Being Alive

Jeremy Bishop 

Deep sea diver, she casts her net,

and yet swims down deeper below,

where the light is transfixed to go, into the darkness…into the abyss

where a seeming ominous world is really filled with goodness that is luminous

But only few have ever traveled to….

For the body and mind must be prepared, must be developed and strengthened

to see that light that blinds

and still come out the other side.

For it can break you in two if you are not ready.

It can shatter all of you,

and all of you will be left to pieces,

shambles of the self you knew.

Like Humpty Dumpty, who will pick you up?

Who will put you back together?

Only the force that made you could.

But before then, you will be left on the border

of divinity and madness, swimming through the tides

of aliveness

with your unconscious wide open

with the powers of creation and destruction at your grip

with the unseen world louder and brighter and more real

than anything else the body could see or hear.

The inner world will rage and roar like a carnival.

Up will be down, down will be up.

The flaming dragon will fling you to every side

with no remorse or restraint

only fire burning in his eyes.

Right will become wrong, wrong will make no more sense,

and blurring insanity will have filled your cup

until it is overflowing again

into a pool of illusions

with glimpses, you will see,

See so crystal clearly

for sanity will wake back up

and then you will slip back into the darkness and depths

that none around have traveled, so how can they help you climb back up?

No, no, something else must do it….

the inner Savior must come find you,

must take your hand and guide you

into the clear waters of redemption

into the good earth of your amendment

where all is balanced and retained

both the moisture from the rain

and the Sunlight’s nutrients penetrating deep

into your Soul’s enclave.

You are going to need it all.

All Nature must come alive within

and make its home in your heart.

All elements must become the family that supports and nourishes,

become the members that grow you and know you

and teach you and learn you

back in, back out….

sanity starts peaking in

reaching in to your body and mind

til you again have your sight

for this world

for that which you see

and all that you see, that cannot be seen

will become a language between secret friends

and talking and communicating and understanding

will become easy

and you will find yourself happy about this descent.

You will be happy you unraveled out and back again

and are no longer cursing the pains of the world inflicted upon you

by the ignorance of man.

You will come to see the glory that lives in all of them too

and this world will become only, yet unimaginably beautiful to you.

Everything in it….the mad, the sad, the artful and the bore

all will come to be delighted in

and find temperance and feeling for

living inside the softness which cannot be maimed

inside the glow that reflects all rays.

Yes, surely this is what all the madness was for

to get us kneeling on our hands and knees

in utter awe of all the beauty that stands before

poised with the brilliance of sobriety

that comes with the hum of a quiet mind

which melts the heart with wonder and gladness

simply at the experience of being alive.

Jim Tolles

Why You Lost Motivation After Spiritual Awakening?

 

Carl Jung explains why you feel 

numb, lazy, and hopeless 

after a spiritual awakening

1. The Anxiety and Fear After Awakening

Somewhere along your journey of awakening, maybe after a major spiritual insight or a personal breakdown, you felt something shift within you. You saw the illusions of chasing with the world, the unconscious patterns, the futility of achieving. And then… silence.

At first, awakening from the mind’s voice was powerful, even empowering. But slowly, that silent joy just vanished. Not overnight. But quietly. Like the divine turned down the volume on your life and forgot to turn it back up.

Previously, you charged through life like a lion chasing its prey—driven, fierce, and relentless. 

But now that the chase is over, you find yourself standing still like an elephant—majestic and content, yet with a nagging feeling that something exciting is missing from your life.

You stopped chasing. You stopped caring. 

Not recklessly, just quietly, in that existential sigh kind of way. 

The question started whispering louder: 

Why do I feel so numb now that I am finally experiencing the truth within?…

There’s a strange paradox here. 

We expect spiritual awakening to ignite our inner power. 

But it does the opposite for so many—especially the deeply introspective types, the seekers. 

It empties us first. It de-conditioned us.

2. The Psychological Death—Die Before You Die

Carl Jung, the father of analytical psychology, hinted at this post-awakening fog years ago. 

He didn’t talk in trendy spiritual terms, but he understood what happens when the unconscious becomes conscious.

Jung said, 

“Enlightenment doesn’t come by imagining figures of light but by making the darkness conscious.”

That sounds beautiful—until you realize what it means. 

Awakening isn’t the end. It’s the beginning of a psychological death. 

The death of who you thought you were. The structures that gave your life meaning—goals, careers, relationships, even your sense of time of past and future—all collapse.….

But here’s the catch: your senses and thinking are confused. 

1. They all constitute a confused ego. 
2. Your center of life has shifted from your mind to your inner Being. 
3. Your life is getting partially operated by the inner Being as your awakening is not complete yet. 

So it’s not that you’re depressed or have lost motivation. 

You’re just in in-between. 

You’ve awakened from your mind’s tyranny, but you still haven’t functioned fully from your inner being yet.

What you’re feeling right now isn’t failure. It’s not depression or anxiety in the clinical sense. 

It’s something sacred.

Jung actually warned that our modern world avoids this phase at all costs—this sacred pause, this void, this in-between. He believed it was essential for true individuation—the process of becoming one's authentic self.

The word “individuation” feels egoistic, but it means realizing your True Self in Jung’s terminology.

But no one tells you about this part, do they?

That’s exactly what we’re going to unravel next: what’s really happening in your psyche after awakening, and how this loss of motivation might be the biggest spiritual upgrade you’ve ever experienced—if you understand it right.

3. The Ego Lost Its Fuel

If you’ve been floating in that post-awakening fog, wondering where your spark went, know you’re not crazy. You’re going through a psychological shift most people can’t name—a change so significant it doesn’t just tweak your thinking; it reprograms your whole operating system of existence

All the goals you used to chase,

the to-do lists,

the five-year plans,

productivity playlists

They don’t move you anymore. 

