The Friday Sex Blog [Riding the Horse]

Hola mi gente,
The holiday season is upon us, and with it lots of good cheer and partying. I wish you all the very best but, whatever you do, please -- please: Don’t. Drive. Drunk.

Getting Comfortable in the Saddle

Statue of the 11-century noble woman, Lady Godiva, who reputedly rode naked through her town after her husband harshly taxed his tenants.

Alchemists sought to transform lead into gold. In the same way, we all have the natural ability to turn our moments of confusion or emotional pain into insightful clarity.

One day I went with a girlfriend horseback riding. I had ridden before, but my companion at the time warned me that we were going to ride “real horses,” real horseback riding. I was so intent on impressing her and I somewhat exaggerated my horse riding experience.

Big mistake. Out they came with this huge, fire-from-flayed-nostrils beast, and no sooner than I got on it and kicked, it just took off. No matter how much I pulled back on the reins this horse wasn’t stopping and we were headed straight to a fence that, it seemed to me, this motherfucker was determined to jump. Luckily, another rider was able to put his horse in the way, causing a collision that threw me off the horse. Fortunately, no one was hurt. As I lay there my ass and pride damaged, the animal just stared and I swear it was laughing at me. They asked if I wanted to switch horses for a tamer one, but I refused. I got some lessons that day on how to ride, but when I got back on that magnificent animal, I held the reins so tight it wouldn’t or couldn’t move. Cautiously, I learned to interact with the beast so that we were able to trot around the place. 

Eventually, my friend taught me enough where I became a pretty good rider and over time I developed a close bond with that horse, admiring (while respecting) its spirit and strength.

Of course, you know there’s a metaphor in here somewhere, right? LOL!

Personal growth is like that: in the beginning we might find ourselves holding on to the reins, white-knuckled, hanging on for dear life, afraid of the full power of our emotions. But if we venture outside that comfort zone, we begin to explore the more meaningful, and infinitely more rewarding, emotional landscapes. We learn to relax in the saddle, to ride.

For most people most times, violent emotions are destructive. People fly into rage, for example, and say things they don’t mean and later regret (can I get a witness?). We may sometimes lash out and hurt someone, or when hurt by rejection, we mope and eat and lay in bed, our hurt festering in the murky waters of self-destructive depression. Most violence has its roots in a form of self-abuse that manifests itself outwardly.

Therefore, at the earlier stages of psycho-spiritual evolution or self-actualization, growth means cultivating compassion and less emotional violence toward yourself and others. My experience has been that the more self-awareness you attain, the more you are naturally motivated toward peace and harmony. At this stage, when upset or angered, you learn to take a few breaths and calm yourself. You try to practice kindness rather than hate, acceptance rather than judgment, joy rather than anger.

In this way, you can become harmonious -- and frightfully bland.

In the stereotype of a harmonious individual, all joy and acquiescence, there is a loss of the depth of love power for the sake of a safe but superficial calmness. Yes, you may have progressed from irresponsible violence and poor impulse control to a practiced tranquility, but growth doesn’t stop there.

After developing the basic skills necessary to breathe through our emotional reflexes and to act graciously, there’s another world. There is a whole new experience, lover, out there waiting for you: you can learn to open as your emotion. Rather than striking out in self-destructive, knee-jerk ways, and rather than merely breathing through your anger in order to achieve calmness, you can actually use anger, or any other emotion, as a gateway to a deeper love, a deeper expression of truth and your lived experience.

If you look back to a time when you felt you wanted to hit someone, punch a wall, break something, you will note the presence of an overriding sense of feeling trapped, restricted. Whether by your own limits or by external circumstances, you most likely felt imprisoned and loveless. Violence is always a dysfunctional attempt to break free, an unskilled effort toward greater freedom or love. Openness is freedom and love. Even the most violent or self-destructive emotions are based on our need for openness, to be free, to give and receive love.

When you are open, then you are able to give and receive love fully, and you are free. However, when you don’t practice how to be open, then you’re unable to live as love, then your chi, or vital power/ love-energy, backs up and roils as emotional mayhem. In this reality, there is a feeling of being trapped and alone, powerless, unable or fearful of riding that magnificent and powerful force, to ride free like the wind. You become emotional constipated.

Embraced skillfully, intense emotions can be a quick path to a deeper experience -- to a more profound openness. Ever heard of “angry sex”? Anger can provide you with the sharp clarity and thunder necessary to awaken from moody distraction, if you can release and really feel your love that moves as anger.

