Love for the Pelvis

In a recent chakra meditation I followed myself shimmering into the colors and rings of music each part of my dimensional body triggered. Some of these associations are learned, co-opted from the larger group understanding but the essential qualities I needed at that moment were all my own.

The first chakra, so wounded? (or touched) recently by an intensively intimate relationship that has ended resulted in my feeling the words-

"I am blessed".

I was actually surprised. It isn't how I have been feeling about my penis recently. But as I lay and breathed I felt the force of life root through my pelvis like a a deep spring recently blocked by a pebble that appeared as a boulder.

I am blessed because I get to use sexual forces once again in ways that dance me in the labyrinth in perhaps ways differently than before. Denying sexual energy is like death. And it really distorts what does seep through.

So even as I grieve and feel lost in some ways I feel attracted once again to myself. To cleanliness and breath and movement and sleep. When I see beauty I respond with a sigh and a sexual urge as well.

I am not done being single at all but life is all around. In my Taoist alchemical meditations I practice testicle, bone and skin breathing. I circulate the life forces in the patterns we are engraved with. Sexual energy is given a pink hue and when the bones shine with this I have to recall the energy is for me first and someone else second.

When early sexual stimulation rose from abuse as it did in my life this reclamation is not a simple declaration. It is a boundary that restores the soul to its legitimate existence apart from another.

Tricky business where merging is so longed for. What I get from my Taoist cultivation is the opening of my own centers as places of refuge and wisdom. Strength and love. The belly heart and head become cauldrons to store and circulate not only my own internal resurgences but yours as well.

Tricky in deep relationship as your issues suddenly appear as mine if I am not careful. I trust it is this care I am developing as I commit to relishing singlehood and being alone.

Imagination and will

I read once when imagination and will are in conflict imagination will win out. One could celebrate this, returning us to a childlike state but when you unite will with imagination both are elevated and grounded at the same time. The will without imagination lowers its vibrancy to the familiar and the predictable, places we all know so well but are getting our butts kicked to shift.

Imagination is one of the skills or tricks in the magicians bag to soften the blow.

Today I did retreat time and followed the nagging sense of guilt I carry mid back. I imagined or as the Taoists say, I actualized scenes from my past that fit the feelings. I ran into past lives and images of dying on a battlefield having killed others and died before I could get back home to take care of my family.

I conversed and wept as if I were them, and asked them what they needed. I asked for help form higher sources and found forgiveness of self seep in through cracks imagination opened.

I ran into my mothers emotional overwhelm and her unconscious desire for me to bring her out. And what a 'failure' I was at that, our personalities being so different. The held beliefs under the emotions- 'you are just not good enough as you are'. How humbling to find them laying in the belly of the psyche tied in knots all these years later.

I didn't drink or eat till late in the day- punishment or reward?- and wondered how healthy this exploration was. How balanced with will, outer will is this imaginative healing journey. It is so hard to tell when one does subterranean work where on the labyrinth one is- closer to center or on the borders of sanity and escapism.

What 'saves' me is movement. Chi kung, walking, cooking and talking to friends who can listen. Making plans, setting up work, buying an old car and driving again after three years of living in countries where a car was an afterthought.

Breathing, washing my body, scrubbing my skin. Bone breathing and tendon strengthening. Circulation of sexual energies and self massage.

Still the sadness is here. The guilt and the hauntings. I can only trust I am in a process of recovery and careful blending of will and imagination fine tuned to my own learning curve is at play. And I wish the same for you. This helps too.

Thinking of you.

Healer Heal Thyself

This past year I have had many fantasies of life after marriage and parenting fall to the wayside. I was never the 'get the red Ferrarri' type of guy but we all have these ideas of what 'freedom' to act looks like.

I have been a man and a heterosexual man in a woman's world of yoga and therapies for so long these last few years of accessible and inaccessible relationships with dynamic women has initiated me into deeper contact with the Divine Feminine in me- through them even as the worldly relationships never manifested for very long.

Now as I am single for the first time in 33 years! I am wondering about the Divine Masculine in response. What I have gotten this past year is a slap from my childhood's ancestry and karmic knots regarding the distortions passed down.

Learning to receive and not just provide, to weep and not know why or know but not tie it up neatly, to be in process and let destination find me. It is not easy.

