The Friday Sex Blog [Transmutation]

¡Hola! Everybody...
If today happens to be your birthday, check this out: there about nine million people on earth who were born on the same day as you. Still feel lonely?

Today's blog art, Transmutation, is by the artist Luis Royo

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-=[ Flipping the Script ]=-

A young lady had just begun menstruating, and was suffering from debilitating cramps. Unfortunately, massive doses of ibuprofen did nothing to relieve the distress, so she went to her acupuncturist, Dr. Lily Ming, to get relief.

Dr. Ming had her lie down on the table and proceeded to insert several needles in her belly and hand and ear. Then Dr. Ming did something our intrepid heroine was unfamiliar with: She light pounded on the nail of the young lady’s big toe with a silver hammer for a few minutes.

“Why are you doing that?” the young lady asked.

“It’s good for the uterus,” the doctor replied.

And sure enough, the young lady’s cramps dramatically decreased as the doctor thumped, and in the days to come they did not return.

After the session, as our young lady prepared to leave, the usually quiet and reserved Dr. Ming started up a conversation. Surprised, the young lady listened as the doctor made a series of revelations. By far the most surprising was Dr. Ming’s description of a traumatic event from her own childhood.

During the military occupation of her native Manchuria, a province of China, she was forced to witness Japanese soldiers torturing people she loved. Their primary act of atrocity was using hammers to drive bamboo shoots through their victims’ big toes.

The moral of the story you ask? (Okay, you didn’t ask, but I like to pretend you ask shit like that.) The point here is that Dr. Ming accomplished the heroic feat of reversing the meaning of her most traumatic imprint. She has turned a symbol of pain into a symbol and tool for healing.

Dr. Ming is a power of example for me and poses to all of us the challenging question: what’s your excuse?

Love,

Eddie

Feelings, pt. II

¡Hola! Everybody...
It is cold out here! But I’d rather be here than there. LOL!

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-=[ Emotional Constipation ]=-

Everything is always washing into my heart. And I have a choice in any moment to open to it or close to it, to resist or allow it to protect myself from it or to open to it and let whatever response comes just be.
-- Amy McCarrel

Feelings aren't facts, but it's a fact that you feel.
-- Popular 12-Step fellowship slogan

When I first wrote yesterday’s blog, I posted it with some trepidation because understanding being present intellectually and actually experiencing it, are two different things and takes practice. However, awakening, another word for being present, is an option for anyone at any time. My own experience tells me that everything necessary for your fulfillment exists right here, right now, this very moment. All you have to do is awake to that potential and actually experience it, rather than to continue to conceptualize it.

Judging by the responses over the years, my initial feelings were unwarranted. When I began this series, I mentioned that my work brings me into contact with literally hundreds of people every year. And I am always amazed by the number of people who have chosen to take responsibility for their own awakening outside the context of organized religions. There is a wave, a movement, of people seeking to find their own answers and that is one of the most remarkable things about the present historical period.

There are two knee-jerk (conditioned) responses to feelings, and they both have their price: to run from them, or indulge them. In addition, as I wrote yesterday, we attach stories to our feelings, creating our own personal novelas (Novelas are Spanish-language soap operas with titles such as Amor Salvaje! [Savage Love], or, Deseo Bestial [Savage Desire]). This does not mean, however, that feelings are not real. Moreover, I do not mean to imply that the awakening process results in a super calm person floating an inch above the ground offering benedictions to everybody.

Let me state two myths about awakening:

Myth #1 Awakening means not having feelings, especially “negative” ones like anger, fear, jealousy, or greed. Instead, the process leads to an unchanging, always calm, state.

Myth #2 You have to choose between feelings and presence. When you have feelings, you have lost who you are.

These two myths are stereotypes and quite laughable, if you ask me. Being awake is to feel completely, to love passionately, to become transparent or translucent. Awakening to what is (rather than arguing against reality) leads one to feel more fully but in a way that doesn't make us prisoners.

