Love and Fear

"Her wounds came from the same source as her power."
Adrienne Rich

I have been passionately interested in love and healthy relationship since I was a teenager. I don't mean romantic love, although I have had typical obsessions with romantic relationship over the years. I mean the Big Love, the Love that is the life's blood of the Universe, the Love believed by all the world's religions. The sort of love represented in the story of the sacrifice of Jesus' life for humanity. When I was a practicing Christian (ages 3-20), I was deeply touched by the story of Jesus and his immense love for us all. I desired to feel that love in my own life and be that love with other people.

I started reading Leo Buscaglia, the first university professor to teach love, when I was 15. I started working on my self development with Scott Peck's The Road Less Travelled when I was 16. Even in the midst of living with my mother's narcissism, addictions and emotional abuse, my stepfather's alcoholism, and my father's neglect I knew there was a happier way to live and I knew it was based in love.

Back then I perceived it as God's Love. As my understanding of God, religion/spirituality and love have grown over years of intellectual study and experiential living, what remains is this knowing deep in my heart that we are capable of living with so much more love than we do. We are so afraid, afraid every day in so many ways. I seem to have been born with an innate awareness of, and drive to create, the Love filled lives that we are capable of living. I can feel the potential of it and everything in my life is motivated towards growing deeper in love for myself and others. My deepest desire for relationship is to find others who will go to the depths of love with me, who will choose to face our shadows together and work to heal into greater experiences of love together.

There is very little black-and-white duality sort of thinking that I invest in anymore, but I do believe that all of our emotions and choices, big or small, are based in either love or fear. Love leads to expansion, fear leads to contraction. Love allows us to be big and shine our lights for one another, fear causes us to shrink into the shadows. Love leads to Oneness, fear leads to separation/isolation.

It seems that part of my ability as an intuitive/empath is to feel when people are making love or fear based choices. I just know, even when they aren't necessarily conscious of their own motivations. I also tend to have intuition about what a person could do to choose love rather than continue in a fear-based pattern. That isn't just intuition, I have a 15 year self education in self development, psychology, philosophy, religion and spirituality. I have a pretty good understanding of how the human heart and mind work (based on our current collective understanding, of course we still have much to learn).

It very literally hurts my heart to witness/feel people choose fear. Because it hurts, I judge it as bad. I don't know how to change that. I don't know that I should. I watched fear slowly kill my mother. Her fear eventually grew so big that she became psychotic with delusions. I watch my ex-husband sit day after day for 7 years in his bedroom in front of his computer because he was too afraid to interact with the world. He lives a very small and depressed life (and I lived that life with him for awhile because I was afraid to give up my delusions about our so-called partnership and be on my own again). I've felt the big impact fear can have, and I see it's little impact in people's lives every day (including my own).

For a long time I have struggled with the story that my mom, my ex, and others chose fear over their love for me. Because I chose my children when fear could have ruled my life, I have told myself the story that my mother chose her fear, her addictions, and her narcissism over me, as if it was a conscious decision she made very day. Same with my ex-husband. I believed he chose his fear over our family. I made it personal and I am working on changing that. It isn't ever about me, it's about their own relationship to love and fear. But even if I take myself out of it, the reality is that it hurts to watch the people I love suffer from fear based choices.

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"Closing the heart is a self-fulfilling prophecy. When we close it, we attract more reasons to keep it closed. Opening the heart is a soul-fulfilling prophecy. When we open it, we attract blessings." Jeff Brown

Part of my grief process right now is accepting that Knight made a fear based choice four months ago (and actively maintained since) that prevents our relationship from being what it could be. It has nothing to do with poly. It has to do with what is, or isn't, between us by his choice. He told me this when we came back together, but I didn't want to believe it. I chose to hope for the potential for great love I could feel between us. I poured my whole heart into our relationship. But he did not do the same. And now I know that I can't be in a relationship that isn't whole. I can't be in a relationship where fear prevents love from flowing and healing from taking place.

The struggle I am having right now is with the story that Knight chose his fear over his love for me. I don't know how not to take it personally, how not to feel rejected. I realize that the bigness of my grief, and my anger towards Knight, come from the history of the people I love choosing their fear. This is a pattern in my life.

The struggle I am having right now is with my own fear. My fear tells me that I will always feel rejected in his presence. My fear tells me that I can never be emotionally intimate with him again, even as friends. My fear tells me that I am not strong enough to bear watching him having other relationships in this community, relationships that I have to watch unfold and be expressed through BDSM and sex in public, in front of me at the parties that I help create.

I am scared. I am scared of how much more this is going to hurt. I am scared that it will hurt too much. My fear tells me to shut down, to shut him out, to try and make myself cold so that I don't feel it. My fear tells me to stay angry so that I can fall out of love with him.

Now I face the choice between fear and love. What are the loving choices for myself and towards Knight as we transition away from a romantic relationship to each other? What is the most loving choice for the community as I try to navigate my grief as we approach a big party? Can I be a positive role-model by making it about love, by embracing Knight as my friend and his other relationships as part of his joy? I desire more than anything for him to be happy. I just wanted him to be happy going to the depths of love with me.

