Towards Sexual Initiation: Part 3 — This is How I Broke Me
Read Part 1: The Ecstasy of Escape
Read Part 2: Encounter With the Priestess
It was early October; my favorite time of year, when the sun begins to descend evermore into the south, and the shadows grow long. The necessary death that is the winter is on the coming horizon, but for a moment nature seems to pause in her abundance and climactic perfection. It was in such a moment that I was born in October 33 years ago, and each year the month feels like a death and re-birth; my special time.
And there I was, in the Alentejo in Southern Portugal, feeling an abundance of love and connection for one of the first times in my life. My contact with Annika had only deepened in the days after the Love School where we kept “running into each other” (aka we lived in the same village) and each time we took it as life turning us towards more connection.
At first, it was casual, simple, and yet, unnervingly deep; especially in our times of sexual contact. And as life continued to “guide” us together, the connection took on new forms of both insight — and attachment. Amidst Tamera’s culture attempting to unshackle love from the traumas of the past, Annika and I began to uncover deeper layers of our habituated patterns of relating.
One of the first insights was that it’s simply fantastic what tangles one can wrap oneself in when the frame is that it’s “guided” — which, in reflection, could be a convenient rationalization to abdicate responsibility for the path one is on. And yet, it did feel guided, and in that guidance, revelations came — to illustrate, I’ll share a journal entry from that time, in reflection on a trip our entire course took to the Beach for 3 days.
October 19th, 2018
We just arrived back from the Beach — sandy, sunburned, and beaming with the life-force of emergent community; And I am beaming in my deepening love story with Annika. I went to the Beach with little expectations on us sharing time, given we’d be with 50 other humans, and yet life kept bringing us together again and again.
It’s a wondrous thing to arrive to a beach at the edge of the European Continent, peering out West across the Atlantic to the land where I was born. And to do so with 50 others from around the world, building a little pop-up village at this edge where the old world meets the new; suddenly, all begins to feel possible.
We set up big shade roofs for sleeping and for the kitchen and most people from our group slept together in big cuddle pods under the roofs. I, however, put my bed way off on the far side of the beach, next to a freshwater drip from a sea cave and beneath the glorious stars. In these rare days outside of Tamera, I prefer the solitude of nature to more social time.
However, that first night when I went to sleep there was another person who came later, setting up their bed relatively close to mine. I was rather annoyed, given that I wanted solitude and yet I was also curious. The mixture of annoyance and curiosity started to activate my system to an extent where I finally had to get up and investigate.
I walked up to the mystery sleeping bag and made out the contours of a feminine form, and lots of hair. Was mystery woman asleep? I leaned in closer to observe the face, seeing if I could make out who it was. As I leaned in, two eyes opened, and I was met by shining amulets bluer than the dark of the deep sea — it was Annika. We both giggled — she also had no idea who the person at the other sleep spot (mine) was, and yet it felt so obviously true that without trying we’d found each other. I laid down next to her in the sand and folded myself under her sleeping bag. She folded her body partly onto mine, and we laid there in a sandy embrace, gazing up into the Milky Way; for a long time just in the sleeping, wild silence of a calm night, next to the crashing waves of an Atlantic that never ceased.
The next night I came back from the fire and found her again, lying there asleep, cozy between the sand and stars. I kneeled down and gently began to caress her face. Slowly eyes the color of the sea where it meets the horizon opened and smiled upon me. “I have something to show you,” I whispered, as I motioned her to get up. Annika nodded and slowly nestled out of her sleeping bag. Once standing I turned her body towards the North and said, “Look up, just above the cliff.” As she looked, I put binoculars in front of her eyes. “Wow,” she gasped, seeing the pleiades star system in 10X magnification, distant stars glistening in all their beauty. I allowed her to fully take that perception in before saying, “There’s something else I want to show you.” I slowly pulled the binoculars up and slightly to the left. “You’ll know when you find it, it looks like nothing you’ve ever seen before.” In a few moments, she gasped again, “what is that?”
“Andromeda,” I replied.
“A whole other galaxy. Every star we see is part of the Milky Way, is part of our galaxy, except this — it’s the farthest away you’ve ever seen.” I felt her body ripple as it took in this perception. I placed my arms around her belly and slowly began to kiss her neck. After a while of gazing at stars, we went back to her sleeping bag and both nestled inside, wrapped leg over leg, arm over body, together in a sweet embrace.
