Presenting the free seminar last night titled “Deepening Intimacy” (the third of the series on love titled “The Heart of the Matter”), I realized why I am so passionate about the topic of intimacy.
It becomes clear to me each time I experience an opening to the core of my Being and let go of limiting beliefs and neurosis, I want to be creative, express my passion, and share the essence of myself with people who care. The more I shift away from the ordinary chatter box mind towards experiences of pure Being or connection, and the more deconstruction of so many of my old patterns and beliefs I have had after practicing years of intense meditation, attending many transformative retreats with the Clairvision School of Meditation and giving thousands of sessions to clients, the more I realize the need for intimacy, or the shared warmth, closeness and trust with loved ones, is core to the human experience. My sense is that most of the time, when we get the intimate part of our lives sorted, the rest flows.

As always, presenting on one of my favorite topics in front of a group of receptive and interested people gave me a lot of insight and inspiration.

I will post a short video from the talk this weekend, but meanwhile here are some sneak peeks for you all to enjoy and comment on.
Last night, the key to the talk was a question asked by one woman towards the end:

“What techniques can help me to deepen intimacy with my partner?”
Of course, the answer to this question is many-fold, and more than a few sentences. However, when forced to think on my feet, it was clear that the most immediate things to help this woman, and all of us in our quest are:
1. Self knowledge. You cannot let someone else into your heart, if you have not gone there yourself. Find out your own blocks to intimacy, find ways to resolve those blocks (I recommend working with a practitioner using Inner Space Techniques and or attending retreats with the Clairvision School of meditation because that is what I practice for myself and with my clients and I know that it works).
2. Needs-based communication. Communication is at the essence of building intimacy, starting with the need for safety. When you can first listen to yourself and hear your own needs, then you can start to communicate with your partner or loved one and build trust in a positive way. (I recommend the book by Marshall Rosenburg PhD “Non-Violent Communication”).

Wikipedia says, “Intimate relationships provide a social network for people that provide strong emotional attachments, and fulfill our universal need of belonging and the need to be cared for.”
To conclude for today, when we open to feel our own need for caring and belonging, safety and trust, we can share that with loved ones and grow as human beings.

Wishing you all joy-filled intimacy this week!
Samantha

P.S. I would love for you to sign up for my juicy newsletter here !!!

Spring in my apartment, the orchid gives birth.

Spring is bursting forth with more than a little Joie de vivre.
I am catching this “exaltant ressenti par toute la conscience” (exhilaration through one’s whole being) from nature, and delivering a fresh look to my website.

As part of the ‘Heart of the Matter’ series I am posting a juicy new blog entry and newsletter every Tuesday. They will be around 500 words, and full of useful personal growth related information. The plan is to include fun video blogs, and stories of self-development experiences that I hope will be both thought provoking and entertaining. (You might also notice some new fresh photos by the most awesome www.johnmazlishphoto.com. I cannot recommend his work enough!)

Much of the content being unfolded in this series comes from my 15 years of client work, coupled with a relentless pursuit of my own self-understanding.

I am really excited to provide a platform for a deep exploration into the very core of what makes us human. And not to settle for conceptual theories alone, but to delve into the human experience of ‘heart’. What does it really mean to open your heart? How do you achieve a tangible experience of more opening? The focus is is the exploration of what it means to be in relationship, to be connected, to have love and to live fully. There is also the important element of how to connect to your essential ‘inner’ sense of self and purpose.

Deepening Intimacy
This brings me to the question of intimacy. How do you define intimacy? What would you say develops intimacy between couples? What is ‘healthy’ intimacy?

Way back in the 17th century the word intimacy was used as a euphemism for sexual intercourse. Nowadays intimacy refers to any personal connection that is defined as very close or familiar – not necessarily sexual.

Esoterically speaking, intimacy results from a deep merging on the level of life force or qi (as described in the Chinese tradition) between yourself and another.
This is not something conceptual but a deep level of experience. For instance, when we talk of ‘chemistry’ between two people, we are touching upon the subtle or ‘energetic’ level of relationship dynamics. For most people these dynamics are almost entirely unconscious, leaving them confused and unsure of what they, or their partner is feeling or wanting. Perceiving the qi energy dynamics between you and others allows you to continue the exploration toward intimacy with greater confidence.
You may be thinking that this sounds complicated or difficult, but it’s not!
As a simple starting point for consciously experiencing your qi energy, simply attune yourself to the sensation of tingling or vibration in your body. If you sit still with awareness of this sensation you will go deeper and connect to the internal qi layer. It is the energy that keeps us alive, that buzzes, pulses and flows through our body. Many people feel this level of consciousness often without realizing it. At the beach, for example, there is often a certain tingling in your hands, your feet, your bones that makes you feel vibrant and vital. This is an experience of your qi energy or life force.