Not because you’re failing but because your motivation system itself is collapsing. 

And Carl Jung saw this coming long before it became a trending topic on social media.

For most of your life, your motivation came from your ego identity—the “me” you thought you were. You wanted to prove yourself, be seen, be successful, be loved. 

That’s not a bad thing. It’s how human Ego development works.

Jung called this the persona—the mask we wear to function in society. 

But the awakening process strips the mask. 

Suddenly, you’re not trying to be liked. 

You’re not trying to win the game—because you see the futility of the game.

And that’s where it gets weird.

Without the mask, your old goals don’t fit anymore. 

They were tailored to a worldly version of you that doesn’t exist. 

So now, you’re like a character in a play who stepped off the stage and can’t figure out what your role is anymore.

That’s why you feel unmotivated. 

You didn’t lose drive—you outgrew the egoic fuel that powered it.

4. Spiritual Rebirth Through the Dark Night of the Soul

Jung believed we’re not here to serve the ego. 

We’re here to integrate it, to surrender to its source—Being. 

He named this process individuation—the journey of transforming from a fragmented identity into a whole, unified self.

Not the small self that wants praise, but the Self, your inner essence that connects to everything.

This Self doesn’t care about 

status, approval, or even clarity. 

It’s here to express the truth.

So once the awakening happens, your psyche starts recalibrating. 

It begins rejecting anything fake, forced, or ego-based. 

That includes jobs, relationships, ambitions, and even your carefully crafted dream board from 2025.

That’s why people often describe awakening as both freeing and disorienting.

But Jung warned: If we stop here, we get stuck.

Some people awaken and fall into the trap of spiritual bypassing, convincing themselves that nothing matters and that it’s all just illusion. So they disconnect, float, and numb out. They confuse detachment with disengagement.

But the Self wants to bring awareness through your mind-body into this world.

It wants access to this world through an awakened being—you. 

It wants to bring heaven into this world by spreading awareness through you. 

It doesn’t reject the world. It redefines your role in it.

5. Your Role: Messenger of Awareness

In order to step into that, you’ve got to go through a weird middle phase Jung described perfectly—and few people recognize while they’re in it.

The Sacred Phase of Being Nothing & Nobody

There’s a phase after awakening that almost no one talks about. It’s not glamorous and doesn’t get you recognition and thousands of likes. It doesn’t look like meditating in Bali or writing profound Instagram quotes.

It looks like this: sitting in silence, unable to explain and express yourself, while the world keeps rushing by.

Carl Jung would say you’re not lost. You’re in between. 

You’ve disidentified from the ego, but haven’t yet found a new way to live from the Self (Being).

This space is not a failure. It marks a significant transitional period in a person’s life. 

But in our hyperproductive world, stillness gets misdiagnosed as laziness. 

Pause gets mistaken for paralysis. 

So you judge yourself by thinking that there is something wrong with you—and that judgment blocks the energy of your Being that is trying to speak to you.

Jung had a term for this psychological pause: enantiodromia, the process where things flip into their opposite.

Carl Jung’s enantiodromia is the idea that everything, when taken to its extreme, eventually turns into its opposite.

In simple words:

If you push too far in one direction, life will pull you back the other way.

For example:

• If you are overly disciplined and controlling, you might suddenly break down and become impulsive or chaotic.

• If you chase success obsessively, you might one day feel completely worthless and unmotivated. (As your mind identity will break due to awakening)

Jung believed this “flip” isn’t a failure — it’s nature’s way of restoring balance to your psyche.

When you awaken, your inner pendulum swings from ego-driven striving to stillness of Being. 

You go from “I must do everything” to “Why do anything?” 

And this swing is sacred. It’s how balance is restored.

In myth and ancient teachings, this is the hermit phase—the death before rebirth. 

It’s the moment the caterpillar turns to soup inside the cocoon. 

Not a butterfly yet. Not a bug anymore. Just… formlessness.

And yeah, formlessness doesn’t hustle.

This is where the ego panics. It wants action, identity, and direction. 

But the Self is whispering, Let go. I’m building something deeper.

6.  The Rise of a New Inspiration Within

Here’s where most modern spirituality skips the difficult aspects. 

It teaches, “Just follow your passion,” "Be in high vibes only,” or “Think positive.”

Some books say you can achieve anything you want. 

Just Ask, Believe, Recieve.

And yes, you can manifest that way, but whatever you manifest has its opposite, too. 

Pleasure comes with pain.

While intention and energy matter, Carl Jung would tell you that if you try to skip the darkness, you skip the gold.

Jung believed shadow integration—bringing the light to repressed, unconscious parts of oneself—is essential for becoming whole. It's not optional. It’s the core curriculum of being a conscious human.

You’re not failing. 

Your psyche is incredibly wise. 

It will stall your motivation, drive, and even your access to clarity on purpose, so you’re forced to feel, witness, and reclaim what you’ve buried—to bring light to the darkness of unconsciousness.

That’s the real work.

And here’s the beautiful twist: when you stop resisting the void, something strange starts to happen.

Motivation begins to return. But it feels different this time. 

It’s not anxious. It’s not achieving. It’s not performative. It’s not hustle. It’s not wanting.

It’s intuitive. It’s selfless. Its good-for-everybody.

7. Living from Being—The Symbolic Life

So you’ve walked through the void. You’ve felt the silence, the stillness, the deep pause. 

And now something new is starting to stir inside you.

Not a lightning bolt. Not fireworks. 

More like a quiet inner pull—not to go back to your old life, but to build a new one in service of others.

This is where the Self begins to speak. 

Not in words, but in nudges. 

In resonance. 

In what Carl Jung called the symbolic life. 

He believed that once the ego has surrendered, we become capable of living from a place deeper than personality.

That’s when life stops being about survival—and becomes about meaning.

