For the last few weeks I've been re-reading "Grace and Grit", the book that first turned me onto Ken Wilber when I was seventeen. I've been loving re-reading the story and really savoring not only the beautiful life and story of Treya's death and her battle with cancer, but also the amazing way she had with words. She was quite the poet!
 
Anyways, I found myself really strongly resonating with Treya's shadow side. I too have many similar shadow struggles, namely, I have a really hard time asking for help, feeling loved and feeling like I'm good enough. These of coarse are just personality aspects and at some level I also feel my practice opens parts of my being which see through and beyond them, but they still play a relative role in my everyday existence and how I respond and reach out to the world in certain moments.

Treya found the act of letting in others love an extreme challenge and so one of her central practices while going through chemotherapy was to imagine herself in the center of a circle of people who loved her and breathing in their love like white light. When I first read this my reaction was "Oh my god I couldn't do that it is so narcissistic". That was when I knew immediately that I had to do it! 

When I got home I sat down for my usual Tonglen meditation session but began with this visualization. I started placing all the people in my life who love me in a circle around me. Then I found it extending to teachers and leaders, some who were dead, some I'd never met. Then even people who I wasn't that close with started to sit down at my circle and offer this complete unconditional love to me. As each new person sat down I found the tears flowing more swiftly as I struggled with feeling both overwhelmed with unconditional love and also afraid and judgmental of myself for doing the visualization. I continued to just Witness the reactions and keep a clear, empty channel of clarity at the center of my heart. I started to feel more and more how everyone was exuding this unconditional love to me at all times, even when it looked quite the opposite in the relative, conditional world.

I found that day that I no longer felt the same clinging or wishing people to fulfill any criteria or say any specific thing in order to feel loved by them. It was like even if people were unable to listen to me that day or totally oblivious and caught up in their own whirlwind; I still felt their love for me on this totally deep unconditional level. The same love that I could then offer back without saying a word or "doing" anything. 

I was interested in this because I think it will fit in well with this paper I want to write on the Levels of Love (Kierkegaard and Irigaray). For both our ability to give and receive love are developmental. I have often been really good at giving; I've always been the helper at the less developed stages, and in the deeper/higher stages, I've grown more inclined to Tonglen practice,  to being the background which holds suffering with total clarity and compassion. But I've always struggled with the reception of love from others, it always circles around fear of rejection, fear of loosing someone etc. But the highest forms of receiving love from others are not separate from giving... I know most of you know this. I myself don't believe I truly understood this in a real bodily sense until this past week.

Anyways, I highly recommend this practice for anyone who struggles with receiving love or fear of rejection... It is an essential practice for sure and it really illuminates how we truly are loved so intensely at all times that it actually hurts to truly feel it....

Photographs of myself, static moments captured by eclipses of time, moments of fabrication, holding the self, clutching to a nullified existence, unable to breath under the closed folds of claustrophobic space that surround a face no longer in relation to the other. Flesh bound to decay, plays itself off as immortal…eternal. The binding pulls of attraction and revulsion, the narrowness of my mirrored view finds no resting place in a heart torn by the dualist skew. It breaks the mirror into shattered moments, traps reflection in severed locations and begs masturbatory seduction, of the self on the self on the self… an infinite regress of perspectives on the self that is no one, that becomes the image I see, a self that adds ever subtler flavors of suffering to its own arousing delusion.

 

But static images are only a manifestation of static thoughts, a repercussion of our need to hold perspectives as substance. Fear is in abundance and leads us to continually play this game of self vs. mirror. This was why I repeated my own rape, the abusive infliction of objectification that I tried to use to break the static taste of this imagery. Break the object to find the subject, then rape the self to find the soul, one way to annihilate existence and open ourselves to ecstatic surrender, one way to blind ourselves so that we might perceive the beauty of God… I’m not saying that I recommend rape… nor would I recommend the flight to God as a form of good health. But it is God’s rape that every woman yearns for. The rape that undoes the image, the rape that forces submission of the static, the unconsented intrusion that tears open the strength sitting at the center of our most humiliating vulnerability.          

 

                                                                                                            -March 18, 2007

 

I've been writing my final paper for my Philosophy of Sex and Gender class and have been just processing and sorting through all the feminist approaches and theories around sex and gender. I'm using Integral theory and especially Carol Gilligan and Susan Cook Greuter's work to talk about the development of the feminine and I'm hoping to expand the paper in the summer into a publishable one.
The title is: Re-Imaging the "Essential Feminine": Moving from Static to Dynamic Conceptions of Beauty and Femininity.

I was just doing some writing/poetry on the whole process tonight and thought I would post it for any of you it might interest. It is just my sort of mix of thoughts put into poetry that speaks to the pain, struggle, appreciation and yearning for where feminism has been, where it is and where it could grow into.


When it comes to our bodies as women neither self, culture nor nature can be negated or forgotten in their essential shaping of our flesh. None can be refused existence or dissolved into essential fictions of the other. To be corporeal as “woman” is to hold both the painful constraints of our prison and the blissful possibilities for our freedom. It is through the canvas of our bodies that we reveal and express the creative gestures of our interiority. It is upon the vulnerability of our skin that we write and perform the unique signature of our culture. And it is within the formed embrace of our vaginas that we welcome the folds of the universe to penetrate the space of our unique physical form.

 A woman’s body is not meant to be explained away by her mind in a way that deconstructs its mystery and renders it neutered to thought, to touch, to pleasure. A woman’s body is not meant to be taken control of by her fear of intimacy or a need for self-reliance and control. The heart becomes hardened by concrete wombs of self-enclosure, our movements become mechanical, we forget our feet, our breasts, and our anger that surges with desire, screaming to be seen as beauty.

A woman’s body is an offering of love, and cannot be reduced to an idea, to a history or to an image. A woman’s body naturally yearns to love uncontrollably, to feel love’s force opening its tenderness to ecstatic and unbearable surrender. This is what we are struggling to remember, the transformative possibilities of our own bodies. Women, Woman, Wimmin. I don’t want feminism to take away my language, my voice, my unique letters of communication. Please don’t reduce my body to neutrality or lifeless androgeny. Please don’t reduce my interiority to a side effect of social fabrication. Instead, touch me, remember me, kiss me, create me. Help me reclaim my gestures, my breath, my beauty. Help me unfold my femininity and embrace my masculinity. Be a mother, a sister, and the most intimate lover to my soul.