One of the reasons I chose the name ‘Vital Switch’ for the business, is that my work is about providing experiential pathways and techniques to ‘switch on’ a conscious connection to the subtle layers of energy inside. I am fascinated with the exploration and cultivation of these so called ‘subtle bodies’, because they hold such keys for improving our ability to navigate in the tricky waters of human relationships. More on ‘subtle bodies’ in my coming blogs.

A great benefit of the conscious illumination of the subtle energy layer, is the break it gives us from the ‘chatterbox’ level of the mind. That interminable ‘blah, blah, blah’ laundry list that goes on in the background. Resting on the deeper level associated with the conscious experience of qi inside, can silence the chattering. Sometimes you can experience this after great physical exertion. In the immediate aftermath, your body is tingling and your conscious awareness is focused on the experience of your body – not the chattering of the mind. Anyone familiar with meditation may see the connection to the experience of a deeper mediation state, where the chattering also falls silent.
Back to intimacy! There is no doubt that the incessant background chattering of the mind gets in the way of cultivating the intimate connections that we crave so deeply. Alternatively, awakening to the deeper, internal, subtle aspect of ourselves is conducive to experiencing depth of connection with others. These are skills that can be learned. And actually it’s not that difficult! Unfamiliar – yes, difficult – no!

Do you have experiences of your qi to share below in the comments? I would love to hear from you.

P.S. Sign up for my juicy weekly newsletter here!!!

I feel so lucky to have been able to present a beautiful talk about love last night in New York City. We had 30 people there, asking a lot of great questions, and bringing a lively discussion. One question that touched me deeply was a private one from a young man after the presentation was complete:

“I have never been in love, I have never felt that feeling, how can I get it?”

What a great question asked with such sincerity and yearning, that it deserves a real answer. Essentially the short answer is that this young man needs to re-connect to his ability to feel. This young man, like many people today, has most likely become blocked from being able to feel any kind of emotion in his body in a connected way.

Being in love is like a dance. You cannot learn to dance if you cannot feel your body first. The first step is feeling the body, then learning how to move the body and with practice, learning how to move in unison with another until finally you become able to dance.

The First Step

In matters of the heart, the first step is to be more conscious of your inner feeling response to things you experience in your day-to-day life. You do this by connecting the emotional feeling to a corresponding sensation in the body. It’s not mental, it’s visceral. A visceral emotion is one you feel in the body, like a gut instinct, as opposed to a more mind-based feeling like ‘feeling inferior’, or guilt.

If you see someone whom you find attractive, and you may think to yourself “They are incredible!” – but also you can connect to the effect in your body of the emotional trigger. Perhaps you notice a bubbliness in the belly, or a lightness and uplifted feeling in the chest. By doing this you are beginning to feel the raw material or energy, behind the emotion. There is a lot of force, momentum and volition in this raw material, and connecting to it is the starting point for realizing the goal of opening to yourself, and to receiving love from another.

Chances are that if you cannot feel “in love” you cannot feel much else either.

Cutting Off Doesn’t Help

Many people cut themselves off from “bad” emotions in order to be successful and productive in life. There is an idea that cutting off from emotions like anger and jealousy and greed will only make us feel better and act more rationally. And to a degree it is true because if we just gave way to these basic instinctual emotions then we would probably behave like animals and all would be chaos.

But the trouble with shutting off from our emotions is that these responses are at a very basic level, just expressions of life force moving through our bodies. When we cut off from the emotions we also potentially block or cut off the life force, and on top of that the good feelings.

Emotions and Feelings

In the talk last night, we discussed at length the concept of emotions and feelings as two separate categories of experience. The English language says that the words emotions and feelings are synonyms. Here though I am referring to them as different categories of experience for the purpose of mapping consciousness.

