways to connect, really connect, sexually. Some of those include physical contact. Some of those do not.
WEEK 8 . THE CEREMONY — Life becomes ceremony
Life as a ceremony of meeting and being. Making love from that place of connection that already exists between us. Relaxing into our natural rhythms. Allowing our longing new space to express.
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I look forward to welcoming you into the Be Fully Alive Podcast community. We're diving deep into the elegant systems that transform complex lives into embodied aliveness.
Join The Be Fully Alive Podcast Community
See you there.
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 | Making peak experiences a way of life.
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The Be Fully Alive Podcast
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