The Sacred Edge

What happened when I broke an agreement with my wife — and we both stayed.

I’m standing in my living room, dancing intimately, erotically with a pillar, tears pouring down my face. My wife Kiki is sitting three feet away, watching.

I’d been telling her what I wanted — to fully inhabit my sexual aliveness in the world. Even when that might mean dancing intimately or sensually with other women, as long as I’m rooted in myself and honoring our partnership. This had been part of our shared agreements for years, but I’d been afraid of letting myself go there. I didn’t trust that she supported it.

And instead of arguing, she just said: Feel it. Feel my support, right now. She said she wanted this too — for both of us to be fully, erotically alive, even out in the world.

Something in my body moved. I’d forgotten I wasn’t alone in my desire. I turned toward the pillar, projected a woman onto it, and started dancing. A spontaneous ritual that neither of us planned.

All of this was happening inside a big rupture.

A few days earlier, I was at an embodied eros facilitator training, and I could feel my own erotic energy stirring — desire, attraction, aliveness moving through me. I didn’t know how to be with it. I didn’t trust it. I was cutting it down before it could fully arrive, bracing against my own aliveness because some part of me believed it wasn’t safe to feel that much. In the process, something I did — subtle, brief — was outside the agreements Kiki and I hold.

So I came home and told her I’d broken an agreement.

She felt it in her body as a deep betrayal. Her heartbreak was total. And instead of defending, explaining, or collapsing into shame — I stayed. I held what I’d done without trying to minimize it. She felt the whole thing and stayed open hearted, without going into attack.

This was the most skill we’d ever had access to in a rupture, and we’d worked hard for this moment. No rush to repair. No fear or threat of “the end of us.” Just stability amidst deep heartbreak. We sat in the mess for days.

At one point we went to our practice room and did a dyad practice for moving stuck energy in rupture — one we learned from our teacher Ethan and have been honing for three years. We got underneath the story to what was truly happening. I could see that I needed to trust my life force and desires as fundamentally good. She could see that beyond her heartbreak, there was a way to meet me from a fully open-hearted place.

The depth of devotion it took her to do that undid me. I felt an even deeper level of devotion to the love that we share.

That’s how I ended up dancing with a pillar.

“Feel it all the way,” she kept saying. “Keep going.”

I felt through waves of grief I didn’t know I was carrying. All the times I’d shut myself down. All the years of dimming my aliveness because some part of me believed she couldn’t hold it — because I couldn’t hold the possibility that that much love existed. And here she was, not just holding it, encouraging it, witnessing my full erotic aliveness and saying more.

What followed was the most connected, alive, devotional sex I’ve ever experienced. Something had shifted underneath — a deeper relaxation in both our bodies. A trust that we can hold this too. That we can hold ourselves, and each other, even in the messy edges. This is how secure attachment actually gets built.

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Here’s what I see now.

Most couples, especially monogamous ones, live inside a bind that no one names. Don’t go outside the relationship for that, but I can’t meet you in it here either.

The energy has to go somewhere. When both directions are closed, everything contracts. The aliveness dims. And slowly, without anyone choosing it, the relationship becomes a place where we’re less of ourselves than we were before.

This isn’t just my story, or Kiki’s. It’s about what becomes possible when two people see through the bind — when they both choose to be fully alive, fully expressed, and deeply devoted. Not one person’s freedom at the expense of the other’s safety, but both people wanting that aliveness for themselves and for each other.

For us, this is what radically whole monogamy looks like — and it’s the path we’re choosing. More broadly, we’re taking a stand for fully expressed erotic humans living in their aliveness in the world.

This is why I’m starting The Sacred Edge.

The Sacred Edge is a recurring gathering for anyone interested in relating to partnership as a path of awakening — those who want to meet themselves at the edges where they normally contract. Come solo or with a partner, whether you’re in a relationship or calling one in. Each session has a different theme, a different doorway into that territory.

We’ll explore teachings on partnership and land them in the body with embodiment and relational practices. Together, we’ll cultivate the capacity to slow down, stay, and widen the channel of sensation, so we can have more freedom and safety at our own sacred edges.

This work comes from my life. From years of navigating desire, devotion, shame, and freedom with the woman I love. From learning to stay through the sensations of rupture instead of looking away.

What I shared above was some of the most vulnerable territory Kiki and I have navigated — and we did it without a container. I don’t want that to be the only way. I bring what I’m learning — not from a place of having figured it out, but from the place where the figuring is still happening.

First gathering is Wednesday, April 29th, 5:30 - 8pm in Boulder, CO. Come meet your sacred edge.

https://coawaken.com/sacred-edge

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P.S. Kiki also wrote her side of this story. Read it here.