TALKING ABOUT MARRIAGE (& DEATH), Part 1

Apprenticeship to Love: Daily Meditation, Inspirations, and Practices for Authentic Relationships, August 12, 2023

• Today’s question: What song does your Siren sing? How are you preparing to sacrifice, to become something more than you imagine yourself to be?
• Today's suggested practice: Day 11 of this month's practice, to practice for yourself, your wants, the things you yearn for (see my "Short Practice to Relieve Anxiety,” below)
• My practice: 4am: 75 minutes: Yogic postures, breathwork, mantra, and Pranayama for the Vagus Nerve)
• My vulnerability practice: Stepping up and expanding into my authority —risking and failing and learning to trust myself...
NOTE: I've recently changed platforms for these chapters. That means some things have gotten lost, including your preferences. My apologies. Please forgive me. Either upgrade your subscription to the Premium or Bronze benefits (see the "subscribe" button for details), or downgrade your subscription, as you need. Your readership is, always, appreciated.
~Rev. Hans Peter Meyer

TODAY'S MEDIATION

It's nearing the date of one of my favourite weddings, between one of my daughters and a man she decided to marry many, many years ago. Her heart was made up early. She knew. He took 10+ years to ask for what she knew.

Yesterday I drove 50km to visit this daughter, her husband, and their two children. It's always a delight to see them. How they are doing marriage and parenting, I would wish this for any couple that I marry (I’m a certified Life-Cycle Celebrant™ —weddings, funerals, and all the rituals & ceremonies of this life, etc).

But most of us don't experience this. It's why I'm writing this book and sharing these chapters: I want to understand myself more, why things turned they way they did, how this thing called "love" looks and feels when I allow it to be what it is rather than what I think it ought to be. My children —all four of them, in their very different ways— are giving me their perspectives, mostly in what I observe and feel and hear. Truly, if there is anything I give them it is my shoulders to stand on, to do so much better than I managed.
...
On the drive to see them, and back, I listened to two of my favourite thoughtful people, Kimberly Ann Johnson and Stephen Jenkinson, interviewed on a raft of topics. Among them: matrimony, birth, death, witnessing, how large or small events could/should be, and more. What they said, and especially in light of KAJ's recent wedding (which she's written about for her readers), resonates with what I'm hearing in "the trenches," of my life, and of my students and clients.
...
I believe m work is holy work: I have the honour of listening to men (& women) talk about their desires and fears. Mostly they talk about their fears, and how they feel themselves failing. I am humbled by this trust.

Recently, one man spoke to me of being afraid, of seeing only the losses he anticipates with marriage. He wonders how I manage to step into this risk with so little concern. (I have to laugh, and share with him that there is much trembling in these boots as I step forward...)

Another man speaks of his wavering commitment to marriage. He loves the woman he is with. Is committed, he says, to "doing everything." And then, it all falls apart and he is confused. And afraid. Perhaps even cynical. (Almost too familiar.)

A third man, perhaps the most serious of these serious men talking about the sacrifice that marriage commands, he speaks quietly of his readiness. Maybe he has the least to lose? Maybe, already experiencing how much his surrender to loving her is giving him, maybe he is less afraid than most of us? This makes him perhaps the most ready to cross the threshold into nothingness—and to receive everything, and especially the "everything" he can't imagine?

It is my belief that crossing the threshold into commitment to marriage, and especially to a feminine-identified woman, this is the most frightening thing we —as masculine-identified men— can imagine.

She is the Siren. We've been warned by our bros: these are dangerous waters; protect yourself; get a prenup; etc etc etc

Nevertheless, we are drawn to her, and whatever her particular song, the song of marriage that comes through her voice and her body, it is a song of our ruination. At the very least it calls us into the ruin of who & how we know ourselves to be.

It is, I believe, a rite of passage that this culture has failed to remember, failed to honour. The 15 minutes of glory in front of our family and friends, yes. We know that well. But there is a deeper ritual and it is about sacrifice and loss. It is about death. And we would do well to spend some time with that before we so willingly throw ourselves over the threshold, onto the rocks of our ruin. Because we do not serve love, and certainly not our beloved, our betrothed, the woman or man we say we love, we do not serve them well if we are not ready to go through with this death of our younger and —I will say this— or less masculine self, consciously.
...
I don’t see a lot of men, certainly not the majority of us, truly ready. We submit to the Siren song, but now with consciousness, not with a willingness to sacrifice our lesser selves. I certainly wasn't ready.

That's why I write these chapters. That's why I teach what I teach, and why I offer a program on the Arts of Sacred Marriage. I want the couples who choose this path of marriage to succeed.

There is so much more to say. And so much to say too, about the feminine who calls the masculine to his ruin. She too experiences sacrifice in this, as one writer calls it, "crucible of marriage."

I try, every week with the couples who give themselves over to me in the mini-workshops that are the weekly Yoga+Tango for Lovers classes, to feel into what these men and women are going through. I try in these chapters. I feel them, and hope to honour them by treating their vulnerability and trust as, yes, holy. Sacred.
...
Marriage is so much more than we imagine, standing on lesser side of the threshold. Once crossing, we are undone, and open —perhaps— to be made into something even more beautiful than we can imagine.

TODAY’S INSPIRATIONS

🌀You deserve nothing. (Kendra Cunov)
🌀Pranayama is …practised in order to expand the dimensions of prana within you but also to expand the dimensions of time and space. (Kundalini Yoga School, Pranayama sadhana, Day 1)
🌀In order to support a life that is intuitively guided, you must have the freedom to make mistakes, for it is this very freedom to make mistakes, and not be punished, that opens the higher centers of the brain to intuition. (Guru Singh & Guruperkarma Kaur)
🌀You are beautiful. (My beloved, my Oracle & Siren)

TODAY'S SUGGESTED PRACTICE

Day 11 of this month's practice:
Please read through first, then ...
Today, set a time —at least three minutes, perhaps 11— 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 my guidance on this month's 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: Are you willing to feel everything, and just let it breathe you, rather than feeling the need to do anything about anything?
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.

SAVE $75 WHEN YOU'RE A PREMIUM & BRONZE SUBSCRIBER

★ Join me for the August 16 Apprenticeship to Love Virtual Workshop where we’ll talk about Barbie as an Oracle in our lives at this moment. (Premium and Bronze subs please choose the no-charge.

If you’re not yet a Premium or Bronze subscriber, please choose the Regular ticket or click on "subscribe" and choose Premium or Bronze.