Sadness, something we all try to avoid at all costs, can expose your heart, too. Sometimes we harden ourselves against sadness, in the process creating dead zones in our psyche and body. It’s as if in our fear of unleashing our full potential, we’ve numbed ourselves against feeling fully. We have the reins tight in our hands, and we’ll never let go, lest we lose ourselves, we think. Soften yourself and feel your sadness. Really feel your sadness. Softness is like the ocean, while it is yielding, it is not weak. Yield, surrender to your sadness without falling apart. Soften your belly, feel the tidal swells moving through you, the heaves of gasps for yearning. There’s an astounding depth of love released by sadness. Ever heard and experienced the raw beauty of the blues art form?

Love can transform all these previously destructive emotions into something powerful and alive.

People mistake my work in social justice for anger. But aggression for love’s sake is passion. Even the word protest uncovers some this: Pro means being for something. Test is to speak, as in testify, or testimony. To protest is to speak for something, to stand for something. To speak truth to power.

In order to take the next step, we have to come to the awareness that true spiritual and sexual passion demands your capacity to open as wild as the moment does. Just like with me and that horse. Sometimes the force of our emotions can scare us, and we need to be careful, to develop psychologically safe spaces. But to refuse to venture further is to deny yourself life.

Smacks and shouts and dark desires can wield love as powerfully as gentle kisses, mild-mannered moods, and pats on the back. And yes, this takes practice, and you might want to hold on to those reins a little tightly at first or until you feel safe. It might take years to open freely in this way, but until you do, it’s as if you’ve entered an amusement park but have refused to get on the rides.

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.

Sunday Sermon [The Full Catastrophe]

Hola mi Gente,

My first day at my new gig is tomorrow. I’m still looking to rent a room or studio, if anyone knows… 

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The Full Catastrophe

Am I not a man? And is not a man stupid? I’m a man. So I married. Wife, children, house, everything. The full catastrophe.

 -- from Zorba the Greek

Those of you familiar with the author, Nikos Kazantzakis, are probably familiar with the above quote. Jon Kabat-Zinn, the founder of the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MSBR) Clinic named his book on the subject of using mindfulness meditation as a way to address pain management, Full Catastrophe Living.

It’s an interesting proposition: using all of life -- the good, the bad, and the ugly -- as grist for the mill. I hear too many people talking about how they want to remove “negativity” from their lives. I question the notion to ignore/ remove at least 50% of your life. Actually, I’ve tried this and I’m here to tell you that living in a sensory deprivation environment (otherwise known as solitary confinement -- true story), is not all it’s geared to be.

I mean, I’m not saying we should go out of our way to create or engage “negativity,” but why turn away from it? Why not use it? I don’t know jack about gardening, but what I’ve learned from gardeners is that refusing to engage negativity is a lot like refusing to use manure, or compost to cultivate your garden. And what is negativity but some kind of shit anyway? Sadly, negativity is oftentimes some shit or some one you don’t like. And no matter how much you try to turn away from negativity, everywhere you go, there you are -- with all your own negative baggage. If you perceive it as merely negative, whatever it happens to be, then no amount of turning away will erase negativity because you are creating the perception of negativity in the first place.

Check this out: every situation, accurately perceived, becomes an opportunity to heal. That means negative situations too. No, it doesn’t mean life will be all pleasant and the sun will be shining all the fuckin time. What? Didn’t you get the memo?! If you want fair, go back to kindergarten. Sorry to break it down in such a cold manner. LOL Honestly, I see a lot of unrealistic expectations from the adults of the world. It seems many of us actually believe spending our lives running from unpleasant feelings and clinging pleasant ones is a viable life strategy.

It isn’t... 

People will disappoint you, the fates will conspire to fuck up your plans, your kids will sometimes never appreciate your sacrifices, and not all women will find me sexually attractive. Shit, Rosario Dawson doesn’t even know I exist.

I’m not saying I should deny my feelings. I am actually saying we all should do the opposite: feel your feelings completely. Feel the full catastrophe of your life. What happens to anger, sadness, fear, hate, and envy, lust when you stop trying to categorize / analyze them and just feel them? What happens when you invite the negative as well as the positive and embrace both as a mother would embrace both a “good” and “bad” child? I’ll tell you what happens: you become free as you are healed and made whole.

All healing is essentially letting go of fear. Playing the run-around game based on your likes and dislikes is in reality fear-based living. Try it one day: stay with the hurt without giving in the compulsion to attach a story to it. What we often do is we substitute neurosis for suffering and that just makes it all a lot more painful. Add stress to pain and you have suffering. Let me break that down:

pain + stress = suffering.

I think that’s also a good formula for neurosis.

Coming to wholeness is actually a release from the past. Now here’s where it gets a little tricky. People will rightfully point out that there is a process that leads to letting go, that leads to grief. The thing is this: how many times must you do the process before you start getting it without having to go through all the stages?

Suffering, my friends, is optional.