The main reference for peeling out the experience of emotions from a feeling can be found in Samuel Sagan’s book Regression Past-Life Theory for Here and Now Freedom. Sagan says that emotions take us out of ourselves, they are loud and they create a lot of projection onto our environment or the people around us. One of the best examples of an emotion that works to pull a person outside of themselves is road rage. And of course, all those fights with a lover or a family member that you later think “oh why did I say that, or do that thing that I regret so much now?”

Feelings in Sagan’s model take us inside of ourselves. They connect us back to our core or the essence of our Being. Feelings are also infinitely varied, with all of us able to have unique responses to similar things. If we all look at a night sky filled with stars, we might use the words wonder and awe to describe what might be quite different responses. Feelings are connected to states of Being or Oneness. When we look at the stars in the night sky, we may feel more connected to ourselves at a deep level of Being, and therefore our response to the experience reflects something about our own true nature inside of us, as well as the incredible beauty of the stars.

Emotions on the other hand are typically fairly basic, instinctual and even animalistic. They do not tend to vary much from one person to another, and there is not a great range to choose from.

Case Study

For example, I worked with a person who suffered from fits of rage, including but not only road rage. At first he would become overwhelmed with the rage and could not control his temper. Through his initial session he learned to change his response to the rage without blocking it. When he was caught in his car on the freeway in a traffic jam and inevitably stared to feeling rage, and the inclination to shout at another driver for cutting him off, or anything like that. But this time, instead of shouting, and blaming the other driver for the rage, he sat with the emotion and felt it in his body.

In his next session, using the Inner Space Techniques, I helped this person to feel his rage from a much deeper level of self awareness than he had ever felt it before. These techniques use a meditation space to help people to see or feel their emotions from a different place inside where there is a potential for a lot more connection or presence. As he moved his awareness into the rage, deepening his appreciation for its heat, its energy, the somatic experience and even expressing sounds when necessary, he began to see the true source of the emotion.

The true source of an emotion at any one moment is most often not the situation in front of you. The true source of an emotion is often what the Indian texts refer to in Sanskrit as Samskara. A Samskara is an emotional imprint or scar from the past that conditions the mind. It is like the colored glasses that taint our vision of the current reality.

The man standing on the highway in a traffic jam, full of rage, found that he had some major trauma with his father early in life that left him feeling abandoned, impotent, scared, and vulnerable. The rage built up inside over time as a reaction to having been left without a father, and the feelings of powerlessness he had about that.

Using the Inner Space Techniques, we spent a few sessions reviewing what happened with his Dad, and allowing the real feelings about those events to be released and unraveled. Most of the time people carry emotions in their body of energy like weights, that do not allow them to receive the experience of their life right now as it really is. The baggage of the past colors every moment.

For this man who released the anger and hurt he had about his Dad, there would typically be a major shift in feeling everything. That means that when he has been able to use the sessions to express the grief, the hurt, the anger, and even the love and the vulnerability he had about his Dad as a little boy, his ability to experience life right now will improve.

Ironically, his relationship with his Dad also improved as he was able to let go of the unconscious grudge he was carrying inside from a very young age.

Feeling Makes Life Richer

We all think that by protecting our hearts, and holding in our emotions, we are making our lives better. The opposite is true.

When we are willing to let ourselves feel the bad stuff with the aim of letting it be unraveled and released from inside of us, then life becomes richer.

Life is far more vibrant, beautiful, multi-colored and dimensional than many of us ever allow ourselves to be present to.

Listen to a symphony orchestra playing so many instruments at the same time. The sound is both rich and simple, it has depth and it can be heavy or light, textured and subtle. This is like life. Life can be all of those things too. But we cannot control how it comes packaged. We have to be willing to feel it all.

So for the sincere young man who asked me how he can fall in love, when he has never had that feeling before, start by making efforts to connect with the feelings and emotions in your body. Expand your capacity to feel anything, by placing awareness on what is happening in your current response to your world. When you are passionate about something, anything, feel it in your body. And if you feel an emotion that you might previously have judged to be negative, this time let yourself feel it. As an adult, you can take an emotion and feel it without having to react. Your behavior does not have to be driven by the fact that you feel en emotion like anger or sadness. In fact you can choose to behave in ways that help the energy of that emotion to move through.

