I want to tell you about something that happened to me recently. Not a dramatic event. More like a quiet earthquake.
I saw a beautiful woman, and the old familiar impulse arose — the urge to make a sexual comment, even if only internally. And for the first time, the impulse didn’t feel wrong. It felt boring.
That word matters. Boring. Not shameful. Not inappropriate. Not something I needed to correct. Just... small. Like a suit I’d outgrown. It still fit technically, but it no longer expressed me.
If you’ve ever had a moment where a deeply ingrained habit suddenly lost its charge — not through willpower, not through moral effort, but through something more like completion — you might know what I’m talking about.
The Bottle and the River
Here’s what I discovered when I sat with it.
When you encounter beauty — real, stop-you-in-your-tracks beauty — energy rises. That energy is raw, alive, and multidimensional. It contains attraction, yes. But it also contains awe, aliveness, gratitude, creative force, and something almost devotional.
The habitual move is to capture that energy immediately. To channel it into a sexual frame. A comment. An appraisal. A category. This happens so fast it feels like the experience itself.
But it’s not the experience. It’s a premature collapse of the experience into one dimension.
It’s like bottling a river. You get a bottle of water. But you lose the river.
What Happens When You Don’t Grab
I started experimenting. Not suppressing — I want to be very clear about that. This is not discipline. Not morality. Not “the right thing to do.” Those routes suppress energy, and suppressed energy always returns sideways as judgment, shame, or passive-aggression.
No. This was curiosity. What’s actually there when I don’t immediately route the energy into the familiar channel?
The answer surprised me with its intensity.
What’s there is divine arrest. And I don’t use that word lightly.
When you see beauty and don’t grab it — when you let the energy flow uncaptured — what emerges is an awe so intense it stops you. Not you capturing beauty. Beauty capturing you. The reversal is the whole thing.
The sexual response doesn’t disappear. It’s still there. But it’s a subset — a small current within a much larger river. The awe holds it all. Attraction, aliveness, reverence, creative energy, something devotional that connects you to a dimension of experience the old reflex couldn’t touch.
Why Boredom Is More Powerful Than Morality
I’ve spent decades working in transformation, and here’s one of the most important things I’ve learned: when a pattern dies from morality, it gets suppressed and comes back sideways. When a pattern dies from boredom, something is genuinely completing itself.
The energy isn’t pushed down. It’s released upward into a fuller expression.
This matters because most of us have been taught to handle our impulses through discipline, correctness, or shame. “Don’t do that. It’s disrespectful. It’s objectifying.” And those moral guardrails have their place. But they don’t transform anything. They just build a dam. The water still pushes.
What I’m describing is different. The dam isn’t needed because the river found a wider channel on its own.
The Masculine Trap
In my thirties, I pursued the art of connection with beautiful women with tremendous zeal. I had a move I loved. After hours of authentic conversation, when the chemistry was undeniable, I’d say: “Strength or weakness? I choose strength” — and decisively take her hand.
That was pure masculine energy. Decisive. Clear. Powerful.
But here’s what I can see now: that decisive masculine energy — that impulse to choose, to act, to collapse possibility into one clear direction — isn’t always the most alive move. Sometimes it’s a premature collapse. Sometimes the most powerful thing is the feminine move: staying with the energy as it flows, not pinning it down, not deciding what it means before it’s had a chance to reveal itself.
The sexual comment is the masculine move applied too early. It kills off the other possibilities to focus on one familiar dimension. Divine Arrest is the willingness to stay in the full current — and discover that the full current is infinitely more powerful than the single channel you were reducing it to.
A New Way of Encountering Beauty
I’m not suggesting anyone should feel shame about attraction or sexual energy. That’s the old game, and it leads nowhere good. I’m suggesting something far more radical:
What if your automatic sexual response to beauty is too small for what’s actually happening?
What if the comment, the appraisal, the internal narration — all of it — is a way of not being fully present with what you’re experiencing? A pre-packaged response that short-circuits something deeper?
What if beauty, when you actually let it land without grabbing it, opens you to an experience of awe that makes the old response look like a postcard of the Grand Canyon compared to standing at the rim?
The Practice
This isn’t a technique. It’s a recognition. But if you want to taste it:
Next time beauty stops you — a face, a sunset, a piece of music, a human being who takes your breath — notice the energy that rises. Notice the habitual move to capture it, name it, route it somewhere familiar.
And don’t.
Not from discipline. From curiosity.
See what’s actually there when you let the river run.
I think you’ll find what I found: the awe was always there. It was just hidden behind a reflex that arrived so quickly, you mistook it for the experience itself.
The old pattern wasn’t wrong. It was just a fraction. And there’s a whole river waiting for anyone willing to stop bottling it.
Sunil Bhaskaran is a transformational coach and CEO of Global Communities LLC. For over 30 years, he has helped leaders and entrepreneurs discover what’s on the other side of the patterns they’ve outgrown. Learn more at www.SunilBhaskaran.com.
Since 1991, I’ve been reflecting on, designing, and implementing methodologies and systems for bringing a transcendent, creative and innovative approach to critical aspects of entrepreneurship.
