Everybody's got a story

So.. I was contacted by a gentleman via my stories on Literotica and we've entered this dialogue . He told me a bit about himself and asked me if I had any advice as to how he could be more sensual. I responded as follows:

If you want to be more sensual in a sexual way, more comfortable with your sexuality, then I would recommend that you make love to yourself. Masturbation, with self-love. I masturbate daily. I treat myself to long baths twice a week... I shave, oil my legs and mound, and retire to my bed for an evening of fantasy and voluptuous masturbation.

And because he'd not had much success in his intimate relationships the past few years. I asked him some questions:

You say that the women you have been with in the past you were able to be open and sensual with, but now, you aren't sure you can. What has changed? What happened in your past that you are getting hung up on?

He responded with his story. A good story, a painful story, an honest, self-revealing story that moved me and inspired me. A story of a man who suffered a profound loss and still went on to create an extraordinary life for himself. I responded with:

As for what you wrote.... There isn't anything wrong with you. Really.

I think that what went awry for you in your relationships is what happens to most of us, including me. And it has to do with Fear.

The thing about Fear is that we will always feel fear. Our fears will never go away. We may resolve some of our fears, but we will always encounter situations in our lives that cause us to feel afraid. And most of us respond to life out of fearful places. We let our fears get in the way of living life. We allow our fears and our pasts to dictate how we respond to the current situation instead of being present to what is really going on. But I've learned that it doesn't have to be or stay that way. Before I tell you what I've learned, let me share a bit of my story with you, so we can establish that I do understand where you are coming from and why you feel as you do.

My mother left me with my grandparents when I was 10. My grandfather died that same year. My father got custody and moved us to a new town, and he moved my sisters and I nearly every year from then on. I lost my mother, my friends, the life I knew, over and over again. I was so tired of the pain of loss, and so afraid of losing people, that I stopped bothering to form attachments at all. When I entered romantic relationships, I insisted that my lovers understand that the relationship would end, sooner or later, and that I could not, would not, be possessed. I was an emotional coward hiding under the guise of being a 'free spirit', and I knew it, and I knew myself for a fraud.

In my early 30's things started changing. I faced the fact that the way I approached life and the methods I used to cope with the stresses, disappointments, problems, and fears in my life were not working, and I went looking for something that did work. I read self-help books, did two years of therapy, wrote in my journal, conversed with people, attended worshops, and contemplated my life.

And one of the things that became apparent was that I needed to be courageous. I needed to have the courage to face that I would always have fears and problems--that there was no magic wand that would smooth out the road of life ahead of me--and that I needed to find the courage to not let those things stop me from living my life right now.

One of the Christophers in my life told me that I also needed to stop trying to plan and predict life. Intellectually, I understood what he said. I understood the argument that if one can plan and predict life, then one is not living life... one is re-living the past by over-laying it on the future. But recently, I GOT it. I got what he meant on a visceral level. I got the whole thing Jung said about neurotic suffering. I got the whole thing about fear of the uncertainty of life causing me to pull as much of the familiar past forward into my future as I could. I realized that in my fear I was forcing myself to re-live the past, even though I really didn't want to. I really, really, don't want to relive the past. It is dead, and there is nothing for me there.

Today, the future is wide open. It is a vast nothingness, a place of potentials, and I have the power to chose to either fill it with the expectations and fears and disappointments of the past, or create the life I want to live out of it. And I want to live an extraordinary, vibrant, fulfilled life. And since I want to live an extraordinary, vibrant, fulfilled life, I am choosing to BE an extraordinary, vibrant, fulfilled person. But in order to be those things, I had to accept that fear would always be a part of my life, and find in myself the courage to not let it stop me from living the life I want to live and being the person I want to be.

So there it is. That's my story, and my advice. Find the courage to let your fears remain where they belong, in the past. Sure, you may open up to someone and you may get hurt. That's Life. That's the risk we take. But being hurt isn't so bad, and adults are by nature far more compassionate than we give them credit for. So open up to lots of people. Play the odds. Keep trying. Keep living. Keep being the person you want to be, and you will find that others will be drawn to you, to that person you are being, and you will have the love and companionship you have chosen for yourself. Really.

It will be interesting to see what happens next.

Returned from California

My visit to California was extraordinary. I got to see two different sets of friends, my sister and her family, and my father. I watched my nephew in a play, bounced my niece on my knees, enjoyed the 50F Bay Area weather and the 90F Valley weather, and smiled a lot.

Last Friday I pulled up to my sister's house around 11pm. She stumbled out of bed to greet me and gave me a big hug.
She said "Wow, you feel good."
I said "Thank you."
She said, "No, I mean you feel GOOD. Have you fallen in love or lost weight or something?"
I said, "I've fallen in love with Life and I've lost the past."

Landmark Education is paying off. Best investment I've made in myself. Better than the two years of therapy I went through. Wheee. Finally, I have access to tools that make it possible for me to live an even more vibrant, extraordinary life!

Dawning comprehension

I participated in the Landmark Forum this weekend hoping I would discover new tools for tackling those fears and problems that I felt were taking up too much of my energy. I wanted to free myself up to pursue a happier, more fulfilled life. I walked away with full and complete comprehension of three things: that I would always experience fear, that I would always have problems, and that the tools I wanted were too small, too specific. Instead of discovering the magic wand that would make fears and problems disappear, I now have something more important: the tools to live an extraordinary life despite these difficulties. Now all I need is practice!

One of the things that really hit home with me this weekend was the distinction between knowing a thing, and comprehending it. I have a tendency to collect knowledge, to learn as much as I can about something in hopes of finding the answer(s) to my questions. But answering my questions about a thing does not mean I comprehend it, that its mystery has unfolded for me, that I have truly 'gotten' it.

This weekend I learned how incomplete my understanding of what it means to be human is. How incomplete my understanding of the human condition is. A lifetime of empathy, two years of therapy, years of gathering information and evidence, of reading books like Tolle's The Power of Now and Heidegger's Being and Time and Batchelor's Buddhism Without Beliefs--I learned much from these things, and I intuited some wisdom from them, but my understanding was (not surprisingly) incomplete.

My viewpoint was too fixed, too limited, too focused on questions and answers and meanings. I was asking questions and then neglecting to question the answers until the point of irreducibility. For example, the question at the heart of all human angst is: What is the meaning of life? And the answer I arrived at was: Life has whatever meaning I ascribe to it. And I was close, oh god I was so fucking close, but my understanding was incomplete. The answer to the question What is the meaning of life is, Life has no meaning in and of itself. Life is simply life. This is irreducible--it has been stripped of all romantic notions and religious interpretations. One might even think that this answer also strips life of all hope of meaning anything. However, (and this distinction is the most important part) our lives, individually, have whatever meaning and purpose we choose to create for our lives.

My life has whatever meaning and purpose I choose for it. Now that is a powerful statement. And arising out of the flowering of that powerful and empowering comprehension is a question far more powerful and pertinent than What is the meaning of life. It is, What meaning and purpose do I choose to create for my life? And the answer, right now, is, I don't know. Yet. I need to find a problem that I feel is worthy of my life, of dedicating my life to. For now, I choose to create the possibility of being consistently awake to the fact that I am perfect, complete and whole as I am, of passionate commitment to loving myself as I am right now, and being open to the possibilities that love brings into my life and the world. Baby steps, right?

(I enjoyed re-reading my blog entry from 9 days ago. I've taken 'choice' to the next level, I think.)