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It isn't about being fearless. Most of us will struggle with fear all our lives. We're evolutionarily conditioned for it and it's something we have to change as a species.

It's a matter of being willing to face our fear, to shine the light on our shadows in order to experience deeper joy, love, and intimacy. Most of us run from our shadows, especially in relationship. Yet there is nothing more intimate than sharing the evolutionary process with another person and actively choosing love in the face of fear together. There is nothing more vulnerable than exposing your darkest shadows to each other, forgive yourself and the other, and to choose to heal through conscious action to be happier and more loving together.

I am a Masochist for God

I have often said that my biggest kink is evolving. I am literally turned on by the process of conscious growth, especially periods of intense transformation.

The truth is that I am a masochist for God. The deep surrender that I give as a submissive in BDSM play is a reflection of the greater surrender that I strive to give to God every day of my life.

I love, love, love the process of growth. I savor the burn of Kali's Fire. Yes, it is painful to grow, but pain does not have to be suffering. It can be traumatic to let parts of my self that are no longer needed to die. It can hurt like hell to break out of self-imposed fear prisons and allow the heart to expand into love. But it can also feel exhilarating, exciting and joy-full as new pieces of my self are revealed or new connections are weaved between pieces I've already known. There is tremendous relief in the emotional releases that occur throughout a dark night of the soul. And then I always come out the other side with a permanent transformation into greater awareness and deeper love. The whole process makes me feel very alive.

The last few days I have been high on this glorious experience of transformation, even in the moments of my deepest vulnerability, discomfort and heartache. Knight said the other day that I am glowing. Something significant has shifted in me and the insights are flowing faster than I can document them. I surrendered to the Divine and to Love in this experience of losing my life-partner and it's like the floodgates have opened emotionally, intellectually and spiritually. I am buzzing with the thrill of it all and where I know it will lead me.

I am learning so much about how wounded souls relate and what is needed for relationship to thrive in healthy love. But I don't think I'm just learning it for me, I think I'm learning it so I can share it with others. At the same time that I'm having all of this growth around relationship, I am also having some amazing insights about my life purpose.

I am one of those people who believe we all have a unique genius or Divine Spark to give the world (a Divine Spark is the God in us being expressed as a unique personality). We all have a calling to something that only we can meet with our strange combination of personality quirks and life experiences. I recently came across the recommendation of noticing what people say they appreciate about you and how that is a reflection of your purpose. At the Imps leadership meeting several weeks ago I was told by someone that what they most appreciated about me is my journey -- how I am always striving to grow. I am realizing that consciously pursuing the fullest expression of my Divine Spark, and sharing my process of growth with others, is a significant aspect of my unique genius. Oh, I am an evolution genius! I think that the Universe has put me through the school of really hard knocks, given me an obsession with experiencing the greatest potential of love, and then compelled me to write about it, make art about it and do healing work, as a means of giving others a light on the journey.

I have been telling myself for years that I don't have the credentials to help people on their evolutionary journeys. I've been keeping myself small in administrative work because I don't have a piece of paper that says I am qualified to coach or counsel others. I haven't written a book or started a business of some kind because I feel like I'm not an "expert" in anything. And yet I haven't felt the call to go back to school. In fact, even though I am a passionate learner, institutionalized learning and I are not compatible. Over the years I have been feeling the intuitive knudge to trust there's another way to transition into healing work. But I've had no solid leads on what it could be, until recently, when I started coming across people who are doing healing work that also don't have pieces of paper, but have tremendous life experience and self-directed learning. People who trust themselves and claim their gifts with boldness and confidence.

What I haven't been trusting is that I have been going through a different kind of education that allows me to help others from the place of having been there and made my way out. Instead of going to years of school to get a degree in Pyschology, I have lived through the process of healing several significant traumas and transforming my own mental illness by studying psychology, consciousness and spirituality and applying what I learn to my own life. I have not been giving myself the appropriate credit for being my own therapist and spiritual teacher.

Many years ago, someone who was helping me on my spiritual path told me they believed that I lived through so many difficult experiences, and have such a strong capacity for empathy, so that I could accompany others on their journey through the dark night. Instead of sitting in a classroom and talking about how violence affects families, I have lived through and then healed violence in my own home. Instead of learning how to counsel others in a formal setting, I have been putting the healing work that I have learned into action in my own relationships. Instead of writing a doctorate thesis, I have been working on the frontlines of building a community through striving for healthy relationship and deeper love.

I started this post thinking about how I am head-over-heels in love with God and Life right now. But I'm ending this stream of consciousness with the realization that I'm falling in love with my self. I have been so focused for so long on making myself better, that I haven't realized I already am. I've been focusing on my fears and where I need to heal so intensely because I believe I'm still broken. But I'm not.

I am not broken.

I am whole. I will always be in the process of evolution toward greater awareness and deeper love, but I am whole right here, right now.

And I have so much to give others from that wholeness.

Excuse me while I go sit with that and cry for a bit.

Oh, and thank you for witnessing me. I really appreciate it.