Dear Lover (10 page)

21

Because the feminine is connected with the flow of life energy much more intimately than the masculine is, you will often feel when your man is “off” before he does. You will be able to feel instantly when he is lying to himself or to others. Your heart will cringe. Your body will tense. Your breath will tighten.

You may not know exactly why. You may not be able to precisely articulate what you feel is “off” about your man’s actions; you just know that your heart feels something is amiss. Your man is not living his deepest truth, he is not feeling your heart and everybody else’s as deeply as he can: he is deceiving himself, living in his own justifications, and choosing a course that is less than his deepest gift.

You may try to tell him about what you feel, but he can’t see it. Or, he may admit that he is “off,” and then he may do nothing about it. When you try to talk with him about the way he is living his life, you may feel him defending himself, getting angry and deflecting your insight.

He may tell you that you are projecting your own needs onto him. He may claim that he is being honest with himself and with you, or that he is doing everything he can. Eventually, you may just give up trying to help him see his blind spot. You may even begin to question your own heart—do you really feel his self-deception or is it your own block that you are up against? Are you the one who can’t feel your man’s integrity, or is his integrity actually “off”? Are you afraid to totally surrender to your man’s sexual claim, or is he truly blind to your deepest heart’s yearning?

If you don’t trust your man, you can’t surrender open with him, sexually or otherwise. If he denies that he is “off” but you continue to feel it, then your frustration, rage, and confusion build inside. You begin to feel stuck, full of pain, unable to tell what is “his stuff” or “your stuff.” The separation between you and your man grows.

Naturally, you try to guide yourself when you don’t fully trust your man. You begin to rely on your own masculine capacity to navigate, since
your man seems unwilling to even consider that he has a blind spot limiting his integrity. Or, he considers it, feels nothing, and then dismisses it as your own emotional neediness and lack of trust. Yet, you can still feel something off, something not quite right, about the way your man is conducting himself in the world and in bed.

Other than those critical moments when telling your man exactly what to do is definitely called for, your two-bodied trust would grow deepest by giving your man your fully expressed feelings while allowing him the chance to correct his own actions. Rather than telling him exactly what to
do
with your masculine directional guidance, tell him with words and show him through your body and expressions how you
feel.

Reflect to him how his “offness” hurts you and affects your heart. Rather than saying, “I think you should do such and such,” express what you feel—hurt, anxious, mistrustful—but allow him to find his own way to a correction and learn to navigate from a deeper truth.

If you regularly tell your man what to do—even if you can clearly see what course he needs to take—then you are depriving him of a learning opportunity. You are stepping in and applying your masculine capacity to navigate rather than allowing him the chance to exercise and cultivate his own masculine navigational skills. You are creating a relationship in which he will come to depend on your masculine guidance. Is this what you want? Can you fully surrender your heart and body to a man who regularly depends on you to tell him what to do?

Obviously, there are critical moments in life when you should step in and take charge for the sake of you, your man, and your family. But how often do you want to be in charge of your man because he hasn’t learned to navigate? How is your sexual desire for one another affected when you take charge and tell him what to do?

Learn to trust and value your heart’s deep sensitivity. Fully express to your man how you feel as your lives proceed together, moment by
moment. But, as frequently as it feels appropriate, give your man the opportunity to step into the space of being the navigator. If you don’t relinquish this space for him to step into, then he may never learn to guide with integrity and correct his own errors, and you may never fully trust him with your heart’s surrender, sexually or spiritually. Your man may be willing to listen to what you think he should do, but the price you pay for him stepping aside to let you navigate is sexual neutralization and spiritual mistrust.

Meanwhile, don’t suppress your pain and passively wait for him to get his act together. Show him your wince every time his actions are shallower than you know he is capable of living. Shout your anger every time he persists in denying his lack of integrity. Every time you feel him unreceptive to someone’s honest feedback—yours or his friends’—display your disgust. Give your man your fullest expression in response to his self-deception or blunders, and allow him the opportunity to learn how to correct himself.

