I wrote this post several days ago at the tail end of the Buddhafield festival in England. Since then, I’ve been unable to find my charger so I haven’t had access to this. I just made friends with someone with a similar computer so I was able to borrow their charger. Anyway, here’s something important. I’ll write an update to it all soon enough as there’s been additional movement here.
I’m at a very important juncture in my life which has to do with making relationship decisions based on truth versus based on need and psychological structures. I’ve been invited to France to travel with Shanti, the woman I traveled with in India for the final month of my journey there. While I am fully glad that we had the opportunity to travel together, share our lives, and to learn more and more about Love, the truth of the situation is that we really aren’t that compatible. With an effort to err on the side of caution, I’d say the bottom line for me is that we seem to experience the world from very different vantage points. For a metaphor, imagine an imminent battle in the middle ages between two kingdoms. In my imagination, it feels like she’s be riding at the head of the horse brigade blowing the horn and brandishing sword while I’d be drafting peace treaties and running ragged with shuttle diplomacy. It’s an exaggeration of course, but impressions often are just that.
So the catch here is that I’ve been planning on seeing Shanti and joining her on a pilgrimage walk through Spain. I’ve also known full well in my belly and mind that we’re ultimately not meant for each other, yet I was still planning to go. Why? It’s an excellent question and one which is at the crux of this juncture of my life. I’ve spent too much of my adult relationship life in relationships which were not right for me but for one reason or another I got emotionally hooked in them and wasn’t courageous enough to step away from them – from the comfort and security they provided. I’ve also spent too much of my relationship life looking outside for something that is already inside. In a brilliant dance workshop at the Buddhafield Festival, the leader, a magically gifted woman named Jewls held up a sign which read, “You are the Love that you seek.” How incredibly brilliant. She didn’t talk much about it as this was a dance workshop rather than one of the tantra/relationship workshops she teaches as well, but how obvious really. So much of our lives are just a great big projection, and here is the most obvious one of all. Why would we give the power/ownership of our love to another being or object? We “are” that Love and another simply triggers our experience of it. It is very much similar to what I wrote in a recent post that we are the pleasure and the other is merely the object that helps to bring that pleasure to the surface to be known.
In my meditation this morning, I sat curiously with this stuff and what became clear is that I would rather have the world as my lover than to have as my lover someone with whom I am not that compatible. I’m open to loving connection that isn’t intended to be permanent if it’s between two fully aware people intent upon sharing love together in a more conscious way, but sex is way too powerful to be tampered with lightly. When the thought, “I’d rather have the world as my lover” came into my head this morning, I couldn’t help but to chuckle. I found it humorous as it’s something I also wrote about the other day on this blog. At that point it wasn’t a stated preference but rather simply an occurrence in which I was experiencing the world as my lover. Now, it’s come to fore in my consciousness and I’m beginning to act from that place. Chuckle Chuckle. Happy Chuckle Chuckle.
This would be a good place for a parenthetical break here to help you to understand more of why I write this blog. For me it’s a very helpful and powerful mechanism which encourages my exploration of whatever is really truly actually happening in my life. Without the blog, I tend to not focus enough and end up becoming more of a passive bystander to my own life. This blog helps to square me more in the center of my own life. My experience in writing this blog for a few years now is that through this exploration, truths continue to surface and that these truths begin to intelligently inform my life and have a positive affect on the decisions/actions/behaviours (we add the “u” here in ruddy ole England) that are important in my life. Thus the exploration of the power of my sexuality in a recent post has led to a deeper understanding of it’s power and the channeling of that energy in a more informed, and less purely instinctual way. In another example, the exploration of the projection of pleasure to an outside person or object in a recent post has led to my openness to seeing that I am also doing that with Love, which I’ve been doing for my entire adult life.
So wow. I’m not saying I’m completely there as this feels too big to fully metabolize and integrate in just one point of realization, but imagine walking through the world knowing that you “are” Love rather than Love being something that you simply experience at various moments and points of your life. This is nothing minor but is in fact potentially hugely impacting. I’ll see how it all pans out over time but it feels very, very important. I hope you see the distinction here. I’ll try one more time just in case it‘s not so clear. The distinction here is between, for example, 1) feeling Love for another, and 2) feeling the Love that you are which is touched and expressed through contact with another. There is nothing wrong with the first one, with feeling Love for another. In fact it is perhaps the sweetest, most pure, most excruciatingly wonderful experience that a human being can have. Imagine though now, that that Love is inherently yours, that the Love is inherently you. Now the experience of feeling that Love has a magnification factor because that Love you feel is actually an emanation “of” you, not just “from” you. You are experiencing that Love “as” you, as truly your own. To whomever reads this, I encourage you to not just “Be the Love you seek” as Jewls suggested in her class, but to actually “Know yourself to be the Love that you seek.” Now there’s a real step.
My apologies to you English language purists who twitch at the capitalization of the word Love. I’m simply unable to find a word more deserving of capitalization.