And here’s an unexpected fact: it’s often beautifully ordinary.

• When the Self leads, you don’t hustle. You respond. 
• You’re not motivated by fear of missing out. You’re guided by what feels divine and aligned. 
• You no longer chase clarity. You recognize it when it arrives. Because you are living from the abundance of Being

Living from the Self doesn’t mean you’ll always feel motivated in the traditional sense. 

You might still feel waves of fatigue, confusion—even grief. That’s being human.

But you won’t feel that constant sense of inner abhorrence—the feeling of dragging yourself through a life that doesn’t fit.

1. Instead, you might start to notice you’re drawn to create, even when no one’s watching. 
2. You say no to things that don’t resonate—even if they look good on paper. 
3. You start following your curiosity, not your checklist. You choose peace over performance.

This is the new fuel. It’s not adrenaline. It’s awareness.

Jung called this living symbolically—not in fantasy but with Being. 

It is where you begin to trust your inner intuitions, synchronicities, and gut feelings for guidance.

So, what does this look like in real life?

Sometimes, it’s as simple as asking different questions.

1. Instead of “What do I want?” ask, “What does life want from me?”
2. Instead of “What can I get?” ask, “How can I give myself to it?”
3. Instead of “What should I do?” ask, “What’s my inner calling telling me?”
4. Instead of “How can I prove myself?” ask, “What feels true now?

You begin to participate with life instead of trying to dominate it.

And this doesn’t mean giving up ambition. It means transforming it. 

Ambition becomes devotion—to truth, to presence, to service. And the irony is, that kind of energy gets things done way more effectively than ego ever could.

But now it’s sustainable. Now it’s Being-powered.

This is the Self’s motivation—not to impress, but to express. 

And it often leads you to create, serve, heal, teach, and build—not because you should, but because your whole being says yes.

So, if you’ve been feeling like your spark is gone after awakening, it’s the old fire that burned down so that you could find a deeper flame—one that doesn’t flicker when external winds blow.

If you’re here, reading this, you’re already walking that path. 

It’s not about getting back your old motivation. 

It’s about discovering a new one, rooted in Beingness, in wholeness, not performance. 

Surrender and let the divine use your mind and body to fulfill the purpose of the universe.

Aby Vohra

On the Death of the Beloved

 

Style Arena

Though we need to weep your loss,

You dwell in that safe place in our hearts,

Where no storm or night or pain can reach you.

Your love was like the dawn

Brightening over our lives

Awakening beneath the dark

A further adventure of colour.

The sound of your voice

Found for us

A new music

That brightened everything.

Whatever you enfolded in your gaze

Quickened in the joy of its being;

You placed smiles like flowers

On the altar of the heart.

Your mind always sparkled

With wonder at things.

Though your days here were brief,

Your spirit was live, awake, complete.

We look towards each other no longer

From the old distance of our names;

Now you dwell inside the rhythm of breath,

As close to us as we are to ourselves.

Though we cannot see you with outward eyes,

We know our soul's gaze is upon your face,

Smiling back at us from within everything

To which we bring our best refinement.

Let us not look for you only in memory,

Where we would grow lonely without you.

You would want us to find you in presence,

Beside us when beauty brightens,

When kindness glows

And music echoes eternal tones.

When orchids brighten the earth,

Darkest winter has turned to spring;

May this dark grief flower with hope

In every heart that loves you.

May you continue to inspire us:

To enter each day with a generous heart.

To serve the call of courage and love

Until we see your beautiful face again

In that land where there is no more separation,

Where all tears will be wiped from our mind,

And where we will never lose you again. 

John O’Donohue

On Losing Someone You Love

pixabay

 

Why the Stoics didn’t want you to suppress your pain and how to stop building an identity around your loss.

My grandmother passed away four years ago. She was a large part of my childhood, and in the years since she's been gone I have thought about her more than I ever did while she was alive. 

Grief does that. 

It returns the person to you in a different form, after you no longer have them in the form you were used to. 

If you have ever lost someone you love, you already know that no writing can touch what you carry. Words don’t go where grief goes. I write this knowing that, and knowing some of you are reading it while the loss is still raw, and others are reading it while carrying something older that never quite settled.

Nothing here will lift what you’re carrying. The Stoics never claimed their philosophy could. What they offered, and what I want to pass on as carefully as I can, is a way of thinking about grief that doesn’t shame you for feeling it and doesn’t trap you inside it.

The Stoics have a reputation for being cold about grief, and almost everything the standard picture says they meant is wrong.

The reputation comes from three places, and once you know where it comes from you can see how the misreading happened. Epictetus has a line about kissing your child as though they might die tomorrow, which sounds chilling out of context and has been quoted out of context for two thousand years. The word apatheia gets translated as having no feelings, when what the Stoics meant was something closer to not being controlled by reactive passions. And the practice of premeditatio malorum, the deliberate contemplation of loss, sounds morbid until you understand it as a way of refusing to take what you love for granted.

Put together, these three things produced a caricature of Stoicism as the philosophy of the stiff upper lip. Don’t grieve. Don’t feel. Get on with it.

This is the opposite of what they actually said.

In one of his letters to Lucilius, Seneca responds to the death of Lucilius’s friend Flaccus. 

The letter survives as Letter 63 in his collected correspondence, and it contains one of the most overlooked sentences in the Stoic tradition on the subject of grief.

Seneca’s position, restated in plain modern English:

Don’t weep too much, and don’t refrain from weeping.

That’s the Stoic position on grief. 

The tears are not the problem. 

Pretending the tears shouldn’t be there is one kind of problem. 

Building a life around the tears is another kind of problem. 

Between those two is where the Stoics actually lived.

Seneca elaborated and wrote that to feel no grief at the loss of a friend would mean we hadn’t really had a friend. The grief is the evidence that the love was real. Removing the grief would mean removing the love retrospectively, which is exactly the move the caricature accuses Stoicism of recommending and which the actual tradition consistently refused.

