That Loving Feeling

Hola mi Gente,

People always wonder why I’m single. At some point soon, I will attempt to answer that query. LOL! Today I’m going to connect you to that holy grail of relationships: “The One,” your “Soulmate,” your real love... 

Love Action

Love is a verb

Everybody wants some love action.

Many of us, even the well-adjusted ones amongst us lesser mortals, seek love and reassurance from others for feelings we seldom experience. If we don’t think we are capable, sexy, or lovable, we will look for others to give us those things. What I am about to attempt is to show how to feel loved in the same way you feel loved when you perceive that another loves you. I will show you how to develop this inner loving quality so that you’re not out there looking to get it from someone else. And even if you’re perfectly well-adjusted, entertain me and act as if... 

Ask most people about love and their reaction usually involves pointing outward. Love is something out there waiting to happen. It sometimes falls on us like a piano out of the sky. Oftentimes, the language we use when talking about romantic love is fatalistic, as in, “I fell for him.” Or it’s a chance we take, or some other nonsense. Most of all, people tend to describe romantic love as a feeling they get from someone else. Love is something you get from other people.

It follows then that being loved or being lovable is not part of a lot of people’s self-concept. It’s funny how we talk about love. We talk about love as if we were passive victims of an elusive emotion: we fall in love. We go crazy with love. Pop songs are full of such imagery. However, isn’t how we describe other emotions ironic? We say, we are angry, we are sad, but how many times do we say, we are love?

Yeah... thought so.

But that is the point: We are love. Anything you ever needed or wanted -- that feeling of love and being loved -- exists within you right this very moment. In fact, I doubt it very much that you will ever find someone to fill that void for you. You will look and look until your sex organs expire from atrophy and still you will not find that love, because you’re looking in all the wrong places.

No date tonight? Let’s find one for you, ok? Stay with me, don’t catch a feeling. I promise that you can go back to your myths and pain after reading this if you so desire.

Right now, I want you to think about something about yourself that is true -- regardless of what others think. Some people will say that they are kind, persistent, or intelligent, for example. The only important thing is that it’s something you hold to be true about yourself.

How do you know this? What is the internal experience that makes you know that you possess this quality? I’m not asking you for what you think, or the feelings you associate with this quality.

I’m asking you, how do you know you possess this quality When you look back to the times when you experience this quality (i.e., kindness, sensuality, compassion, perseverance -- whatever you believe to be true about yourself) what happens inside? Do you talk to yourself, do you see mental pictures; do you feel the movements you make when you express this quality? Perhaps when being kind you see mental pictures of when you were being kind to someone.

Are you doing this? Good! Commit to you memory the things that let you know you possess this quality. Now, what happens to your sense of self when you’re not expressing this quality? For example, if you chose kindness, what happens to your sense of self when you’re being unkind? Do you try to make things right? Good! That shows you really do possess this quality.

How would you feel about thinking of yourself as being love, or as being a lovable person (as in the example of the quality of kindness)? Wouldn’t that be a good idea? You wouldn’t have to go about getting validation from outside of yourself.

Close your eyes and recall one example of a time you experienced creating love or being love or loving. Now put that mental picture into the same place as one of the pictures of being kind (or whatever quality you chose). Make the mental picture the same size, the same distance from you, etc. Now think of another time you experienced love or being lovable, perhaps with another person, or a different situation, and put that mental picture there with the previous one. Continue doing this until you have a bunch of mental images like the ones you have of being kind (or the quality you chose at the beginning). Keep assembling those pictures and storing them.

It may feel a little strange at first, but if you’re actually doing the exercise correctly, each time you develop and store a picture, your feeling of being love or being lovable becomes more real.

Welcome to your real self, people.

Who loves you?

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…

Moral Politics

Hola mi Gente,

Well, now the nation knows what we New Yorkers have known for quite some time: the New York electoral process is broken -- has been for quite some time. I can’t even to wade through the cesspool of yesterday’s primary election. I can only say that 100s of thousands were disenfranchised. That New Yorkers (at least those who had their votes counted) voted overwhelmingly for a hawkish neoliberal Thatcherite.

Suffice it to say that the shit storm was so bad even a mope like faux liberal, Mayor Bill De Blasio, has called for an audit.

* * *

The Sociological Imagination

It is not what you look at but what you see.