Two reactions with a heavy price attached: running (aversion) and clinging (desire). Two sides of the same emotional coin. We live in a male-dominated society in which feelings are viewed as inferior. To be “emotional” is considered unprofessional and we spend much time and money constantly “processing” our feelings away. I think in this sense, women (or rather, the feminine essence) offer a lot in teaching us to be present with our feelings. I have a simple technique when I am working with people. Ask anyone what he or she is feeling and I have found they usually will proceed to describe to you what they are thinking. So what I do is to ask them to tell me where they are feeling it in their bodies. This usually works to center someone in the moment, rather than describing his or her emotional novelas.

This is where the feminine principle can help us: that wonderful capacity to experience everything in the body can become repressed when our little “mini me” starts its whispering.

But I digress!

We pay a high price when we avoid our feelings as they arise. They then become sticky and gooey and don‘t pass through us as cleanly. What happens is that we first create a tension in the body and literally cut off the free flow of sensation. In order not to feel anger in the belly, we clench the solar plexus and block feeling, blood flow, and energy. To avoid feeling fear we contract the pectoral muscles and collapse the chest. The consequence is that, over time these attempts to stop feelings leads to imbalances and stress-related illnesses. We literally create body armor to protect ourselves from feelings.

Another consequence of avoiding feelings, especially the ones we view as negative or threatening, is to become “rational.” We develop strategies to control or stop feelings. As an answer to the question, “Why am I feeling this?” we often quickly say something beginning with “Because”: I am angry because of you… or: they made me feel sad when they…” And in that way, we get caught up in the endless rollercoaster of cause and effect.

The other option is indulging our feelings. Sometimes this happens right away (I was infamous for this. LOL!) and sometimes it simmers for a while before boiling over -- maybe after a few hours, days, or even years. The point is that once the floodgates open, there is hell to pay and a big mess to clean after. You can even cause permanent damage. Indulging is just another way of rebelling against the tension created between the feeling and its repression. We have to compensate for our initial response with an explosive mixture of emotion and willfulness:

Angry?!! You’re damned right I’m angry, and you’re going to sit right there and listen to why!”

Exploding is just another way of attempting to have control over feeling and avoid being overwhelmed. You think you are managing the feeling, but in fact, you are not feeling, but doing emotion. We create drama. Rather than experiencing feeling as a wave, we constrict our sense of self and become the wave itself. Instead of feeling anger or sadness, we become it. Listen to the language we use to describe these states: we say, “I am angry,” “I am sad.” This emotional experience has temporarily taken over our very identity.

Once in the possession of our small, fearful selves, the only choice we think we have is either to repress our feelings or to be taken over them and become reactive. Either way, we are still trapped. We are still run by our personal emotional novelas disconnected from the reality of the world around us, and we are still unable to give ourselves and others our deepest gifts.

That’s it for now. Tomorrow: our emotions as our children...

Love,

Eddie.

Relationship Thursdays [The Wounded Heart]

¡Hola! Everybody,
I’m gone all day, as is usual for me on Thursdays. Hope everyone is doing well, AmyRae: get a miniskirt and we’ll date. LOL! Latina: open up your fuckin QCs, dammit. I don’t care if Joe “Kneckbone” Loser is the jealous type. Emily? When the fuck are you coming back?!!

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s a repost but 90% of you ma’fuccas don’t read my shit anyway, so it’s new. LOL

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-=[ Why I Love Fragmented People ]=-
(or: The Wounded Heart)

“The heart is itself its own medicine. The heart all its own wounds heals.”
-- Hazrat Inayat Khan

You are loved… period.

Just as you are, right now, this very moment, you are perfectly lovable.

In fact, you are love itself.

When I exhort you not to complain, I’m actually trying to focus your attention on that which you are most committed to. Make a list of your major complaints over the span of several days and in that list you will find a pattern composed of what you are most committed to in life.

Some people mistake my issue with complaints. Most people assume I’m asking them to disassociate from their complaints and that is exactly what I’m trying to tell you not to do. What I am asking is that you look deep into your complaints, maybe even stop the habit of complaining for one fucking day.

One fuckin’ day!