The philosophical work underneath this distinction was done over generations within the Stoic school. Later Stoic writers distinguished between the first involuntary movements of emotion and the judgments we add afterward. When you lose someone you love, the first wave of feeling, the gasp, the tears, the way the body buckles when the news arrives, was not treated as a fully chosen moral failure. It was the kind of thing that can happen before reason has had time to assent or refuse. 

No philosophy could or should try to legislate it out of existence.

The strictest early version of Stoicism had leaned toward treating emotional responses as judgments through and through, which means in principle they could be reasoned with. Later thinkers, including Posidonius, complicated that picture. Some responses arrive before reason gets there.

Grief, in its first wave, is one of them.

To tell someone in fresh loss not to feel what they’re feeling is to ask them to perform a kind of mental gymnastics that human bodies aren’t built for and that no Stoic worth reading ever actually recommended.

What the Stoics did want to talk about is what we do with the grief afterward. 

The first wave isn’t up for evaluation.

What comes after is.

There are two ways we tend to betray our grief, and both of them are betrayals of the love that produced it.

The first is suppression. 

Treating grief as weakness. Performing okayness in front of others, and increasingly in front of ourselves. Moving on quickly because the people around us seem to want us to. Filing the loss into the past tense and refusing to revisit it, because revisiting hurts.

The Stoics noticed this and called it what it is. 

If we can lose someone we loved and feel nothing, we are saying retroactively that we hadn’t really had them. The suppression looks like strength. It is actually a small denial, repeated daily, that the love was ever there.

The second betrayal is the opposite. 

Building an identity around the loss. 

Letting the grief organize the rest of life. Treating the grief as the thing we owe the person we lost, and slowly converting them into an emblem of our suffering rather than letting them remain who they actually were.

This one is harder to see clearly, because it feels like loyalty. 

• Doesn’t it seem disloyal to soften? 
• To allow joy back in? 
• To find ourselves laughing one day and realize we forgot for an hour that they were gone?

The person clinging to grief as devotion is usually avoiding something harder than mourning. 

Grief that stays a wound asks nothing of you except that you keep it. 

Grief that becomes a continuing influence asks you to act on what they gave you, in your own life, with no further confirmation from them about whether you’re doing it right. 

The grief stays intact because the alternative is to convert the loss from something done to you into something you now have to do something with. 

The wound is the easier position.

Seneca anticipated this and wrote a long consolation to a woman named Marcia, who had lost her son three years before and was still organizing her life around the loss as if it had happened that morning. He is not gentle by modern standards. He believes her grief has become its own thing, separate now from the love that produced it.

“Three years have already passed, and still your grief has lost none of its first poignancy, but renews and strengthens itself day by day, and has now dwelt so long with you that it has acquired a domicile in your mind, and actually thinks that it would be base to leave it. All vices sink into our whole being, if we do not crush them before they gain a footing; and in like manner these sad, pitiable, and discordant feelings end by feeding upon their own bitterness, until the unhappy mind takes a sort of morbid delight in grief. I should have liked, therefore, to have attempted to effect this cure in the earliest stages of the disorder, before its force was fully developed; it might have been checked by milder remedies, but now that it has been confirmed by time it cannot be beaten without a hard struggle.” 

— Seneca, Consolation to Marcia, 1.7.

The phrase to sit with is “acquired a domicile in your mind.” 

The grief has become a tenant. It has its own room. It has lived there long enough that Marcia has started believing it would be shameful to leave it, which is Seneca’s diagnosis. Earlier in the same letter, he puts the same idea more bluntly. He tells Marcia he intends to dry her eyes, which “already, to tell you the truth, are weeping more from habit than from sorrow.” That is the moment the grief and the love come apart. The tears keep arriving, but they are no longer arriving from the place the love lived. They are arriving from the routine the loss carved.

Seneca was hard on timing. He thought time usually does its work, and that three years was already long enough for the usual softening to have happened. In Marcia’s case it hadn’t, which is why he wrote.

I don’t want to pass that timing on. There is no correct date by which grief should have resolved into something gentler, and the people I’ve known who carry old grief well have not been on anyone’s schedule.

What I want to take from Seneca is the diagnostic underneath the timing, not the timing itself.

Grief can eventually stop expressing love and 

start feeding on itself.

Duration tells you nothing. A grief of two months can already be habit, and a grief of ten years can still be doing real work. What matters is what the grief is still for. 

Marcia’s son would not have wanted to be remembered as a wound. 

By keeping the grief intact, she was preserving him as a wound rather than letting him become what he could become inside her, a continuing influence on the way she lived.

The shift Seneca was pointing toward is rarely talked about clearly. 

It runs from grief that wounds to grief that becomes something else. 

A kind of warm remembering. 

A way of carrying someone forward that doesn’t require keeping yourself broken on their behalf.

There is only the slow, unforced movement that happens when grief is allowed to do its work without being either crushed or curated.

What does grief actually do, if you let it do its work?

Hierocles gave the Stoics one of their clearest images of human life as relational. 

The self at the center, then the rings of family, fellow citizens, and finally humanity.

The image was originally a way of thinking about duties and appropriate action, but it points at something deeper. We are not the isolated individuals we sometimes imagine ourselves to be. The configuration of our attention, our care, our daily concern, has always been bound up with the people in those inner rings.

If this is right, and the Stoics were not the only thinkers to suspect it was, then losing someone you loved can feel like losing part of yourself, because part of your life really was shaped around them.

The configuration of who you are had become organized partly through them, and now the organization continues in their absence, like a vine continuing to grow in the shape the trellis gave it after the trellis is gone.

This is why grief is the correct response. 

Something has actually been removed. 