Your energetic attunement is a gift to your man. He often gets lost in the surface results whereas you can feel whether his deepest heart lives through his actions. You can show him, through your pleasure or displeasure, how profoundly his heart-depth affects you. He probably has no idea that you are so pained when he lives his life less deeply than you know he can. He probably can’t feel his own lack of depth—he gets lost in rote tasks and the results of his actions. Apparent success is often enough proof for him to think he is doing the right thing. So your heart’s response may be his only way to feel that he could be living more deeply.

If you both stand within your shells, then you will remain at an impasse, separate and self-reliant. You won’t be able to open in two-bodied devotional trust.

Your man may say, “I can tell if I’m living true to my own heart. How can you know this better than I?”

You may feel, “Why are you defending yourself? I love you and only want your deepest heart to come through your life and our relationship. Why can’t you see that you are pushing me and others away, saying you are open to feedback but justifying somehow you are right? I can’t trust that you will see your errors, so I can’t totally give myself to you.”

Your shells make you the last person able to feel whether your true heart is being expressed through your body to the world. That’s why, as you grow more open in two-bodied love, you must choose and inspire a man whose spiritual and sexual direction you trust more than your own. And your man must choose and claim a woman—you—whose heart-responsiveness and deep sensitivity he trusts more than what he can see for himself.

22

As you practice opening your heart and body to flow with love’s yearning, pleasure, and power, you will notice that fewer and fewer men are interesting to you. You find shallow men boring. As a lover, you require a man who challenges you with the fullness of his love and commitment, a man who claims your heart more deeply open than you usually open by yourself. Few men can meet your heart’s requirements to be fully seen, deeply felt, and taken open to God.

If you are already with a man, as you grow, his usual diversions may cease to interest you. Your old habits of relating may continue, but your heart is untouched by his superficial contact. Perhaps you used to enjoy cuddling for hours; now you begin to want your man’s deeper passion. You may interpret your desire in strictly sexual terms, but you may actually be feeling your heart’s deeper yearning—to be claimed by God’s force through a man’s love.

Sex may certainly be a big part of it, but your genuine desire is for a man whose very presence claims you and calls you deeper. No matter how much resistance you put up, you want a man who can feel your deep heart—who smiles lovingly in the face of your surface refusal, gently embracing you, suddenly humoring you, thunderously surprising you, softly cracking your shell open, and entering you with such tender passion that you melt open in his love. His strength of love is unyielding and yet he always feels your heart.

There aren’t a whole lot of men who can offer you this depth; there aren’t a whole lot of women who can respond with equal devotional fullness. So, as you grow, you will find fewer men and women who understand you, and fewer potential lovers who you can trust fully.

But there
are
deep men out there. If you aren’t attracting these men, then you aren’t amongst the few women who are offering the irresistible devotion that would attract them. Look at your life: you are already getting, and have always gotten, the kind of man you deserve, equally committed to practicing openness as you are.

If you complain that you haven’t met any men who can open you to God, or that all the good men are taken, you are copping out and settling for less from yourself. The depth of your heart’s yearning offered through the pleasurable surrender of your body will always attract a man who can claim you equally deep—as well as attracting lesser men to whom you can say, “No, thank you.”

If you haven’t found a man worthy of your trust, or your current man doesn’t seem able to meet your heart’s desire to be claimed, then you haven’t allowed your heart’s yearning and body’s energy to open through your moment-to-moment devotional surrender fully enough. You have been afraid, or mistrustful. You have held back. So you have probably ended up with a man who holds back—even if you have now grown ready to open more fully.

You may find yourself wondering if you should stay in your present relationship or start a new one.

Men tend to leave relationships too soon, always looking for a better option. Women tend to stay in relationships too long, always hoping that their man will change and grow.

To know whether you should stay in your current relationship, you need to know
why
you are in relationship to begin with. Your heart must feel its
deepest
desire in relationship, and then you can align all your decisions from your true depth.

