YOU SEE ME

Apprenticeship to Love: Meditations on this Path to Authentic Relationship, November 18, 2025

• Today’s questions: Have you ever led or been led in courtship? What was that like —for you, and for whatever relationship or marriage resulted?
I look forward to hearing from you! Please feel free to comment on the Apprenticeship to Love chat group on the non-profit/non- billionaire Signal app at https://signal.group/#CjQKIPbfC01rTfBN7f8peArlP_VtY3q8aK2uchw4kmlTLlZCEhDKe0nFRfMoRDapdf3hAB7V
-Rev. Hans

TODAY'S MEDITATION

Listening. So much comes down to being still and allowing myself to hear what is true, for you. Still enough to see who you are. Still enough to feel my own fears, and allow them to dissipate as I see you, hear you, feel into you.

...

I listen to younger men and women. I am reminded of my own growing pains. They are not entirely in the past, these pains. I am not yet done opening to the world or to my own true self. The love I feel, I trust this obsession, as my daughter calls it. My devotion, as I know it. There is no hurry now. So the pains are less acute. But I hear how acute they are for you, dear readers, when you talk to me. And I am grateful. You remind me how important it is, that I do this work. That I write. That I keep opening to the wonder and awe of this life.

...

The other morning I was listening to a young woman describe an all-too-familiar pain. Yearning to open to a man who, in his very willingness to sit with her and hold her in her pain, takes her deeper into her own fears, pains, distress. There is, I said, quoting one of my teachers, only opening and closing. They have their reasons. Our work is to become aware of whether we are opening or closing, and to make choices, as neither is good nor bad in itself.

...

She wanted to open, fully. But this was what she was most afraid to do.

She had learned to not trust herself. And, certainly, not to trust him, though most of the evidence suggested he was trustworthy. Most. But not all.

What to do?

With her words she denied him her heart and her body. But... The yearning we feel, to be vulnerable and to become fully ourselves, this is a strong yearning. I hear it most often in the women I listen to. Especially the younger women who have not yet understood that most men —certainly the men they've known— are not worthy of their trust. The yearning is strong. The doubt is strong. But there is still hope. And it is here, hoping but always feeling the pain of the last episode of trust-betrayed/lost, that feels the worst.

A few days later she went back on her words. Opened herself to him. Her body. Her heart? This is the problem: for her, for many of us, it's impossible to do the one without the other.

I don't believe there is a right way or a wrong way to do this. I'm reading a novel about a man. He begins to fall in love with a woman with whom he's recently had sex. It was all a confusion. He is stumbling through it. He tells her, "I'm not good at this." She looks into his eyes, "None of us are."

But we believe we should be. And so we don't trust that the one thing we need perhaps to do most of all is be patient. With ourselves. With the ones who are the occasion for our confusion of feelings. With the notion of love itself. Because love will take us to the limit of ourselves, and then into the darkness we do not know how to navigate.

...

There is no path in my life so clear and obvious as the labyrinth of love. I have a tattoo on my left wrist. A spiral. Years ago I understood that it was a motif, a map that I could trust. I seem to circle through familiar moments. But they are different. I am different.

Currently I am spiralling through "courtship." As a practice, for myself. But also a remedy for those who seek something from me to help them with their marriages and divorces and dating.

I know that my sexuality and yours are so much more than all the sugar bits we've been taught to believe are the "important parts." The one I love once implored me for "connection." I was too busy, impatient with the vagueness of this. Years later I began to understand that to path to her opening as a woman lay through my patient attention. Not to her beautiful parts, or the sum of those parts. But to all the dark and shadowy places that I only began to hear (yes, I can now hear the darkness and the shadows) after a long time of silence.

...

I'm working with a man who has mentored me and coached me for most of my adult life. We are writing his book. My working title is a phrase he likes to use, "connection before direction."

Not so long ago someone I admire suggested that "the world will be saved by women's sexuality."

What I have learned so late in this life, too late for so many of the women I've known, is that my salvation lies in attending to her sexuality. Not as something to be taken or enjoyed, but as a way of being in the world, of revelling in the world, that my patient and attentive listening, hearing, and seeing allows to blossom. There is no strategy here. No goal. Except this: I want to be present when she becomes all that she is. It seems the fastest way to this experience is to become more patient than I, in this moment, know how to be. So I practice. I breathe. I sit. I listen. I watch.

To me, today, this is courtship. To attend. To learn how to create and hold the safe space for the beloved, the one desired, to emerge. Fully. In the safety of my awareness.

...

You help me to understand myself by seeing me, hearing me, feeling into the man I am. This is a subtle form of play. I am beginning to understand it as the highest form of "courtship." My devotion to you finds itself in the ways in which I am learning to court you, that you may revel, fully, as the one you are.

TODAYS INSPIRATIONS

🌀The Conscious Warrior practices the cultivation of wonder and awe. (John Wineland, Precept 7)

🌀There are so many others. But you see me, you hear me, you know me. (My beloved)