The grief is your system registering the removal accurately.

But here’s what’s also true, and what the Stoics understood and what much modern grief discourse can flatten. The shaping the person did is still there. The way you notice certain things, the small gestures you picked up without realizing you were picking them up, the values you hold, the particular way you treat someone who needs the kind of care this person once gave you. Some of that is them, still alive in you. Not in the soft sense people sometimes mean when they say someone lives on in our hearts, but in the practical sense that lineage works this way. We carry forward what we received.

The Stoic consolation, if there is one, is this.

The grief is evidence the love was real. The love produced something in you that survives the loss. What survives is what they gave. What they gave is now yours to carry forward, into the way you live, into how you treat the people still here, into who you become from this point on.

This isn’t faster healing, and the loss stays exactly as large as it actually is.

It is a way of refusing two betrayals at once. 

The grief is permitted, because the love was real. 

The softening is permitted, because the love continues, in a different form, in you. 

Both can be true. Holding both is what the Stoics meant by grieving well.

There’s no schedule for this. There never was.

Some readers will be in the part of grief where Seneca's letter to Marcia is exactly the wrong thing to read, because the wound is too fresh and the only honest response is to feel it. If that's you, set this aside. The question Seneca was pressing on Marcia is not the question fresh grief needs.

For readers further along, or carrying an older grief that’s gone quiet but never quite settled, Seneca pointed Marcia toward a harder question. 

Is the grief still doing its work, or has it become something you’re keeping intact because softening would feel like betrayal?

Seneca’s answer to that question, for Marcia and for anyone since, was that 

the softening is itself a form of fidelity. 

To let the wound become warm remembering is not to lose them again. It is to finally let them be inside you the way they were trying to be the whole time. 

As evidence of what was given, rather than as evidence of what was taken.

What’s left, in the end, is small and specific. 

A turn of phrase you use that came from them and you didn’t know it came from them. 

The way you do something small in the kitchen because that’s how they did it. 

The way you reach for the person beside you when something good happens, because that’s what they taught you to do. 

The way you treat the next person who needs the kind of care they once gave you.

My grandmother was the kindest person I have ever known. People who only met her once remembered her. Nobody had a bad word about her, not because she was performing kindness, but because there was nothing else in her to perform. She was kind the way water is wet. It was simply what she was made of.

What she gave me, without ever sitting me down to teach it, was the conviction that being kind to people is the most important thing you can do with a life. I don’t always live up to it. I am more impatient and quicker to judge. But she is in me anyway. When I'm patient with someone who needs it, when I stay on the phone longer than I planned, when I give someone the benefit of the doubt, that is her, working through me, four years after she stopped being able to do it herself.

She is the reason I believe what this post has been arguing. That lineage is real. That love produces something durable inside the people who received it. That the dead go on shaping the living, in small daily ways, if the living let them. I am not done grieving her. I don’t think I ever will be entirely. But the grief has become, slowly, a way of carrying her forward rather than a wound I keep dressing.

That is what she would have wanted.

That is what I owe her.

in, Stoic Wisdom

Basket of Figs

Pumarck-Favim

 Bring me your pain, love. Spread 

it out like fine rugs, silk sashes, 

warm eggs, cinnamon

and cloves in burlap sacks. Show me

the detail, the intricate embroidery 

on the collar, tiny shell buttons, 

the hem stitched the way you were taught,

pricking just a thread, almost invisible.

Unclasp it like jewels, the gold 

still hot from your body. Empty 

your basket of figs. Spill your wine.

That hard nugget of pain, I would suck it, 

cradling it on my tongue like the slick 

seed of pomegranate. I would lift it

tenderly, as a great animal might 

carry a small one in the private 

cave of the mouth.

Ellen Bass

in,  Mules of Love

Sexless Marriage

 Question: I hear from many women who love their husbands, but have no desire to have sex with them. They really have little sexual desire at all. These women are often in their 40s and perimenopausal. They have no desire to open up their relationship and are not sure what to do. While a part of them wants to sexually satisfy their husbands, the lack of desire makes it challenging, if not impossible.

Esther’s take: For years, many sex therapists assumed that if you have no desire inside the bedroom, that means there are problems outside the bedroom with communication, division of labor, life stressors, etc. That is not necessarily true. Esther has spoken with many couples who are otherwise happy in their relationships. They don’t harbor resentment toward their partners or struggle with external stressors that affect their desire.

Direct quote: 

When I hear this, I ask them: 

“What is it like to live in a state of deadness—of flatness?”

This really hit me, and I know personally, when I have no desire to have sex at all—with anyone—it’s a sign that I’m depressed. I am emotionally flat. Desire, horniness, the ability to want is healthy, at least for me. It makes me feel alive. Esther would agree with the sentiment. 

It’s why she doesn’t just say, “If you don’t want to have sex, you don’t have to.”

To clarify, she’s not encouraging you to have sex when you desperately don’t want to—and of course, you have autonomy over your body and can decline sex at any point—but she will encourage you to reconnect with your desire. There are various ways to reconnect, one of which is to share stories with your partner, connect on a deeper level, and get to know sides of them you never knew, even though you’d been married to them for two decades.

Learning new things about your partner doesn’t just deepen your connection. 

Ironically, it can add a layer of mystique, of mystery, that can be arousing. 

In other words, you don’t know everything about your partner; he’s not just the same man you’ve had dinner with for the past twenty years. That mystique can lead to arousal and desire.

Question: How do men experience intimacy when they worry their partner is having sex out of obligation?

Esther’s take: One thing that Esther hears in her practice is that men get turned on when they see their partners turned on. While this may sound sweet and altruistic—and it can be—the root of this desire is often fear. Many men often fear being predatorial. They fear their partners (in this case, we’re talking cis, straight women) aren’t actually enjoying the sex they’re having, or are faking it, or are placating them. 