As we lay there, I asked her how her evening was. She told me she had been communicating with Augusto, through feeling. Augusto is Annika’s partner, of 5 years, who currently lives in Germany. I simply listened as she told me how strongly she felt his presence. I didn’t feel fear, nor sadness, nor joy; I just felt, perceived, and held a space big enough for two people who just peered into another galaxy. That’s how big love is, it travels the speed of light. And so why would Annika, or anyone loving another man, lead me to feel small? — it’s just more love.
The sun doesn’t shine upon a single flower, saying, “Just you!..I’ll shine just on you. You are the ONE!” No, the sun shines on all.
After having the space to speak about Augusto, she began to share about her feelings towards me, reckoning that something was awakening in her heart. I conceded too that something was awakening in my heart — it was no longer just simple and casual and feeling free.
This was the point where previously I would disengage, given that Annika has a partner, and therefore the relationship couldn’t “go anywhere.” And yet in this moment, at this edge of the world Europe, whoever I thought I was in matters of love crashed against the shores of a different possibility. Questions began to rise like the moon now gently kissing the horizon:
How do we love and not demand forever, or to be the one?
How do we love when a future is never guaranteed?
Can the heart stay open, knowing what it loves will be lost, nay, that it never “had it” anyways?
I shared these questions with Annika, to which she responded by nuzzling her face into my chest with a sigh, as her hands held me tighter around my back.
I was clearly saying the “right” things. Her sweetness was beginning to really engulf my system in feelings that, at least up until that moment, I only had one word for: love.
I am falling in love with a love priestess! A love priestess that is a beautiful, open being, who has a partner of 5 years. So can I really dare to open to this person who most likely will not marry me, bear my children, be my anything and perhaps who I have no future with?
Can I dare to open to someone who imagines her daily life, the primacy in her life with a man, with someone else?
Actually, there is no question here. Love is an anarchistic power, and it will do with me what it wants, so I let go of resisting.”
A year later, I cringe reading these words. Although beautiful sentiments pointing towards a vision of “freedom in love,” I see now that these words were construed by my mind spinning lofty visions, trying to justify how this “falling in love” feeling was somehow any different than the previous times in my life.
I knew, precisely because of my training at Tamera, that most of what we consider “falling in love” in the West is ultimately a projection of our own wounding, a usually too quick attempt to label and cement a wonderful momentary feeling of wholeness. I already knew that this feeling can never sustain in the nuclear style partnership, where one person is a vain substitute for the loss of village, yet, I then did not know that the projection of love itself — no matter the outer structure — is inherently impossible to sustain, for it is just that; an imagining.
I had even been warned not to fall in love with a love priestess, and yet, here I was; so enamored by the attention and beauty of Annika, and how good it felt to finally be received by a woman, that I was deeply being hooked…ultimately by myself.
There were some profound evolutions and maturity in the deepening of mine and Annika’s contact. For one, as I mentioned above in my journal, Annika had a partner of 5 years. She would routinely tell me when she was thinking of him, feeling him, and, despite whatever momentary flurry of fear and jealousy, I would rather quickly find a place of curiosity, listening, and authentic joy around this other love in her life.
When that man, Augusto, came to Tamera for 10 days (he was living in Germany at the time), we navigated the territory beautifully and I fully stayed present in my connection with Annika; inwardly allowing her complete freedom to choose to be where and with who, she wished (of course she was already outwardly allowed, always).
Annika and I were extremely public about our relationship, routinely using the Forum (Tamera’s social technology of transparency) to share what was happening, and receiving mirrors, sometimes brutally honest, about the traps of our connection.
I remember one day an older male friend of mine from my course listened to me, as I lamented about how increasingly weighted, and often distraught, perhaps even obsessive, I was becoming about Annika. He simply replied back, “yours and Annika’s connection is about Eros, it’s about really high energy, it’s a sexual gift — stop collapsing it into a romantic story through all the hooks of saying you love each other, and endless cuddling and doting on one another.”
