Beyond Intimacy

Large-Flowered Trillium

Today I see yesterday’s writing as not quite complete. Intimacy alone is not enough. Or rather perhaps, intimacy must be more carefully defined. Intimacy can be mental and even involve talking about emotions without being in and feeling the emotions I am talking about. It seems that true intimacy involves connecting from the felt sense of the emotions we feel. This means letting go of control and allowing the emotions and feelings to arise spontaneously and sharing them from that spontaneous unguarded space. So I want to be clear with myself and not delude myself into thinking that talking about my feelings necessarily means I am being intimate. Intimacy means being in my feelings and freely sharing from that unguarded vulnerable place.

Secondly, bonding, the kind that happens in healthy families, means more than sharing feelings either mentally or from that deeper spontaneous place. Bonding involves a special kind of feeling, a warmth, a longing to connect and be with, a deep caring for another. It involves feeling love for the other.

And, as with other aspects of intimacy and bonding, it must begin with experiencing those feelings toward myself. Only when I experience that warmth and caring for my own being am I healthy enough to reach out to another. Oh I can will myself to do acts of loving care out of a sense of duty, or to relieve my conscience and guilt, or to manipulate another to get what I want, but by these ego actions alone I easily deceive myself that I am “loving.” Others see this and are sometimes confused. Who is the real Gary? Authentic love and caring would come from my core, my Divine center, that place where I experience my oneness with God and my Christ-consciousness.

All of this takes me beyond intimacy and into deep feelings of love, both for myself with all of my faults and for others with all of their faults. This is at least another missing ingredient in my gene set, one that I long to cultivate and nurture. Anything less than this will keep me from peace and in fear.

This means also identifying with this deep God-self center within and not with my doing-ego. And of course to identify with my deep God-self center I have to Know (not intellectually but experientially) that my God-self is there, that this is who I am, one with God and one with Christ. Very challenging for my ego to recognize and certainly cannot be willed into being by my ego. But I can decide to ask for spiritual help and then be open to the possibility that God and Christ do manifest from within my being. I can begin moving in that direction if this Divine Center proves to be the Truth of me.