These are some of my reflections at the end of this adventure in humaning.

Men of my age and older

Having been surrounded for more than a decade by very aware, caring and spiritual people has upped all my baselines for communicating and relating. And engaging with mainstream ‘normal’ men gained a surreal retro feel thanks to the evolution and growth shared in various communities. I caught myself over and over in surprised and speechless moments of “People are still doing this and not aware enough to see it for what it is and change or grow?”

Habituated to fellow growth-minded people the slow pace of progression and learning in others, coupled with an unadulterated and unapologetic rigidity in holding on to dysfunction felt not only alien but put me off, even if the man had other good qualities.

A history of immersion in psychology, communication sciences and being part of the polyamory community has taught me early on about communication, consideration and respect for another’s needs and feelings. So much so that it has become second nature and my world is primarily populated with people who are eloquent practitioners of it. Therefore the disjointed communication styles, absence of consideration of my needs and feelings, unabashed egocentricity, unconscious mind games, ego tantrums and other manipulative attempts felt jarring and alienating. And I realized these block communicating and relating so much that even the most basic levels of these are repeatedly or permanently unavailable with these men. Though the reasons for said blockages are amalgamated by individual unaddressed patterning and wounding the general dynamic was quite repetitive.

Overall I observed the immensity of emotional and spiritual poverty rampant in men of my age, the ways they try to compensate or flee it (sex, status, money, etc.) and the suffering, fragility and loneliness underneath all their striving or posturing as they have achieved enough of their goals to be confronted with their fecklessness in the face of the hole within they tried to fill with them.
I am saddened by how few of them are courageous and willing enough to face their shadow and integrate it now. Too many messages and conversations had men acknowledge that they probably should address this or that and then giving me rationalizations and excuses why they won’t just now or ever. Of course change and healing is impossible, shouldn’t I know?

With men who are spiritual and have their own self work journey the fault lines lie along similar lines though in a more tempered and less obvious way. They also strive and posture by displaying their spiritual practices, jobs, achievements – the more integrated have a humorous awareness of it when pointed to it while others will react with the same fragility to be found in other men. I cannot help but see a lack of decisive actions and investment in things of value due to the ease of being distracted or too sluggish to leave the (spiritual) comfort zone. A lack of ability to slay the Buddha on the path and progress beyond on the one hand and the inability or unwillingness to marry spirituality with the mundane on the other.

Conditioning is truly strong and finds ways to operate in new ways along old lines, the spiritualized ego is just one of the more visible ways this shows itself. If we do not keep alert, sharpening our awareness and consciousness our human affinity for comfort and consistency will limit our progress and insert unhealthy stagnation and calcification. A valuable reminder to be honored.

Power differentials

The most fascinating experience I made for the first time in this intensity and across all encounters is a dynamic power differential which put me in the stronger position without any intent or effort on my side.
All the disappointments, heartbreaks, and subsequent ongoing self work that emotional unfulfilment has brought into my experience has blossomed and is bearing a magical fruit. Said fruit is twofold as it manifests as the ability to fill my own cup by having a variety of ways and flexibility to fulfill my needs independent of a singular other. Sitting alone and dropping inside already washes away all burdens, worries, and needs in the luminosity of presence and equanimity. Taking full responsibility for my experience has grown and transcended me beyond the strangling grip of trauma and conditioning into a state of compassionate self love that allows me to navigate life with awareness, trust, playfulness and inner strength.
The second manifestation is the curated life I have been slowly building from the inside out, rich in connections and relationships that can nurture me more than *enough* and which evolve and grow steadily and healthily. When filling my cup internally or from Spirit doesn’t quite hit the point there are cherished friends and acquaintances who will do it. And often it takes only a word or sentence here, a hug, moments of shared laughter or commiseration. Even little things are superfoods to my heart and Soul in this web of love that lights up around and in me.

Having worked on my childhood trauma and with my sexual desires and energy has shifted my relationship with sex in ways I haven’t had a chance of being so acutely aware of in the absence of viable sex partners. I realized that the past years had taught me to transform the dense, sharp, burning imminence of sexual desire into other forms of energy in service of my spiritual practice or into a gentle, encompassing, warm, expansive erotic energy that is more akin to a wide flowing river than the intensity of burning fiery sexual need. My urges no longer hijack or control my being, I can feel, sense and take pleasure in them without having to act on them right here and now, frustration, or loss of the energy. There is no enslavement nor opposition to sexual desires, just an allowing, awareness and loving intentional engagement. Which is very different to the way it dominated and drove the decisions and action of the men I encountered, even the spiritual with a few exceptions (true tantric practitioners). This dominating drive was often the reason why connection was impossible as their system had concept of relating and connecting outside of sex. Not only a mental poverty but also a terrible pattern of starving the emotional body.

