OH, HOW SHE SUFFERED MY FEARS

• Today’s questions: Can you hear your inner voice? Can you hear yourself in others? What stories do these voices tell? How do they help you know? If you’re wondering what this means, or how to answer, and it’s helpful to talk to someone, please set up a short, no-charge chat at sacredbodies.ca/chat

• Today's suggested practice: Day 21 of this month's practice, to notice where I stand, with coach Leroy Gordon (see below).

• My practice today: 5am: 60 minutes: yoga, with breathwork, mantra, and Gayatri meditation

• My vulnerability practice: I am sorry. I feel the hurt I’ve created. I prostrate myself, asking for forgiveness…

Hans Peter Meyer

TODAY’S MEDITATION

Stephen Jenkinson often refers to the “skill of heartbreak.” What might this be, for me? For any of us?

With the help of his words —these and others—, and the help of other teachers, and my own heart, I’ve come to know that it is in the breaking that I open up to what is most true and most beautiful in my life.

This is the “apprenticeship to love.” It is, for me, and for any man with the courage and foolishness to embark upon it, what I call the path of the sacred masculine. And, I’m sorry to say, this path and this apprenticeship, they never end. Always a “work in progres.” Always, at this stage in my life, so much more breaking open to go through.

Of course, I yearn to be released. I want to know, to feel secure, to trust, finally. But, in this life, I believe there is only this endless opening to the beauty and the gifts of this heart breaking open to Her ways, Her time.

…

I listened to a man recently, and felt the fear in his words. I’ve heard this fear before, from this man, and many others. It resonates. I too am afraid. I too want to retreat into the security of what I will call masculine culture, a culture where words mean something. Where contracts stand. Etc. It’s all bullsh*t, frankly. A house of cards we’ve created to dupe ourselves and the rest of the world that we’re intent on conquering and despoiling. A house that cannot bear the weight of our yearning for security and stability. Indeed, this is why I am on this path: because I want to find my bedrock, my root, my grounded place, from which I can build a sense of being and love, and into which I can invite my beloved, that she too may find respite from the world and its depredations.

So I listened to this man and felt a familiar fear in his words. I’d heard it before. I’d spoken it myself. Not for a while. Getting close to five years now. But thinking of that moment almost five years ago when I felt and spoke and acted on that fear, oh that is painful. There my heart breaks. Not for me. I was the destroyer here. No, my heart breaks for her, who was already heartbroken at my inability to feel the pain of our moment.

I walk this path because of that fear. I walk to feel my deeper, truer self as a man. I walk to break my heart and allow that part of myself to speak, to feel, to hear, to see, to know.

It’s not easy walking. I’m not complaining. Just saying: If I could find an easier way, I’d walk that way. But —and again, I have the benefit of a few years of experience on most anyone reading this— I know there are no easier ways. And the difficulty I feel, well that’s just a remnant complaint: life has been good to me, easy for me in many ways; now I get to feel the juice of it. And I am grateful.

…

I feel compelled today to remember to have compassion —for myself, and for those who walk with me, for those who walk their own, parallel, paths.

I’ve felt tender these past days. So much so close, and yet so far away. I can force things —as I’ve done so often in the past, so often getting what I think I want, but at a cost. Or, with the wisdom of experience, I can sit. Allow what is mine to, as one teacher puts it, “come sit in your lap.”

The fear I heard the other day does not allow sitting. Only allows forcing. The stakes are too high, apparently, to allow things to move as they need to move. Better to grab while the grabbing is good.

I feel that still, and today I am remembering to be compassionate with myself. I need to be honest with myself. To hold myself accountable. And, I can still be kind. My training in grabbing is deep. Not just in the years of my life, but in the millennia of how we as men have been raised. It brings us to the horrors of, among other things, sexual predation, divorce, illness, climate change, capitalism. The way ahead lies along a different way, but in the meantime and even as I acknowledge the pain and suffering and fear of this legacy, I must breathe into this body, in this moment, and have compassion for who I am, today.

This is not an easy path. But I’m not complaining. It is the only path I know will lead me beyond this fear and beyond the horrors of my culture, its legacies.

TODAY’S INSPIRATIONS

🌀You deserve nothing. (Kendra Cunov)

🌀 Compassion is not something we merely apply in our approach towards others, first and foremost we need to apply it towards ourselves. When we meet what rises within us with compassion we can allow ourselves to be vulnerable and the need to defend or attack can drop away resulting in a whole different way of communicating.

Allow yourself to feel whatever wants or needs to be felt in every moment, without reacting, without judging the feeling, without suppressing it, without complaining (!) or analysing it, just let it move through you, it will come and go. (Kundalini Yoga School, Speak Your Truth sadhana, Day 4)

🌀The Conscious [Man] is ruthlessly honest with himself [at the same that he is]… kind [and compassionate with]…others [and himself]. (Adapted from John Wineland, Precept 1)

🌀You are beautiful. (My beloved, my Oracle & Siren)

TODAY'S SUGGESTED PRACTICE

Day 21 of this month's practice:

Please read through first, then ...

- Today, set two alarms, one for the early part of your day, one for late afternoon when you may be feeling low energy.

- When the alarm sounds, wherever and however you are, take less than three minutes to do this short practice with coach Leroy Gordon:

https://youtu.be/kvwU_BBTwmw

- When you’re done, stand for a minute and breathe long and deep, consciously and slowly filling and emptying your belly.

- Notice if your body-mind feels somehow changed. And whether you notice a change or not, be content with yourself, exactly as you are in this moment.

- Continue with your day until the next alarm sounds, and repeat.

Ps. I’m happy to do a short session or conversation with anyone who’s reading this and feels the need to talk. No charge for 15 minutes. Set that up for Zoom at sacredbodies.ca/chat