Moving Toward Lovemaking At Deeper Levels of Consciousness

Coffee Time – Wednesday, July 17

I got up early (4:00), did my meditation on the deck (yes, in the dark, and yes, with my coffee in hand), and afterwards continued listening to my most recent helper session with Moira Shaw. I am so thankful that I can record these sessions and work them through carefully over the days that follow my session. As I listened and digested Moira’s and my engagement, writing down what came up in our session and pondering it, I found myself in an ever-expanding state – a very rich session indeed, and a session that inspired further expansion as I listened to it.  Coffee in hand, Pat joined me as I was listening to my session with Moira. Pat had arisen at five and had just competed her AIP meditation.

Gary: I find I am full of gratefulness for the experiences of my life. I stopped there and listened to what was up with Pat. I did not jump into what was so alive in me through my engagement with my session with Moira. I shared nothing to say that I was alive to the point of overflowing. The day before I had jumped right in to my aliveness and Pat could not find her voice. I did not want to repeat that experience. I wanted to give Pat space. We paused after Pat’s sharing, and then we took up the conversation again. 

Pat: A primary relationship takes a ton of intention. I consider you one of my two really intimate friends, the other being of course our mutual friend J. As Sage has said, we, you and I, have to let go of everything to be in this relationship, we have to pay the price for the intimacy that is US. But then we find we give up nothing, it is all of a piece. All oneness. …

But right now, here and now, I’m anxious. I sense you are in your own stuff (which, of course, I was) and not present to me, to our USness. But maybe this is again my anxious/ambivalent attachment disorder — having my hypersensitive antennae up and into your space and avoiding my own inner state. But I find I am worried about how tightly you hold things, your fixed images of how things should be. I ask myself, “Is this my projection onto you of my own fixed images?”

Gary: At Pat’s first words of the morning I felt my energy collapse and disharmonies arise. How quickly my high state of expansion had evaporated. Had I been insensitive? Was I being self-centered, self-absorbed — still full of my own high energy from my session with Moira? And if so, is that OK? After a long pause I responded to Pat.

I feel shame for not being present to you or to US. Then I start feeling trapped. Suddenly I am not free to be me, right where I am. If I’m honest I have to admit to myself and to you that I start resenting you. I get all caught up in these reactions and feelings – a huge disharmony inside – feeling constrained, shut down at the level of my Essence. (Or perhaps, though no longer at a “high state of expansion,” this new feeling of contraction may have still been my Essence, flowing, always flowing, now in contraction, if that is my NOW.  But this possibility did not occur to me at the time — perhaps still in duality.) Pat: This sounds like a complex (Later I just had to look this up: Psychology. a system of interrelated, emotion-charged ideas, feelings, memories, and impulses that is usually repressed and that gives rise to abnormal or pathological behavior.) – this thinking wraps you up. It is your pattern, and it doesn’t have to be that way.

Gary: Yes, and as we explore this reaction in me I recall my experience with Sister Catherine Griffiths in Massachusetts nearly 17 years ago (November 1996). My 5-day intensive with her began with a visioning/prayer session with her in which, to her own amazement, she saw me in my mother’s womb wrapped head to toe in chains and steel bands. And during the five days it was clear I did not want to get out, that I was terrified of even having so much as my hand stick out from the chains wound so tightly around me. It was a powerful image carrying the message: “Whoever I am, I had better not reveal myself.” It is terrifying to reveal the true me, so I pull my head back into my shell where I feel safe. Perhaps this is my core belief, my core image: I have to be someone else other than who I am in order to be safe in the world.

Pat: Sr. Catherine seeing you as an embryo in chains is such a gift, seeing this is freeing you. For me the corresponding image that sticks in me is that of the smashed-face girl. I’ve shared this before with you many times. Gary: Please share it again.

Pat: It was a repeating dream when I was very young. The dream would begin with my being a young girl standing at a cosmetic counter, a countertop that I could barely see over, as the sales lady brought out various perfumes. The sales lady so affirmed my feminine side. I was taking in and loving the experience of feeling my femininity! Second I see an elegant woman in white, with a flamboyant white hat, coming down a spiral staircase. She turns out to be Mom. Mom takes me outside to a huge pit. “If you aren’t good you’ll fall into this pit and be smashed. Each time after this dream I would awake feeling myself to be the smashed-face girl.

Then later in life I remember two incidents related to this dream. One was in 1995 or 96 when I was turning 50. I was taking a course in Columbus for nursing CEU credits. It was titled Journey of Wisdom. While I was there I had an experience in my hotel room of sitting in a chair holding the smashed face girl and realizing how beautiful she in fact is. I took that in.

The next incident was with two friends, J. and J., in 1998 or so. We were each making a collage and it was important to me that for my collage I would have a picture of a beautiful girl – the real Pat Peterson, not the smashed-face girl. Again this was healing, reclaiming my femininity.

Gary: So we both have had experiences that have blocked us from being who we truly are, you seeing yourself as the smashed face girl instead of the beautiful woman that you are in so many dimensions, and me the terrified embryo tied tightly in chains in my mother’s womb rather than one Divine in his Essence and wanting to radiate Love, Joy, and Wisdom. I suddenly notice that making love from these broken places of the smashed-face girl and terrified and chained up embryo is very challenging – there is so much in the way. Pat: What’s do be done? I remember Sage in our intensive last month inviting us to make love with what is there, that making love heals what’s there.

