Dear Lover (13 page)

If you were single and available for a relationship, the 3rd stage men in the restaurant would notice your depth and strength of heart. Compared to the hurried, stressed, and self-worth-obsessed demeanor of most women, the confidence of your vulnerable and yearning heart shows through the openness of your body, eyes, and smile. And so does your untamed, undomesticated, unafraid energy.

A 3rd stage man would be able to feel that you are not afraid to destroy that which is less than love. If you were single, your eyes might say, “I’m available.” Your heart-disposition might say, “I yearn to be worshipped and to give myself in devotion.” But your energy also says, “And don’t even try unless you are living true to your heart’s deepest purpose, offering your heart’s deepest integrity, and you are fearless enough to stay present with me—to ravish me—even when I am a wild slut or a crazed fiendess. Take me, if you dare. If you give me less than your true heart, I’ll kill you.”

A 3rd stage man would feel your demand for his depth of presence even while sitting in the restaurant from a distance, without talking with you or touching you. He would feel your heart’s openness offered through your breath, voice, and motion, and he would feel your readiness to chop off his mediocre head should his consciousness remain shallow. He can feel
you this way because you are offering devotion or chopping off his head right now, in the restaurant, simply through a momentary glance and exchange of brief eye contact.

He would also feel if you were not single. In relationship, your disposition would be one of unavailability to random exchanges of sexual energy. Your heart is already claimed by your man’s deep worship, and a 3rd stage man in the restaurant would honor your heart’s commitment to your chosen man. He may internally bow in recognition of your heart’s deep offering—he may be silently awed by the blessing power of your radiant form—but he will keep his distance in respect. At heart, you and he are breathing as one—you and everyone are breathing one at heart—and so his 1st and 2nd stage desires open in transparency to the one heart of love that breathes as all beings.

During lunch, you are bombarded with various 1st and 2nd stage pulls, hooks, and jabs. A friend criticizes you, and another complains that you hurt her last week. A sleazy man walks to your table and tries to pick you up. The hunky waiter still entices you. Your food absorbs you, and you realize that your heart’s love has been shallowed to the dessert melting in your mouth. Through all these moments, you do your best to practice opening your heart to feel and breathe everyone, relaxing your body open and offering your deepest heart through your entire being as a blessing of love’s light to your friends and to all.

Your practice of heart-depth, love-offering, and exquisitely responsive energy is what attracts a deep man and inspires all beings to open in the trust of love.

26

Imagine you had a friend who was in a 1st stage relationship: Her man controls her, diminishes her, perhaps even beats her. But then they make love, he apologizes, and they connect in deep intimacy. A few days—or hours—later, he abuses her again, only to be followed by tearful periods of making up, contrition, and then passionate lovemaking.

She comes to you for advice. To you, it is obvious: she should leave her abusive man. She, however, thinks that is too drastic. She feels her man might be able to change. That he really
wants
to change, he just can’t help himself. He is willing to see a therapist. He really loves her. She knows it.

She tells you how good it feels when they make love, how passionately he takes her. You understand what she says, and may crave a passionate man yourself, but you can’t understand why she would tolerate his abuse. You try to help her understand that she could be with a man who would offer her passionate love without the abuse. She knows that’s possible, but the void in her heart is being filled by her abusive man, and she doesn’t trust that another man could love her so deeply.

Her choice is to be an active victim of his abuse, offering herself to him to be pummeled and then loved, in cycles. This is her choice. It is not your choice.

Your choice is to wait for a good man. You are more comfortable in the 2nd stage, taking care of yourself while your career progresses, your friends grow, and your life improves. Perhaps you have a man in your life, but you know that a deeper intimacy is possible. Or, perhaps you are waiting man-less, dating now and then, having lunch with men friends, but nothing serious.

You are probably not aware that, like your friend, you are
choosing
to be a victim of abuse. This mistreatment is not from a man, but from yourself. You are actively closing, protecting your heart from love, shutting down so your body and heart don’t ache so openly. You may be damaging yourself as much as any man could damage you.

Every moment that you breathe more shallowly than you would while you were deeply making love, you are actively training your body to feel less, your heart to open less, your love to flow less. You don’t need a man’s raised fist to diminish you; you are diminishing yourself. You are choosing to stay in a relationship with yourself that diminishes you, just as your 1st stage friend is choosing to stay with a man in such a relationship.

A man’s threat and your lack of trust create the same effect in you: Your body tenses, your breath becomes shallow, your muscles contract, your heart cringes, and you become numb. You may cry, wondering if it will ever end, if love will ever finally embrace you and enter you? Will you ever be able to trust love, or will you always live in doubt and fear? Your feelings can become so walled-off you aren’t even consciously aware of them any more.