Tips To Help You Connect To Feeling

1. Making sounds, like shouting or moaning can release emotions if you connect that sound with the feeling in your body. Some clients practice car shouting, where you roll up the windows in the car and shout as loud as you can. The truth is when you are in traffic, people cannot hear you in your car when the windows are sealed. It becomes like a sound-proof booth where you can be free to express. Another option could be to shout or scream into pillows at home.
2. Vigorous exercise can help to release emotions if you connect the emotion in your body to the physical expression in the exercise. For example many clients do something like running, or boxing or gym work that really makes them sweat, and they allow the activity to be an expression of something like anger or sadness. It is always easier if you do not have on ear phones, as they tend to disconnect people from feeling what is happening in the body.
3. Writing journal entries where you express the emotions that are in your body, allowing the writing to flow freely can really help to move things. I often ask clients to write for 10 or 15 minutes at a time without holding back, and just put whatever comes into the head on the page.

The key with these expressions is that you be consciously connected to the feeling in your body while you are making them. Generally speaking when people express emotions they are not doing so in a connected way, they are spilling their energy and they lose touch with their center.

Opening to love means being willing to open to feel your self, whatever that means for you right now. This may or may not be pleasant, and it is totally worthwhile as a pathway to connecting deeply, both with yourself and others in your life. Intimacy is not an on-way activity. It is about giving and receiving. In order to receive and to give, we need to be able to feel ourselves present in that moment, whatever that means for us right now.

Resources

Sagan, Samuel. Phd M.D. (1996) Regression Past-Life Theory for Here and Now Freedom  Clairvision School Foundation. Sydney, NSW. Australia.

Blossoms by www.johnmazlishphoto.com

I Could Drink A Case Of You

“Oh, but you are in my blood
You’re my holy wine
You’re so bitter
bitter and so sweet.
Oh, I could drink a case of you darling
still I’d be on my feet
I would still be on my feet.“

Joni Mitchell, “I Could Drink a Case of You” from the album, Blue.

Writing about love must be the easiest and the most difficult thing to do. Easy because it is so close to the core of life, and difficult because so many people have done it before, and some of them so well. How can we live up to that? My hope is that my tales here speak to your heart taking you back to what is true for you, because I am sharing the tenderness of my own experiences from my life and also thousands of one-on-one sessions with clients.

Falling in love is meant to be something that happens to us like a clap of thunder from heavens above. And we want so much to dive into it, yet it often brings pain. As Joni Mitchell says in her song “I Could Drink A Case of You”, it is bitter sweet and we want to drink the whole case in one sitting. Yet we also want something that can last, and make us strong, and even help us to get home.

There is something about the yearning for love that is similar to the longing for home. Each time I watch Battlestar Galactica and they talk about their longing to go home, I am close to tears. The television series is a great illustration of the archetypal pull for home that we all experience. Each show is centered around the main theme of fighting to get home.

Even today people fight to connect to ‘home’. Think how much energy people give to arrange their external circumstances in an attempt to reach a feeling of home. But the sense of home that we long for is truly located inside of us.

Funny then that, not unlike the warriors in Battlestar Galactica, we search outside of ourselves for this home, and even try to find it in another person. It is an high expectation to put on our dear ones.

Why do many of us end up with the wrong partner?

How is it then, that with such a strong yearning for this union, we end up with the “wrong person”? And in those circumstances why do so many people keep pushing for more even when the relationship is clearly not working?

I have had a lot of experience in this area, with relationships that made me weep, and made me ache and made me crazy out of my mind watching that phone way more than I should be. Is that love? Is it love when you are crazy about someone and they do not return your adoration with warmth? When you are addicted to the feeling of the boot in the gut when they tell you again, with or without words, why you have not been good enough for their heart to open?

I am going to suggest that this is not love, that love is something that takes you back to your center. An emotional pull that takes you away from your center is a samskara.

Samskara

“Samskara is one of the most important Sanskrit terms in Hindu philosophy. Yoga, the union with the Higher Self, is said to be achieved as soon as the last samskara has been worked out. Therefore the primary objective of all yogas, or paths of self transformation, is to eradicate the samskaras of the mind. This is why it is so important for those who to want to know themselves, or rather their Self, to have a clear vision of all the mechanisms of their samskaras.”

(p. 6 Sagan, Samuel. 1996. Regression: Past-Life Therapy for Here and Now Freedom.)

Loosely translated, samskara is an emotional imprint or scar from the past that has etched its way into the unconscious so that while we forget the original wound or trauma, it still creates a momentum towards recreating that same wound over and over again. That old saying, ‘like attracts like’ is very well applied to the mechanisms of samskaras.

