Safety has for the longest time been on the forefront of my mind, though it referred to physical safety from potential harm through violence. But that attachment and focus born out of a protective hyper-vigilance ended years ago. Thankfully. 

Emotional safety was something I did not actively and consciously look for, as I had rarely experienced it consistently nor (un)consciously believed it could be a ‘normal’ to strive for. Predominantly experiencing emotionally volatile and often unsafe relating  had impressed on me the importance to get better at protecting myself, at taking hits, and fighting more effectively. Habituating me in time to facing high level of distorted and combative energies without even giving myself the opportunity of exiting or becoming skillful at averting them. Awareness of the cost of such energies to my mental and physical health and growing self compassion have motivated me to focus more on listening to my body’s feedback, and being gentle with myself and others while moving away from such dynamics. Yet having gone through countless experiences of unsafe emotional relating has had an interesting side-effect: the knowing that I can and will not only survive but also use it for my growth. 

My focus is not on emotional safety because I know from experience that disruptions are sometimes necessary to break me out of entrenched patterns and therefore gifts of healing and growth, when received appropriately. And I am aware what a privilege it is to be able to say that emotional safety is no longer the focal point of awareness to me. It also means that I have reclaimed enough internal balance, integration, and harmony to focus on more subtle and creative aspects of relating. 

These days my measure and focus for the kind of relating I desire to co-create, experience more, and which is my current growth edge, is sweetness. Sweetness, not in the sense of the saccharine artifice many mistake for it or try to present but as a quality arising within me in certain relational moments or in connections. 

Sweetness is a softness of spirit, fragrant and sweet to the heart and being, it symbolizes to me a drinking of ambrosia from my own cup. Sweetness can have incredibly healing, nourishing, grounding as well as liberating and inspiring effects on mind and body. There is a shimmering warmth and timeless quality to her. An experience of being without or few overlays of persona and conditioning, where spaciousness is equally present as is a sense of being held in (a welcome) containment. 

Sweetness is a state where oneness and being an individual co-exist in awareness. And from this awareness and fascinating embodied experience the self expression, energy, and needs of an ‘other’ are perceived with awe, embraced, and met in a spirit of loving generosity.

Being met with sweetness in another when I feel distress or dysregulated is still an incredibly magical and tangibly transformative experience to my system. Some aspects of me still need time and a slower pace to allow it in as the specters of facsimiles of sweetness and their poisonous sting are still very present to them. It is lovely to observe them allow it in with more and more trust, as they remember the delight they feel at being met by sweetness from the Self. It is one of the most precious gifts of love the Self offers aspects/parts/exiles/shadow. 

There is no judgement, hierarchy, or harshly contrasting duality in sweetness’ golden shimmering luminosity. Sweetness is a healing salve to wounds of separation (abandonment, rejection, neglect) and disablingly stuck emotions (shame, guilt, fear), a healing frequency emitting ceaselessly towards the inner tribe, an invitation to attune and thrive in the harmonious and joyful resonance it co-creates with them. 

Sweetness does not need the other to be a certain way, she might offer other perspective vantage points as a gift of her spaciousness and to support an easing of contractions and tensions held in the other. Sweetness is effortlessly giving with his warm conscious gaze and welcoming embrace to all that arises and is present. 

Sweetness embraces all things, knows them to to be the One in the many, and honors everything and its role in the unfolding of reality.

Sweetness is the gateway to novel relational co-creative explorations I am open and drawn towards in all relationships. A gateway to walking and exploring unknown lands as the trusting and playful golden children we truly are at heart. 

Safety is a given, when sweetness is present.

Photography: ‘Father and Son’  by Steve McCurry (1980)

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Making a home of ourself in his spiritual sense means the cultivation and practice of self compassion, loving embrace of all that arises, and turning towards our suffering with compassion.

In my vision of relationship, born out of my experiences, current physical realities and higher visions, there are two more pieces missing from the above that are indispensable and non-negotiable to an intimate relationship with me: an active self practice of shadow work and conscious integration of trauma.