He was right. I knew at one level that I was playing out a very deeply grooved pattern of projecting Annika to be the one, and hooking her and myself through ways of continually tracking and relating to her, even when we weren’t in the moments of connection. It was as if my psyche was fusing itself to hers — or an image of her — and no longer was I autonomous. Rather, like a rudder to my boat, I was completely swayed by her movements, and whether or not I perceived she was accepting or rejecting me in any one moment.
In psycho-analytic terms, what was happening is known as transference, which is:
“the phenomenon of redirecting emotions that were originally felt in childhood, or in former relationships with previous partners, onto someone in your present reality. When one is caught in transference, they cannot see reality clearly. The emotion of fear often works overtime when there is no immediate threat.”*
Most love relationships in the western world are built upon unconscious transference, and that’s how patterns of trauma and abuse continue — we transfer, instead of heal, old, often ancestral, wounds. When Tamera speaks about “freeing love from fear,” I believe they are speaking to love beyond transference, and the necessity of community to both fill us with the belonging that no one person now, and no mommy and daddy in a nuclear situation of the past, could ever provide us. Additionally, the community serves to give these potent mirrors and reflections, helping to keep us “Sober” about what is happening in our relationships, and curtailing abusive patterns when they start.
Although we usually need to still live through our own lessons for healing — we must come to our own insight — the role of the community is to support that healing path to be as minimally damaging to oneself and others as possible (I.e. you don’t need to hit rock-bottom or cause real harm to others to finally have insight).
And so, despite my friend’s mirrors and advice, I carried on mostly per the course with Annika, for the sex was sooooo good! I mean really, unbelievably, incredibly good.
I remember a few times in the middle of love-making, moments where our merging was pulling so hard at the veils between the worlds, that Annika had to stop and pray out loud — or perhaps negotiate — with the Goddess that we were not calling in a child, and to please send any spirits that are trying to come through us back to the other side. Other times, she and I would simply start crying at the beauty we were touching. It does something to man to have a woman he’s fallen for, on top of him, in the middle of love-making, begin to cry because of how beautiful she feels.
Tamera is the only place I’ve experienced tears from making love, for in Tamera, the notion of “make love, not war” has become a political imperative where their culture of “peace research” has unfolded over 40 years with the understanding that through making love (in all the myriad ways), we alleviate war on this planet. There is an understanding that violence comes from the eruption of blocked life energies, and that life energy will release. It either can happen consciously, with love, or unconsciously, usually as violence. When I think of the Me-too movement, I see this pattern so clearly. The shame of sexuality, fueled by eons of a Patriarchal, fear-based, control-oriented culture, led to that life-force energy coming out sideways in a multitude of nefarious and shadowed ways; especially in men. And it makes sense, for in a culture where we are forced to uphold a proper image of ourselves to get ahead, where lies and deception are indirectly (or sometimes even directly) encouraged, one’s sexual truth, one’s longings, are not safe; and thus they remain repressed and hidden, leading to their maladaptation, and spilling into the world, in often horrific ways.
As I wrote in my journal last fall, as Annika and I would meet, we would consciously place our meetings onto a level of spiritual and political relevance; understanding deeply how our encounter was healing something for the whole related to/regarding this ancient war between men and women (not to mention the significance of a German and Jew making love). This opening to that significance directly opened new worlds of feeling and consciousness in myself — I never really want to make love again without that framing; it’s too small to be only considered a personal, even purely hedonistic, endeavor**
Yet none of that deep political and spiritual understanding prevented me from falling, like I’ve done every other time in my life, in love. I was falling out of my center, out of my power, and into a false promise that this love would become something.
It got bad. Towards the end of October, nearing the end of our course, I thought about Annika at least 1/2 of the time. She became like a shitty pop song that is constantly running in the background of one’s mind, one that you start to hate yourself for ever loving so much, now that it’s stuck to you.
I wasn’t really happy, except for the increasingly rare moments where she gave me attention — for my anxious attachment style was beginning to push her away. And of course, in that anxiety, I did everything I could to do it all just right, my relationship with her becoming one over-construed calculation after another.
Should I ask her to hang out now, or later, after lunch, when she’s more likely to have time? Should I sit by her in class, or wait until tomorrow.. to pretend like I’m not really wanting to be close to her?
Our course was coming to an end soon — I knew that my time with Annika was limited. I devised a plan, a beautiful vision of how Annika and I would end our time together with a “love trip” to the beach..it would be ceremonial, deep, sexy and perfect.
