THERE IS ONLY THIS, NOW! EXPERIENCE ALL OF IT

Apprenticeship to Love: September 12, 2025

• Today’s question: Are you willing to surrender?
• Today's practice: Take eight minutes and sit with the mantra (below). Whether you join in the chanting or not is not as important as allowing your body to feel the subtle vibrations of the repeated sounds. Be disciplined about this. Make this time for you, yourself, and only yourself. Just eight minutes...
• Then, click on this link to join the group chat on Signal and tell me what it feels like, to be bigger than you imagine yourself to be.
  Rev. Hans Peter Meyer

TODAY'S PRACTICE

TODAY’S MEDITATION

I am choosing these days to spend much time either in solitude, or in the company of only one or two others. In larger groups, I feel myself protecting myself. I experience myself becoming a shield. It's not how I want to be.

There is a siren call to be more of myself, to experience more of myself. I am choosing to listen. To keep things simpler, slower, quieter. And then I begin to hear things, and wonder about things.

This wondering is apropos a conversation with a woman I would describe as living life in “neutral.”

...

I’ve lived much of my life in neutral. Neutered at a deep level. This neutering is not the fanciful unmanning that so many of us, as younger men, are afraid of experiencing if we allow the feminine (and, particularly, a woman) to show us a different way in living.

It's also not a lack of sexual interest in women, though that has become something deeper and more beautiful than it was when I was young. So, no. Not neutered there. But, yes, in any deep engagement with the feminine, neutered.

I was unmanned not by a woman in her power but by my disgust at having grown up seeing too much pain and willful stupidity on the part of my male elders and peers. Too much chest-beating, too much shallow “being a man” to want any part of that.

My male elders —father, uncles, grandfathers, their friends and company– were unable to show me how to grow into being a man in a way that was useful. Really useful.

They weren’t flourishing as husbands or fathers. Their wives and daughters weren't flourishing as women, at least not because of anything they were doing. Perhaps in spite of how they were being men, but not in a helpful or supportive way. It wasn't all dull or dark. There were moments of light. But not enough to really guide me anywhere except into a neutral and neutered zone.

…

It’s one of the things I love about the woman I love: she seems incapable of really compromising herself. This costs her great discomfort. That is hard to see and hear. I believe that I have something to offer. I believe that her discomfort and suffering is her feminine calling me into being the man I am.

I didn’t hear this call for a long, long, too-long time. It is a siren’s call. Powerful and beautiful, and inviting me to smash my protective neutrality on the risk of what else I could be. I would not allow myself to hear this for a long, long time. Not until I’d smashed other things.

...

How do I, as a man, learn to listen to the siren call when the only guidance I've been given is to stop my ears and sail my ship well clear of the rocks?

This is important to me. I want to live more fully myself, in all the ways I am and can be. I am finding that way to hear the siren call and allow myself to smash through the neutering of safety. I am finding the way to release myself into the deeper and more powerful man that I am. It's not as dramatic as the words. It is, in fact, subtle. It's my discipline of practice. Of teaching. It’s in teaching other men to surrender to themselves, and then to teach other men, in turn.

So many of us are either neutered and dull, or beside ourselves with pain and anger. Silently or loudly, struggling to find a way to be who we are.

…

I believe myself to be lucky, in so many ways. I have, as the passage of the Bhagavad Gita says, "work." This is the gift of my life, to know and to do my work. And to do this work without consideration for the fruits. Yes, I have desires, things I want. But I am learning that it is simply in the doing of the work, and sometimes the doing means sitting in silence, that all things come to me.

My beloved cannot help but call me into being the man I am. Still, and better able to hear, she calls me. From the depths of herself as the woman she is, she calls me into the experience of feeling everything. With practice, I learn to enjoy everything.

Even her silence.

Even a million miles away.

Perhaps most of all in her silence, a million miles away.

...

I sit. I wait. I listen, and I hear. Hearing her, I allow Her to break my heart open, that I become the man I am. And she is there.

TODAY’S INSPIRATIONS

🌀I am he as you are he as you are me
And we are all together (Lennon & McCartney)

🌀Recognize that the other person is you. (Yogi Bhajan , Aquarian Sutra 1)

🌀...surrender your point of view...; incorporate other angles...the perspectives of others. Relate to life through this expanded perception ...become your more infinite self...surrender to you. (Guru Singh)

🌀Thy right is to work only, but never to its fruits; let not the fruit-of-action be thy motive, nor let thy attachment be to inaction. (Bhagavad Gita, 2:47)

🌀There are so many…. and then I remember you, who sees me and hears me and knows me. (My beloved, my Oracle and Siren, my Muse)

SIGNAL CHAT

If you have thoughts about this meditation on the crooked path of sacred marriage, please join me on the Signal Apprenticeship to Love chat group at https://signal.group/#CjQKIPbfC01rTfBN7f8peArlP_VtY3q8aK2uchw4kmlTLlZCEhDKe0nFRfMoRDapdf3hAB7V