Lovingly holding and embracing our suffering mostly will not help us to know and liberate ourselves to a degree which allows us to understand the dynamics of our trauma responses and how they link into other’s pattern, and most of all how to step out of their destructive dynamics. It also doesn’t necessarily teach us individual practices to calm our nervous system, resource ourselves and retrain our brain in a timely way. There is much to be gained by wedding eastern and mystical wisdom with western scientific insights, it is wise to embrace our suffering and also wise to drop some of it when we have tools to do so in an integrative and healthy way. But I digress.

Making a home of ourselves, clearing the house of our Soul to be a welcoming, warm, clean, beautiful and safe space for self and other is a pleasant way of describing my path and journey.
It has been a slow and rewarding process to get to this current degree of inner peace, coherence of my inner tribe and their acceptance of the leadership of the impersonal self. She has been busy co-creating lasting peace between selves that had contrasting approaches and goals, teaching parts lacking boundaries to cultivate and uphold them fluidly and those whose boundaries were too rigid to ease up and become more fluid, lovingly nurturing the wounded parts and their protectors into more ease and a sustained sense of safety. Over and over my inner tribe has unified behind an updated vision of selfhood and path to walk, the years of intense resistances and infighting are thankfully behind me.
Almost every self trusts that it will be heard, taken seriously, be part of decision making processes, and their real needs will be fulfilled even if it may be delayed to serve a more pressing need. Internal disruptions are mostly dealt with calmly and with curiosity about the insights and learning available for all selves in the process. There is an acquired culture of knowing, trust, cooperation and compassionate kindness which is sustained and supports the growth, peace and joy of my self.

In other words I have come a long way of making myself from a war zone into a beautiful home.

This home of mine is deeply precious to me, as it was built at the cost of years, sacrifices and strife to get to its current state. Not everyone is welcome in it, no matter how much I may love them. Those that bring the taint of war and disruption to my door are sent their way with a blessing for their own healing and protection along their path. Those who approach with muddy boots and littering habits are told to clean up and shape up before they can enter my sacred space of serenity.

Potential partners, especially if they want to share my life center (co-habit, co-work, share finances, etc.), have to have built a home of a comparable quality and beauty if I am to answer the question “Are they a home to me?” in an affirmative.

I have worked hard to create this home of mine and have earned the right to no longer accept invitations into cold, drafty and unsafe shacks of people lacking boundaries, to sit in the entryways of the dark starkness of windowless fortresses of the emotionally unavailable, or any other inhospitable environment I encounter.

Another piece of insight completed contemplations I had on the aspect of safety in choosing another as a home. Safety, is a painfully lacking translation of the German term Geborgenheit at the center of this inquiry, which describes beyond ‘safety’ also a sense and/or feeling of being protected, cared for, cozy, secure, belonging and more.
In my reflections on what constitutes a good home in another I realized that safety stood for a dual quality I need to feel and sense. For one I have to trust the other to be capable of standing up for and protecting me, even if my warrior self can do that job very well I want to know that if she is down there is a reliable and strong second line of defense. On the other hand I have to trust the other not to carelessly or willfully neglect, abandon or hurt me and thereby act as a trigger dysregulating my nervous system.
Both qualitative aspects of safety are not simply known by what another professes or their track record with others, the assessment is mainly intuitive. Now that my trauma and mind no longer override the voice of my intuition in this, whenever my body says no it becomes an amplified whole being NO. A non-negotiable boundary which I gladly and lovingly uphold for my body and nervous system she suffered decades of abuse at the hands of my ignorance and distorted thinking.

With these and other reflections on being a home to self and others it becomes self-evident why someone who has not made a home of themselves cannot be a safe and homely refuge for another.

And a new dimension of inner work, of decorating one’s home to support and delight one’s beloved opens up when meeting one another on an equal footing. A joyful journey of explorations and shared creative play is gifted to those who will receive and expand into it.

Photography by Unknown

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“The waves hit the cliff with more intensity than the shore, because the ocean knows the cliff has that masculine intensity which won’t complain about her feminine energy.” ~ Nityananda Das

If I would have seen the above quote years before I would have laughed and asked to see such a man. The only people I had ever experienced meeting feminine energy in her wild and intense emanation with strength and awareness were a few exceptional women. 