The modality I have formed is called Listening Touch. I am the best client but am developing a following mostly over the phone. It is my path. To touch and listen and follow into the darkness. But what a bitch of a year it has been. Thank you my soul.......

Ode to my dead father

The Sweetness of Line

It isn't what I write that counts but how these circles and connecting letters that ink up a page came to be. The wonder is how in second grade, Mrs. Miller, a tall buxom narrow teacher in grey two piece suit falling below her knees drew for the first time on the blackboard these connecting curves for my separate letters.

Before then my "A's" stood upright forted against any invasion from a "T" or an "R" and I liked that. I liked the power of emergence- the upright cowboy on his horse- lone man among his neighbors- helping radiate me as the runt in a large family.

With my "I's" or "T's" I was the captain on his bow overlooking the deepest blue- the pirate eager to capture gold on his secret forays into hidden coves.

I wouldn't have taken cursive writing from a man. Mrs. Miller though had a secret heart, a fondness for words and connecting people. I wondered if she had 26 children at home and figured out over the years- for she must have been ancient like the oaks I climbed- I wondered if she had been a keen observer of how her children connected and made the bold discovery that our 26 letters must do the same! It was only because she was this gleeful scientist that I went along.

She abducted me with a sly conniving magnetism.

One by one my pirates held hands with my princesses. Solitary monks kissed white virgins. Letters who once stood proud, chess pieces in their own squares broke down under Mrs. Miller's demanding tutelage. Lined papers instructing me how to connect my heroes slowly imprisoned them in a smaller world.

No longer a man of stature in the family I became small, indistinguishable from my brothers, one more shaved tree in Mrs. Miller's forest.

I learned. I was a good boy. I knew and wanted to believe this was only play so I could return soon to my capitals.

Years later having succumbed to this weighty community of letters, this practical flowing democracy with no king or queen, these ant scribbles in the sand, I received a letter from my father.

Never having met Mrs. Miller, Samuel Portney, my father had never given up his ship. Being the boxer he once was, fighting the Depression, earning money slamming into men's noses with thinly cushioned fists, he never laid down his letters into the realm of the feminine.

His was not a world of connections but of rulership. Not only that, he wrote his one page letters ripped ragged from a notepad in red felt pen- unlined and rigid. I opened these envelopes slitting through his dried moisture stuck tight in the flaps. He commanded respect. His letters yelled for attention and got it fully.

I would move to a corner of the room away from women's things and sit. Thank God at least he hadn't given in to Mrs. Miller's coy experiment.

No way.
Not him.

I am certain he wrote these notes alone after my mother had kissed his cheek and gone to bed. Probably after watching Columbo.

I love my father. He carved a path for family out of raw thorny passages. The death of a father when he was twelve surely cured him of his Mrs. Miller. I am certain one night he burned the soft cursive flow of a child's world and leaped forward into manhood returning to capitals- the mythos of the innocent.

To get ahead I will stand apart, he invoked. To connect with those I love I will separate myself in distinct red felt.

What I'm curious about all these years later, now that all those short notes have come and gone, those messages of rebuke and praise and the lists of items left to me- black leather jacket, heavy oak desk, narrow alligator shoes. After all of these correspondences read alone and written alone connected us. I wonder about the spaces between each inked letter. I wonder what price he paid to separate them. What inhaled scream or trembling of fear lay transparent between his "I's" and "T's". What paths had he not taken, connections had he not made?

On the other hand I wonder in those spaces what self respect he cultivated, what strength of character to remain upright, responsible, a lighthouse beacon for his widowed mother, seven siblings, young wife and four children.

I certainly spent many years cursing his lack of cursiveness. I placed myself directly underfoot his capitals when I think now he was only trying to lift me up to his heady heights.

I know there is a place for cursiveness in my life. I write to him now, dead so many years, with connecting thoughts rounded with care and concern and his echo is a distinct cry from the connection he cultivated without anyone noticing.

On his deathbed my brother held his hand and chanted a Jewish prayer: "Hear O Israel the Lord our God the Lord is One."

My father knew who was in charge. He knew with red felt pen in hand the life he was here to craft. Though he died alone, as will we all, he died underneath the canopy of a cursive God, Mrs. Miller's consort.

He died in his lover's everlasting hidden embrace.