When stillness touches the heart, you feel intimate love. It opens a refined and sensitive attunement to self and others. It is a gentle, soft, boundless darkness. It is a silent night that feels safe, friendly, and very familiar. With this love, you may be alone, but not lonely. With this love, even when you don’t know the way, you are never lost.

Learning objectives

• Learning to identify somatic ground of intimacy
• Getting familiar with intimacy decoupled from ideas about intimacy
• Working with issues around intimacy
• Working with issues around loneliness
• Working with issues around isolation
• Experiencing internal intimacy with shadow sides

Sonnet XVII – Pablo Neruda
I don’t love you as if you were the salt-rose, topaz
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as certain dark things are loved,
Secretly, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom and carries
hidden within itself the light of those flowers,
and thanks to your love, darkly in my body
lives the dense fragrance that rises from the earth.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you simply, without problems or pride:
I love you in this way because I don’t know any other way of loving

but this, in which there is no I or you,
so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand,
so intimate that when I fall asleep it is your eyes that close.

Jiddu Krishnamurti
“If we try to listen we find it extraordinarily difficult, because we are always projecting our opinions and ideas, our prejudices, our background, our inclinations, our impulses; when they dominate, we hardly listen at all to what is being said. In that state there is no value at all. One listens and therefore learns, only in a state of attention, a state of silence, in which this whole background is in abeyance, is quiet; then, it seems to me, it is possible to communicate”