Love Practice

I've spent a lot more of my adult life single than in relationships. I could offer a long list of reasons why. I've held on to my need to be fiercely independent, and can't imagine being pinned down. I've seen what relationships tend to be - codependent, clingy, needy, broken people trying to fill their cracks through each other. And I've wanted no part of that. I've also seen what marriages tend to become - traps set up by fear, materialism, and habit. I have ran far away from getting too deeply involved in any of that. While my life has had little romantic love compared to a lot of people, it has also had tremendous freedom - freedom to learn, to travel, to wander, to explore, to grow spiritually. And until recently, those things felt much more important than any "mere relationship."

This winter has been a time of going within, of facing some of the deepest darkness that I've held within myself. I haven't been able to hide from that darkness, nor escape it. It has filled my whole body, it has become the very fabric of my experience. I have felt utterly alone, standing at the edge of an abyss that seems bottomless. I have felt the strong winds from within that abyss pulling me into it, and I have clawed and scratched my way back up to the side of the cliff each time I have started to fall in. The terror, the sorrow, the anxiety have become palpable through this winter. I have tasted them, touched them, felt their grip on me. I have looked into the eyes of death time and again, fearing that my turn, too, will come before I have lived fully. Everything I have ever held on to has slipped away. Everything I have loved has turned to vapor. Everything I thought myself to be has simply vanished. The texture of my reality has been so utterly transformed, that almost nothing remains from before this Dark Night.

And now the energy of spring is upon us.

In each relationship I have entered into, I have worked carefully to guard the doors to my heart. I have hidden behind a veil of openness, and only let a tiny bit of the sunshine within me shine outward. I have allowed the shell of a love relationship form around me, but never have I let love burst me open like the sun. Those relationships fed me as much as they could. But I entered into each one knowing that they would never work. I knew from the first or second encounter with each one that this man wasn't right for me, not really. And yet, a part of me yearned for the little bit of love they could offer me, and to share the little bit of love that could squeeze past the tiny crevice in the door to my heart. Sometimes the intellectual connection was fabulous - and I felt loved for my mind. Sometimes the physical connection was incredible (and sometimes not) - and I felt loved as a woman. But I have never felt fully embraced and appreciated and accepted for the fullness of who I am. I never let myself get involved with a man who could love me like I want to be loved. Too scary. Too much doubt, too little trust. After all, with all that fierce independence, I might be caught like a butterfly, able to breathe freely no longer...

Things are changing though. So fast, things are changing. I feel the way that resisting love is resisting the flow of life through the universe. I feel the way that I become tense and closed, and the life force doesn't flow through. And I also feel in those moments when I allow love to flow through me without any hesitation, how I am filled with radiance and light. And I guess I'm starting to see how relationship offers a practice of that. I think I've held myself away from the messiness and chaos for as long as I can. And now, the joy and love are calling me forward. My practice, now, is to face that resistance day by day, to breathe into it, to explore it with gentleness and curiosity.