 -- Henry David Thoreau

Most of my readers know how much I detest overly simplistic explanations. Take these for example:

• Idiots are consistently voted into office = Voters/ people are stupid.
• The subprime meltdown was the consequence of clueless borrowers.^[1]
• Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.

I could go on ad nauseum on yo ass with a list of the foolish and narrow-minded shit people pull out of their nether regions in their quest to form opinions. I believe that the greatest postmodern challenge facing us is our inability to apply what C. Wright Mills called the sociological imagination (1959). Mills described the sociological imagination as the capacity to shift from one perspective to another: from the political to the psychological; from examination of a single family to evaluation of the national budgets of the world; from considerations of an oil industry to studies of contemporary poetry. Simply put, the sociological imagination is the capacity to view issues from both a micro and macro perspective -- inclusive of divergent points of view.

This lack of the capacity for a sociological imagination is killing us – literally.

We blame “a nation of idiots” on the election of idiots; lazily ignoring the massive propaganda machine tied to interests that want idiots in office. We blame borrowers in what is the greatest financial scam in our nation’s history, ignoring the decades of deregulation and dismantling of government insight that paved the way, not just for the subprime meltdown, but also Enron and every other corporate malfeasance, since the Savings & Loan debacle of the 1980s.

In fact, it is a common practice of neoliberals to set up government agencies for failure and then blame any failure, not on the cause (often lack of oversight--deregulation), but the very agencies they set up to fail. We ignore the fact that a gun gives people -- in a culture steeped in violence -- the power to inflict destruction like no other instrument. Sure pencils don’t make people misspell words, but let me see how many people you can shred with one pencil as opposed to an assault rifle.

::blank stare::

The genius of the neoliberal/ conservative project lies in how they have convinced you that a regressive rather than a progressive tax structure is better for you (they call it “tax relief”). It is remarkable in how it has convinced a number of you to go along with trickle-down and austerity economics -- economic theories advocating for upward shifts in wealth and income (trickle down) no credible economist has ever endorsed, and the bloodletting (austerity) that ensues when the theory fails.

As cognitive linguist, George Lackoff, has shown, our opinions are most often driven by the beliefs, or better put -- by the metaphors -- we live by (2006). Conservatives have exploited this fact for some time and that is partly the reason why people voted for Bush II or still see Hillary Clinton as something other than warped. Most importantly, it is why you vote against your own economic interests. Neoliberal operatives discovered that people vote their values, not on the issues. Therefore, if you can frame, say, “family values” in a conservative way, you have co-opted the most important metaphor we all live by -- the family.

Progressives have labored under the false notion that reason or issues should come first. Yes, issues are important, but people vote on values (frames) -- people make decisions based on emotions -- and if you can’t connect with people on values, you will never get your agenda on board. Let us take the following facts as  examples:

• During the Iraq War, an overwhelming majority of Americans wanted a timetable for pulling out our troops. On economic policy, most Americans support stronger government regulations to protect citizens.
• On trade, polls consistently show the public is very suspicious of the free trade agreements that have hurt the middle class^[2].

If, as polling data consistently shows, the mainstream is more left of center, then why aren’t these issues on the table for public discourse? Part of the answer lies in the reality that the issues have not been framed adequately. A larger part of this lack is that powerful interests invested in undermining progressive policies are now the ones driving public policy. As some social scientists have noted, we have slowly become an oligarchy. One of the ways issues are framed is through repetition. Jon Stewart, formerly of The Daily Show, made a career out of showing hilarious video clip compilations of mainstream media pundits and political leaders repeating the same emotionally charged words over and over.

Far right-wing politicians use this technique consistently. Neoconservative such as Ted Cruz frame their attack on women’s reproductive rights as a life and death moral struggle. His expressed and constantly repeated belief or frame (echoed 24/7 on mainstream news media cycles) is that as a society we are locked in a crusade against those who wish to persecute Christians. His key words include “reckless,” “immoral,” “dangerous,” and his overriding metaphor is one of war -- the war of “good” vs. “evil.”

