First, I get shanghaied into dinner with a former supervisee. Actually, I suggested dinner, but I didn't count on it becoming an extended convo about my project and a drinking binge (his). By the time I convinced to go home it was late.
Drunk people are boring, BTW.
On my way home, I'm stoked because I have a fire in my belly about a post I have germinating -- inspired by the recent events in Wisconsin. But before I get to my place, I get a call from a former lover and she needs to talk. She's a dear friend, and she's always been there for me. Besides, she's like, one of the hawtest women I have ever known (I'm superficial, shoot me). Already long story shorter: By the time I get home, it's really late and that fire in my belly -- the story I had germinating for a few days -- it's gone...
It's Friday and that means it's all about sex...
* * *
-=[ Knowing, Feeling & Living ]=-
Go through the motions and look as if...
My father loved telling us to “go through the motions” and appear as if we knew what we were doing. I don’t think he meant it as a way of life, but as a way to adapt temporarily to a strange situation. I think what he meant was that sometimes taking your cue from keen observation was necessary before knowing the truth.
Everybody knows at least some truth. For example, most people know it’s unhealthy to overeat. Of those who know this truth, less feel the truth as they go through a gallon of Rocky Road ice cream. Fewer still are able to change their behavior based on knowing and feeling the truth.
The truth, as many of us know, is harder to live than to feel or know. Knowledge is easiest. The mind is more easily changed than emotions or the body, so the mind is quicker to change. Of course, political and religious fundamentalists are the exception. For the rest of us, you can hear something and almost immediately, you know the truth of it. You might feel inspired to run around and tell others this truth. You might even write or blog about it. You can create a whole way of life based on this truth. And still not much will have changed in your life. For example, you might now the truth that exercise improves your cardiovascular fitness and still sit on your butt.
After your mind has understood a truth, the next to change are your emotions. It often takes years of suffering before the truth of something sinks in deep enough for your tears to flow and enthusiasm to grow in response to a truth. Yet even your capacity to feel truth with great sensitivity -- your emotional intelligence -- is not enough for real transformation.
The last part of you to be touched by the truth is your body. Being more solid than your mind or emotions, your body changes last. You can know what you are supposed to do, and you can feel the truth of it, long before you are willing to live it with your body. You may know that you shouldn’t date that asshole, you may feel the truth sending you messages from the pit of your stomach, but you may not be ready to live that truth, so you go through the guilt-ridden motions for yet another bout of suffering.
Your body’s habits, the motions you go through, are the least open to accept truth and last to change.
Because your body is the densest part of your self-process, sex is often the last part of your life to be transformed by the truth. For example, you might know that love could be the foundation for sex. Eventually, you learn to feel your lover emotionally during the clinch of passion. Finally, you learn to live your motions as love during sex.
Even during the most intensely erotic, pleasurable, or painful sexual moments, you can learn to breathe as love, thrash as love, thrust as love, receive as love, and speak as love with your entire body. Sexually, and in every moment throughout the day, you can be love by opening up, feeling, breathing in the moment whether it be pain or pleasure, and exhaling love from the deepest part of your heart as you go through the motions as love. Sex can become the doing of love with your entire being.
You can train your body, like an athlete, to reach the farther reaches of love -- to go the distance as love. And when you feel you are about to collapse from exhaustion, you can give love through your breath and through your actions just a little bit more. Something as simple as the offer of a smile, the invitation of an open hand, or a caress, for just a moment more than your habit would allow you. What happens is that over time your life blossoms as love’s doing stretched -- again and again.
Today, and throughout your days, try to slow down and feel your heart beating. Go in and feel deeply the source of the stream of love flowing through you. Let you body open as love, soften your belly, and imagine breathing in and out through your heart. Offer that. Offer the deepest part of your heart and allow more love to move your body every conscious moment.
Ask yourself, "How would love walk down the street?" Walking, breathing love in and out of your heart, feeling the outer edge of your carnally fashioned form, how do your hips sway as you walk down the street?
How can you make a gift of the truth of your heart to your co-workers, even when you find them disagreeable? Should you smile, tell a joke, act kindly, touch, or walk away to give them space? Every day, practice opening as love as your body’s offering. From deep in your heart out to a moments infinite possibilities.
Knowing truth, of it self, is pretty much useless; feeling it is profound; but living it makes all the difference in the world.
Love,
Eddie
