DROWN PROOFING

Apprenticeship to Love: July 17, 2025

• Today’s question: Is the flow of life –the tension, pressure, friction of it all– overwhelming you right now? Or are you swimming with it, allowing it to teach you who you really are?
• This month's free offering to Premium subscribers: the July 24 Apprenticeship to Love Virtual Workshop. FMI see http://sacredbodies.ca/forintimacy
  Rev. Hans Peter Meyer

TODAY’S MEDITATION

I'll paraphrase something that came across my desk this morning. The reference was to meditation as a spiritual practice. The longer I meditate on my experiences, and the more I work with couples with their weddings and their marriages, the most profound spiritual practice I know is marriage. So let me paraphrase...
When marriage takes you into a non-logical state, don't reach back for the logic of familarity... Swim further. Further into the dark, deep ocean of the unknown. Allow it to teach you something completely new...

The men and women who come to me are often swimming in deep, dark waters. They're troubled. They are, perhaps, hoping I can throw them a line. I'm hoping I can teach them to "drown proof" their marriages. To discover their capacities, their limits, and ways to enjoy what deep waters bring.
...
Yesterday I listened to a man who doubts his ability to swim the depths and currents of his marriage. I get it. I know that doubt. I also know the temptation to abandon the deep waters for the familiarities of the shallows. And, I also know that there is no going back. Not if I want to experience the man I'm just beginning to know myself to be.
...
We imagine that marriage is a safe haven. It may be that, at times. But for most of us, it is also the place where we experience our deepest fears and vulnerabilities, because we want safety and stability and are unprepared for just how much we must learn to trust ourselves to be without safety and stability.

This thing called love, between consenting and committed adults, is rarely about safety. For many of us men who are attracted to feminine women, it is to know this profoundly. We find ourselves endlessly tested. Endlessly confronted with our limitations and our fears and our failure to be the men we believe ourselves to be. The depths and the currents of marriage are overwhelming. We feel ourselves drowning, and so often we desire only one thing: for the testing to end, finally.
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I am an avid swimmer. All of my life I've been attracted to the water. I love how She moves me, how she holds me as I move with Her. She is the flow that nourishes. To this day, when I dive into the pool or off the boat, that moment of plunging into Her brings me joy. I am free. Flying.

But I know this too: that no matter how much I feel the joy of Her nourishment, and no matter how strong a swimmer I am, She will undo me if am not paying attention. We drown when we let our attention slip.
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Early in my swimming career I learned a technique to sustain life when in the interminable and forever of Her flow: drown proofing. It's a way to conserve energy and maintain breath over extended periods in the water. It's not a way to tame the flow. She is always "too much" for that. But it is a way to, perhaps, tame my own over-confidence and/or panic.
...
One of the most useful bits of wisdom I've learned in studying the yoga of sacred sexuality is the wisdom and art of rest from the 24/7 of Her flow. No man is a match for what a woman will bring. No man can sustain the 24/7 of attention a woman demands. She will outlast me in everything. Everything. So I must learn –through practice and more practice– to temper my nervous system. To breath from my belly. To learn how to hold myself firm but not rigid, and always to be breathing into the opening of my heart, my belly to what she brings. And also: to learn the simple but difficult art of resting and returning, with integrity.

When we are young men we imagine ourselves indomitable. Then, if we are lucky, we meet a woman who invites us to become more than we imagine ourselves to be. This invitation is the beginning of the feminine testing that will prove us to be the man we are.

Why this feminine testing? Because she sees our desire to be more, she knows us to be more, she wants us to be more. And finally, she needs us to be more. Only when we are more than we imagine ourselves to be can she begin to trust us, and herself with us, to become the beautiful and terrible flow of life and love that she yearns to be. All her life she feels this yearning. All her life she seeks and tests for the man who is enough for her to be who she is as a woman. Choosing us, she begins to test, in many and divers ways, and her testing overwhelms. And this is how it is.

And because this is how it is, we men who love a woman, we do well to learn the skill of drown proofing our marriages. This skill, to survive the deep and dark waters of marriage, is perhaps the truth of sacred sexuality, the heart of our practice as men who love a woman.

TODAY'S SUGGESTED PRACTICE

Drown proofing your marriage. The next Apprenticeship to Love virtual workshop will focus on intimacy practices that will help you, as a man or as a woman, can drown proof your marriage. To register please see sacredbodies.ca/forintimacy