I expressed this wish to Annika about a week and a half before the course was ending and her reaction was mixed. She was a bit aloof and simply responded with a “maybe, let’s see” — skirting off my desire to make a concrete plan, which of course sent my anxiety into overdrive. A few days later when I brought it up again, she again wavered in responding, but finally said, “let’s go to the beach with others as well, it can be a community time and our love-trip.”
I was a bit disappointed in her answer, as I was imagining having Annika all to myself, but I also was excited to stay in community. At Tamera there’s a healthy balance oscillating between community and more private time, alone or with others; so I agreed.
As the time of the trip grew near, I felt nervous and excited, and a bit fearful that it wouldn’t go as I planned. It felt really important to me that Annika and I “close” our connection we built in these past months in a conscious, and perhaps ritualistic way, so again I made that request clear to her. She simply smiled and said “yes,” she wanted that too. Whew, I could breathe a bit.
In the days before the trip, one day at lunch, I was speaking with an older male mentor of mine, who also happened to be an occasional lover of Annika’s, and who I trusted deeply. At the end of lunch, Annika came over to our table and flirted with us a bit. As her and I interacted in our typical way, the older man sat and watched, and then, without pause, interrupting our conversation said, while raising one hand parallel to the ground above his head, and his other hand parallel to the ground but a few feet lower, “Oh I get it — Annika is up here, and John, your down here.”
He spoke as if it was the most obvious truth. His hands at varying heights were describing the levels at which he saw Annika and I in our relationship. In other words, he was stating, matter-of-factly, that I had put Annika on a pedestal, while she hadn’t done the same to me.
Upon hearing this pointed out in such a blunt manner, I was overwhelmed and extremely embarrassed. I felt a surge of energy flow through my body in protest, and I remember saying something which I’m sure was stupid and desperate, to try and play it off. Immediately I knew the man was right, his accounting true, and it was a gift of reflection I just wasn’t yet ready to receive.
So I shrugged it off and carried on, not knowing what to do with this revelation, even if I could fully accept it.
Finally the day came where our course ended. It was nearly mid-November, and the guest area campus at Tamera had become a ghost-town. Autumn rains had been washing the place clean off and on for a week. A small group of us, maybe 15, readied to go a beach-town an hour south, where we were renting some small cottages close together.
As we prepared cars for the drive, I maneuvered the situation so that Annika and I would be in the same car; not seeing how little strategic moves like that, coming from my fear, ultimately were breaking the flow of trust and connection between Annika and I. At Tamera, there’s a cultural impetus to track when we begin to spin out in the mind of strategizing, realizing that strategy is often a manipulation, i.e. control — what humans default towards when trust is not there. In many ways it seems that the whole of Tamera was a project to step out of the 6000 years of humans losing trust in life and strategizing/manipulating their way into the globalized, patriarchal, colonial world, I and so many of us grew up in. Yet here I was, at the end of a 3 month deep dive at Tamera, my 5th time there, still attempting to manipulate reality to secure love!
At first, it seemed to work. Our car ride was beautiful, stopping at a cafe in a nearby Portuguese town for coffee and cake, all of us in the playful mood of students having just finished the semester. Annika and I were clowning around, in and out of romantic gestures. For instance, when we went to the super market to buy food for our trip, Annika hopped into the shopping cart and I pushed her around the store to gather our food, stopping every few aisles to kiss this woman I thought I loved passionately. Those moments felt like heaven, like I finally arrived home.
It all changed when we came together with the group at our cottages. I was so flush in the love feeling for Annika held throughout our car journey, that once in the presence of others, I quickly became nervous about losing her to the group. I lost my mood and became a bit despondent.
That night as we had communal dinner, and sat around the table joking as friends, I became more and more anxious about bringing Annika back to our bedroom to finally have our love time. Annika was fully immersed in the group experience, and I was too overwhelmed and nervous to ask her to leave, so eventually I retired to our shared room (we agreed before to share a room as part of our “love trip”). Annika came in a few hours later and, sensing my weirdness from the night, wanted to go to sleep — no cuddles, no sex.
