Dear Lover (5 page)

10

The fairy tale has asked you to believe that if you find the right man and give him what he wants and needs, then he will love you forever. But it doesn’t work out that way. You can’t depend on his love. He either wanders to women he finds more attractive than you, or he stays with you, but doesn’t continue to enter your heart deeply. He may even want to love you deeply, but he doesn’t know how.

Your lover probably isn’t aware of the constant suffering you experience due to his shallow presence. He is sitting next to you—or lying on top of you—and still he is trapped in his own thoughts, his own sensations, his grid-like world of projects, goals, and plans. His emotions seem so narrow—he’s happy when he’s succeeding in life and unhappy when he’s failing—and your emotions seem so full, wide, and extreme. He runs away when you allow your emotions to flow unconstrained. He can’t really deal with your full emotional strength and sexual desire for depth. He might even think you are crazy.

In the end, whether the two of you separate for what you both hope are greener pastures or whether you stay together—seemingly satisfied on the outside but dying, yearning for more, on the inside—you eventually settle
for less than your heart knows is possible. You adapt the minutes of your day to working, taking care of your family, and talking with friends. And at the end of the day, in bed with your lover or alone, you are exhausted and stressed from living a lie, your body not undulating in pleasure, your heart not blown-open as all-light. Your deepest love is waiting, waiting, fading.

If your man’s heart is surrounded by shells, then he loses touch with his life’s truth, his deep heart-direction. He begins to live a lie. He knows he isn’t giving his deepest gift to you or the world. He knows he has sold out on his real dream. He has settled for comfort and security.

Nothing hurts a man’s heart more than feeling that he does not know his deepest purpose—or if he does, that he’s afraid to live it. So, if your man is like most, his deep heart is suffering tremendously—not because of a lack of intimacy in his relationship, but because he feels lost and he knows he is wasting his life.

He is afraid to potentially lose the comfort and security of his family, home, money, or health, so he holds back from doing the only thing that will cure his heart’s pain: He is afraid to commit his life to discovering his deepest truth, uncovering his deepest gift, and giving his deepest love without compromise to you, his family, and the entire world. He is afraid to be free of fear since it will cost him everything he has ever acquired or known.

The only way for a man to be free is to die in every moment, to let go of everything, feel the deepest truth of his heart, and offer himself to you and everyone without holding back. His depth of consciousness, expressed through his unique gifts, is all he has to offer, and it is all you really want. You want his undivided presence, his true and genuine love-commitment, his heart exposed and wide open to feel yours.

When your man is offering you or the world less than his deepest truth, you can feel it, and you suffer the stress of his ambiguity and fear. When
you are intimate with a man who is living this kind of lie—acting out a pretend life of comfort and security yet ungiven from his true heart—how could you open to him sexually?

How could you open your heart and body fully to a man who doesn’t even know what his heart truly wants? Naturally, your heart and body close to such a man, protecting your deepest openness from being violated by a man’s ambiguous poke. Even though you may truly love your man, you are also disgusted by his false face, his lack of depth, genuine commitment, and heart-direction.

To survive, your man has probably numbed himself to the horrible pain of not knowing his deepest purpose. He has spent years in trivial pursuits of shallow goals, and has settled for whatever success he has managed to acquire. Yet, you can feel he is lost, no matter how successful he tells himself he is.

You are exquisitely sensitive to his deep potential—his genuine gifts and fully offered heart—and you are equally sensitive to his self-deception, the way he lies to himself, the distance he creates between himself and his own heart’s desire, and between himself and your heart’s desire. This distance hurts you. His false satisfaction hurts you. His numbness to his own suffering and to yours frustrates you, eventually evoking your anger. You want his fullness—not only for you but also for his own sake and the sake of all beings—and he seems unable to even feel what you are talking about.

When your man lives behind shells of fear rather than opening and offering his heart’s deepest offering, his consciousness becomes weakened and shielded in numbness fed by lies sustained by shallow ambition.

With time, your man’s presence retracts into his own little world. You can’t feel him with you, even when he is entering you sexually. Of course your sexual life is shallow—your man has become shallow, and he can’t even feel it anymore, so thoroughly have his shells encased his heart.

To protect your own heart from being inadvertently raped by your self-centered lover’s lack of feeling and awareness, you have put up your own walls. Your deep vagina is resistant to his mechanical thrusts. Your heart is shielded from his disconnected words of criticism and insult. Every time you try to open to your man, he diminishes your experience, as if your feelings were wrong, sick, or
your
problem.

He asks you how you are feeling, but your feelings are too huge and complex to squeeze into a simple answer. So he abuses you with more questions, convincing you that you are too dependent on him, that you need to be more responsible for yourself, and that your “emotional problems” are your own and have nothing to do with him.