This is a very effective way to express and embed an idea. The words come with frames of reference attached. Those frames in turn latch on to and activate deeper, subconscious frames that trigger emotions. When repeated every day, the words serve to reinforce deep frames by actually strengthening neural connections in the brains of listeners. Even if you are “smart” or consider yourself a latte-drinking, NPR-listening, sophisticated liberal, this onslaught of frames will have an impact on your thinking. At the very least, these frames serve to move the “center” of the political landscape to the right, in the process relegating progressive ideas tom the margins of the national dialog. In other words, progressive ideas and policies are not even up for discussion and whether you agree with them or not, we are all the poorer because of it.

In that way, I can stand up on a stump and yell out catch phrases such as “family values” or “tough on crime” and immediately in your brain a barrage of conservative-framed issues appear. I can blurt out, “tax and spend” and immediately conservative frames come to your mind. And this unconscious form of manipulation is how public consent is manufactured (Herman & Chomsky, 2002) rather than agreed upon in a conscious, democratic manner.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization… 

Resources

Herman, E. S., & Chomsky, N. (2002). Manufacturing consent: The political economy of the mass media (reprint ed.). New York: Pantheon Books. (click here)

Lakoff, G. (2006). Thinking points: Communicating our American values and vision: A progressive's handbook. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. (You can download a PDF version of this book for free by clicking here)

Mills, C. W. (1959). The sociological imagination (reprint, annotated ed.). New York: Oxford University Press.

---

[1] While the government sponsored mortgage giants were certainly not blameless, Federal Reserve data shows conclusively that it was private mortgage brokers, not Fannie and Freddie, who drove the subprime housing bubble: More than 84 percent of the subprime mortgages in 2006 were issued by private lending institutions. Private firms made nearly 83 percent of the subprime loans to low- and moderate-income borrowers that year.

[2] Public opinion polls suggest that Americans are deeply suspicious of free trade agreements. A national survey by the Pew Research Center reveals the ongoing concerns Americans have regarding free trade. More Americans think free trade slows the economy down (34%) than makes it grow (31%).

That Loving Feeling

¡Hola! Everybody...
People sometimes wonder why I’m single. Tomorrow, I will attempt to answer that query. LOL! Today I’m going to connect you to “The One,” your “Soulmate,” your real love...

* * *

-=[ Love Action ]=-

Love is a verb

Everybody wants some love action!

Many of us seek love and reassurance from others for feelings we seldom experience. Even the well-adjusted ones amongst us lesser mortals. If we don’t think we are capable, sexy, or lovable, we will look for others to give us those things. What I am about to do is show how to feel loved in the same way you feel loved when you perceive that another loves you. I will show you how to develop this inner loving quality so that you’re not out there looking to get it from someone else. And even if you’re perfectly well-adjusted, entertain me and act as if...

Ask most people about love and their answer will usually point outward. Love is something out there waiting to happen. It sometimes falls on us like a piano out of the sky, “Look, up in the sky!... ” LOL! Or, “I fell for him/ her.” Or it’s a chance we take, or some other nonsense. Most of all, people tend to describe love as a feeling they get from someone else. Love is something you get from other people.

It follows then that being love or being lovable is not part of a lot of people’s self-concept. It’s funny how we talk about love. We talk about love as if we were passive victims of an elusive emotion: we fall in love. We go crazy with love. Pop songs are full of such imagery. However, isn’t how we describe other emotions ironic? We say, we are angry, we are sad, but how many times do you hear people say they are love?

Yeah... thought so.

But that is the point: We are love. Anything you ever needed or wanted -- that feeling of love and being loved -- exists within you right this very moment. In fact, I doubt it very much that you will ever find someone to fill that void for you. You will look and look until your sex organs expire from atrophy and still you will not find that love, because you’re looking in all the wrong places.

No date tonight? Let’s find one for you, ok? Stay with me, don’t catch a feeling. I promise that you can go back to your myths and pain after reading this if you so desire.

Right now, I want you to think about something about yourself that is true -- regardless of what others think. Some people will say that they are kind, persistent, or intelligent, for example. The only important thing is that it’s something you hold to be true about yourself.

How do you know this? What is the internal experience that makes you know that you possess this quality? I’m not asking you for what you think, or the feelings you associate with this quality. I’m asking you how do you know. When you look back to the times when you experience this quality (i.e., kindness, sensuality, compassion, perseverance -- whatever you believe to be true about yourself) what happens inside? Do you talk to yourself, see mental pictures; do you feel the movements you make when you express this quality? Perhaps when being kind you see mental pictures of when you were being kind to someone.

