Accumulated stress makes your physical body vulnerable to bacteria, viruses, and infections. It also makes us susceptible to mental health issues. To get back into the body and reconnect your energy circuitry, you need to learn pragmatic practices of relaxing and allowing the energy in the situation to move you emotionally or physically.
In long-term relationships, we tend to focus on our partner’s limitations or the restrictions they impose on us rather than helping them heal or break free from them.
Intimate attraction isn’t rational; the desires of our bodies are formed over thousands of years, extending back to our most distant ancestors.
How can you navigate divorce gracefully and with compassion – for yourself and all those affected – so that you’re free from regret and self-recrimination?
There’s a tricky relationship with time that we experience when we are lost in thought or the swirling hyperlinked pages within cyberspace. Time can race, it can slow, and it can stop altogether. But curiously, this experience collapses into the present moment as soon as we experience touch.
Accumulated stress makes your physical body vulnerable to bacteria, viruses, and infections. It also makes us susceptible to mental health issues. To get back into the body and reconnect your energy circuitry, you need to learn pragmatic practices of relaxing and allowing the energy in the situation to move you emotionally or physically.
The one thing that weaves through everything in the universe is consciousness. It is the thread of continuity unifying all. To witness and identify the explicit, self-arising quality of life is to touch upon this deep truth.
Consciousness is what the fabric of reality is actually made of.
We appear as but single threads woven through this vast fabric of consciousness, and because we are made of the same stuff as the rest of this fabric of reality, we can know the rest as consciousness. To realize and deeply understand this fact allows us to transcend the apparent duality of subjectivity and objectivity at the root of any feelings of separation from all.
As humans, we are easily able to change our minds.
Think about how easy it is to lose your train of thought or forget what you said in conversation only moments earlier. This is because our thoughts are the superficial form of consciousness.
Our thinking patterns, including our core beliefs, are reinforced and sustained by repetition and emotional self-identification.
Going deeper within, our emotions are the next level of consciousness. Our emotions form a bridge between our mind and body; they are somewhat more dense and complex, and we have less control over them than we do our thoughts. Emotions are more complicated to modify because our emotional responses are more challenging to exert conscious power over.
In short, emotions aren't in the mind, and this is what makes them difficult to shift.
When men go away on retreats or partake in similar spiritual gatherings, we often experience a shift in awareness or a sense of peace more profound than anything we've known before.
After a deep retreat, men come away with a better understanding of what matters most to them in life. However, upon returning home, they may realize this conflicts with their current living circumstances and whom they associate with. It feels like the people, relationships, careers, and families they have seem to be trying to sabotage that positive inner place they've finally found.
This may ring true for you, and my question is: when you find yourself in such a situation, how do you rectify this? How can you meet your desire for solitude and still sustain a livelihood?
There’s a profoundly subtle distortion produced when we bring the past into the present moment, or when we project into the future from our past experiences.
This is something normal that all humans do, but as soon as we do it, we’ve disconnected from the present moment which is always unknown. We’ve lulled ourselves into believing we understand something mentally—which we do not. It’s in this act of disconnection and retreat into thinking that we cause our greatest heart suffering.
Look into a mirror, or look within. How do you see yourself?
Most of us feel a sense of disappointment when we notice the imperfections in our bodies and the quirks of our psyche. We often feel as though we are secondary characters in others’ worlds, that we are not good enough to be the heroes and heroines we yearn for in the world around us.
We are living our lives cautiously from the sidelines.
“We must surrender our hopes and expectations, as well as our fears, and march directly into disappointment, work with disappointment, go into it, and make it our way of life, which is a very hard thing to do. Disappointment is a good sign of basic intelligence. It cannot be compared to anything else: it is so sharp, precise, obvious, and direct. If we can open, then we suddenly begin to see that our expectations are irrelevant compared with the reality of the situations we are facing.”
― Chogyam Trungpa
We like to fantasize that life with a significant other will be like a rom-com. We get a taste of it early in the relationship — what we call the honeymoon phase, the “New Relationship Energy” — and it's incredibly addictive.