Your experience is that his heart is yours; how he lives his life—even the nuances of where his attention goes, if he fidgets, or his subtle changes in tone of voice—affects your heart intensely. He seems to be able to live in a self-enclosed world where he can pursue his goals apart from whatever is happening with you. However, your heart is directly linked to his, as if threads of feeling were connecting the two of you, so your heart soars or sinks with his heart—and so does your trust.

This is not a weakness on your part, although your man may try to convince you that it is. Your feminine heart is much more sensitive to the flow of energy and emotion than his masculine heart. In fact, your heart is much more responsive to the depth of his consciousness—how present or not he is with you and in his life—than he is. He is numb to his own lack of presence and blind to how he actively shallows his heart, wrapping up his attention in trivial but all-consuming projects and thoughts.

Your heart-sensitivity can be a great gift to him. Your suffering, fully and responsively expressed, can teach him much about how his self-enclosed and unfeeling consciousness is paining the entire world. Your heart’s vulnerable strength can inspire his deepest gifts and evoke his commitment to open
and give his love to you and the world without fear—which is the freedom he most deeply desires. But you can only help him if
you
are open.

Chances are, after years of shallow men, you have closed to protect yourself from constant heart suffering. Otherwise, you would have gone insane. Every time your man drifts, scratches an itch unconsciously, wastes time in front of the TV, pretends to be intimate with you but actually is preoccupied in his own thoughts and sensations—every time your man is less than fully present with you or betraying his own depth, holding back his gifts in fear and numbness, your heart is crushed.

So, you have probably trained yourself to feel less. You can lay beneath a man while he humps you and at least derive a bit of shallow clitoral pleasure—amidst the tragic heart-pain of not being ravished open to God by his feeling-force and deep presence. You can sit and listen to your man talk about his stupid projects without shouting and screaming, “Wake up! Open your heart! You are wasting your life and killing me with your mediocrity!”

Your hurt and anger are hidden beneath shells of civilized stress: You pursue your own interests, spend time with your friends, and try not to complain too much to your man. If you let out what you really feel about how he treats you, you would either scare him away with your churning anguish or chop his head off with your rage.

But at least he is willing to share a home with you, at least you share a decent life, so it’s not worth risking what you
do
share for the sake of what you most deeply desire. You are betraying your deepest heart as much as your man is. You are settling for shallow love just like your man is settling for shallow purpose. You both know there is a deeper way to live, yet you are both holding back your deepest gifts of love, not offering yourselves fully to each other or to the world.

His shallowness expresses itself as ambiguity, purposelessness, and lack of presence. Yours shows itself through your body. Your shells of protection
literally enclose your heart, your vagina, your belly—all the most vulnerable and soft parts of your flesh are hardened against the barrage of insult, abuse, and rejection that your man’s aimless thrusts cause you.

The most feminine parts of your body may become diseased, or at least closed down to pleasure. Your energy becomes blocked, your emotions suppressed. Your true heart’s desire gets buried so deeply that you may no longer even hope for anything more than a decent relationship. Your deep desire to be taken, ravished, opened, and blissfully offered to God as unbounded love has all but disappeared behind years of devastation, frustration, and betrayal.

You and your man are no longer hoping to be fulfilled by someone else. You have grown beyond dependence. But you are probably stuck in a phase of self-reliance. You have probably become trapped in the belief that you can only make yourself happy: You are responsible for your own happiness, your lover is responsible for his, and to give your heart without holding back any in reserve for yourself is a sign of weakness. This results in a terrible and constant sense of separation.

Beyond the needs for dependence and independence, you can learn to love so your shells soften and you grow open without protection. Your deepest heart’s desire can be allowed to percolate up from your depths and express your genuine love outward through every part of your body. As you learn to tenderly open your shells of protection, you can actively receive the ravishment you have always wanted and fully offer your love as a gift to all.

When you are ready, you can open beyond the safety of self-responsibility for one body. You can merge open in two-bodied sexual devotion. You can open to feel and breathe all—your lover, your family, your friends, everyone—in the full offering of your heart’s openness.

You can live as divine love, opening and breathing as this entire moment. You can offer your life as if this moment’s presence were entering you deeply
like a lover’s intense claim, your body danced by love’s unblocked currents, your heart open as an offering, breathing as far as you can see and feel. You can open as the love that lives as all.

11

If you have a more feminine sexual essence, your
strength
is your devotional capacity to open to God in two-bodied form. Yearning open with your lover, you become
two
who open as one love.

