There’s a visceral truth that I’ve been running from for a good 3 years.
After some tumultuous months with my partner, it dawned on me that my approach of arguing for my ‘truth’ and forcibly justifying my position was all wrong. Rather than reasoning and deflecting as my usual way of avoiding emotional confrontation, a wiser and indeed, more seemly tactic was to actually allow the gravity of our argument to consume me; then navigate my response from there.
Let’s rewind.
If my years of esoteric explorations have taught me much, it’s that a woman is blessed with a unique emotional intelligence that affords her the power to transmute her feelings. That is, to change in form, nature or substance. The super powers women get when we’re pregnant or menstruate are oft recorded in religions and esoteric practices. For instance, Gnostic Christians lavished on a ‘drink of immortality’ made from menstrual blood, which is full of healing stem cells, which can actually activate our cellular capacity to regenerate and transport us to endocrine states of rapture. The Maoris stated explicitly that human souls are made of menstrual blood, which when retained in the womb ‘assumes human form and grows into a man’, while Africans said menstrual blood is ‘congealed to fashion a man’. Even Aristotle said human life is made of ‘coagulum’ of women’s sacred juices.
Just as we can take in a gooey cluster of cells and cook it to produce a baby (miraculous), so too the crystallis of our clumped emotions can emerge as a butterfly’s spiritual flight of truth. Similarly, we can absorb the crude and jarring pain of an experience, and exhale it as something learned, loving and profound.
When we give ourselves the space to move through and manage our emotions, suddenly they all evolve from thumping bass lines to spaciousness and power. How do I know?
Because I’ve just done it.
My partner and I have been at loggerheads over what exactly, I forget now. The fact is, it was another impasse, his way over my way. One wilful character against an equally stubborn force. We weren’t progressing – and usually things would dissolve when the pitch of anger couldn’t escalate no more… and we both fell apart, broken by violent words and crude insults, regretted yet impossible to reclaim. And this would go on for ages, absolvement cycling with resolution, trying to forget but deep down, not forgive.
There had to be a better way, I thought. After all, what of my decadent decade of spirituality and Tantra, if not to retain some tools that would crack this like some secret code it promised.
In the spaciousness that the post-mortem of an argument allowed, I gathered my thoughts. Feel it all - and all will transmute, my memories whispered. Instead of rejecting this as an unfamiliar notion, I relived the process and the aliveness that danced in my cells at once.
At first, piercing blades of heartbreak swept my being. But as I let them be…. and they disappeared. Then, a wave of devastation washed me clean, so dense and heavy that barely could I breathe.
And yet again, once it had its moment, it strangely just once more, fell away. And finally, those erratic bolts of panic that prodded at my soul after a time, also subsided.
I just observed and breathed and let the wisdom of my system do its thing upon surrender to Her process. New internal expressions let themselves be known. Inner voices buried but needing to be heard, usually ignored and silenced by rash logic, spoke to me in their unique and clear tongues.
This whole soup of sensation, finally, had the space to be unpacked. And underneath the clusters of hurt, shame, guilt and fear, the rays of resolution shone their answers brightly.
No matter what was said or thrown, there is a much deeper psychology at play. And that’s the language of the soul that’s craving to be heard… and loved. And when I get all that, I treat my partner with compassion. I turn toward him and engulf him with my love. It is the fluid way that sees beyond the heartbreak and the rift, into the possibilities of how love can live again.
If you’re concerned with justice, penance or revenge, please know that this is just your ego. Against a man’s cold logic, it will fail. But, open your heart to a vulnerable surrender, and you will have a bond that will replenish you for life.
Here is to a love that dances lightly.