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

Hillary Derangment Syndrome and The Mini Me

Hola mi Gente,

I’ve been accused of suffering from “Hillary Derangement.” I assume that to mean that I suffer from an unreasonable and unhinged hatred of Hillary Clinton. I got this because I cited (with documentation) some key policy areas in which Trump is to the left of Hillary. What’s that? You shouldn’t be surprised. Hillary has a long history of corporate-friendly and right wing policy stances. If you doubt me, think of her long and recent history advocating for mass incarceration and her ties to the private prison industry. But don’t take my word for it, you can find out more here and here.

I will submit that Hillary derangement Syndrome exists. Hillary Derangement Syndrome is the unreasonable belief that voting for Hillary will result in different outcomes than the neoliberal/ neoconservative outcomes she has produced throughout her career. Hillary Derangement Syndrome is the belief that committing the same actions (i.e., voting conservative) will produce different results.

I’m reposting the following because it reminds me a lot of the Clintons and Trump.

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The Mini Me

and the Creation of the Personal Novela

Human beings are driven by a core wound, this kind of madness that something’s missing. The more conscious they get, the more desperate that becomes...

 -- Saniel Bonder

In Shakespeare's play, Othello, the protagonist and his young Venetian wife are deeply in love. Othello is a noble and simple-hearted soldier who trusts those around him. Desdemona, his devoted wife, loves him deeply and hangs on his every word. It is Iago, Othello's advisor and apparent friend, who plays one character against another, creating an atmosphere of separation and distrust. He whispers doubts into Othello's ear, inciting in him a violent jealousy that ultimately leads to a senseless tragedy.

We are all Othello's at heart -- open, trusting wanting to see the best in each other -- and we are seduced and driven to insane action by our own invisible Iagos. Our Iago is a state of mind; he cannot be seen, he lives in the shadows. Yet his work can be seen everywhere. Iago whispers to us both from within and through other people: it is the voice of a collective conditioning.

Our Iagos are like the “mini me” from the Austin Powers movies -- a smaller, angrier, and spiteful version of ourselves. A tragically funny alter-ego. Most of us live with a painful sense of separation from others, a sense of something missing, and a deep experience of limitation, fear, and desire -- we experience ourselves as small. As a result, we engage in a flurry of activity to avoid the objects of our fear and obtain the objects of our craving.

This is best exemplified in the current electoral cycle. This is the dance of fear-based living and, although widely perceived as normal, it fuels an endless drama of struggle. It's the main character in our personal novela -- like the over-the-top Spanish-language soap operas my mother watches. And no matter how hard we try, the poison seeps through the cracks in our armor, manifesting as disease, conflict, and failure.

On a personal level, it can manifest as a general anxiety, or a body image problem. On a community level, it can sabotage something as seemingly simple as a blog (if you want proof of the mini me, just take note of the widespread pettiness on social media). Globally, as manifested in the likes of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, it is expressed as war, as economic and environmental madness. This force has been given many names. I have heard it called “The Gremlin,” or (for the fundamentalists here) “Satan.” I call it ego-based living, or the “Mini Me.”

Unlike the movie, we cannot see or measure the mini me directly; we only know it by its effects. It is like a thief in the night: you actually do not see him, but you know he has been there because your valuables have been taken. This mini me is state of mind -- a social conditioning of sorts and it possesses certain qualities:

Sense of Lack This is the essence of the mini me. Enough is never enough; we are never spiritual enough, skinny enough, smart enough, or hip enough. We perceive everything through this sense of lack. We can’t do the big things and must settle for less.

Sense of Separation Constantly reaching "out there" to fill up our sensed emptiness keeps us focused on a “me-oriented” reality, reinforcing our separateness.

Addiction Gripped in the throes of craving and lack, as soon as we sense that something external will “do it” for us, we latch on to it and become addicted. In this way, the mini me can lead us into unhealthy attachments to wring-headed and pernicious social policies, work, sex, food, drugs, the internet, or even romantic relationships.

Fear Once desire and addition take over, we are overcome by a sense of non-specific fear. If we believe the right politician will alleviate our sense of emptiness, immediately loneliness becomes a terrifying fate.

Suspicion fear makes us suspicious, we trust no one completely.

Strategic Living We always plan for the worst -- something bad can happen any moment (politicians are notorious for using this aspect of the mini me).

Anxiety There is the notion that something is wrong, that we should be doing something more to be “complete.”

Hostile Competition this is especially true in the realm of politics (and dating). If there is this notion that there is not enough, we must fight others who are trying to get it too! This is hostile competition as opposed to co-creation.

From a political standpoint, how do we get back to a vision of a society where ego-driven madness doesn’t rule? How do we (or do we want to?) get back to our collective original self -- connected to something more powerful than mere desire, aversion, and grasping? I do know this much: we don’t get it back by participating and electing the same candidates and expecting different results.

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