The Friday Sex Blog [Openning the Heart]

Hola mi gente,
I’m taking a break from politics today… 

A long time ago, a man in charge of ringing the bells at a nearby church for years would play the opening notes to My Cherie Amor every Sunday. One day I tracked the man down and asked him why. He explained he rang the bells in that way because it was the song he dedicated to his now deceased wife when they first met. After being uprooted from my community for years, I returned to find that the bells no longer rang. When I inquired, I discovered that the man had passed away and no one else knew how to ring the bells.

Opening Your Heart

You can outrun that which is running after you,
but not what is running inside you.
-- Rwandan proverb

According to ancient wisdom, the Anahata Chakra, more commonly known as the Heart Chakra, balances the world of matter (lower three chakras) with the world of spirit (upper three chakras). The Sanskrit word implies that deep beneath our personal stories of suffering and pain lies boundless love and compassion. 

According to this map of the mind/ body, signs you may be blocked include feelings of shyness and loneliness. If you have an inability to forgive or a tendency to lack empathy, then you may be leading with your head more often than your heart. On the other hand, an overpowering chakra can include feelings of codependency, and looking outward for acceptance or fulfillment. Intense jealousy or harsh judgment of others is also a red flag.

If you fall into the blocked category, figuring out how to find balance really boils down to repressed emotions. Whether it's a traumatic event stemming from childhood that you can't even remember, or a grudge you're holding so tightly from a recent incident. When you repress your feelings, your balance gets out of whack.

I realize many of my readers, especially Marxist materialists (LOL) probably view teachings such as the chakras a scam. I won’t get into a defense of that right now because -- shit, you’re gonna believe what you’re gonna believe. In any case, the goal of this post is to explore experiential methods we can use to effect change.

I feel in order for lasting change to come about there has to be a how: actual exercises we can implement that can bring about a change in our mental software. It has been my observation that as humans we follow scripts, some of which were written generations ago, and they often cause much pain. So today I'm going to offer you an exercise. I try to offer experiential exercises because people think too fuckin' much. What I mean to say is that people confuse being overly analytical with “rational.” In fact, many of us are tyrannized by thinking most of the time. So I try to offer basic exercises you have to experience in order to begin moving you away from thinking and toward the experience of change.

See? You're already thinking. Sheeesh! Shut up! LOL

Okay! Ready? Breathe… 

Pretend you are going to kill the next person you see. I want you to try to feel this in your body. Imagine that you are really going to kill this person. How do you feel inside?

Now, imagine that you are going to have sex with the next person you see. Again, how do you feel inside? What are the physical manifestations?

Bear with me for one last time: Pretend you are going to save the life of the next person you see, but in doing so your own life will end. Imagine you are going to die as a result of saving this person's life. How do you feel inside?

Now, answer this question: which imagined action -- killing, having sex, or saving while dying -- most feels like liberation, freedom, and unbound love?

My question to you is why would you intentionally hold anything in your mind, except that which most opens your heart and soul so that others may benefit from it?

Now, if you followed my instructions correctly, I may have just fucked up your constriction. Now you know. From now on, the choice is yours. When you find yourself imagining something that results in you feeling less open, simply imagine whatever most opens you. It is that fuckin simple, believe it or not.

This is the first step that helps you get off the merry-go-round of living those painful scripts -- those childhood neurological imprints on your psyche. It might help to remember my fave “equation”:

constriction = hate/ love = openness.

This is the beginning of replacing habits that bring constriction with habits that bring openness. The other step is to hang out as awareness in space, maintaining openness without support; being openness without effort or intention. At this point, if you haven't done the exercises and just tried to think about them, you will not understand what I have written here. So go back and do them now. Not later, but now. 

Remember the feeling that most opens you? Perhaps it was saving your best friend's or your child's life. Whatever feeling most opens you, allow this feeling to dissolve into an awareness of openness, like a swirl dissolving in water. Let go of any effort to imagine anything, just be that feeling.

Another moment will come and you might find yourself once again reacting to something -- perhaps a rude driver -- that constricts you, if even a little bit. What do you do? What can you do?

First, consciously visualize or feel whatever opens your heart, softens your body, and relaxes your mind. For example, you can visualize making passionate love with a superior lover, your bodies entwined in emanations of light. Then allow this visualization to dissolve into an authentic feeling, like an ocean of openness, alive and real as this bright moment.

This is a way to replace unloving (constricted) mind formulations with loving ones. With time and practice you will be able to allow all mind forms to relax open as love's clear light. Repeat this two step process whenever you happen to notice that you're closing up, so that openness becomes the default state in every moment that you are conscious of. 

