Choosing Celibacy
(or Brahmacharya)

by Stuart Sovatsky, Ph.D.

A broken romance, a penchant to be different, a tiredness of the sexual merry-go-round, a search for something deeper, curiosity, fate -- what brings a person to consider celibacy for a few months or years cannot be easily explained. In erotic actions, we enter a mystery, and often we only discover afterward the real reasons we got involved.

You may or may not find a great deal of anxiety in setting the duration of your practice. Should a period of more than a few months shock you, I would advise you to think again about what you want and what you believe about your sexual situation. Brahmacharya is more than a weekend workshop. It requires a sincere and devoted application of oneself to develop its potentials.

My first commitment was for fifteen months. After that, I stopped counting and thus added another dimension to my practice, an almost frightening sense of freedom. Before I reached that point, however, I saw more subtle, ambivalent feelings taking the form of the thought "When is this going to be over!" At this point, I feel I must raise a question for you to consider: If you really start to enjoy tantric sublimation, on what basis would you decide to stop?

You might insist that you'll know exactly when to return to conventional sex. Ramakrishna, an Indian saint who went deeply into the practice of brahmacharya, described his experience as "one in which it seemed that all the pores of the skin were like female organs and intercourse was taking place over the whole body". Such experiences, which may emerge only after years of development, can make the decision to stop or continue far more thought-provoking than you might imagine.

Not setting a specific duration can help make your practice less self-conscious and studied. You might even begin to feel a sense of freedom in having no predetermined limit. On the other hand, if you have trouble establishing yourself in your commitment, a preset duration could give you support to pull yourself through the first months of practice and uncertainty. You need some time to reorient yourself within the everyday world of sexual attraction from the tantric perspective.

Another formidable consideration is how tantric sublimation fits into the idiosyncracies of your personality. Are you a perfectionist, expecting to get it right the very first time and more and more right as you go along? Or are you spiritually competitive and think sublimation will make you "more" spiritual than others? Are you from an older school of sex and feel that celibacy is a proper way to restrain waywardness? Do you tend to go to extremes, expecting to swing from sublimation to utter sexual abandon? Perhaps you consider yourself overly dependent and feel you might be doing this to win someone's approval. Another possibility is that you may be angry at someone and want to inflict your celibacy on them as a revenge. 

As you might guess, all such motivations can severely narrow your experience of sublimation, at least initially. As you progress, however, more positive motivations based in your new experiences might arise.

Consider whether you might not be trying to avoid the challenges of social interaction by going celibate. Not only is such uneven growth unsatisfying; the high degree of intimacy that tantric sublimation works toward will not allow it.

If you intend to practice with a partner, observe the manner in which any problems you ordinarily have while talking about sex emerge during your conversations on trying celibacy. Notice which partner wants to practice it more, who acts as though he or she knows more about it, who is taking it more seriously, and so forth. By returning to the foundation of eros-as-mystery, you will be aided in dislodging yourself from these hierarchical and polarizing dynamics.

Finally, you may be concerned about AIDS, problematic relationships, being rejected or getting committed, or sexual performance. It is important that you be as honest as you can about such concerns as you set out on your celibate path. Your tantric practice might even help resolve some of these nagging worries of the ego-mind as you discover moments of the self-acceptance known as "the peace that passeth all understanding".

Why You Might Choose Brahmacharya

1) You are going to be involved in a project for some time, and you think tantric sublimation will help you to focus your time and energy.

Celibacy has long been part of certain traditional lifestyles of service and personal development. Mother Teresa, Mahatma Gandhi, and United Nations Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold are three well-known exemplars of chosen celibacy as a support to work and service. It was her doctoral research on creativity that led Gabrielle Brown, author of The New Celibacy, to draw a correlation between unusually creative people and celibacy.

Meditation becomes particularly useful in conjunction with brahmacharya for a creative project. When the mind becomes still in meditation, currents of energy begin to flow up through very subtle pathways, invigorating consciousness. As you return to thinking about your project, new lively ideas may emerge, so you might want to keep a pad and pencil near your meditation cushion -- but not so near as to distract you.

The principles of karma yoga, the yoga of life activities, might be particularly relevant to a celibacy that serves a creative project or activity: to enjoy the process of your work at each step, rather than focusing too much on the gratification of completion.

2) You are feeling seclusive.

As one of my teachers used to say, brahmacharya is discovering the love in yourself that you usually reserve for falling in love with someone else. He claimed it was an ideal preparation for a relationship or a satisfying lifestyle in itself, based on discovering one's inner source of happiness.

Meditative peace is itself an inner form of being alone, for we are free of that crowd of chattering thoughts that can endlessly distract us. Such inner quiet holds the possibility of discovering a profound paradox: We are each singularly alone in the world, yet, in this undistracted silence, we feel even more intimately related to one another and to the world. If you are single, you might choose to use your personal time to practice three or four hours of yoga almost daily, while maintaining your other involvements. For some single brahmacharins, sadhana might become "the love of your life" -- at least for the months or years of your practice.

3) You have a sexually communicable disease, and you want safe ways to express love, passion, and affection.

AIDS, herpes, chlamydia, and other sexually transmitted diseases are demarcating the limits of a territory that earlier sexologists depicted as an idyllic paradise. You might be feeling unjustly backed into this seemingly claustrophobic corner of "no sex" for longer than you expected. Tantric sublimation will reveal many alluring gateways out of that boxed-in place.

4) You want to develop nonsexual friendships, and you are being more selective these days.

We are used to seeing one another either as possible sexual partners or as "just friends" (that is, "There is no way I could be turned on to you!"). An inner yes/no switch automatically catalogs everyone we see as sexually desirable or undesirable. In tantric sublimation, we can operate beyond this binary narrowness via the unprepared openness of "nonattachment".

Though nonattachment may sound austere, it simply refers to an experience of intimacy without agendas. We learn to see others without appropriating or grasping at them for some personal end. Our friendships with the other gender often take on a freeing and relaxed intimacy when the expectation of sex has been put aside.

Continued on the next page:
Developing a Deeper Sense of Intimacy;
Help with Relationship Difficulties;
Enhancing Marriage;
Contraception;
Spirituality & Celibacy

This article was excerpted from the book Eros, Consciousness, and Kundalini: Deepening Sensuality through Tantric Celibacy and Spiritual Intimacy, © 1999 by Stuart Sovatsky, Ph.D. Reprinted with permission of the publisher, Inner Traditions International. www.innertraditions.com.

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About The Author

STUART SOVATSKY, PH.D., has been a practitioner of kundalini yoga for twenty-four years and is the director of two psychotherapy clinics in the San Francisco Bay Area. A former presenter at the World Congress on Sexology in India and the International Kundalini Research Network, he teaches at JFK University and the California Institute of Integral Studies. You can contact the author at stuartcs@jps.net or visit his website at www.jps.net/stuartcs.

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