Are you doing this? Good! Save this data you use to know you possess this quality. Now, what happens to this sense of yourself when you’re not expressing this quality? For example, if you chose kindness, what happens to your sense of self when you’re being unkind? Do you try to make things right? Good! That shows you really do possess this quality. *grin*

How would you feel about thinking of yourself as being love, or as being a lovable person (as in the example of the quality of kindness)? Wouldn’t that be a good idea? You wouldn’t have to go about getting validation from outside of yourself.

Close your eyes and recall of one example of a time you experienced creating love or being love or loving. Now put that mental picture into the same place as one of the pictures of being kind (or whatever quality you chose): the same size, the same distance from you, etc. Now think of another time you experienced love or being lovable, perhaps with another person, or a different situation, and put that mental picture there with the previous one. Continue doing this until you have a bunch of mental images like the ones you have of being kind (or the quality you chose at the beginning). Keep assembling those pictures and storing them.

It may feel a little strange at first, but if you’re actually doing the exercise, each time you develop and store a picture, your feeling of being love or being lovable becomes more real.

Welcome to your real self, people.

Who loves you?

Eddie

The Game of Love

¡Hola! Everybody...
How is everyone? Just in case: if you’re trying to call me today to have sex with me, please know that I accidently left my cell phone home today. Just leave a message (breathe hard), and I’ll get back to you as soon as I get to your slot in the “Let’s All Screw Eddie so He can Stop Crying” lottery.

First Prize: Extended weekend-long Love Workshop with Eddie. Includes massages, marathon cunnilingus sessions, anal and vaginal sex, extended hugging sessions, light spanking, and role-playing games. Workshop ends with lively, hair-pulling, angry sex. Some cuddling and conversation. Post workshop psychological treatment available.

If you haven’t entered the lottery yet, there’s still time. Lottery closes as soon as the Friday Sex Blog is posted this Friday or the Ex from Boston arrives.

[Disclaimer: Any failure to adequately sexually satisfy any lottery participants is not the responsibility of the owners of the lottery. However, “orgasm coupons” redeemable at any participating Eddie will be handed out and cunnilingus workouts will be available only as long as tongue strength holds out or Eddie’s mood changes -- whichever comes first. Eddie maintains the right to be emotionally unavailable for extended periods of time or to deny sex to participants who refuse to wash. WOMEN ONLY NEED APPLY! No trannies or midgets please.]

* * *

The Game of Love

Love is magical...

Deep down inside, we all know that love is magical -- that it can heal and transform our hearts. Whether it’s the love of a mother for her newborn, the love of a man for a woman, the love of life-long friends, love creates magic and wonder within us.

What does love do?

Love warms our hearts inviting us to care for others in new and wondrous ways. Love moves us to extend our limited sense of self for the sake of another. Love melts the icy landscape of our scarred hearts and we learn -- as with a child’s eyes -- how to appreciate another’s kindnesses. Love evokes wonder and awe at the mystery and majesty in another. Love transforms us. Love moves us to become more real, more authentic, genuine, and more human. It allows us to esteem ourselves more fully. Love fuckin’ validates us!

We all know this -- we all know love does all these magical things and causes some of us to wonder how we could promote such love in our hearts. More specifically, we ask ourselves how we can make love our highest state of mind as we relate to those in our lives. If love is a game, then how can we discover and play the best Love Games?

How can we win at the Game of Love?

As a student of human behavior and wanna-be healer, it’s obvious to me that at the heart of love lies an incredible power for limitless transformation. I often wonder what my participants could accomplish if I were able to empower them to fully access this state. As a mechanism for change, love transcends all psychological techniques for turning an individual around. Yet, love is something psychology has only begun to explore.

I personally know of the transformative power of unconditional love. I once ran into a group of men and women who flat-out told me to let them love me until I could learn to love myself. I thought it was bullshit, but because I had run out of options (what options are there beside love?), and because I knew that I didn’t know jack ma’fuccin shit about living life, I stayed around. And it was true: their love transformed me and it served as a model for the love I needed to cultivate and give to myself.

Today, it is true you might be able to fuck with me a little bit. Shit, you might even be able to get inside my heart and cause a little damage. after all, my heart is open. However, because of the healing and protective power of my love, you won’t last long inside here, sweetie. In the end, love flows through me -- I am love.

