Being vs Reacting

Hola Everybody,
Though I have known it at an intellectual level, the past election cycle has made me actually integrate the fact that there is no Left -- no progressive movement -- in the US. 

I just realized today that I have only a couple of more posts and I will have completed my commitment to posting at least one blog post per day for the whole of 2016. I don’t know if I’ll continue into 2017 -- at least not at the same pace.

Don’t say such changes cannot happen. A vast freedom could live inside you. A loaf of bread wrapped in a cloth for the table is just an object, but inside the human body, it becomes gladness for being alive!
 -- Rumi

I guess that if you wanted to get somewhere, an accurate map is a good place to start. It can make the difference between arriving at your destination with ease and becoming hopelessly lost. However, imagine, for a moment, that when you ask a friend who has just raved about a restaurant where it is, she says, “Just visualize the restaurant clearly. Post a sign on your refrigerator door that says, ‘I can easily and joyfully find any restaurant I want!’ That’s all you need to do.”

I’m sure most people would think such a statement silly -- and they would be correct. But what if my destination is “self-acceptance”? What if all I wanted was to reach a state of inner wholeness that I have never experienced before? As in the directions to the restaurant in the above example, I may have heard wonderful things about it, but I had never been there and don’t know how to get there. Perhaps many of us can relate having been told to, “Just do it. Just accept yourself.” That’s a lot like being told to “Just go to the restaurant,” without being given any directions.

Today, I am grateful for having that direction in my life, for the luxury of experiencing self-acceptance.

Better yet, what if you ask how to get to a restaurant and you’re told that before you can even begin to try to find this restaurant you need to spend several months, or even years, thinking about how bad your own cooking is. That before you can experience this restaurant you will need to explore the reasons why you aren’t happy with your own cooking and why you have this need to go to the restaurant in the first place. In addition, before you can go to this restaurant, you also have to understand how you became such a bad cook. I would say this is sillier than the previous example.

A common belief is that if we understand a problem well enough, it will simply disappear. Yet in my life I could have, at any given moment, articulated the intricate psycho-dynamics of, let’s say, a $300-a-day heroin habit and still not change.

Today I am grateful for the freedom from the tyranny of thinking and the over analyzing that was the prison of my life -- literally and figuratively -- before I became free.

My life is not about affirmations or positive thinking. Shit, I have tried many times to overcome my limitations by sheer will power or trying to act or feel different, telling myself repeatedly that I would be different. But I discovered that this approaching the issue from the outside in. It is tantamount to trying to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic. It’s a lot like taking pain medication for a broken bone: you might feel better for a little while, but if the bone isn’t set right, the pain will persist.

Today I am grateful for the many people who have helped me do the “inside job” of creating a lasting transformation.

Most of all, I am grateful for having an underlying sense of wholeness and well-being whether or not things are going well in my life in the moment. Even when things seem to be falling apart, I feel resourceful. I have had this experience numerous times and, little by little, it has become my default way of being. I am grateful for developing and maintaining an inner sense of self, well-being, and wholeness and perhaps a connection with something beyond myself, that sustains me in difficulty as well as in good times. I am grateful for the awareness that this inner sense of fullness and integrity, and a strong resourceful self is available to each of us, and is our own birthright.

Now, mind you, I ain’t all that well, and have times of when I become attached to sadness, frustration, despair, anger, and irritability -- that’s part of being human. But I am equally grateful that even in those times I can still have an underlying sense of joy as my ground of being. I possess an inner knowing that I have the resources to weather the storms, an unbeatable sense of pragmatic optimism that I will come out on the other side of my difficulties not only intact, but also wiser and stronger.

What more could I ask of my life?

All of us have personal limitations we have struggled to overcome. With some of these challenges, it seems that no matter what we do, they won’t go away. Most of us turn away from those parts of ourselves we don’t like. We try to repress feelings we don’t want to have. We try to “think positively” and push away negative thoughts. These approaches will never work -- they never seem to create natural, lasting change. Besides, at least half of life ain’t all that pretty and how can you expect good results if you’re busy denying a good chunk of reality?

I am here to say today that I am most grateful to be able to carry the message that the way to happiness is through our limitations.

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

Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it, please consider helping me out by sharing it, liking me on Facebook, following me on Twitter, or even throwing me some money on GoFundMe HERE or via PayPal HERE so I can keep calling it like I see it.

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

Get your own playlist at snapdrive.net!