Rather than only being responsible for your own body to open, you become responsible first for opening as love through two bodies with your lover, then for opening as love through all bodies. Love is openness. This openness yearns at the heart of everyone. Through two-bodied practice, you learn to feel and breathe this yearning at everybody’s heart and surrender open as the love that lives the universe.

While making love, you and your man practice opening beyond self-enclosure. Your surrendered yearning draws your man beyond his fearful shells, into you, deeply into your body and heart. He yields his last hold of separation and enters fully into your love, guiding your surrender even as he dissolves with you, opening as one love.

As one love passionately emerging through two bodies, your pleasure is a deep unfolding, wave upon wave of ever deepening surrender, opening out—not to your man, since your man and you are unseparate, but opening out deeper than your yearning and wider than the skies, without end. His love, your love, is aflame from source to endless openness. Your bodies and hearts surrender open to feel and breathe the openness of all hearts, even as orgasmic waves of unbearable bliss continue carrying love wider open.

For days after such lovemaking, your body reverberates with love’s resonance. Your womb is relaxed and full. Your face is soft and bright. Your heart is relaxed open, unshelled, and so you can feel and breathe the love at the heart of everyone.

Together, in two-bodied devotion, you and your man can often open more deeply than your individual habits otherwise allow. Your love demands his, and his love demands yours. Your feminine heart can offer a devotional openness so inviting that your lover has no choice but to come to full presence through his fear and numbness and enter you with utter integrity. His fully present masculine heart can claim you so deeply that you have no choice but to open and surrender as love’s bliss, larger than you would ever do on your own.

Your man’s body of love is a wedge that can open you to God. Your man’s heart is a force that can claim you beyond your self-centered moods. Learning to open with your man prepares you to open in loving communion with everyone’s heart.

As you learn to open with your lover in two-bodied embrace and breathe as one heart, you begin to feel all bodies as your body, all hearts as one heart. Sitting in a room with five friends, you feel and breathe their needs, their tensions, their suffering, and the love that yearns to open through their hearts and bodies. You are naturally moved to serve their openness with yours.

You are not weak for wanting to be claimed open by your lover; you are simply feeling your deepest truth—your heart is here to be claimed by all, offered to all as love’s fullest light and most tender openness of yearning.

Nevertheless, because all bodies die, your intimate relationship is tinged by sadness. Your man will eventually leave you, betray you, ignore you, or die. One way or another, his personal presence will no longer give you what your heart desires most. At some point, you will lose your beloved. Your two-bodied practice of love is therefore offered through a heart raw with love’s impending loss.

Your heart can remain vulnerable and open, willing to suffer the absence of your beloved’s presence without closing and pouting like a child. Spiritual and sexual maturity require that you develop the capacity to feel your heart’s deepest yearning moment by moment, whether or not you are with a lover. Are you allowing yourself to yearn open right now so you can feel your heart’s most divine depth of love? Can you trust your heart’s yearning, softening just as you are, so you can breathe and feel everyone’s heart while giving your love to all?

Your man is a temporary blessing of divine presence, a form of grace. Love’s force is given to you through the form of man, so you can practice breathing and feeling love deep in your yearning heart as you offer your
whole body
to be opened by love and given as love’s gift.

Even now, in this moment, with or without a man, you can practice breathing deeply and fully. You can feel everyone from your heart and breathe their hearts in and out of yours, and you can practice relaxing your whole body so love can have its way through you.

Especially, the more feminine parts of your body—the places where you feel the most yearning to be touched, entered, caressed, or ravished—those are the parts to practice relaxing open. Your neck, your breasts, your belly, your vagina, your hips, your buttocks, your legs, your feet—open your entire body and especially the most yearning and responsive parts.
By relaxing your body and breathing love-energy in and out of every part, your tension eases open and love can flow more fully through you.

You may choose to practice dancing, yoga, or even masturbating as an exercise to help open your heart and body to the flow of love. While you practice your chosen discipline or art of whole-body surrender, always remember to breathe love in and out of your heart, in and out of your entire body, through every pore.

You can allow your body and heart to surrender open so large that you feel and breathe the openness or love that yearns at the heart of everyone. You can magnify your pleasure until your body and heart are forced to open more. Feel how deeply you want to be claimed and taken by love, and how deeply you want to surrender open and offer yourself to be taken.

Your man probably feels your heart mostly through the openness of your body, especially through your offering of sexual devotion. With a wounded heart, even though you have been betrayed in the past and will be again, you can practice to feel and breathe open, alive as love’s yearning. While making love through two bodies, you can practice receiving your man’s penetration so deeply no part of your heart or body is left untaken by love. And you can practice all day, feeling and breathing the yearning at everyone’s heart, while opening your body to be taken by love just as fully.