In the morning she felt the same; she was affectionate, but with an obvious wall put up around deeper intimacy and any sexual contact. I, in return, became even more overwhelmed — this wasn’t as I planned it. We returned to the group for breakfast and all I felt was threat. I spent most of my morning tracking Annika and struggling to resist my mind’s wrath of trying to concoct a way to get her to give me love again.
Luckily, I was in community and so I spoke about it with others, but this was mostly just venting; it didn’t really relieve my anxiety. Our group went for the day to the town and beach, and Annika and I took space, going in separate small groups. I ran into Annika in town later that day, and I was so overjoyed to see her, but she was still distant and cold, and wanting to be alone.
Later that afternoon, when I returned to the group house, I discovered that Annika had been invited to a love encounter with another man from the group (who had been her occasional, albeit much less frequently than me, lover during the course). She accepted.
I went through the roof when I found out. My emotionally fueled mind screamed,
“Annika was supposed to be with me! This was OUR love trip and she won’t even touch me and then she goes and sleeps with another guy. What the fuck?!?!”
Again, I am so grateful to have been in community, for I was able to process this with other people, and not bring it to Annika — an essential part of building a peace culture; protecting each other from one another’s triggers and trauma responses. Looking back, this is exactly what I was in; an activation of my childhood trauma of abandonment by my mother.
That night Annika and I barely interacted. In a group circle share, she made it clear that she didn’t want to share the room with me. It was my last night there, our last night together, for the next day I would catch a train to Lisbon to fly back home to the States. There I was sunk — my entire dream of a love-trip crashing down around me, and the last months of Annika’s and my connection, suddenly coming undone; like a storm ripping through a poorly built house.
That next morning, Annika and I had a circle, held by a few other close friends from our group. I had thought, in my more overwhelmed moments, to come to the circle expressing all my anger, frustration and sadness, to really make Annika see how she Fucked up and how much it hurt me. Instead, I simply expressed my gratitude and gave her a gift of a sweetgrass braid I wild harvested myself back in California. Then her and I went on a short walk to the beach. I simply focused on the joy of being in her presence, and put my heart-break and overwhelm to the back-burner for the moment. We got naked, we swam, we played and we talked about staying in touch. Then we hugged and I departed.
It wasn’t suppose to end like this.
On the plane ride home, for the first time in months, I was alone. And finally in that space from the group, from Annika and from Tamera — I began to fully see how far I had slid into an unhealthy, uncentered love dynamic. I saw how much, again, I had attempted to make someone “the one.” I realized that my heart was broken, for the 2nd time in my life. However, as compared to the epic heartbreak 8 years earlier, which led me on this journey to Tamera (detailed in this series of essays from 2015), this time my heart was broken every step of the way in the full light and consciousness of community. I realized then that heart break was the book-ends to my story, thus far, with Tamera. What had began in unconscious heartbreak in 2010, with I being a victim of love, was now ending with a conscious heart break — my taking ownership for breaking my own heart.
It has taken me this past year of integration to realize that the journey of the last 9 years have been my initiation into the power of love through the shedding of the story of the one. No one woman, no one person, will be my salvation, and when I stop projecting my wounds and thus my unconscious longings onto this story of the one, of nuclear family, I can orient towards a new story, a story of the village, of healthy, regenerative human culture, as being the true container for my life.
When we let go of the story of the one, we can move beyond personal heartbreak, and into intimacy with the heartbreak of the world. When I no longer play into the cycles of drama and wounding in love, I create space to be with a much bigger heartbreak — that of an entire planet in profound crisis. Perhaps, from that place of anchoring in the heartbreak of the world — the love I need on a personal, human level, will show up softly, quietly, in the ways I least expect, in the corners of my life that I have forgotten to tend. Perhaps it already has.
- J. Wolfstone, Salt Spring Island, B.C. Sept. 10th, 2019
Notes:
*www.artofwellbeing.com/2018/09/15/transference/elive.tvlive.tv
**Our lust can be the deepest source of activism, as not just held by Tamera — it’s a deeply necessary understanding that is emerging across this planet, perhaps best articulated by Black, Queer-woman, Feminist author, Adrienne Marie Brown in her latest book — Pleasure Activism (she also authored the best-selling Emergent Strategy). Also to note, it was another black, queer-woman, feminist author, who first popularized the notion of the Erotic being a key to activism in her seminal essay, Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power