Most people I have met, regardless of their gender, would have complained and fought or denigrated the other even if the feminine energy flowed in a rather mellow way. After all there is a conditioned brittleness and fragility in the way masculine energy in all of us expresses and meets the feminine energy until the energy has been freed from the distortions effected by culture and programming. 

I will admit freely that it takes mastery and a conscious equanimity to stand in the storm of another’s intense energy. And especially so if it is the dark feminine in its intensity. I myself cannot handle it at times and therefore cannot fault anyone who feels overwhelmed or momentarily incapable of dealing with it. These are the moments where we need to own our momentary limitations in meeting the other and self care, not moments to blame the other and/ or project our made up ego storyline on them. That is a messy work in progress.. and challenging.

Last year I learned that what I has taken to be as a “strong man” in my still conditioned/ blind spotted mind was another fragile expression of the masculine energy which in turn had a darkly fascinating way of triggering quite unhealthy reactivities from a distorted feminine energy in me. A loud and clear pointer to the inner work I still needed to do in order to free my inner feminine energy from distortions and to disarm her trigger-happy dysfunction.

I have been immersing myself in deep shadow work and not specifically addressing the above therefore I was quite surprised to witness myself having an inspiring new experience with masculine energy which the above words reminded me of.

Being aware of the distorted egoic game between a shadow-ridden masculine energy and mirroring feminine energy (and vice versa) seems to have created the space for another possibility of relating. It sure helped to have met someone who effortlessly matches my intensity, commitment to self work and who is grounded and stable in areas I am not (yet). A gorgeous mirror and complementary being, a wonderfully passionate and playful partner in this dance of souls, bodies and minds we call relationship.

I was amazed how in one of our conversations the above mentioned energies were triggered and present yet there was a decidedly different quality to this experience. He had the capacity to hold space and meet me with openness, compassion and wisdom even though he felt the intensity of my reactive intensity and wouldn’t let himself be baited into reactivity. He stood calmly in the storm of my emotions and helped me stay connected with him while allowing my emotions and thoughts to move through me. Did I ever mention that I have a massive weakness for guys capable of conscious meta dialogues in the midst of emotional fires and storms? Oh my heart, even sensing the possibility of observing together what unfolds as it happens is amazing but truly experiencing a man capable of holding space and standing up to me… I was floored.

To have a passionate discussion and weaving in and out of the dimension and knowing of our union and observing patterns playing out with equal compassion and self compassion is so precious to me. What an epic moment of self mastery and so much sweeter by sharing it with a beloved!

This is huge for me. Having had to deal with multiple layers of trauma laying siege to my nervous system and an intergenerational familial culture of heated debates and fights instead of calm discussions… every moment I can move beyond all of that and get closer to acting like the loving and caring essence of my being is beyond words. 

I feel so much gratitude for all who helped me get here, my teachers, guides, ancestors, the hard work I have put in, the beautiful man that is taking me and my nervous system to a this new dimension of trust and safety and allowing me to experience my expanded resilience and all the people who came before and showed me how unhelpful and wrong my protective patterns have been. But most of all I thank Source for guiding me along this wondersome path of integration and self leadership.

And I need to point out that this experience wouldn’t be possible if the man I shared this experience with had not tempered his energies and ego with self work and met me equally in his masculine power and feminine receptivity. I feel grateful and honored to learn from this gracious soul. 

It is fascinating to me to observe how quickly my system began to mirror his temperance and open to more vulnerability and trust “simply” by him holding that energy so well. He wouldn’t even know or say that that was what he was doing because to him it probably is just what he does. Sometimes we can be blind to the extent of our greatness and the gift our being is to another.

A beautiful moment of possibility and connection in-midst of the intensity of pain, vulnerability and love.

A moment which gives me hope that this raging ocean in me might have found a veritable cliff after all and not a sandy shoreline masking as a cliff… enabling the vast possibility of a truly passionate dance in all of our forms, allowing all aspects to play and be free flowing as we live and love one another.

Only time will tell… but even if this one moment was all there is to this connection, I would already be immensely grateful. Fortunately there is much more and it seems that way more is meant to come our way and I cannot wait for my next lesson from my personal love guru.

Photography by Unknown

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