This is the practice of opening your heart and throwing away the old scripts -- of undoing the deeply ingrained childhood imprints that force you to sabotage your life. Many of you say you want to be loved, but as long as you're closed, you will wait forever to be loved.

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

Monday Madness [As Love... ]

Hola mi Gente,

By the time this post publishes, I’ll be rushing out the door. Wish me luck…

My campaign is still accepting donations. If you are so moved, you can give here… 

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As Love…

I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body…
-- Pablo Neruda

I want to try something a little different today. I want to offer the following as if you were my lover… whether you are single or married. I want to offer the following words to you as if you were the lover in my life. Sure, we may never meet, but perhaps today you can feel your heart through mine.

You look for love all the time. But it is only when you go deeply into your heart that you feel love. The reason for this is that essentially you are love.

Try to feel that statement in your body for a second before you analyze it.

Isn’t it ironic that people constantly say, “I am angry,” “I am sad,” “I am lonely,” “I am bored,” but you hardly ever hear someone say...

I am love.

Today’s quote from one of my favorite Neruda poems is a powerfully erotic statement. Love radiates from you like a light -- like a “sunbeam flaring in your lovely body.” This light/ energy flows through you and you yearn to offer yourself completely. Your heart’s natural state is that it wants to give and receive love fully. This is your heart’s essence.

Love is openness and it is this openness that everybody’s heart craves. Lover: You are this love. You are alive as love, and your entire existence yearns to live as this love, to surrender to love -- and to be seen as the love that you truly are. 

I know you long to be taken and opened, all the while surrendering blissfully, so that every moment you experience is on fire as the radiance of the passion of love, as an offering to your divine heart’s devotion.

And you build walls and offer false clues in an effort to create safety in your relationships. There’s a fortress around your heart and an accumulated tension in your body. And yes, while these walls give you that sense of safety you seek, over time they act as cocoons of fear that block the radiant flow of your love. These cocoons can serve to imprison the love you so desperately want to offer and keep out the love your heart craves.

The secret to opening your heart and receiving its most profound bliss is to give and receive fully. There’s no holding back with love. Romantic love isn’t for punks, lover. You have to love fully, caution thrown to the wind. Love fully, with or without a lover.

You’re confused, you say?

Instead of depending on someone and hiding behind the walls of your accumulated disappointments, you can learn to open fully -- to open your body. Open your body as if it were this one big heart, vulnerable but also powerful, pulsing with the radiance of love’s life-force.

It is this state of open radiance that will be your gift to the world and also serve to attract and keep a lover worthy and capable of equaling your own heart’s desire.

Come back, don’t analyze this, lover. Come back and tell me: are you living and breathing as open love this very moment? Are you breathing with the same open pleasure you would if my body were pressing against yours in a tender embrace? Or are your breath and body tense with the fear of survival and a profound sense of separation?

Do you even know that every moment offers an opportunity to live openly as love?

Take this, lover, if you take anything at all today: whether you are alone or in a relationship, your spirituality and sexuality requires that you live daily in heart-openness -- in this state of whole-body consciousness -- or else you will shrivel like a plant that has not been watered.

My name is Eddie and I'm in recovery from civilization...

Sunday Sermon [Sex and Money]

Hola mi Gente,

Hope you’re having a great weekend. Yesterday, I spoke about the death of a relatively young man. He died of cancer. From the time of his adolescence, he spent a substantial portion of his adult life in and out of prison. I say this to highlight that the policies we choose to implement have life and death consequences. I doubt he would’ve spent that much time, or even any time had he been white. Period.

Today it is Sunday, my excuse to rant.

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Sex & Money

My life has a superb cast but I can't figure out the plot.

-- Ashleigh Brilliant(1933– )

Imagine, if you can, going out and seeing a reasonably trustworthy-looking stranger you find sexy. Imagine giving this sexually attractive stranger some money, looking him or her in the eyes and saying, “I’m doing this as part of an assigned exercise. I’m supposed to give some money to somebody really sexy. Then I am to have no further discussion.”

As you imagine doing this exercise, how does it feel to give someone money while admitting out loud they are sexy?

Most of us are a wee bit conflicted about both sex and money. Essentially, these are forms of energy exchange, which can be as simple as an unexpected gift, or as complicated as a lawsuit. Sex and money: the sources of our desire and disappointment, our hopes and fears.

To live fully, as far as I’m concerned, is to live every moment so that no residue remains except the free openness of love. Sex and money are most often our least lived domains, these are the areas smeared with the most residue -- the most baggage. Therefore, few people (if they are honest) can imagine doing this exercise without some lingering clinging of an emotional complication.

I have found that the best way to discover how live fully is to break the usual rules, in the least risky ways, in order to find out where the obstructions reside within us.