A man’s abuse or your own self-abuse can become so familiar it feels normal. You can become so used to living a tense and contracted life that you no longer feel you are actively
choosing
to tense and contract. Your choice has become habit. You doubt there is really an option. You are afraid to risk opening larger than your tense stance of self-protective control, just like your friend is afraid to leave the confines of her man’s control.

You have merely shifted your mistrust from external to internal doubt. You doubt love, so you buffer your heart and harden your body. You can become afraid to leave the familiar lifestyle—and tension—that continually abuses your heart. You’ve grown used to some suffering, and you truly love your well appointed home, your friends, your cat, your garden—just like your girlfriend loves her man’s passion. Yet, both of you are choosing to play the victim to less love than you know, deep down, you deserve.

Tonight you may feel fine. You had a great evening dancing with your friends, enjoying a fine dinner, seeing a good movie. Tomorrow you may feel desperate, alone, ugly, worthless, unable to get out of bed. Your cycles
of emotional self-abuse resemble your girlfriend’s cycles with her lover, being battered and making up, wanting to leave and wanting to stay—in any case, unwilling to open beyond the home of familiarity you have created, however inadequate the loving is.

Until you can feel the openness beyond your drama—he loves me, he loves me not; I’m fine by myself, but I long for a good man—your heart will remain tangled up in abuse. You will habitually choose your 1st stage dependence relationship or your 2nd stage separative independence, until your yearning for love breaks your heart open beyond the drama of love’s coming and going.

You can continue to provide support for your girlfriend to leave her abusive man, but she won’t leave until she is ready to stand on her own, away from the unending drama of being abused and passionately loved. Likewise, nobody can make you grow beyond your heart-protected independence until you are ready to trust love and yearn open without becoming entangled in the unending drama of aloneness and possible relationship.

Are you ready and willing to live devotionally open—feeling and loving the layers of deep hurt and pain as they peel away from your heart—and offer your deepest yearning even while a man’s love and your self-love come and go?

At heart, beneath your habitually clenched shells, you
are
love. You can
choose
to surrender open as your heart’s deepest yearning. You can breathe, speak, move, and live
as
love’s yearning openness. But you may refuse to relax open because you are afraid to feel the immense pain still abiding in your vulnerable heart. Just as a financial or political challenge can give your man something to do with his life on the surface, an insufficiently loving relationship or mistrust of men may give you a drama to justify your refusal to open as your deepest heart’s yearning.

How dramatic do you prefer the story of your refusal? Do you require a man to abuse and neglect you? Or have you grown beyond that need, so
you are quite able to abuse and neglect your own heart’s deepest yearning? If you are not opening as love’s fullest yearning right now, then you are refusing—
because you want to.
You can blame your man or his lack; you can blame yourself or your lack. But right now, you have a choice: Are you closing in tension or opening as your heart’s deepest yearning, breathing, feeling, and opening as the love at the heart of all beings?

27

In the midst of life, you can easily forget your heart’s deepest desire. If you have a feminine sexual essence, then your deepest desire is to fully open, receiving love’s ravishment and offering your heart in devotion—to God, but most often, through a man. Your heart probably prefers the two-bodied form of devotion to the one-bodied form. You probably would rather be taken open to God by a man’s love, full of deep passion and integrity, than take yourself open alone in a room.

So, your deepest desire is not only to open, but to
be opened.
That is, your pleasure is not only to feel yourself wide open, but to feel your resistances welcomed and inhabited by your man, penetrated by his love, and surrendered open as he enters your heart with the tender force of his love. Through your fighting, tussling, and refusing, you want to enjoy the pleasure of your man staying with you, entering you with love, humor, and persistence, and opening you to God.

You want to feel and trust your man’s ability to open you, and the only way you can feel this is by refusing, closing, and resisting long enough to feel his capacity to persist in his loving. His capacity to persist in loving turns you on—not merely the fact that he loves you. You want to feel him loving you when you are being a total bitch, a screaming banshee, or a closed down ball of “No.” You want to feel him open you to “Yes.”

You cannot help but test his love. You may say, “Leave me alone,” in order to feel him stay with you in the face of your refusal. You may criticize his weaknesses in order to feel him not collapse, but stay humorously present in the face of truth. This is what “ravishment” really means: that your man takes you open deeper than you are apparently willing to go. In your deep heart you want to open completely, but the drama you sometimes play is one of refusal and resistance.

In the 1st stage, you are lost in your moods of refusal and frustration. In the 2nd stage, you try to suppress your yearning, sadness, and anger, acting calm and civilized on the outside, going crazy with pain on the inside.
In the 3rd stage you realize that your feminine form plays the refusal of love in order to feel your man open you in spite of your resistance. Your feminine drama continues even in the 3rd stage, but it is played with humor, both you and your lover knowing that your deep hearts are one, even though you are saying “No” and he is opening you to “Yes.”

