Awakening to Consciousness Within
Twenty years ago, I was really in despair about love and intimacy. I had this pattern of being attracted to unavailable men, and that was a pattern that went through decades of my life. I used to stay in relationships for some years, but then something broke down and we broke up. Then came a moment when I got that if I was not going to intervene, the trajectory was clear. I did not want to leave this planet without experiencing lasting intimacy and love. Of course, in order to really bring that forth, I needed to look at where my blindness was, where I was unconscious.
So I decided to deeply delve into meditation with Thich Nhat Hanh, this Vietnamese monk who has a monastery in the south of France. At that time, I was a management consultant and I was on a project in Germany. So I just took the train down to Plum Village near Bordeaux.
Being in silent meditation for 10 days - like sitting meditation, walking meditation, eating meditation – was excruciating. I was so confronted with myself because there was no lover around who I could blame for the way I was feeling. While it was really difficult for those 10 days, I left the retreat with a new insight getting that I am the generator of my feelings. Until then I had lived my life like a reactive machine subjected to others in my environment.
Then from there, after that deep dive into meditation, I went on to really apply myself to the study of Tantra like a discipline. Not just reading books and doing a practice here and there. No, that was an immersion. And in the immersion tremendous openings and healing arose.
Actually, I got in touch with some cellular memory where I discovered deeply seeded distrust towards men that I had not been aware of until then.
The memory had to do with my teenage years when I was 18 years old: first love, first boyfriend, and then first intercourse. After two years of bliss and joy with this young man who I so adored, I didn’t feel ready for intercourse. However, I thought, "Okay, I'm going to agree because he wanted it," … and it was extremely painful. I had to go to the gynecologist and then the bill from the gynecologist went to my house, my dad opened it and all hell broke loose. I felt so alone and not understood and really a whole world broke down for me.
Shortly after that the boyfriend left, and my dad was this kind of a dad who said to me when I shared with him that I was going to split the bill for the gynecologist with my boyfriend, "You won't allow yourself to get paid,” with this connotation of sex for pay. It was just so beyond what that all meant to me. And that was the time when I decided that men are never there for you when you really need them.
This decision had been living in the background ever since permeating every one of my relationships and everything I was doing. It’s like a monkey on the shoulder where you don't even know that it's there, however it’s running the show. No wonder I was attracted to unavailable men because it proofed to me over and over again, "Look, see, they are not there for you." Perhaps, for an afternoon or an evening and then gone.
Through the tantric healing I was able to break that pattern and let go of distrust. What opened up in place of it was love and trust in myself, then deeper trust in men in general, and six months later my beloved came into my life.
It's almost miraculous. And this is available to anybody who is open to finding his or her beloved … or if you're already with your beloved and you feel something is off in your relationship, you can up-level your relationship into higher consciousness.
Stay tuned for Part II of 'Crating Conscious Relationship'
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