Now, repeat this exercise, or invent one of your own that requires you to imagine offering gifts beyond your comfort zone. As you learn to give despite your fears, your sexual and financial lives can be lived according to what serves openness the most, rather than being ruled by the consequences of living a fear-based life, holding back your gifts.

It’s easy to become stuck in your own personal soap operas of sex and money. What you can’t live as openness, offered without baggage, creates sickness in your life. Yet, the price of discovering where you’re stuck sexually and financially may be more than what you’re willing to invest.

The core question today being do you maintain sexual or financial secrets? These secrets are among your most secret refusals to live openly as love.

Are you willing to face, feel, confess, and open beyond your every sexual and financial complication now? My life has taught me that human birth is for those who are not quite ready but may be on the verge -- willing -- that’s the reason why you are here as you are. If your issue was about swinging from a vine, you would’ve been born an ape.

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

Frozen Thinking

Hola mi Gente,

Last night, a Black Lives Matter activist confronted presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, about her embrace of the myth and racist conservative dog whistle, the superpredator, and asked why she had never apologized. Hillary’s response? “No one ever asked before,” and then turning in a dismissive way and saying, “Now back to the issues.”

::blank stare::

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Photograph of Crashing Ocean Waves Frozen in Time by Pierre Carreau

Frozen Thinking

Convictions make convicts.

-- Robert Anton Wilson

When I came across the above quote and I had to laugh for several reasons. One is the simple but elegant truth of the words, another because I am a former “convict” -- a person who was formerly incarcerated I also like what the great French existentialist writer, Albert Camus, said about convictions -- something about not dying for them because he might be wrong.

I am struck by the sense I get from both quotes: that rigid thinking, or adhering to rigidly held beliefs, choke creativity. Oh yeah, did I mention I am obsessing about creativity? One common theme I hear coming up constantly is people’s need for more creativity -- especially in the realm of work and relationships.

I hear it from people all the time: how they wished they could work at jobs where creativity is valued, for example. The irony is creativity is a choice that is available anywhere at anytime under any circumstances. If I were to allow it (and sometimes I do), my work could quickly morph into a dry set of rituals of paperwork, data, and rote knowledge.

Anyway, in the past I have written about the “enlightened” or open heart. Today I am reflecting on the opened mind. I would say, and I think it would be correct, that when people think of the creative mind, they think of a mind full of ideas and brilliant new insights. My own experience tells me the creative mind is both full and empty. It is able to create within itself a space for the new to arise. A creative mindset is constantly opening itself to the internal and external world.

My experience of the opened mind is that it can be relaxed and playful. It is filled with curiosity and wonder. The opened mind has a childlike quality about it. It loves to go off the beaten track, to explore paths not taken by social convention. Playfulness is important. The opened mind likes to play with an idea or object, and enjoys looking at it as if for the first time. Try this one day: take a walk around your neighborhood and pretend you are a tourist. How does your perception of the mundane and “normal” things you see on an everyday basis change when you do this?

The opposite of that playful quality is what I call frozen thinking. Frozen thinking is what you get when you no longer think of possibilities: 

“This place sucks.”

“My life would’ve been so much better without you.”

“I’ll never succeed in this shit job.”

Frozen thinking deals in absolutes, there are few, if any, possibilities in frozen thinking and everything seems to be set in stone. Whenever someone begins a sentence with, You never… or You always... you can be sure you’re in the presence of frozen thinking. In short, frozen thinking is the sum of all our assumptions and beliefs about others and ourselves.

The open mind remains receptive to the possibility that we may not know everything there is to know -- and what we do know may be wrong. It challenges assumptions, makes new connections, finds new ways of perceiving the world. The opened mind can wander joyfully into areas others do not take seriously, and return with creations that must be approached in all seriousness.

Some of the most celebrated creative minds in history have allowed themselves to drift into dreams states and extended meditations during which they have played with the irrational, the symbolic, the metaphorical, and the mysterious. Often they have returned with images that they translate into scientific theories, musical compositions, and transformative social actions.

I would like to point out that people often mistake obsessive thinking with creativity. Nothing could be further from the truth. Creativity entails dropping the mental rumination. There’s a lot of letting go in the creative process -- a lot of “emptying out.” Creativity is about not thinking (in the conventional sense).

This is a scary journey into the unfamiliar for me, personally. There are times some discoveries are so strange that I want to cover them back up and run. Whether exploring the depths of the human soul or the depths of matter, artists, mystics, scientists, people like you and I, come face to face with chaos and disorder. Still, the enlightened mind thrives on this chaos, sees the emerging patterns, respects difference, and remains open to the paradox of life.

My name is Eddie and I'm in recovery from civilization...