THE HE/ART OF MY VULNERABILITY

Apprenticeship to Love: The crooked path of marriage (April 27, 2026)

TODAY'S MEDITATION


As a man, I am, whether by birth or by culture, trained to do good things. To master situations. To fix problems. To direct towards goals. To defend my family and my community. To overcome challenges.

My training as the person I am, whether to be a logger or a writer or a photographer or a yoga teacher or a father or a husband, even a lover, so much of it is about mastering technique. I am guided by the how-to-manual approach to living this life.

This has been a good thing. A powerful and efficient way to live. It's been effective in so many ways and aspects of this life. This is how I have achieved so much that matters to me. And yet....

...

Hubris is also my teacher, when I pay attention.

I can so easily slip into the arrogance and comfort of thinking that I can apply this capacity to master technique to all of my life. Whether it is the "problem" of being a man in love with a woman, of being a father, or a dancer, or an artist, or a writer... I am so confident that I can apply my mastery of technique to all of these. And then I am surprised.

"You are always surprised," she said to me.

She knows me well. And she knows that she —and life, and love– can not be fixed or tamed or solved by my technique.

...

First comes love.

But what a risk that is! I want the protection of the how-to-manual. I want the step-by-step and the safety of the predictable.

There is nothing like that. Instead, there is the poetry of her vulnerability.

Her tenderness teaches me, when I am paying attention, about the softness and subtlety of life around me. I hold these children, my grandchildren. I become aware of this woman, the one I love. I become a little more tender myself, and I feel into how much they long to trust me.

There is so much to learn. And all of it outside the safety of the how-to-manual, beyond the guidance of any technique of mastery I have leaned on. How do I hold with more care and more selflessness and more somehow-rooted presence than I can imagine?

Practice!

There are techniques for being the man I am. They have to do with breath and stillness, and stretching myself and holding myself into deeper places. So, yes, absolute, practice is my way. But then also this: to surrender to the poetry and subtlety of my own heart as it yearns to know the whirling and whimsy of feeling and flow and boundlessness beyond "technique."

TODAY'S INSPIRATIONS

🌀...Life's an adventure into the unfamiliar...if you want to grow, your priority cannot be to feel safe. (Guru Singh)

🌀As a prerequisite to any polarity practice, practice love first.
Full Body Love, so steeped to the bone, so brimming and full, that the only way to hold more is to let it flow into the body of another.
Polarity without love looks a lot like manipulation. If you want to master the energetics of the universe to get what you want, to be rich juicy successful powerful well-fucked, I'll send referrals.
But if you want to unclench and expose and dig deep and taste truth through the alignment of your heart with the heart of Love…..
If you want to know trust and devotion through flesh into god into life into all into the core of who you are...
If you want to shed romanticized ideals of how another will complete you, and instead offer your completeness to the completion of another...
Welcome. (Nina Lombardo)

🌀The Conscious Warrior is committed to developing strength of the mind, physical body, and nervous system through dedicated physical, yogic, and meditative practice. (John Wineland)

🌀You're not like that now. (My beloved, my oracle)