Knowing their partner is enjoying it alleviates male anxiety, allows them to be more present in the moment, less in their heads, and actually be able to enjoy the sexual experience.

This response also really spoke to me. In fact, it’s why I tend to engage in kink far more with men than women. I feel like I’m less likely to accidentally cross a line. I also know it’s more egalitarian as we’re both men, and men are more conditioned to say no and set boundaries, whereas many women are conditioned to people-please. Not to mention, I am 6’4 and 215 pounds. When I sleep with a woman who’s 5-feet tall and half my weight, I can’t help but be mindful of the size difference and fear hurting her. 

Is this a form of benevolent sexism? 

Potentially, but I think there’s merit to it. 

Men and women are societally conditioned to be different sexually. 

I am simply acknowledging that fact.

This is not to say I don’t have kinky experiences with women. 

Of course I do, but I need to know they are comfortable saying no and using the safe word. 

What also helps me is knowing that they are far kinkier than I. 

For example, I have a play partner who I’ve seen take a BRUTAL beating at play parties—she loves it—a true sub and masochist. Anything sexual I could want to do with her wouldn’t come close to the shit she does with her other partners. 

So I don’t fear accidentally crossing a line. 

That allows me to really enjoy the sex we’re having and be less in my head.

Zachary Zane and Esther Perel

Getty Images/iStockphoto

Sexless Marriage Effect On the Husband: 

8 Effects of No-Sex Marriage on Men

1. What is the sexless marriage effect on the husband? 
2. Can a sexless marriage last? 
3. Is it healthy to be in a sexless relationship? 
4. What causes a sexless marriage? 
5. Should a man stay in a sexless marriage? 

Sex plays an important role in any marriage. When one partner loses interest in intimacy, it can cause issues in the relationship. As a man, it is important to learn more about sexless marriages, the causes, and how they affect you.

A sexless marriage can be defined as a relationship with a lack of intimacy between the couple. Since different couples have different sexual expectations and desires, experts say that any marriage with ten or fewer sexual activity sessions in a year can be quantified as a sexless marriage. However, this is dependent on the couple, as some couples can still enjoy healthy relationship sex once a month or once every few weeks. If your sex life has drastically declined or become nonexistent over the past few months, you can say that you are in a sexless marriage.

According to a study done in 2019, 19% of 659 couples were in what would be termed a sexless marriage. Most of the couples in this category had only been intimate once or twice in the last year, with some of them saying they had not experienced any form of sexual contact for more than a year.

In comparison, about 35% of the couples had experienced sexual intimacy one to three times per month in their happy marriage, 25% said they had sex weekly, while 21% said they enjoyed sexual intercourse a few times a week, which is healthy sex life.

Numerous reasons can cause the frequency of sex to change in a marriage. Most couples struggle with mismatched libidos, which puts a strain on the person with a higher libido since the spouse cannot satisfy or meet their sexual needs.   

While mismatched libido is the most common cause of a sexless marriage, many other factors can lead to a lack of sex in marriage.

Some of the most common causes include:

• Health issues or a medical condition
• Childbirth
• Stress
• Trauma
• Failed communication
• Mismatched Libidos

Sexless Marriage Effect On the Husband

Sex is one of the things in long-term relationships that foster well-being, continuity, and strengthening of the bond between a husband and wife. When a husband no longer gets sex from their wife, they can experience some side effects.

Low self-esteem

While most men may not admit this, lack of sex at home affects their self-esteem. They see their wife’s lack of sexual desire as a sign of their lack of physical desire for the man. When a man’s sexual advances are constantly rejected at home, they are bound to start feeling undesirable.

Feeling of shame

Men often feel ashamed when sex is no longer served in their homes. This is especially common if the lack of sex is because of the man’s inability to rise to the occasion. The man will avoid any conversation about sex since they feel shame.

Feeling like a failure

A common sexless marriage effect on the husband is the feeling of failure. As it is often said, men are physical beings, and sexual interest is an important aspect of their sexuality. When a man is having regular sex, they develop a sense of fulfillment and see themselves as complete men. On the other hand, if a man cannot get their spouse interested in sex as often as they want, they eventually start feeling like they are not good enough.

Disconnection

Any couple in a sexless marriage will tell you that they feel disconnected from one another. For men, not having sex with their wives over a prolonged time will change their feelings and possibly develop these feelings for another woman willing to meet their sexual needs. This emotional disconnection is often a leading cause of infidelity in marriages.

Poor mental health

Anxiety, stress, and depression are also common sexless marriage effects on the husband. When a husband is denied sex at home for a long time, his mental health is likely to deteriorate from stress, overthinking, and inability to release the feel-good hormone from sex. Poor mental health can also stem from the man’s obsession with his inability to meet his spouse’s sexual needs.

Start to see the wife as just a roommate

Once sex stops being part of a marriage, how the man perceives and treats the wife also changes. With time, the two start coexisting like roommates and not a married couple since sexual intimacy is no longer present in the marriage. Without a sexual connection, it is difficult for a man to treat his wife with the same love, consideration, and care as he did before.

Feelings of loneliness

When a husband does not get his sexual needs met, he may feel lonely. This is often caused by the feeling of isolation stemming from the contract rejection. This is why many married men are lonely.

Isolation

When there is no sex between men and women in a marriage, a man will feel unworthy, lonely, stressed, and frustrated, making him want to self-isolate. This makes the issues worse since the man cannot express his emotions and feelings for fear of being misunderstood and neglected. They see it of no use to keep sharing since sexual intimacy is not there.

If you have been in a sexless marriage for a while and feeling a few or all these issues, it is safe to say that you are going through the effects of a sexless marriage.

Can a Marriage Survive Without Sexual Intimacy?

Yes, a marriage can survive with sexual intimacy. 

