Intimacy is a popular topic.

We joke about that. If you want people to come to your event, offer healing on money issues or intimacy issues!  And I think part of that is just a misunderstanding of what that word means.

What is intimacy?

There is so much confusion about what it is and what is. We think of intimacy and immediately we think of romantic relationships and physical connection and all of that. But really that is just an expression of intimacy. The best definition of that word that I've ever heard is from Ric Weinman, the founder of VortexHealing®. He says that intimacy is divinity experiencing itself, and meeting itself, through form. It's a very deep recognition and reconnection of that which was separate, coming back together.

There are lots of types of relationships. You can have a very intimate connection with someone without necessarily having a deep personal backstory. That moment on the street or that moment in the gym, when you have a very sweet moment with someone because you recognize something in that moment. You feel a connection. You look into that person's eyes and realize that you know exactly what this moment is. And you have that beautiful sharing that goes well beyond history or backstory or anything that's going on. That moment of presence- that's intimacy.

That’s the moment that will stand out all day.

Our work is to really come back to experience that intimacy. It's always there, it's just that our issues get in the way of that experience, which is why we explore and bring healing to them.

Presence is the foundation of all of it.

There's so much confusion and we've lost touch with what it is to be intimate. We have all of these ideas, from the media, of who we want ourselves to be in the ideal relationship. We have forgotten what it means to have those precious moments of pure presence.

When something's intimate, it touches you in a very tender spot, you know, something that was closed off opens. It's touched, met, seen, and held.

Our experiences and issues us out of that. We're in the story of mind. Intimacy requires vulnerability, and that's the hard part. You can't have intimacy without being open to it.

You can't expect that deep connection if you don't allow yourself to be open.

We have this need to connect, and yet at the same time, we're still hiding the parts that we're ashamed of. So we want to be seen on some level, but we're still hiding.

How can we have intimacy when we're giving mixed signals to ourselves as well as the rest of the world? It’s difficult.

I taught a class once in which we did a whole segment on loss. I had a woman in class. She was lovely older woman, and during the loss segment, she was like, “loss isn't an issue for me.” She had known loss, but she was saying loss wasn't an issue.

Then when we did a segment on self-protection the next day. Afterwards, she came up to me privately and said, “okay, I get it.” She said she was able to see it, and through working on that issue with VortexHealing®, she could see the ways that she had shut herself down from experiencing the pain of loss. She would never allow herself to be open, to love the way that she had loved her grandmother. When she allowed herself to feel that, it opened the door to everything else. And that's a very intimate moment when she allowed herself to experience that.

That's why we take a look at things from different points of view, because going at it from the loss angle, or the angle of anger may not resonate. When we take a look at where are we shutting ourselves down from intimacy, we realize.

There are different ways we want to connect and identify with ourselves and other people. I'm a very mental being myself, so I'm looking to connect to someone on a mental level. I feel seen and heard and an intimate relationship when someone sees me in that way, whereas on another level that's not so important. Another person might be more emotional by nature. They speak a different language! They identify more on an emotional level, so they look for someone who has that same language.

I think we all have our different identifications, what we're looking for, and how we want to be met. I think it's important to take a look at yourself, what you want, what you're looking for as well as where you shut down.

Intimacy with another person grows over time.

Over the years you realize that time, time, and again, this person proves themselves. Little by little, guards come down. It's a lifelong experience, and then suddenly you look across at this beautiful person. And you can just be yourself and appreciate them. What a gift.

Shared experiences may be intimate, but they don't have to be. It depends on the openness when you're sharing that experience. People go horseback riding together, play golf together. That could be very intimate, but it doesn't have to be just because you're doing the same thing in the same place. It doesn't mean you're really sharing. It really depends on the people and the willingness and the trust and what people are looking for from that.

You can't talk about vulnerability without talking about trust.

That's where the rubber hits the road. I think it comes from a willingness, a wanting to see and a willingness to be seen, which is the only place where change can take place.

I think the danger in relationships is that we fall into habits and we stop seeing each other. Not just in romantic relationships. If you've known someone for quite some time, you start to think, “That's the way she is.” We stop actually looking at the person in front of us and see sort of that imprinting buildup that's been in between. We don't look at the person as they are now. That's a way of not being present. We sort of fall into those habits and stop seeing each other. Then you wake up next to someone 20 years later, and think, “you don't even know me.” Maybe they don't, because maybe they've been looking at how you were 20 years ago and have stopped seeing you and vice versa. It takes a willingness to stop and say, “Hey, what is this?” Now, in this moment, that's a willingness to see, and a vulnerability to be seen, if you can bring that to the table.

Intimacy takes commitment.

A commitment to yourself and a commitment to your partner and a commitment to the world to keep re-evaluating that. A commitment to not fall into the habit of seeing someone as they were when you met them. Dynamics in a relationship get established pretty quickly. People fall into their dynamics, and we kind of ride on that as a given and we stop seeing each other.

It takes a kind of commitment to look as someone you care about and see them as they are now. It requires presence.

There’s a freedom to presence. There's a freedom to it, but freedom is always relative, isn't it? Because you're free from something, like your issues or your conditionings. Or you're free to something, free to be a certain way or free to do something. There's sort of a relative quality to freedom, but there's more to presence because that needs to be anchored through the heart in some way.

It’s not just freedom out there somewhere. It's a freedom here. A freedom in form. There's a livingness to it. The thing that makes presence really presence is the now— there's a now to presence. It’s freedom here, now, so that I can be with you without my stuff imposing on it. It doesn't mean I don't have issues, but it means that it’s not about me in this moment. I can sort of bring myself into totality here with you now to experience what's going on.

I think there can be a misconception about this— that you have to put everything out. It's kind of just relaxing and inviting it all in. For example, an intimate moment with my husband could be sitting on the couch with him, holding his hand while we're watching the nature channel. That's a different kind of intimacy. Just the texture of his hand, the way that he laughs when he sees something. That's also a sharing. We don't have to put out all of our stuff, we don't have to shut everything out. We just have to recognize that it's not about us, and allow that moment to be free-flowing.

Whatever tenderness that's revealed, when you allow yourself to be vulnerable in the moment, it can be shared.

There has to be a willingness to show up.

Coming back to how intimacy is perceived in the world, and all the games we play with ourselves and with each other to get the ideal relationship. They're just games. There's just another way of managing human interaction to try to get what we think we want. It really just comes down to a willingness to be present and vulnerable and to be seen. And it's what we crave and it's what we all resist.

Presence responds well to presence. If someone's in something and you let them know that you see and hear them, without wanting to fix them (even though that's a natural instinct when someone's in pain), it can diffuse things pretty quickly.

That person can feel safer in expressing their pain, anger or whatever it is because you're bringing, that presence and intimacy to the table. That's where magic happens. That's where transformation can happen. It’s that willingness to see and be seen.

Our issues are all connected. They're completely interconnected because that's how we experience ourselves— through these identities that get created.

So we do our work, we do our VortexHealing® work or whatever work we do to be able to create space in that. We do it so that we can be present, and have an intimate experience with life. This is why we do the work. We bring love to it. We bring our healing to it. We get that stuff out of the way so we can experience what's already there. We don't have to go somewhere to find intimacy. We have to be calm and still enough to realize that it arises when we're present.

That's the beauty of it. Pain is always going to be there. So long as we're in form and we have bodies, and we love, there will be pain. But in the center of that, can we keep our heart open? Can we be vulnerable? Can we have a willingness to be intimate with life?