For instance, is your deepest desire in relationship to raise a family? If it is, then stay with your man as long as he shares this desire with you—even if he is less than spectacular in bed and doesn’t give you the depth of love that you want.

If your deepest desire in relationship is to create financial security and a comfortable home, then stay with your man as long as he co-creates your vision of life with you—even if your heart still yearns to be ravished open and your man seems uninterested in spiritual matters.

What do you feel when you feel into your deepest desire in relationship? You may want a large family, money in the bank, and a house in the country, but is this the totality of your heart’s
deepest
yearning?

Perhaps, in addition to everything else, your deep heart yearns to be seen and known and loved so fully that your yearning unfolds wide as God and divine love opens boundlessly through you and the hearts of all beings. If this is a primary aspect of your
deepest
desire in relationship, then you want a man who evokes your devotional surrender with his undeniable love and undoubtable claim of your heart. If he does so, then stay with him. If he doesn’t, then why are you choosing him to begin with?

In part, you may choose to be with your man for reasons of security and familiarity. You don’t want to lose your cozy nest. If you leave your man, you may doubt that you’ll be able to find another man who loves you more
adequately. So, like many women do, you may stay in a relationship that doesn’t touch your deepest heart.

You have probably stayed with a man who doesn’t have the slightest clue of how badly your heart aches to be claimed. And even if your man does know of your heart’s desire, he probably doesn’t sufficiently offer you the depth, humor, and persistence necessary to tenderly penetrate your resistances, unfolding your deepest yearning through his love.

Your man has probably long ago lost touch with
his
heart’s deepest desire—ask him the deepest purpose of his life and listen to his answer—and so he certainly doesn’t know how to stay in touch with
your
deepest heart.

Should you stay or should you go? The best way to answer this question is to put a time limit on suffering the shallowness of your relationship. Are you willing to remain unclaimed by your man for another six months? If so, tell your closest women friends that in six months
they
should decide if you seem more deeply opened by your man’s love, more deeply offered in your devotional openness, more deeply ravished. You may be the last person to know if you should stay or go. Your nesting instincts and fear of not finding another man may keep you with an inadequate man far longer than is healthy for your heart, hoping he will change.

If your closest women friends feel that after six months of waiting, for instance, it is time for you to leave the relationship, your heart will suffer. No matter how unravished you may feel, your man was able to offer you
some
amount of love. His penis entered your body, his care entered your heart, however shallow or uncommitted his entrance may have been. Your man opened your body and heart somewhat with his love, and this opening retains his shape.

Even after you leave your man, you will feel a “him-shaped void” in your heart and body. You will miss him, long for him, hope that he calls you and tells you it was all a mistake, that he can change, that he wants you back. Your him-shaped void yearns to be filled—by him.

This sense of longing for the man who was able to love you most deeply so far will last until another man loves you deeper. You will retain the him-shaped void for the rest of your life, unless you attract a man of deeper loving into your life. You may feel that you are weak for wanting a man who was clearly unable to love you as deeply as you wanted—a man who may even have outright rejected or betrayed you. You may feel that you are “sick” for wanting him so badly even years after your abusive or mediocre relationship has ended.

But you are not weak or sick. You are a woman whose heart naturally retains a void shaped by the man who was able to love you most deeply so far, even if that wasn’t deep enough to stay with him. The only cure for your him-craving is to attract another man whose love opens you deeper than the him-shaped void that remains from a previous man. Eventually, as your devotional capacity to offer yourself grows, you will attract a man who opens you to God’s shape through his loving.

Then, your heart will retain a God-shaped void in moments when you have separated yourself from divine love. Your yearning will be to feel infinity’s claim of your heart, opening you without bounds, filling you with an abundance of presence and pleasure beyond your capacity to bear, forcing you open as full as all. Your heart will only settle for love’s total command, and you will tolerate only a man who can offer you this divine and utter claim. His deep presence will ravish you open to infinity’s bliss, taking you open in the He-She merger of God’s two-bodied expression of love.