I enter every encounter as a whole being open to new experiences, cognizant of the goodness and abundance of life, while these men act from mindsets built on scarcity, competition, domination and neediness. A power differential asserts itself as I am less driven than them, moving at the pace of my awareness and intuition, my desires for the encounter being for it to be respectful, kind, and interesting/expansive. While on the other side they are under pressure to fulfill their burning needs and desires for ‘the one,’ sex, admiration, alleviation of loneliness, filling the emptiness in their life, etc. The exception being that spiritual guys have less of a pressure and more of a desire and the best of them meeting me in a similar openness to mine.

This calls for extra mindfulness and compassion in my words and actions in order not to enter into the dysfunctional patterns this power difference might invite and to be kind and caring towards the tender aspects of the man. Gifts always come with new responsibilities to keep relating balanced and fair.

Take away for me

All the work to disempower and dismantle romantic conditioning and be more spacious about relating and loving has changed how I perceive relationships, my visions and needs in relating with an intimate partner or friend, and lastly me. I can smile at my inner romantic when she starts going off creating Hollywood movies in her future projections, and still stay anchored in awareness and act from my higher senses and mind.
No longer a slave to these narratives by blindly following them nor by rebelling against them, I have learned to allow life to write an authentic and healthier narrative into every encounter with potential while practicing detachment from outcomes and surrender to the way life unfolds.

And so here I am in a state of awe of the wholeness this path has gifted me. Grateful for the expansion of my awareness, the learning of skills that help me navigate challenging feelings and pains of the past with tender compassion and firmness in service of the wellbeing of all. Grateful for the lessoning of the selfishness and self absorption of the ego which used to blind me to the needs, wants, desires, and feelings of others in the pursuit of my emotional fulfillment. Thankful for leaning into interdependence, allowing vulnerability, honesty and tenderness to strip me to my essential nature and truths in the face of worthy beloveds, learning and practicing how to keep filling another’s cup while keeping mine full *enough*.

I bow in gratitude for my teachers in the past months for the insights and learning they co-created with me. Grateful for them helping me realize that companionship and friendship are fundamental to me and my vision of an evolutionary and fulfilling relationship and that many fail to meet the basic skills and awareness needed for that starting point, let alone the evolutionary trajectory I see as intrinsic to my life and loving. Grateful for making me realize how unique and special a man has to be to co-create a relationship and life with me that would be worthwhile to surrender my aloneness for. Laying the foundation for the proper appreciation and gratitude for the one that will take this role in times to come. Grateful for making me more committed to my path and consciousness work to avoid the pitfalls of conditioning, rigidity, and stagnation which render us lifeless.
Hoping from the bottom of my heart that our encounter was in some little way enriching and nourishing to them and that their Soul flourishes and delights along the path she choose.

Last but not least I bow in gratitude and awe to Life/Self/Source for the playfulness, love, creativity, care, and challenges they pepper my life experience with. And for the blessed and indomitable knowing that what is mine will never pass me by!

Photography Karen Williams by Paul Innis

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When communicating with people who lack an aligned spiritual background, or who have not delved into it as far, my mind starts translating, explaining, and becoming more detailed in conveying its meaning. Realizing the difference in cosmologies and how these influence the conception and perception of my words and their meaning, and understanding beyond the mind that some of the meaning of my words lies in the invisible which necessitates a listener to have an intuitive or conscious access to the invisible to fully grasp what I am sharing or pointing to.

I catch myself attempting to make that meaning tangible and perceptible for those without access to the non-physical through words, which necessitates more words and a higher level of complexity or communication of interconnected aspects.

Someone called it my ‘branched’ thinking, which amused me at first because that has a different meaning to me, as I conceptualize that as taking an essential or fundamental idea and following it into branches of its meaning and manifestation. Which I do at times but had not in conversations with them.

In my morning reflections today I became aware what they were trying to verbalize by talking about my ‘branched’ thinking. They were pointing to something I had not been mindful of, though I was conscious of in my higher mind: my wish to verbalize my multidimensional perceptions and thoughts.

That was an interesting moment of realizing how the higher mind acts without the ‘human mind’ being aware of it, even if consciousness is utilizing the ‘human mind.’ What I refer to as the higher mind is not located in the brain, and may include what we usually think of as the mind (human mind), yet it exceeds it by accessing the field of consciousness in more subtle or higher layers depending on how you picture it. It is through this aspect that access to the higher realms and dimensions is possible to us. Some people perceive it and conceptualize it as the heart-mind.
A term I intentionally side-step as it subtly affirms to too many their dualistic perception of heart and mind and the rejection of the mind (mental, intellectual), which to me is something I don’t want to feed into. One could argue that ‘higher mind’ might be misperceived as a disregard of the heart but that is easier to address than the other perceptive distortion because it is an effect of mainstream thinking.