Gary: Perhaps true “lovemaking” has a different form from our stereotypical images of “lovemaking” from the culture. The article in the New York Times last Sunday about young women who were students at the University of Pennsylvania. They were casually “hooking up” with men to get their sexual needs met. This “hooking up” is the antithesis of “making love.” Pat: Yes, “making love” is so beyond the clinical and mechanical instruction we were given as kids. I remember even as a young girl knowing that there had to be more to sex than what I was being told. Part of my task in this lifetime is to find the Truth in the Grand Mystery of intimacy, sexuality, and connecting.  … PAUSE …

Pat: So, “Good morning, Gary.” We are now here, venturing into the field that is US. How does it feel to “arrive” in the field of US?  My longing for connection happens in this morning time together. We can step into the field that is US only when we are each connected to ourselves and open to where we truly are in the moment.

There is so much baggage with the word “lovemaking” – the word is burdened with so much distortion. If God is love, then “making love” is an activity beyond the sexual experience. Beyond anything we yet know. And “making love” is what we are doing in Life – in all of Life. Love is coming through us in our lives moment by moment. Our Lives are ones of “making love”!

Gary: This is a lot to hold! Pat: But we like it that way!

Afterthought.  Over this past week I was listening to Pathwork Lecture 37 Acceptance, Right and Wrong Way – Dignity in humility. I was challenged by ¶5 of this lecture, which goes as follows…

“What is a wholehearted decision for God?  It always involves giving up something.  It may mean letting go of an opinion, a desire, perhaps a way of life.  Yet in reality you do not give up anything, but the act of “giving up,” which is how this surrender appears to you, must be carried out.  Only after you have proven your willingness and taken this step will you find that you actually receive much more than you have given up:  you find that you have given up nothing!  This paradox is veiled in a cloud of unknowing, which automatically disappears when a person has proven the willingness to sacrifice something important for God.”

I see that I resist sacrificing something important for God. Somehow this idea of sacrificing anything really precious to me triggers me. I can feel my stubborn NO!  And of course for me the “something important” relates to my sexual longings that have so powerfully influenced the emotional side of my being for my entire life.

So what do the Guide’s words in this paragraph mean to me in particular? My sense is that when I came into this world my entire sexual side was skewed, distorted, and narrow. From this immature start my intimate connecting seemed to evolve in only two dimensions at first: physical and emotional. I did not know deep and mature intimacy on any one of the sides of its physical, emotional, intellectual, or spiritual aspects, let alone an integrated intimacy with a woman on all these levels simultaneously.

So for most of my life my sexuality and intimacy with women have been immature and fragmented. I can see this as I reflect back through the years of my relationships with the eight or so women who have been significant in my long life. So what is the Guide suggesting in this paragraph from Lecture 37? Perhaps this paragraph is challenging me to “let go” of at least some of my strongly held “opinions, desires, and ways of life” regarding how I relate to women, and now especially how I relate to Pat. Perhaps what I would find out if I “let go” of my preconceived ideas and images around intimacy and sexuality would be that, as Lecture 37 says, I “actually receive much more than I will have given up:  I will find that I have given up nothing!”  Yes, my preconceived somewhat culturally based ideas and opinions may inoculate me from the reality that is possible in the wholeness of a fully integrated intimate relationship. This feels very real to me and sets a direction for my life! And it enables me to finally make a “wholehearted decision for God.”  And who is this God? The God that is within, the God that is an aspect of my very Essence.

This conversation with Pat continued in our coffee time on Thursday morning, July 18 …

Gary: I am reconsidering Sage’s words, “making love from what is,” or at least from the narrow way I had interpreted this. I was seeing it as “putting new wine in old wineskins.” Perhaps I need to back off from my specific sexual longings and then, from this place of “emptiness,” or “creative emptiness,” as Pathwork Lecture 224 says, or from this “void,” allow to arise within me the full potential of what wants to happen sexually in me from my deepest Source, from my Divine Essence.

Perhaps this experience requires a transition to a higher level of consciousness, a level of consciousness where I can truly experience what Sage calls, “Intercourse at every level: intercourse at the physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual levels” and experiencing all levels simultaneously and spontaneously! Pat: This sounds correct.

Gary: This is backing away from what I longed for at a lower level of consciousness with its dualistic narrower views and limited understandings. AND this backing away is not resignation or giving up, or denying my sexuality. But rather it is a surrender to my inmost God-Self, to my Essential Self, my Real Self, my Divine Spark, my Higher Self, or however we want to name God or Source. True God IS the God within, and I am one-with my God-Self – God is not separate from my Self, from the ME that is ME. This awareness in this moment brings me a spontaneous and profound level of Peace. This awareness brings me to an experience of expansion rather than an experience of contraction.

This expansion, this experience of my Divine Self, is the Life Force that was my Embryo Self that was all wrapped in chains in my mother’s womb. This is the Life Force GARY that longed to break out and yet was at the same time terrified at breaking out. My entire life has been about breaking out of my chains. And the breaking out has happened gradually over my lifetime and has involved many women along the way – in each relationship I was learning, maturing, healing, and growing out of my distortions, weaknesses, fears, faults, and images. I can see my long life with all of these women along the way as a perfect unfolding — each experience in its own time and way affecting my journey into the Mystery that Life is. I am not sure where this is all heading, but this awareness, at least in this moment, is so enlivening and freeing. I am full of gratitude.

And in all of this I have a great appreciation of Pathwork Lecture 152 Connection Between the Ego and the Universal Power, recommended to me by Moira in our most recent Helper Session. So clearly does this lecture lay out these life lessons for me. I can see myself listening to this lecture over and over again, digesting its messages for my Soul, bit by precious bit. (I include text of Pathwork Lecture 152 here in its entirety)(audio of Pathwork Lecture 152 in entirety)

Shared in love, Gary