However, this is only possible if both parties are no longer interested in sex. 

If a couple is not having sex because of a low sex drive on one partner, or one partner is asexual, there is a chance the marriage may not survive unless they seek help from a sex therapist or counselor. This is especially if the union was founded on shared sexual experiences and not an emotional connection or friendship with one another.

The decision to not walk away and instead stay and make the love life work despite the sexual dysfunction lies solely on the two people in the relationship. 

Sean Galla

Are You Spouses or 

Just Roommates?

You've drifted into a sexless marriage. 

Can this relationship be saved? 

Yes, experts say.

There's no drama, no fighting. You've been together for years, raised kids and pets. The love is still there, but the spark just isn't. As months drift into years, you realize: You're in a sexless marriage.

Most married couples don't really know what to expect of a long-term relationship, says Diane Solee, MSW, a former marriage counselor who is the founder and director of Smartmarriages.com. She is also director of the Coalition for Marriage, Family, and Couples Education.

"It's so normal to hit the doldrums. In a way, you should be smug about it," Solee tells WebMD. "You have a partner who is not bringing drama into your life. You're not going to alcohol or cocaine treatment classes. You are in a very good place. Realizing all that, your job is to get out of the doldrums. You may have gotten into a rut."

There's more at stake than simply boredom. Very often, couples are headed toward a bigger disconnect in the marriage -- and possibly divorce, says Pepper Schwartz, PhD, professor of sociology, psychiatry, and behavioral medicine at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Schwartz is on the Health Advisory Board at WebMD, and author of several books including Prime: Adventures and Advice about Sex, Love, and the Sensual Years.

Signs you're in the marital doldrums: 

"You're leading parallel lives, and don't see each other anymore," she tells WebMD. "You tell everything important to your friends but not to each other. Those are really big problems, and you've got to tend to them."

A sharp tongue is a red flag of growing frustration in a passionless marriage, Schwartz adds. 

"If you're bitchy, if you treat each other with contempt, it's a warning sign. It may not happen all the time, but it happens often. It's because people start to feel neglected, disappointed. They had expectations of what marriage should be like, and this is not what they'd hoped for."

In fact, boredom is very often a cover-up for anger and disappointment, Schwartz explains. 

"Those deeper feelings have to be dealt with. I'm not talking about deep therapy; it can happen in one or two visits. But there has to be a refocusing on the relationship... a renewal of what this marriage is supposed to be."

The Anatomy of Love

First step: Be realistic. If you're looking for the swept-off-your feet sex of those first few years, dream on. And a new partner certainly isn't the solution. Three years later, you'll have the same sizzle-less marriage you have right now.

"The initial passion of any relationship changes after 18 months," says Sallie Foley, MSW, director of the Center for Sexual Health at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Modern Love and Sex and Love for Grownups.

"It moves from the romantic and exciting to an attachment kind of loving, fondness," Foley tells WebMD. "That gotta have it, gotta have it feeling is gone."

Take stock of what you want, she advises. If you want a sex life, then commit to making it happen, Foley says. 

"Not everyone wants a sex life as they head into last third of life. But AARP studies show that 65% remain sexually active."

Put aside the romanticized, silver-screen notions of sex, Foley says. 

"The majority of people your age are having good-enough sex. Occasionally, they have sex that knocks it out of the ballpark. But they're having sex regularly. They're getting into bed, hugging and touching, canoodling as I call it, and they're doing it on a regular basis."

You've also got to set aside negative attitudes about your spouse. 

"You have to give up fantasy notions that he or she is suddenly going to be 20 pounds lighter with no cellulite. You have to decide, 'This is what I want, how do I proceed,'" she advises.

Then, have "the talk" with your spouse. 

You have to be willing to say this to your partner: 

"We need to jazz up our sex life. We have fallen into some bad habits. I'm not going to settle for this level. We need to have sex, the same as we do other things that are important to us. We have to set aside time for it.'"

He's Just Not Up for It?

If your partner is unwilling, here's your dialogue: 

"We need to go for a brief round of counseling to get our priorities straight. I'm not willing to settle for a relationship where you sit in a chair, pop a few beers, and our sex life is over."

The stereotype of grumpy old men exists for a reason, Foley explains. 

"With aging comes an increase in depression and irritability. Women complain to me -- I was ready to try these things, but I couldn't get my partner to do it."

Often, the irritability and crankiness is actually masking anxiety and depression. If your partner is downright snarly about it, then you've got to stand your ground. "This isn't the kind of thing in this day and age that people live with," she says. 

"Our parents or grandparents may have lived that way, but we don't anymore."

With therapy and the right medication, the irritable anxiousness and depression can disappear. If your partner won't go to counseling, then you need to go alone, she says. "Counseling can help you figure out strategies to help yourself."

Put Sex on the Schedule

If you're both on the same page, it's time you put sex on the schedule. Think of it as exercise, your regular workout -- whatever time of day you choose. After all, sexual health is an important part of general health, Foley says.

"It's a very healthy thing for a partnership, there's no question about that," she tells WebMD. "People who have sex tend to feel closer, more intimate."

When you're over 40, there's definitely a "use it or lose it" aspect to sex, she adds. "That means you have to do it every day. You have to be committed to intimate time together. That doesn't mean every single time you take off your clothes and have sex. But set aside time just for the two of you."

Fall in Love Again

Outside the bedroom, you must make time for each other. 

"If you're bored, you can figure your partner is probably bored, too," says Solee. 

"Think what would put excitement into your life. Take responsibility for doing something about it. You really owe it to yourself."

Take a cooking class together, take up kayaking or dancing -- or sign up for a sex workshop, she advises. 

"Share each other's interests. Find new interests together. Single people can follow their own interests. You don't want to send your partner off to a class alone. Mother Nature abhors the doldrums, so don't let someone else fill it."