Dissociation, like all other defense mechanisms, serves an important function. It’s our mind’s way of saying no to and turning away from our pain, our need for love, and our anger about not getting enough of it. It’s also a way of turning away from our body, where feelings reside. Sometimes, especially as children, we need to disassociate in order to protect our psyches. It is one of the most effective of all defense strategies in a child’s arsenal.

However, it has a major drawback: it shuts us off from access to two main areas of our body. It shuts us off from the vital center in the belly – the source of desire, Eros, vital power, and instinctual understanding – and it shuts us off from our heart center – where we respond to love and feel things most deeply.

In protecting ourselves from the feeling of being unloved, we block the passages through which love flows through the body and we deprive ourselves of the very sustenance needed for our life to flourish. We wind up cutting ourselves off to our connection to life itself.

This leaves us in a strange place – a painful space. On the one hand, we all hunger for love – we cannot help that, it’s how we’re wired as mammals. At the same time, however, we also avoid it and refuse to open to it because we don’t trust in it. We all have been burned too many times and we seem determined it won't happen again!

This is what one some psychologists call the wound of the heart, or the primal wound. This whole pattern – not knowing we’re loved as we are, then numbing our heart to ward off the pain and in the process shutting down the pathways through which love can flow – this is the wound of the heart. Although this wound has some of its origin in our childhood conditioning, it becomes fixated and grows into a larger spiritual problem: the disconnect from the loving openness that is our true nature.

It’s a universal wound that shows up in the body as emptiness, anxiety, trauma, or depression. In relationships, it manifests itself as the feeling being unloved, with all the insecurity, guardedness, mistrust, and resentment that feeling entails, as well as all the relationship problems that flow from there.

No matter how powerfully we fall in love with someone, we rarely dare to soar above our fear and distrust for very long. It seems that we’ve internalized the story of Daedalus, who perished when he flew too close to the sun and his wings melted. Indeed, the more brightly another person lights us up, the more it activates our wound and brings it to the foreground. Sure enough, as soon as conflict and disappointment arise, the old insecurities emerge from the darkness. Our ego -- what I call the The Mini Me -- pops up whispering, “You see, you’re not really loved at all!”

I believe all the beauty and horrors of the world originate from the same root: the presence or absence of love. Internalizing the feeling of not being loved (or lovable) is the only wound there is. It makes emotional cripples of us, shriveling us in the process. This is why I would say that, apart from the few biochemical imbalances and neurological disorders, the DSM (the diagnostic manual for psychological afflictions) should begin thus:

Contained within these pages are descriptions of all the miserable ways people feel and behave when they do not feel they are loved.

When people do not know they are loved, a cold black hole forms in the psyche, where the beliefs of personal insignificance, unimportance, lack of beauty and goodness have their root. This icy landscape of fear is what causes the emotional storms that rage within us and in our relationships.

The only way we can wipe out this cross-generational plague of feeling unloved is by healing the wound of the heart. Many religions and spiritual traditions have understood the importance of love in eradicating alienation from love. They admonish us to love more, to give more generously. The way to love, they seem to say, is to love first. This truth is, of course, profound, but there is another truth just as profound: we cannot give what we cannot receive.

I think it was in an Y360 blast where I first saw it, but the quote from the poet Rilke is eye opening here: “To love is to cast light,” he writes, while “to be loved means to be ablaze.” The question begging to be asked here is how can we cast light if we are not ablaze? It follows then that the key to loving is to become more receptive to being loved, to let it all in. Even if we believe that God is love, such a belief will have little effect if we are shut down or obstructed, preventing Great love from flowing freely.

Maybe what we need is a teaching that helps us focus on our capacity to receive love and how to develop that capacity. Perhaps such a teaching would integrate a psychology as well as a spiritual component. Conceivably such a teaching would include concrete, practical exercises aimed at developing our capacity to accept love. Because I know this much, it is often scarier to allow ourselves to be loved than it is to love.

May you find, through knowing that you are held in love, the boundless source of joy within yourself and share it with the world around us. My hope is that you realize your true nature as a blissful, radiant love, and that you are truly loved.

Love,

Eddie