Falling in love for me has been something of a lifetime occupation, and often a painful business. When I first started meditation and self transformation work 12 years ago I was pretty much done with the whole thing. I came to my meditation class intent on clearing myself of darkness and never opening to a man again. I used to see couples walking down the street holding hands and looking romantic, and I would say to myself, “what are they doing, indulging in that illusion of love, don’t they know that they are only going to end up in pain?”

It is almost laughable now to remember that old broken-hearted self, after all the healing work that I have done, I am kind of amused to see how closed I really was. But what was it that made me cynical about love? It was the fact that I had been in love, head over the heels, devastatingly, deeply and madly in love, and I never really felt that it was returned. It was the fact that I ended up having awful fights with men whom I was in love with, and I was convinced that I would only ever cause a man pain, so better let them have someone else. It was the fact that I grew up witnessing my parents’ bitter battles against each other as they struggled as new immigrants to give the kids everything they wanted, and I was unable to replicate anything else but that war in my own relationships.

Anaïs Nin describes so well the mechanisms of samskaras and how they affect love in our lives:
“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings”

Revealing the Blockages

I was blown open when I started to work on myself, using meditation-based Inner Space Techniques to see the samskara behind my relationship difficulties. I found that the wound inside of me about relationships came from a deep inability to trust. The inability to trust was a kind of emotionally charged pull out of myself toward the wrong situations. It blinded me from being able to choose freely.

Free choice is only available when we can see beyond our samskaras. Choosing to receive a partner who can love and support me has only been possible since I was able to recognize what that might feel like, beyond the pull of the samskara that made me want to close.

Let me explain it another way. When I went to primary school (grade school) in Cottesloe, Perth Western Australia in 1978, there was a lot of bullying. My experience at that school was rough. I arrived innocent, and unique, with my Southern African/British accent, and my strange taste in clothes, and my wild, free way of being. I believed in fairies, I loved nature, I could make up stories for hours, and I spoke to anyone on the street who would allow me to befriend them, even bringing strangers home for tea to my mother’s surprise.

The other children were not really welcoming to my weird and wonderful self. I was teased, beaten up and ostracized for the first year of school. And I dearly wanted friends. After some deliberation, I decided to try to become more like the other children, basically cutting off from parts of myself that I perceived were not going to be tolerated. I became the tough girl. At the same time, my parents split up and my dear Dad upon whom I had rested my heart, was not around so much. The result being that I closed up shop at the age of 10 years old.

When I was about 16 years old I began to yearn intensely for a relationship with a boy, probably mixed up with an unconscious longing for my dear Dad to come home. Yet the irony was that I could not receive that love when I was in a relationship, and nor could I receive it from my Dad when he came back. The part of me that closed when I was 10 years old, could not open up again except for some very rare moments.

I could fall in love in the initial hormonal flush of desire, but I could not create a long-term relationship that was healthy for me. I could have that initial blast of connected opening when the whole body of energy and the heart flares in a special way, but once that “in love” effect wore off, the tough girl was back, and I would somehow either become bored, or create a lot of unpleasant tension with my partner.

The Child Inside
Part of my own journey to fullness came through exploring and valuing the innocence and the sweetness of that little girl who saw fairies, and who spoke to trees, and who felt no fear even when approached by the most intimidating of adults. That little girl was smart, and she was gentle and she was wise and she was not like the other children. I needed to love her first, before I could let anyone else love her.

Loving the child inside me through knowing her real qualities has been a beautiful process. It remains an ongoing part of my life, creativity and even the writing that I am doing now. She is part of all that I do, and all that I be. She is me.

Now I am not depending on another person to be connected to that sweet soft child-like part of my heart, and the deep sensual longing in my belly. I am content to share that with another person, and I do want to keep exploring what that means in a long-term relationship where there are shared values in regard to love. But my experience of love is not dependent on having that relationship.

Layers of the Heart are Revealed

Learning to open my heart, has meant exploring the layers of closing inside of myself using the Inner Space Techniques and working with some expert practitioners. The sessions took me deep into the unconscious parts of my heart. Much of the experiences of purging old trauma happened through symbolic images.

There was an image of a youthful woman with curly blond hair, a full soft body, and bright eyes. As I sat with the image I sensed that she was a courtesan. It was not imagination, it was something of an Archetypal experience. To my surprise she seemed to derive great joy from her life, including her occupation. She seemed totally in her element. As the scene unfolded, however, she became entangled with a man. She fell in love for the first time with a tall dark stranger who was cruel and treated women poorly. It got to the point where his violence brought about her death.

