The Sexy Spirit

What do you tell couples where one member is more spiritually oriented than the other?
If somebody is closing themselves to spirit, you can't just bonk them on the head and say, "Open up!" I would say that in preparing for a marriage, it's important that you find some measure of compatibility about your spiritual values.

At the same time, we have to honor that spirituality has many faces, and that going to church or believing in a certain manifestation of divinity is not all that counts. So like sexuality, I think we've measured our spirituality by how many times we go to church, and that isn't always the useful measure. There has been very interesting brain research that is really just coming into its own that shows that on sexual stimulation, every part of the brain lights up—the part that has to do with spiritual and religious ecstasy as well as the part that has to do with physical gratification. So whether or not we're aware that sex is spiritual, or that we're being "spiritual," we probably are. There's been other brain research—I call it "love research,"—that shows the biochemical roots of how we reach out and love. Stimulated from the brain, certain neurotransmitters ... go through our bodies, so if somebody is "not spiritual," we may need to [ask], "Are they depressed? Is there something from their childhood they're holding onto? Do they have some self-image negativity going on?" It's so complex when you begin to get into the relationship between the physical and the spiritual. Let me sum it up by saying that we are hardwired to connect sexuality and spirituality.