In the 1st stage, you sometimes act “hard to get” in order to hook your man’s desire. In the 2nd stage, you think acting hard to get is an immature form of manipulation, so you try to express your desires in a direct and civil way rather than going through the games of hide and seek. But in the 3rd stage, you realize that your feminine heart desires to feel your man
opening
you, in addition to simply being open.

Your 3rd stage man would be feeling you, loving you, right now, as you are. He would feel your deep heart’s yearning to open in devotional surrender as well as your play of closure.

A deep man feels all of you as if he were “wearing” you like a perfectly fitting shawl of light. He “inhabits” you as water inhabits the shape of a cloud. He loves you and enters your form so completely, he
is
you, the same openness of love.

In a 3rd stage relationship, you can feel your man sensitively inhabiting you, even while you resist. You can feel him knowing you, perhaps more deeply than you know yourself. You naturally surrender to reveal yourself open in the pleasure of his inhabitance. You know yourself through his persistent recognition of who you really are, yearning open as love’s fullness.

28

Your loving is an art that deepens as your life grows through phases. Sometimes your masculine directionality will step to the fore, perhaps when you decide to cultivate your career. Sometimes your feminine force of love-energy’s hugeness will move you. Since you are composed of both masculine and feminine aspects, you will naturally demonstrate different parts of yourself at different times throughout your life.

But if you have a feminine sexual essence, you will yearn to be taken open to God by a man of deep integrity. Even if you are the president of a corporation and a great success in your life of endeavors, your feminine heart will still yearn to give itself entirely in devotional offering.

You may be waiting to be claimed and to offer all of your body and heart to a man you can trust to open you to God, even if you are a powerful politician with oodles of money. No matter how much masculine success or freedom you have achieved, if you have a feminine sexual essence, then your heart yearns to be claimed in two-bodied devotional trust, ravished and offered without hesitation.

In the world, in business, in politics, in art, let your love guide your actions. Trust what unfolds when you live from your deepest heart. Do what you love to do. But be careful that your love of politics or business isn’t a disguised form of not trusting your man, or not trusting that a man can take your heart open to God. Be careful that your professional life is an expression of your deepest heart, not a substitute for being ravished so fully that every cell is entered and burst open in love’s bliss.

If you are with a man that can’t open you to God, sexually and spiritually, then you are choosing a situation that doesn’t demand your total surrender. If you are afraid to surrender—if one or more of your masculine shells want to retain control of your life—then you will always choose a man who can’t fully enter you, whose demand is weak enough for you to justify your own mistrust and heart closure.

When you are ready to surrender open and be claimed by love, you will attract and choose a man who can open you fully, a man who
does
demand your total surrender with the consistent force of his deep and loving presence.

Otherwise, if your shells still cover your deepest heart’s devotion, you will attract and choose a man whose shells create blind spots of non-integrity, justifying your mistrust and sustaining your closure until you eventually forget what it feels like to be open. Your man experiences your shelled emotional buildup more than your deepest heart’s offering, so he trusts
his
heart more and listens to
your
emotionality less. Both of you trust your own heart more than your lover’s.

This is the basis of a 2nd stage relationship: self-trust, and the denial that your lover can know your heart deeper than you.

The 3rd stage is based on mutual worship of each other’s heart-depth, recognizing that your shells make you the
last
person able to feel whether your heart is being offered fully. You trust your 3rd stage lover to be your heart’s heart.

Your man trusts your heart to feel his heart more truly than he can through his own shells. He opens to receive your heart’s devotional response to his integrity as well as your heart’s cringe in response to his blindness. Thanks to your sensitive connection to his heart, your man can align his life more fully with his own heart-truth. He can offer you—and the world—his love and gifts from a deeper place in his heart.

Feeling your man’s undefended and loving integrity, you grow to trust his steadfast commitment to true heart-depth—yours, his, and everyone’s. You more consistently receive his trustable capacity to feel you and open you more fully than you can open yourself. You surrender open and offer yourself to him—shells and all—to feel, enter, and ravish open to ever-deeper love and blissful surrender.

You each grow beyond self-trust in the worship and trust of love larger than yourself. Your man trusts you can feel his heart—and his life’s alignment
to his heart’s truth—better than he can. You trust that your man can feel your heart’s deepest yearning through your shells, blooming open your deepest joy of surrender better than you can.

You learn to trust and worship each other’s hearts as divine gifts that can open you more than you can open yourself, and as you breathe and relax and open more fully, you feel all hearts’ openness, or love, as your natural responsibility.