Energy Sharing and the Body Between Us
There's a passage in Neale Donald Walsch's Conversations with God, Book 2 that has stayed with me since I first read it, and I want to walk through it carefully because the image it creates is genuinely useful regardless of what you make of the book's framing.
It appears in chapter 7, in the section that offers what Walsch presents as a spiritual account of human sexuality. And it introduces a metaphor he calls TOMARY.
The Passage
The setup is simple. Two people — Tom and Mary — notice each other across a crowded room.
The premise Walsch works from is that every person is continuously radiating energy outward in all directions. Not metaphorically — the framing treats this as something physical, measurable, felt. Your energy pushes out; everything around you is touched by it, and you're touched by everything else.
So Tom's energy radiates outward. Mary's does too. And some portion of each reaches the other.
But here's the part that makes the image land: they don't meet at Tom, and they don't meet at Mary. They meet in the middle.
In the space between them, the two energies unite and form something new — a third thing that is neither of them and is made entirely of both. Walsch names it Tomary. And he calls it the body between them.
What happens next reframes attraction entirely. Tom and Mary both feel the joy of that body between them. And it's that — not each other, exactly — that they're drawn toward. They move closer. Not primarily to reach each other, though it looks that way from outside. They're moving toward the thing they've made together.
And as the distance closes, the cord shortens. The energy travels a shorter path, cycles faster, and intensifies. Closer still, and it intensifies further.
The metaphysical union, in Walsch's framing, happens first. The physical union is what follows — two people attempting to physically experience what they're already experiencing energetically.
Why the Image Is Useful
I'm a practicing Christian, and Conversations with God is not a book I take as theology. But a good metaphor doesn't require you to accept the metaphysics that produced it, and this one does something I haven't found elsewhere.
It locates intimacy in the space between rather than in either person.
Almost every framework for improving intimate life is oriented toward one of the two people. Improve your technique. Develop your presence. Understand her anatomy. Work on your confidence. All of it valuable, and all of it located in an individual.
Tomary points somewhere else entirely. The thing being built isn't in you and isn't in her. It's in the space between you, and it's made of contributions from both. Which means it can be tended directly and which means neither of you can produce it alone.
That reframe has changed how I think about what Brittney and I are actually doing.
What It Explains
Several things I've written about separately snap into focus under this image.
Why presence matters more than technique. If the thing you're building exists between you, then what matters most is what each of you is contributing to that space. A man executing skilled technique while mentally elsewhere is contributing very little to the body between them. As I've written repeatedly, the psychology is the sex and the physiology is how it gets expressed.
Why both people have to arrive. Under this image, one person being fully present isn't enough — the third thing requires both contributions. That's exactly what Brittney named after one of our early Coelle sessions: we're both actually here at the same time. She was describing Tomary.
Why distance intensifies rather than diminishes charge. Walsch's shortening-cord mechanism is essentially Perel's argument about desire needing gap, arriving from a different direction. The energy traveling between two people is more intense when the path is short — but there has to be a path. Two people fully merged have no between. Closing the gap entirely eliminates the thing that was generating the charge.
Why anticipation works. As I've written in the anticipation post, dopamine peaks during wanting rather than having. Tomary offers the same insight in different language: the body between you is already being built during the anticipation. The week before a scheduled evening isn't empty time. It's the energy cycling at a longer distance.
Why the fully-clothed, across-the-room moment can be so charged. Because the thing generating the charge isn't proximity. It's the between. And the between can be intensely alive at a distance — sometimes more so than in contact, when familiarity has flattened the contact itself.
How to Actually Tend the Between
If intimacy lives in the space between two people rather than in either of them, the practical question becomes: what are you contributing to that space?
Notice what you bring into the room. This connects directly to Wineland's concept of evocation, which I've written about — you are always calling something forth in your partner. Under the Tomary image, you're always contributing something to the between, whether or not you chose it. Tension, distraction, and absence all go in. So does aliveness.
Attend to the space rather than to performance. A useful mid-encounter question: not how am I doing but what's happening between us right now? The first produces an observer. The second produces attention to the actual thing.
Build it before the bedroom. The body between two people doesn't get created at the moment of physical contact. It's been accumulating all day, all week — through the texts, the touches in passing, the quality of attention at dinner. As I wrote in the emotional intimacy post, the bedroom inherits the climate.
Use breath and eye contact deliberately. These are the most direct available tools for establishing the between. Synchronized breath is two nervous systems building one shared rhythm. Sustained eye contact is the cord at its shortest. The Yab-Yum practice I've written about is essentially a posture optimized for maximizing the between — faces level, chests together, movement minimal, nothing but the space between two people.
Let it be the point. Not orgasm. Not performance. Not a sequence of milestones, as I wrote recently. The thing you're there for is the body between you — and orienting toward that changes what the encounter is organized around.
The Line I Keep Coming Back To
What I find most durable about the passage is its reversal of the ordinary account of attraction.
We assume we're drawn to the other person. Walsch's image says we're drawn to what exists between us — and that the other person is how we get there.
That's not a diminishment of the partner. It's an elevation of the relationship itself into something with its own existence — a third thing, made by both, that neither owns and both are responsible for.
Nine years in, that's closer to my actual experience than any account centered on either of us individually. What Brittney and I have built isn't in her and isn't in me. It's the thing between us, and it responds directly to what we each keep putting into it.
Tend the between. That's where the intimacy actually lives.
Ready to go deeper?
If this resonates, there are two ways to take the next step with Coelle.
Download the Coelle app — Guided audio intimacy sessions designed for couples who are ready to stop performing and start arriving. Built to establish the between — synchronized breath, shared attention, both partners arriving at once. Download Coelle here.
Work with me directly — I offer one-on-one sex and intimacy coaching for individuals and couples, drawing on my background in sport psychology and years of personal somatic work. Book a free discovery call here.
