To Kiss a Woman

Reflections on escaping the mind

My latest video just came out and I’d love to hear your thoughts on it! It’s a 12 step plan on how to be completely miserable this year. I’m proud of how it came out, and leaving a comment or a like really helps me out.

Il Bacio, Silvio Allason

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One of the great pleasures of life, as far as I’m concerned, is kissing someone you find beautiful.

Every woman kisses differently. Some women kiss very gently. No teeth, no tongue. Brazilians, on the other hand, do not kiss gently.

Not all kissing is great — sometimes it doesn’t feel right. You give it a shot but your mouths do not seem to fit or you just can’t find a common rhythm, the physical equivalent of the feeling you get when two songs are playing loudly at once.

But when things are aligned, well… here I am writing about it right now.

There are obvious things to enjoy — the softness of her lips, how she smells, her arms are wrapped around you. That’s the thing, kissing is about way more than what you do with your mouth. It’s how you hold the other person, the energy you hold them with. Skin touching skin has such a powerfully soothing effect.

Perhaps what I love most about kissing, though, is a little harder to describe. If the physical pleasures I’m describing here are the doorway, then my favorite thing about kissing someone is walking through that doorway. It’s not really a specific sensation but rather that my brain shuts off entirely. I give myself over to the experience. Like cutting an electrical cord somewhere between my cranium and everything below my eyes, the lights go out in my frontal lobes.

I escape the trappings of my own mind and drop down into my body. To call it a wonderful feeling just isn’t enough. It’s better than a wonderful feeling. It’s a little bit like the flow state, when you’re hours into a project and lose yourself.

And when kissing, do not sneak glances to see if her eyes are open, no matter how tempting it may be. Kissing is about foregoing all of your strategic thinking, dropping all defenses, the self-consciousness. If she sees you’re losing yourself, she’s likely to join you. Then the two of you can gradually collapse into this sensory experience, an act of trust, connected by breathe and the warm glow emanating from your chests.

Kissing and thinking just don’t go together, it doesn’t work, it has never worked, just like dancing and thinking don’t go together. If you’re thinking about the next beat, you’ve already missed it.

Before I’ve kissed her, if I want to, I’m usually quite nervous. There’s always the potential for rejection. But as soon as its happening, that evaporates and I’m sent into a kind of blissed-out state. It’s a break from the pointless noise happening in my head, and there’s no sense of time. I feel a kind of debt to the women that have helped me feel this way. For exposing a kind of tenderness and rawness that’s so hard to show elsewhere in day to day life.

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It’s that blissed out state of being that informs my belief that there’s so much more going on than we realize, than we can measure. Paradoxically, the intensely physical experience of kissing someone is one of the most potent reminders that I’m not just a physical being. How can I be? Not when I’m experiencing that. Some will say oh no, it’s just chemical reactions happening in your brain. I prefer not to assume I know what’s happening.

That experience of being so locked into the present moment is first a liberation from the mind, but then it’s also a liberation from the body. Eyes closed, lips locked, I am free to evaporate into the atmosphere.

Here’s the thing: I believe we are Spirit first and foremost, and then human after that. And I don’t think it’s even, like a 50-50 split. In my book, we’re 99.9% Spirit, and the rest is human.

I think we all know this to be true, deep down. We just forget. Moments of bliss, like when I stop thinking while in an embrace, help me come back to that truth. And the place that I go to when in that mode, it’s so much bigger than the place that I inhabit all those other moments of thinking and worrying and stressing, under the belief that there is no part of me that is Spirit.

We forget. This is why life can feel so confusing. Because we live it with the Spirit part of ourselves pushed to the very margins of our existence, or forgotten altogether.

That is not how I want to live. The through line of all of my work, in my opinion, is this ongoing search to be more connected to my Spirit, however and whenever I can be. Nothing feels better, nothing feels more important, and I long for the day that I can stay permanently in that truth.

In the meantime though, you can always try kissing someone and see where it takes you.

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I wrote this listening to this.

Bonus material for people that feel emotions intensely.