It's a Guy Thing (29 page)

The practice of intimacy requires you to face your deepest inner demons and fears. When you are in love with a man, every single part of you that has yet to be totally infiltrated by love will rise to the surface like oil on water.

To be capable of love means allowing all your stuff—and all his stuff—to come up. Your fear will come up. So will your feeling of being needy and dependent. So will your anger. Consciously allow this to be part of the relationship.

You know those electric bug zappers? That’s what love is like. If you are in love with somebody, you can allow your inner garbage to be attracted to the surface, be zapped and then vaporized by love.

Sometimes it takes a little longer than a millisecond to zap it, but it does happen. However long it takes, the process of love will dissolve old emotional stuff. It’s not exactly comfortable, but you could acknowledge that it’s part of the package of love. No matter how “bad” your stuff is, you can continue to practice loving. The force of love itself will, over time, serve to dissolve the “worst” of you.

How Can I Avoid the Negative Feelings That Come Up in Intimacy?

Many people try to concentrate on just feeling the positive aspects of being in a relationship and avoid the negative feelings. But you can’t avoid either of them in a relationship. Part of being intimate is seeing and feeling your emotional stuff come up, as well as his. Seeing and feeling your hidden emotional needs contributes to your growth. You can only avoid negative intensity by avoiding intimacy, or by avoiding relationship altogether.

Those parts of ourselves we are not ready to accept are the parts that will cause us to withdraw from relationship when they start coming up. Intimate relationship brings everything up, some parts of which we are not yet ready to face. It’s good to find out what those parts are. Then we know that when the relationship brings those parts up we will feel like turning away from the relationship.

Nobody
wants
to feel the negative feelings that arise in the midst of deep intimacy. Nobody wants to see their own psychological garbage that limits their gift of love. But intimacy itself is a call to growing through these parts of yourself.

At some point, when you are ready, allow yourself to feel the intense negative emotions that inevitably arise in a relationship. It’s important to be in a relationship with somebody who you actually trust will grow with you. Then when these feelings come up, breathe through them, relax through them in direct relationship with your partner. Continue to love through them as they come up.

Will I Always Fail in My Relationships?

Some people have all kinds of relationships throughout their lives, none really fulfilling, and then they die. You may have spent half your life without a fulfilling relationship. Maybe now you have grown to a place of being able to attract and contribute to a fulfilling relationship. It has been quite an education for you.

In the past you were not yet full. But now you are capable. Remember that you will
always attract someone as capable of loving as you are
. You only sabotage yourself if you close down because you don’t want to be hurt again. If you do close down you will attract a man equally afraid of intimacy.

To begin a successful intimacy, be willing to experience past hurt and remain open to new love. Acknowledge your history of pain, but remain available to love. Then, the man you attract will also be willing to love, regardless of his past pain.

Is It Possible to Achieve a Perfect Relationship?

A perfect relationship is not a relationship that is perfectly fulfilling. It is a relationship that is growing. There will be times in any relationship when you can’t stand each other, but this doesn’t mean it’s a bad relationship.

The more you trust and the more you love the bigger the demons that will come up. For example, the more you relax into your feminine, the more you will become like Kali, the goddess of destruction. When you get angry, you may really go wild.

A full relationship is not always peachy; there may be disagreements and fights on a regular basis. But if it’s a full relationship, then everything happens in the context of your commitment to love. You let it all out and find out if you are capable of growing beyond it. Sometimes you don’t know if you are going to make it through, but you persist. You persist in observing your own stuff and in practicing love.

Intimate relationship is an action. It changes over time. It’s not as if you
have
a relationship. Rather, your relationship is an ongoing, daily practice.

For example, if you do hatha yoga, you might pull a muscle and for days do yoga with a stiff leg. In the “yoga” of your relationship, you may have an interaction that wounds you for days. It doesn’t mean you have a bad relationship; the yoga could still be good. It will just be painful. The yoga, the practice, is to continue discovering love, relaxing into it and giving it, no matter how painful the circumstances.

Sometimes the pain is so intense that you feel totally consumed by suffering. With persistent practice, you can grow in your ability to remember love even during those times.

What drew you to your partner in the first place? Love.
Love itself. Reorient to love itself. Re-remember love itself. Then, practice gifting from this feeling of love. It is a real practice to learn to remember this when you are seething in anger or when you are hurt and feel rejected. A “perfect” relationship is a relationship that supports you and serves you and your partner in this practice of love.

Why Is Loving So Painful?

All of us would like love to be easy, but it is often difficult to love, especially when others are not loving you. It is difficult to love when your relationship reveals your hidden fears and unmet needs.

It is not possible to be in an intimate relationship without experiencing moments of suffering and pain. Some people falsely equate growth with eliminating suffering. Some people believe that the more you grow the less pain you will feel in relationship.

There is a certain amount of pain that can be avoided when you become conscious of the principles of love, polarity and good communication. But love allows all of our hidden aspects to rise to the surface and be purified. This purification process is often painful. In this sense, the greater the love the more effective the purification. Therefore, even though the love may be great, so may be the pain. Perhaps the people who have learned to love the most have also felt the deepest wounds. You may have a belief that the more you grow the less you will suffer the wounds of love; but this is not necessarily true.

You may believe: “If I enter into a new relationship and
feel as much pain as I have in past relationships, then I must not be growing. I must have not learned anything.” This belief may prevent you from living in intimacy.

You and all those you love are in the process between birth and death. Your lover is going to die. The knowledge of death in the midst of love is a kind of crucifixion. What’s the use? You fall in love with people who are all in the process of dying. How much more crucifixion do you want? To think that there is an alternative is a delusion. Everyone you love will die someday.

In true intimacy there is always suffering. But the heart can be open to giving and receiving love even while suffering, even in the midst of crucifixion. It is this knowledge of love, this certainty that you are love, that love is not compromised by death, that is truth. There is suffering, but there is also truth, which is love. The great spiritual figures in human history have often suffered tremendous crucifixion in the midst of their loving.

Those you love are going to disappear. To deny this is to deny the essence of humanity. It is a crucifixion to allow yourself to get in a relationship with someone who will certainly leave you, sooner or later. There is pain in the knowledge that he is not going to be with you forever and that he is not going to love you all the time. He might not even love you most of the time—he probably doesn’t love himself most of the time, so certainly he won’t be able to love you most of the time.

As a lover, you are choosing to embrace someone who is going to die as well as someone who isn’t always going to be able to love you. You are choosing someone who, because he has unresolved childhood patterns, will be re-living his drama with his parents in the relationship with you. If he was
insecure about the love he got from his mother and father, he will be insecure about your love. He will continue to want from you what he wanted most in his childhood and never got. You, too, will want from him that what you never got from your parents.

Loving someone who is dying, someone who is not always going to love you back, committing in intimacy with someone who will repeatedly and unconsciously hurt you due to his childhood patterns—if this isn’t a type of crucifixion, what is? But this crucifixion is only the platform for forgiveness. In the midst of death and suffering, can we return to the knowledge of love?

Why Should I Commit to Intimacy If It Is So Painful?

The masculine in each of us is fond of perfection and freedom from constraint. This is why men, in general, don’t like the idea of marriage and resist intimate commitment. Men sometimes refer to their wife or marriage as a “ball and chain.” You, as a woman, might also ask yourself, “Why would I want to be constrained in an intimate relationship again?” You might wonder this especially if your past relationships have been painful.