Trying something new requires a lot of focus -- and that's good for your sex life. 

"It's like when you had kids, or bought your first house. People actually fall in love again."

Between the sheets, keep things spontaneous and fun, she says. 

"The phone is turned off, the dog is behind the door. You get into bed with an attitude of good will. You don't have to have an attitude of 'complete hot.' That's a big misconception."

Allow each other plenty of sensual time to get warmed up. When you're over 40, foreplay is important in building arousal and desire. "When we're 20, it's all pretty straightforward -- desire, arousal, orgasm. After age 40, you need to give arousal more time. You get into bed, start doing it -- then you start feeling some physical arousal. That increases your desire, which increases more arousal."

Also, your mind-set changes. 

"As men get older, they get more focused on eroticism," she says. "They're much more interested in pleasure, in having the connection. Women start asking for what they want."

Couples should also develop a "sexual style," Solee tells WebMD. 

"Most people think that if they've found a lover and soul mate, the sex will be great. Early marital sex is essentially sex with a stranger. This is about letting your partner know you, and getting to know them, intimately. Marital sex can be hotter if you can develop an intimate sexual style with your marriage partner."

Vibrators and Pills

Tools and toys are important, too.

Men: Viagra, Levitra, or Cialis can be effective in men with erection problems, but if you have certain medical conditions or are taking certain medicines, you may not be able to use them.

Ladies: Don't fret if you're not feeling desire right away. Enjoy the process of becoming aroused. A vibrator can help with that, she advises. "After menopause, they may need a more intense vibration, at least initially, if a woman hasn't been sexual in awhile. She may need a vibrator."

If vaginal dryness and pain are issues, look into topical lubricants and moisturizers, Foley adds.

Many vaginal products contain estrogen (which can come in cream, vaginal ring, and vaginal tablet formulation), which helps with dryness, irritation, and muscle tone in the area. If you cannot take estrogen, products like Replens or K-Y Jelly can help with lubrication.

Try a Marriage Retreat

Keeping your marriage on track -- sexually and otherwise -- requires good communications skills, Solee adds. A therapist can guide you toward improving those skills, possibly recommending a marriage retreat.

"It's not our differences that pull us apart, it's how we handle them," she tells WebMD. 

"You need to really listen to your partner in a way he knows you love and respect him. Take a marriage cruise or retreat or a wilderness workshop. Learn to disagree in ways that breed joy and intimacy." 

Marriage education classes are also held in local community centers, churches, and military bases, she adds.

Some workshops are intense group therapy for couples. 

"Some are enrichment weekends -- you learn to massage each others' feet, or talk about sensuality. It depends on how deep your rift is, whether a therapist would recommend a lighter or deeper workshop," Schwartz says.

Group therapy lets you see the relationship more clearly. 

"Often, people find it easier to give empathy to other people than to each other," she explains. "But once empathy is in the room, it kind of fills the room. It helps you give it to each other."

You learn from other couples in the room, Schwartz adds. 

"Some people give voice to something you haven't been able to. It's different if it doesn't come from an authority figure. It becomes a discussion among equals. Other people can see things you may not see. If everybody looks at you and says, ‘Why are you being so hard on her?’ everything changes. You suddenly see, whoa, I am."

 Jeanie Lerche Davis, Louise Chang

Getty Images 

Reasons why couples drift apart and sex becomes non existent:

1. Sex Feels Like a Chore 

The mental load of parenting, work, and daily responsibilities can make intimacy feel like just another task, draining it of excitement and connection.

2. Resentment and Lack of Respect

When one or both partners feels  unseen or unsupported, resentment builds, making emotional and physical closeness nearly impossible.

3. Feeling Used or Rejected 

Whether one partner feels desired only for sex or constantly turned down, both experiences can lead to emotional withdrawal and insecurity.

4. Loss of Emotional Intimacy

When communication breaks down and couples stop sharing thoughts, feelings, and desires, the gap between them grows.

 

The Shift: Seeing and Valuing Each Other Again

Rebuilding connection starts with differentiation recognising and appreciating each other as unique individuals. Instead of focusing on what’s lacking, shift toward understanding:

• Both partners need affection, attention, and validation, though we all express and receive love differently, so owning your side of the conflict shows emotional maturity. 

• Dropping the blame narrative and seeing your partners perspective can soften resentment and open the door to reconnection.

Rupture and Repair 

Sexless relationships often stem from unresolved conflicts, not just unmet needs. 

Couples get stuck in cycles of rupture and repair, where arguments linger and resentment builds. 

The key is not to avoid conflict but to navigate it differently

1. Acknowledge your partner's feelings without immediately defending your own.
2. Choose repair over being right.  
3. Break the cycle of blame by focusing on understanding instead of winning.

 

Rebuilding Intimacy

Steps Toward Connection:

1. Open Communication

Create regular check-ins to discuss feelings and desires without judgment.

2. Rebuild Trust small  consistent efforts help restore security in the relationship.

3. Redistribute the Mental Load Balancing responsibilities prevents exhaustion and resentment.

4. Cultivate Non-Sexual Intimacy prioritise touch, eye contact, and quality time.

5. Address Resentments Bring unresolved issues to the surface and work through them together.

6. Reignite Sexuality Explore fantasies, preferences, and ways to make intimacy enjoyable again.

7. Argue Productively Stay on topic, avoid personal attacks, and always prioritise  repair.

8. Practice Empathy Try to see the situation from your partners perspective.

Every relationship goes through sexless seasons. 

A lack of physical intimacy doesn’t have to mean the end - it’s an opportunity to strengthen the emotional foundation and build a connection that lasts.

Come out of the Power Struggle, give yourself healing time, be aware you are being triggered in this relationship, look at seeking help to move out of the struggle and to feel the real deal of harmony.

Lottie Passell-Syms