But I am getting little ahead of myself...

If love has this powerful effect, then how does it work? Can we tap into its power? More importantly, how can we become more loving persons? How can we play the Game of Love?

Perhaps today’s blog is about how to love -- how to play, enjoy, and win at the Game of Love. Are you interested in that? Who isn’t!!

Now comes reality...

::arches eyebrow::

Reality and love are connected, folks, and don’t blame me. Santa Claus doesn’t exist, the Tooth Fairy is not the one that left you money under your pillow, and love and your sense of reality are connected.

Our sense of reality comes from our map of reality (our mental model of the world) and is made up of hundreds if not thousands of frames (by frames, I mean frames of reference). Still here? Our maps allow us to go to certain places and frame what we experience. Sometimes this makes for wonderful loving experiences, sometimes it creates living hells. To win at the Game of Love, we must first become conscious of our maps and frames so that we can choose how to reframe our maps and create richer, more magical experiences.

Yet, our maps about love are just that -- maps. The first step to empowering yourself is to realize maps are not the territory. Maps are no more real than you and I make them. Maps are merely frames of understanding, beliefs, values, memories, etc. And because maps are invented, we can change them so that they work for us instead of the other way around.

I should package this shit and call it the Love Workshop. LOL!

Events don’t happen in a void. As humans, we live within a historical context. Every experience has a structure. Experiences just don’t “happen.” There is a structure, process, and form to them. Where there is structure, there is order, patterns, and syntax to the process of creating the framework. There are necessary structures that allow certain things to happen. The magic of every experience -- the spell of love -- has an incantation. Those who know how to cast the spell can have the experience.

Are you ready?

Love, as a state of being and an experience, has a form. There’s a structure to love, to passion, to intimacy, romance, and bonding. That’s the good news. The bad news is that there’s also a structure to hate, fear of intimacy, resentment, regret, etc. There’s a trick to becoming and remaining a great lover and that trick is to discover the spell to cast it on ourselves. That is what will enable you to play the Game of Love.

Though love is one of the most wondrous of all healing forces it remains a mysterious and little known quantity. And though many have tried, romantic love remains unarticulated and indescribable. At the heart of the experience of romantic love are various states. When you love, or are “in love,” you experience excitement, desire, appreciation, admiration, compassion, gentleness, generosity, transcendence, wonder, support, empathy, joy, playfulness, and much more.

And that’s just the surface! Love -- especially romantic love -- involves much more.

If you can unpack the wonder of a loving relationship, you can then model it and reproduce it in your own life. When you expand your understanding of the role of all the frames and games that make up the Game of Love, you will be able to experience more deeply the magic of love.

If love is a game then you should be asking yourself what games are you playing and if you like the games you play. More importantly, you should be asking yourself if you’re winning at the game. Where did you learn to play the games you play? Finally, what are the rules of the games?

Games have gotten a bad rap over the years. When I use the metaphor of a “game,” I’m applying it in a different manner than usual. Games simply refer to all the things we do: our actions, behaviors, relational patterns, and all the expressions that make up our relationships with others. These are our outer games.

When I use frames, I’m referencing to our inner, mental understandings, our beliefs, values, and expectations that make up the rules of the game. Frames make up the inner games we play in our mind. It should be understood that some of us are playing some really sick, unhealthy, and toxic games. However, there are healthy and empowering games also.

As an idea, games gives us the ability to recognize our relating patterns and how well they work in helping us feel valued, appreciated, and loved. The reality is that we can get caught up in games without even recognizing whether the game works or not, whether we want to win at it or not. We can get so caught up in a game that we forget what it is we’re trying to accomplish. We get stuck playing out a repeated set of patterns.

Here’s the deal: the inner game of our frames dictate the outer games of our experiences. If a game is not working, if it is not enhancing your life, if it is not allowing you to feel loved and valued, then you need to re-examine the rules, the expectations, understandings, and intentions of the game and change them.

It’s that easy.

The ease comes from developing a higher awareness of the game itself and the frames that drive it. Without that awareness, it’s hard. It’s all about the maps we create to navigate the landscape of the heart.

People? Some of your maps are really sick and outdated. Time redraw the maps, folks...

Love,

Eddie

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