ALLOWING HER, ALL THE TIME… (Part 1)

• Today’s questions: Am I ready to lose myself, to be reborn into a deeper self? What holds me back from this transformation?

• Today's suggested practice: Day 6 of this month's practice, to practice for yourself, your wants, the things you yearn for (see Kendra Cunov’s short “Notes Towards Self Practice” below)

• My practice: 3:45AM: 90 minutes: Physical yoga practice, followed by Nadi Shadona pranayama/meditation

• My vulnerability practice: I sit and allow all the wanting and the discomfort of this wanting to move, trusting that my presence is all that is required…

Hans Peter Meyer

TODAY’S MEDITATION

It was Heidi’s birthday. I honoured the moment by bringing my mother an apple fritter (it’s become a family thing, these apple fritters…). This instead of the usual sandwich we share during our luncheons. A new ritual, I suggested. A new ritual because we haven’t had one in this family since she died 54 years ago.

She was eight. She would have turned 62.

Later, my youngest daughter and her man spent the evening with me. Eating sandwiches (these are a family thing too, apparently). Sandwiches and cherries picked from the tree, blueberries and raspberries from the garden. And nougat. Her man insisted. I didn’t resist with any conviction. The nougat (“nugget” he insisted, again) was delicious.

My daughter told me she’d grown up wondering about Heidi, this aunt she never knew. There was a blank spot in our lives. We didn’t talk about her. The tragedy something we’d never been able —or at any event, I’d never been able to—overcome to overcome. It was too explosive a topic in the company of my father. He was a model of how feelings become dangerous when not allowed to move. His raging terror at feeling her loss in anything but that raging terror unnerved me. Literally: it dulled the nerve that could feel grief at her loss. For most of my life. Until that moment, late in his life, when I got angry with him.

It was over lunch at the burger place we frequented for our weekly get-togethers. Angry at his possessiveness over this family grief I —finally!— was able to articulate this feeling of being denied by his self-absorption. Did he not know that we all suffered, we all grieved her death? Did he not realize that his rages and possessiveness denied us our own pain? Did he really believe he was the only one who hurt? Etcetera.

He was, I think, stunned. Certainly silenced. Taking it in. I breathed, deeply. And let all of it sink in, to me, to him. All of it.

Love. Death.

I often add sex here: as in, Love Death Sex. Or: Love Sex Death.

There is an experience of sex that initiates us into death. It draws us in and then explodes us, blowing up the experience of the self as separate, allow us to experience something unimaginably more than our selves.

In that moment I am vanquished. Destroyed. Released. Born into something that —for only a flash! Then lingering, the after-image of the flash. For that moment everything is undone. Opened. I am free.

I am the most tender I can be.

I’ve written about how, in my younger adult life, this was both a desired and frightening place, this flash at the end of the sexual orgasm. I’ve written about how it was only in reading Reich on men and sex that I found words for it. And, found that it was not unusual. Normal, in fact, for us as men. Men who are afraid or untrained to know our obliteration. Reich’s words help me to understand that that are moments (always these “moments!”), and especially with my beloved, when I have been ushered to the threshold of myself and infinity, have stepped over, have experienced this unimaginable thing.

I am reminded of this again in a conversation last night after swimming at the beach. My swimming companion asked words to the effect of, Why do men fear vulnerability? Asking as if it were unusual or strange to her woman’s body, to feel fear when standing on this threshold.

A brief digression: I’ve spoken, often and obliquely, about the “sacred womb” that transforms all of us who are masculine-identified men who wander into its orbit of influence (penetration is not necessary; it is enough to feel the tug of deep feminine radiance from across the room…). This is a power we as men cannot fully appreciate. Magical. Confounding. Overwhelming. The essence of the feminine perhaps. Do we, as masculine-identified men, try to control and dominate and somehow limit Her because we are envious of the magic of birth and fecundity —but also of death, Her other domain? We fear our obliteration between Her thighs? Too much, too much, too much —so let us bind and torture and otherwise limit.

(More in Part 2…)

TODAY’S INSPIRATIONS

🌀As with a bud, you must remember, time allows the blossom to flower...from a willingness and hope that ignites it.

…Patience is not waiting, patience is knowing...knowing this future view of the ultimate outcome [will] come...and spending the time for it to arrive. (Guru Singh & Guruperkarma Kaur)

🌀You know how to sit. You know how to wait. It is the greatest art, to sit and wait for it to come. (Adapted from Yogi Bhajan)

🌀I’m beginning to trust “no expectations.” (My beloved, my Oracle & Siren)

🌀You deserve nothing. (Kendra Cunov)

TODAY'S SUGGESTED PRACTICE

Day 8 of this month's practice:

Please read through first, then ...

Today, set a time —at least five minutes, perhaps 15— when you can be alone and in stillness.

• Stand or sit or lie, with a beautiful and straight spine, firm but relaxed, feeling your feet or your sit bones or hips heavy and connected to the earth;

• Close your eyes;

• Inhale deeply into your belly, letting it become soft and round;

• Exhale by gently and slowly, much more slowly than your inhale, pressing your navel to your spine,

• And listen to Kendra Cunov’s few minutes on practice:

When you’re done, stand or sit or lie for another minute and breathe gently, slowly filling and emptying your belly. Here, as you breathe into your fullness, ask yourself, Am I ready to lose myself, to be reborn into a deeper self? What holds me back from this transformation?

Notice if your body-mind feels somehow changed. And whether you notice a change or not, be content with yourself, exactly as you are in this moment.

Continue with your day, open to the gifts it brings.

★ My full conversation with Kendra Cunov about Men & Women & the “No-Man Diet” is now on the podcast at sacredbodies.ca/podcast