Integration Required
He tells me about men's work
How the men make a list of women they feel disconnected from, women they yearn to be in connection with.
Then they call every woman on the list, owning that they feel disconnected and they want to do the work to stay connected.
He reports it is life transforming.
I have no doubt, I feel the transmission in my body, knowing he has lived it. I feel something young in me awaken when the other man with us says "the work works."
Yes, the work worked for me.
It can be hard to believe it will work for others on other paths, mostly hard to believe others will let it work when the path itself is so shiny and full of wonder.
This peak experience of men's work, I see men use it to stay in the middle. Not only men, of course. Now that we've made the work so fun it can seem like the ideal hobby for a group of friends.
My peak experiences fucking sucked, so I kept working the edges, living into prosperity and delight right here right now, in the ordinary. Life-altering grief has a way of calling me to the precious mundane, my mother's handwriting on a list.
I decided to do the work to stay connected, and I found that it has actual practices. It's not not-being-codependent, it's being devotional. It's not not-being-toxic, it's being sovereign and generative. It's not not-being-judgmental, it's a practice of using judgment to define and live into my own values.
I am thrilled for these men and for the women on the list. I imagine it's beautiful to hear him own the disconnection, beautiful to hear the desire to stay in connection, I'm sure that claim of responsibility is a high of freedom like nothing else has ever been for him.
And I hope they can sustain it. Because the work to GET connected is not the work to STAY connected, and this nuance of the language is what, for me, rounded out the integrity I was feeling in the man telling me about it. The language was "stay connected," not "get connected."
Truly, staying connected is not work, and that's what is so hard about it.
Early violation has alienated most of us from the open empty state, so our openness is all receptivity, and the other option is being closed, protected.
The open empty state factors enormously into peaceful collaborative connection. It's what's happening when nothing is happening. There is no receptivity, no penetration, no interaction happening between us, but we don't diagnose this as a problem and close up as a result. We simply stay open and empty, ready when the time is right to enter back into exchanging connection.
People don't have peace if they don't know how to be open and empty, especially how to be open and empty in connection. The open emptiness of connection means that I'm not advancing a relational narrative in my head while I am not interacting with the other person. This narrative-advancement is what some people think is the "work" of staying in connection, but truly, the work is resisting this familiar seduction.
In my childhood, the home I left in the morning was very different from the home I returned to after school. How could I know about alcohol's effects on an adult? I just knew that the situation at home was always rapidly evolving, and I better keep up the narrative in my head, predict who might be mad at me and why, when next I see them.
My reality now could not be more different. I do not anticipate that someone else has cultivated a narrative of enmity or blame toward me in the time we have not interacted. We stay connected because over time my loved ones show me that they are capable of not interacting and not advancing a narrative about why we aren't interacting, how that's a problem, what was problematic about the last time we interacted, and how to "get connected again." They aren't closing up and disconnecting, I'm not closing up and disconnecting, and all our reunions are sweet.
But I had to LEARN this. Real practices in relationship for identifying narratives and cultivating discernment about what I entertain and how. Real beliefs and narratives of my sovereignty, real beliefs that others are thinking of me kindly, or busy with some other love in their life. Real understandings that we do not know each other at all--because that is the stage for curiosity. I had to learn acts of collaboration as well as the energy of collaboration, I had to learn what collaboration looks like in emotional intensity, in extreme situations, when both the wheels fall off.
Now, that's what I teach. I'm not healing, I'm not leading transformation, I'm not helping people leap into the arms of a new life. I'm helping you curl up cozy in the life that surrounds you, showing you the way to integrate the awakening of that peak experience into the banalities of life, adjusting your lenses to recognize the wholeness of right now.
I teach how to stay connected, how to be connected, how to bring it all here right now, agile for every moment, with or without a plan. There is a Way of right relationship, and it takes infinite forms.
Each form is a template, bringing more understanding of the way. The more we give the Way form, the more the Way informs every form of life.
It's a huge transformation for nothing to be different.