Such scenes often emerge in these practices, some people would take it as a past life image although you could see it as symbolic of an internal pattern that plays out again and again in your life. Either way feeling that archetypal source has the effect of an unraveling.

There is a principle in this work that emotion is not a problem, it is the reaction to that original emotion that causes the anguish and grief. Often when you see the cause of that original emotion it allows you to let go of the string of subsequent reactions that lie on top of that original hurt or trauma. People have a pattern, and the seed of that pattern creates events. They blame the events outside of themselves for that pattern, but it doesn’t help. This scene or actual past life or symbolic image contacted the original depth of that pain.

In my own healing, I saw that there was a white, soft, vast and deep love that this woman of the past held which I recognized was also inside me. She had a devotional way of knowing another person tenderly, deeply, that I had felt in moments with lovers in this life. This was an empathy for humanity that was unconditional, kind and gentle, with a sweet yin power that could dissolve the pain of the wound.

After that practice my life changed. I let myself be vulnerable in intimate relationship, I learned to cry when I felt wounded instead of always fighting. I learned to be vulnerable, and speak up when that wound was triggered so that a partner could hold me and tell me it was ok. I learned to ask for help to see beyond that wound to the real reality of any one situation before me.

Stripping Back Unconsciousness

The key here is that when the wound inside of each of us is unconscious, it has a magnetic pull towards similar situations, causing us to repeat that trauma over and over again. With our minds, we might say that we want healthy relationships but the samskara will take us to that same old pattern repeatedly until we face the source of the pain.

I learned to use IST to navigate the maze of my psyche, and that of my clients, towards finding the source of any emotional or physical pain, to see how it really began. When we see the true cause of a samskara, something inside shifts. Through the seeing of the reality behind the mechanism, there is a possibility to see the Self as it really is. When you experience the Self beyond the samskara there is truth, and there is choice.

What does choice mean? In this instance it means discerning who can be a good partner for each of us, beyond the initial flush of sexual desire, into a lifetime of love.

I will finish this piece with a quote by Anaïs Nin, a brilliant writer on topics such as love and sexuality and life:

“I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.”

Resources

Mitchel, Joni. (1970) “I Could Drink A Case of You”. Blue. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5782PQO5is

Nin, Anaïs. Wikiquote.org http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ana%C3%AFs_Nin#Sourced

Sagan, Samuel. 1997 Regression, Past-Life Therapy for Here and Now Freedom. Clairvision, Sydney, Australia.

Tango Couple Silhouette

Dancing with Desire

Have you ever been in love and found yourself driving across town at all hours, with little sleep, just to see your loved one?

It is amazing how people can go with very little sleep, and still be very joyful when they are in love.

I have notoriously been a fool for love. For the sake of love, I once packed up my whole life into one big suitcase and moved around the world to a country that I didn’t particularly like, and where they didn’t speak English. Everyone told me it was not a good idea to follow the man I loved. But I did it anyway, and although two years later it ended in pain, I do not regret one moment of that experience.

Eros, the Greek god of love, “was never considered a sufficiently responsible god to figure in the ruling Olympian family of Twelve” according to Robert Graves.

“Eros (‘sexual passion’) was a mere abstraction to Hesiod. The early Greeks pictured him as a Ker, or winged ‘Spite’, like Old Age, or Plague, in the sense that uncontrolled sexual passion would be disturbing to ordered society. Later poets, however, took a perverse pleasure in his antics and, by the time of Praxiteles, he had become sentimentalized as a beautiful youth.
(Graves. Pp 58. The Greek Myths 1)

I guess I wasn’t the only one who lost their mind for love. And as the myths tell us, it can be potentially dangerous when it does happen. Still I certainly do not regret having had the experience.

Being a fool for love gave me some incredible experiences, including breaking open my heart, deep levels of intimacy and friendship, getting to know myself at a profound level, awakening my sexual energy, and it even led me to face some of my greatest fears when I was climbing the mountains in the European Alps.

I have certainly had an adventure through allowing myself to follow the raw depths of my desire against all rational or common sense.

Stepping into the fire with my whole being at that time allowed me to know the full intensity of this force, the desire that runs deep inside me like a river.

