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.
The best decades of our lives wash past us without getting to truly experience them. We can never get that time back, and this devastates us when we look back on it. But we also fail to recognize the time we still have, now, or the possible experiences that lie before us today, if only we could recognize them.
Let’s be brutally honest. How many people do you personally know that honestly love themselves?
If you come up with any striking example of someone who actually does love themselves, how do you know that? What are they empowered to experience because of that love? Do those same experiences seem inaccessible to you from where you presently stand?
The momentive pattern of our early childhood habits effectively dooms us to repeat them unless there is profound intervention. Even the positive things we experienced earlier in our lives will be out of reach in the future if we don’t connect with our own passion and life force.
Our happiness is the ultimate element at stake.
Ask yourself, are you happy? Would you like to die happy and completely given, knowing that you experienced the fullness of what life had to offer? That you fulfilled the reason for your being born?
No amount of effort or self-help will lead you to achieve this.
The solution—the only solution, in fact—is love. This is not just the fleeting surface-level love we feel at various points throughout our lives, but love as a personified experience—as an embodied volitional practice. This kind of love, in its full incarnation, is something you most likely have not witnessed in other humans except in rare instances.
What is love?
Embodied love is the non-reactive, full presence and reception of whatever is occurring in life around us. To experience this necessarily requires being rooted in a self-position that is open, non-clinging, and inviting of the unknown. It is the tacit sense of security as the core of your being, regardless of situations or life circumstances.
So how can we learn this? How can we experience this in our own lives, and maintain it throughout our intimate relationships as time wears on?
Love starts with your eyes
Begin by nakedly seeing. Our inner sense of self is directly connected to what we experience behind our eyes and what we are aware of when we close our eyes. It’s the you of awareness, as awareness, that sees. Look into another person’s eyes. Notice the twinge of aversion and feel the emotions that arise when we do this nakedly. Consider the possibility that this can be done with complete unknowing and absolute curiosity. Once when you were very young, this was how you saw.
From this point, contemplate with wonder the fact that neither of you within this moment is able to consciously stop your heartbeat, yet something is driving all the machinery and keeping you alive. You don’t volitionally focus your eyes, dilate or contract your pupils, digest your food, or control your breath as you sleep.
Stay with the profound unknowing of what life is. Stay with the vulnerable feeling of connection, palpably present between you and the other person, that inevitably arises when you look into their eyes. This gazing into the unknowable witness behind the eyes began right after your birth as a parent, nurse, or caretaker looked in wonder at the being behind your infant eyes. The you that looked back is still the same you. To not appreciate with wonder this experience of being you, witnessed by another, is to fall into the disconnected sleep of dreaming that you are a separate self, lost in a world of separate others.
Stay with the spontaneous emotions that arise within the heart as you recognize this.
Relax. Allow your breath to flow unobstructed as best you can.
Just see.
Softening into surrender vs. withdrawing into self
In these moments of intimate contact, we can either soften and surrender into allowing this moment to deepen, or we can withdraw into a seemingly-private place within our minds to evaluate, question, seek answers, or dissociate from what we don’t want to experience.
The latter action is the action of unlove. It is the action of maintaining separation—distinguishing you from others. It’s extremely costly in terms of energy and time. But it will guarantee you your perceived sense of being alone. Every time. These last two actions have momentum to them. We’re almost never aware that we are keeping the heavy sense of disconnection going, by our shift into a disconnected mental self-position.
In the Authentic Heart Tantra, it’s possible to notice when we are doing these actions that sabotage our happiness and connection. We can learn how we present roadblocks to our lovers, stopping them from being able to break through our heavy cloud of judgments and perceptions. All of this can fall away in one instant of connection, where love touches us viscerally, and we regain the taste of freedom or love’s fullness.
Learn the art of fanning this ember of love into a fire that can burn off our self-sabotage, our doubt, and our desperate need for certainty.
Reach out to me to learn more about this Authentic Heart Tantra, and experience it yourself through private coaching sessions with me and my wife, and through the upcoming Deep Intimacy Intensive.
To learn more, visit my website here.