But when the downside comes, and we first experience some kind of pain, we get stuck because we haven’t yet developed the skills to bloom the relationship back open into something greater. It seems gravity will always pull us back down.
Invite devotion into the sacred core of your being, your innermost sanctum where truth reigns and all emotional evasion and avoidance ends.
Doing so is like initiating nuclear fusion joining heart to Self, tapping into the core power of the universe to feed life and relationships.
It's almost unimaginable how much energy devotion can enable within your life, whether it's caring for a child with disabilities, creating a new business, standing as an activist that heals the world, or creating an intimate relationship fueled by faithfulness and fiery desire.
Devotion empowers and energizes us to do great things, transcend limits, and leave the world fuller with more love, openness, and acceptance.
"Absolute warriors, ideal warriors, don’t struggle. Their actual inspiration comes from the situation as it is. If the situation becomes more and more overwhelming and powerful, that much more energy goes along with it. It’s like judo: you use the situation as your power rather than trying to fight with it."
- Chögyam Trungpa
People envision spiritual awakening as some profound experience afforded to only very unique individuals after much work or divine providence. We largely miss the incredible opportunity our intimate relationship provides to awaken within this lifetime, not for the sake of self but because of our profound love for others.
If you’re feeling stifled and stuck in your relationship, that cramp might be an invitation to look deeper. Treat it like a mirror reflecting back your unconsciousness.
There are limits we place on love, and we don’t really own or investigate those. Relationships, particularly when they are edgy and volatile, can be a portal to your awakening.
Most of us compare ourselves to fictional ideas of what great relationships look like. For example, reality shows portray elements of relationships that can stimulate FOMO. Once this anxiety is stirred, and we base relationship goals on fears of missing out on something we believe others are getting, we can become like an addict perpetually chasing a high.
This is not a conscious decision; it stems from a lack of strong role models or healthy communities from which we can learn our true untapped potential within intimacy.
When we make comparisons, our inner motivation for intimacy arises – primarily out of FOMO. This fear of missing out is a disconnection and a sense of moving away from our center.
It's a wonderful thing to have a high libido. The best way to stay active your whole life is to appreciate and keep adding fuel to this erotic fire within you.
The problem is, we are only feeding it kindling continually instead of putting a big hefty oak log on it and allowing the massive coals and embers to build so you can stay up all night, warm with the lingering heat.
We’re missing out on something in our sexual lives–we don’t realize what that fire can be fanned into if we nourish it properly.
It can go places much deeper and longer-lasting than we’ve ever experienced before.
When your mind thinks you understand something, you skip over the details and jump to the next thing in awareness.
Around people that we have spent a lot of time with, we like to think that we know them. However, you never fully know your intimate partner.
Keeping a relationship connection alive requires a moment-to-moment practice of seeing them like it was your first date. If you actually think you fully understand them and know who they are, then you are limiting them to the past and who they were before.
The consequences of this are particularly evident in the realm of intimacy.
For many men, spiritual retreats oftentimes take the form of camping, hunting, sailing, and meditation intensives.
The masculine, as consciousness, relishes being free—from everything.
The beauty within empty spaces and desolate places soothes the masculine soul.
The concept of freedom is encoded into our western culture as one of its paramount values. It’s a masculine ideal that resonates in the heart of most men I know, and when you get a taste of it, it’s really hard to come back to the regular world of form, filth, and family.
Stepping into your purpose may bring up fear and internal resistance, because the patterns of your life don’t want to die.
Finding our purpose reminds us of the gap between their current state of happiness to the happiness they want to be, but focusing on the gap is what sustains the gap.
Purpose is an essential aspect of masculine being. Men thrive on knowing where they’re going and why they’re going there. Being lost and confused, not knowing where you’re heading, feels terrible for men. The sensation of being lost cuts against the grain of who you are, and it’s one of the leading causes of depression.
Losing your sense of purpose and direction in life can be a dangerous period to navigate alone. If you find yourself in a dark place regarding your purpose then please reach out to either myself or others in your circle—this is not something that you have to bear alone.
This being said, I want to talk to this masculine aspect of purpose and the question of why you’re here on this earth - this is best discovered in solitude.
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