Awakening The Beast Within

I now know that desire is a force that is neither good nor bad. It has a mind of its own, so to speak. And it loves to love. This force can be asleep inside, like a sleeping dragon. Love is one of the things that can wake it up. When it wakes up, you better watch out because the results are not always what you expect.

The first time that I fell in love I was 17 years old. I was in love with that man for many years, and in a relationship with him for 4 years. Wow what a beautiful person, great lover and wonderful friend. And how it broke my heart that I could not remain with him for the rest of my life, mainly because I wanted to live more and could not settle down.

That was the first time I was with a man who was so gentle and strong, and capable of sharing a soft deep love that could last through changes wrought by time. I was however, unable to really receive it at that time. I was driven by that yearning for the raw, passionate desire that comes with something a little more dangerous.

The second man that I fell in love with was a lot more dangerous. He was 6 foot and 6 inches tall, with a tattoo of a werewolf on his back. This was a quintessential bad boy, and the sex was wild. That was probably the first time that I really lost my mind for love. After 18 months with him, and a lot of heartbreak, I was done. It seemed bad at the time, but looking back there was an element of awakening that happened in that relationship that was really important.

Prior to the passionate experience with the bad boy, I did not really want anything in my life. When I was with the bad boy, the wanting was so intense it burned me up inside.

The passionate affair ignited the fire inside of me to such a degree that I was under the (mistaken) impression that I could do anything. In the immediate aftermath of that relationship, I lost a lot of weight exercising like a tri-athlete, caught a bus across Australia to move to Sydney where I knew no one, and spent months searching for a job as a journalist despite the warnings from anyone I knew who said that it would be too hard for me to make that my career. I proved them all wrong with my newfound stubborn, fiery will power. Looking back, I can see clearly that relationship, as disastrous as it seemed at the time, woke up my ambition.

Now after having been deeply in love a number of times, and followed a number of foolish passions, my approach to the whole business of a relationship is very different. I want the steady reliable, profound, supportive warmth of love and friendship that helps me grow. I know now that this can be passionate and it is developed through trust and care, and time.

Self Love as a Pathway to Relationship

Now I know that trust with another comes through trusting myself. My relationship with myself determines my ability to receive and open to another.

In order to be present to that kind of soft and deep love, I need to have a relationship with this part of myself which has these qualities. Through exploring my own heart using Inner Space Techniques I found that there is an extraordinary depth of softness inside of me. It is at least as intense as the passion, and yet as gentle as a vast cloud.

In the exploration of the loud desires within myself, through partnership and self transformation work, I found that the softness is closer to who I am at the core. This illustrated to me that there was a wisdom in dancing with desire, even if I did get burnt along the way.

Confronting the nature of the beast made me feel alive, in the same way that I felt alive when I looked into the face of an angry bull, and when I saw my own fear on the top of a mountain, and when my little sailboat was careering towards a jetty wall at high wind.

Desire and fear dance side by side. My relationship to these forces of fear and desire is the thing that has driven me through this life so far. Whether I have been riding the beast of desire or gripped in the jaws of fear, I have been owned by a pull that was more about nature than my own true Being.

Most of you out there know already that the fight or flight response is definitely part of our everyday reality in a town like New York City. We are sophisticated in many ways, yet these forces still rule the majority of life. Through exploration, and facing the beast within, we can become more present to our own real yearnings, separate from the pulls of nature.

In facing these forces that essentially are part of the animal kingdom, I have become more connected to myself beyond those pulls, and I believe more available for real love in whatever form it comes.

For me it was only through exploring the things that pull me, like the fears and the passions, that I was able to break open and find the real thing that I was looking for all along–myself. The vast, soft essence of my own gentle Being.

Confronting these desires and the fears has also given me an ability to be grounded in myself. When you look death in the face, or see the heights of passion that can be reached when you have sex for days, it is easy to lose a sense of self. But when I faced these things, and found my way back to my essence, I found a real strength inside.

One of the things I have always wanted was to be grounded in myself. I wanted to be able to remain connected to that place of clarity, even while I stared into the face of that wild beast inside of me. Letting the desire dance, and using Inner Space Techniques to come back to a sense of my own center, has been the real reward of all this exploration and passion.

The lesson of love for me, is about learning to give and receive with abandon. Yet the outcome of that has been to find my own core sense of self, even in the midst of those stormy waves of emotion.

References

Graves, Robert. (1955) The Greek Myths Volume One. Penguin Books, London, England.