Back to my adaptations in communication when speaking with people who are not familiar with relationship dynamics, energetic dynamics, and spiritual cosmologies pointing to the oneness of all that is or the field of consciousness. As my perceptions and reflections of life are based on these knowings they often feel alien, weird, or outright nonsensical to those who perceive life through the lens of mainstream conditionings, which deem the physical and quantifiable the only reality.

Therefore while sharing of myself and my perceptions I am aware of a need to make the invisible and intangibles, which are real aspects of life to me, shine through and become more visible and tangible to the human mind.

It feels like changing languages, and coming up against the limitations of my language skill and vocabulary in the other language, and having to accept my falling short of truly conveying my meaning and releasing the hope for their full understanding. At best 50% or 60% of it is accessible to the open minded but closed bodied/hearted. With people whose intuition is more intact and integrated it can go up to 70% or 75%, which is not too bad.

And how does my being know or guesstimate the percentage of what has been transferred? The feedback is mostly clear and loud in the non-physical, non-linear, and non-verbal. This is also where cues to rephrase, explain, or drop a subject come from even if the other doesn’t communicate their confusion.

Don’t get me wrong I get the same ‘lost in translation’ feedback when communicating with some spiritual people, whenever what I share is from my current growth edge and ‘too far out’ for their cosmology or current grasp. The difference there is a different kind of openness to the unknown, a part of them hearing me and opening to what may lay out of their ken… allowing the meaning to come to them in time, if welcomed.
In a sense a listening happens with with others too, but the part that hears and opens is not as integrated into their waking experience or awareness. Which makes it unclear if that knowing will ever be theirs in this lifetime, depending on their life’s trajectory. It is like a seed that doesn’t fall on fertile welcoming soil, but on a hardened soil in a dry and hot climate, making it a matter of alignment of many factors if the seed will ever get a chance to root and grow.

Becoming aware of my unconscious attempts at and challenges of translating the mystical into the mundane is quite entertaining. On the one hand I cannot help feel a deeper appreciation for the dynamics of communication and its complexities, and on the other hand I cannot stop laughing at this human experience and its countless futile toils.

Making it conscious allows me to stop wasting my energy in attempts which are not going to be fruitful and only end up confounding and mesmerizing another in ways that are not conducive to a meeting of equal beings.

Once again I wonder how subtly my path keeps changing and transforming my expressions and how I live in the meeting point of two worlds. What a gift that I am surrounded with beloveds, who not only understand my mystic’s experience, heart, and mind but also inspire her to travel and explore further.

Who would have thought that a mundane thing like dating could be the source of reaping sweet fruits of insight? But then isn’t all made of consciousness and awaits our attunement and ability to commune with it in playfulness?

What magic this life holds for all…

Art by Robert Cook

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Being invested in self work, growth, non-monogamy, spirituality, travel and interculturality and living a rather eccentric life made for amusing experiences of being lost in translation and struggling with relating to mindsets left behind years ago in the first encounters. I felt the challenge of having to change gears and dust off skills I had put aside as they were unnecessary in my small corner of the world. 

Dating instantly made me uncomfortably aware of the privileges my life afforded me and which I have and am building on. Not that I deny them or pretend else-wise, the discomfort arises through realizations of the disparity in the lack of opportunity and access others had and have. 

I am confronted with the height of what I chose as a baseline of relating as they struggle to even fathom aspects of communication and relating that feel as basic as the ABC to my reality and circles. Leading me to inquire into and weigh the importance of being accessible and relatable and the need for self care and energy efficiency. Refining my philosophical and spiritual stances on engaging with others.

Surprising and thought-provoking conversations giving me insights into the lived realities of others are like jolts of electricity reviving parts of me that had gone nigh dormant in my years of immersion. I am called to revisit relational and erotic preferences as a “new” me to intuit and know where I stand, what works for me now and what no longer is of value or relevance to me. Contrasts and stark positions expressed as well as observations of my embodied responses (sensations, gut feelings) facilitate clarity in areas I had neglected or which were of low interest to me until now. 

I am truly enjoying the commencing of this new journey with all its miscommunications, disruptions, vexations and joys of meeting fascinating, endearing and underwhelming new people. I am not fixated on outcomes and much more excited by what unfolds, what wants to be seen and learned and what inspires and impassions me.

It is good to bask in Venusian energy and cycle with nature into the aliveness and potentiality of spring. 

Art by Daria Petrilli

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