Advanced Spiritual Intimacy

Stuart Sovatsky, Ph.D., has degrees in religion and psychology from Princeton University and the California Institute of Integral Studies. A kundalini tantra practitioner since 1972, he was the producer of the World Congress on Psychology and Spirituality in India in 2008, which featured more than 400 delegates from 40 countries, including B. K. S. Iyengar, Robert Thurman, and S. S. Ravi Shankar. A kundalini chant-master with Axis Mundi, he has counseled thousands of people worldwide on yoga and relationships. He lives in Richmond, California.

Acknowledgments

Prologue Urdhvaretas: Yoga’s Path of Complete Maturation of Ensouled, Engendered Bodies

1 Everything Will Change
A Most Unusual Invitation
Awakening Dormant Seed Potentials
Urdhvaretas First Bursts in the Modern West
Reenvisioning Family Life

2 Entering the Mystery: Moving from Cynical Certainty to Spiritual Intimacies
Something Hidden Is Going On
Five Degrees of Approach

3 Shared-Gender Mystery
Male and Female as Starting Points
Gender Is the Sharing of Mystery
Gender Awe
Gender Worship
The Prosthesis of an Owned Sexuality
Homosexual Mystery

4 Purposeful Urdhvaretas
Who Chooses Urdhvaretas?
Why You Might Choose Brahmacharya
Beginning and Setting a Time Frame
Considerations of Personality and Mystery

5 Yogic Anatomy and Transformation of the Ars Erotica Body
The Subtle Bodies
The Chakras
Transforming Passion into Divine Rapture
Meditative Knowing

6 Commitment and Marriage as Grihastha Mysteries
Lifelong Commitment: The Crux of Finitude
To Stay or to Leave?
Viyoga (Hidden Unions) and Spoken Passion
The Erotic Freedom of Belonging

7 The Passions and Mysteries of Fertility
Procreative Wonders
Meditation: Retas Mysteries
Creating New Life
Procreation and the Shared-Gender Mystery
Sharing a Home with Mystery
Ars Erotica Facts of Life for Teenagers

8 Within the Intimus: The Myriad Inner Empathic Spaces (IES)
Sixty-four Intimate Spaces of Ars Erotica

9 Communication Yoga
Twenty-one Verbal Asanas of Creative Communication for Couples

10 Relational Worship
Ritual Worship of Mystery
This and That
Profundity within Simplicity

11 Hatha Yoga as Ars Erotica
Bandhas and Mudras
Asanas
Chair and Bed Yoga
Family Practice Ideas
Partnered Practices
Sahaja Yoga

12 Sringara Rasa
Suggestive Ambiguities of Twilight Teachings Reveal, Conceal, and Protect the Intimus
Beyond Protective Ambiguities and Scholarly Demystifying Certainties into the Sacred Intimus

13 Brahmacharya: Solo Intimacy with the Source
The Heights
The Saint
Elder Sannyasa, Letting Go

Afterword

Glossary

Notes

Bibliography

Index