SHE NEEDS TO BE FREE

Apprenticeship to Love: April 5, 2026

TODAY'S MEDITATION

This yoga teaches me about contradiction and polarities. I stand at the masculine polarity. I live with contradictory appetites: I want to experience all of it, everything that life brings to me. And, at the same time, I am afraid of being overwhelmed. I want it to be manageable; yet I feel that this is an ugly thought, that all that I want should be managed! Ugh.

What do I do? How do I limit the limitless flow of nourishment that is the expression of the feminine polarity in my life? It's easy to say I want the good and the beautiful, but they are sisters to chaos and unhappiness, ugliness and dis-ease. How do I hold a sacred space for all of this, without dulling it into manageability?

Every man and woman should ask themselves these question, daily. How am I failing myself by not holding space for the love and beauty (and their sisters!) that yearns to flow in our bodies and our lives...

...

"I'm moving across the country," she told me. "For three months. Maybe more. I don't know." She was sitting across the room from me. Watching me holding her gaze. And then, after a pause, she asked, "Are you sad?" I laughed.

No, not sad, I said. Happy that you are moving from an unhappy place. Happy that you are excited to be in movement. Happy that you will be dancing again.

It doesn't matter where you are or what you do, I continued, I am still here. Holding this space. I love you.

The unexpected time together slipped into hours. Tea. Then her tears. Endlessly flowing. Long stretches of silence. Tenderness. Deeper and deeper into her vulnerability. Telling me of her need to be held without speaking words, held in my gaze and my listening. So much trust blossoming so gently in her body, her eyes, and into the space between us.... And me, feeling somehow so at ease in this testing, this offering.

This relationship, I said, is obviously not about being together in any conventional way. It is, for me, about learning to love beyond distance. Without expectations. This thing we are doing is about learning to hold my heart open. To hold you, I said. To hold this space between us. To be a witness to your radiance. To be nourished by the flow of you as you become yourself.

...

To live way is an art, an art I need to practice. Daily.

My neediness and my fear, these are important too. They are a constant test of my capacity to hold what is becoming a holy space between us. It's how I reset and recondition my nervous system.

The strange and unknown is transformed. It is no longer a threat. Instead, it becomes the form of nourishment I need, as a man. An inspiration to go even deeper with myself. To become even more skilled at receiving even more and stranger treasures and learning to trust myself to make art of it all.

...

Am I sad? No, I said.

I am grateful that my beloved is expressing her whimsy, that she enriches the distance between us into something more beautiful than geography, beyond proximity. I am loving this solitude, and yet yearning to know more of her tenderness.

This is a beautiful dance... to experience her tests, not as threats, but as moments where I learn to relax into my art. My greatness.

TODAY'S INSPIRATIONS

🌀Tuning into another's needs is a skill –it is a meditation of feeling awareness that requires you to expand beyond self and feel into another body and heart. Like any art form, it takes intention, commitment, and practice. Not to mention a willingness to fail and course correct. (John Wineland)

🌀Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love. (Erich Fromm)

🌀The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries; on the contrary, a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust....
But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky. ( Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet)

🌀You're not like that now. (My beloved, she who must be free, my siren)