Did I tell you I’ve been single since 1997? Along with that goes celibacy, and, although not by conscious choice, a loss of male friends, an abundance of female friends and a vantage point on my life that was once missing. Personally, I can see much more clearly from here, and am able to embrace certain imbalances and formerly missing pieces.
In this context, I can honor my own masculine energy because I’m not projecting those needs outward right now; I can more fully embrace my inherent feminine energy because there is no man out there projecting onto me asking me to care-take his needs; I have learned to acknowledge and run my female creative (sexual-spiritual) energy without the stimulus of a sexual act; and I can address what my mind defined over and over as loneliness.
Pretty amazing view from here, yet I can’t seem to transmit just how fantastic it is to my friends who are caught up in, or are fantasizing about, a relationship. I can see myself and my programmed patterns much more clearly from here. Without this context, I would have been otherwise occupied and probably less willing to dive deeply into my shadow material to experience the many facets of this painful program.
We all have our contexts and often defend them to the end. There are the ones in which we operate automatically and unconsciously to some degree, and those into which we transition or desire because we want to make life changes. Until the last decade or so, most of my friends and family have been in relationship, have children, full-time jobs or career priorities. There are exercise, eating, teeth brushing and other daily routines as well as health contexts, emotional contexts driven by beliefs and thought entrenchment.
If we are in the soup of those contexts, it’s challenging to know or even imagine how another context will benefit us. Sometimes we dream of escaping our lives and living in wealth, or simplicity on a tropical island. Sometimes the soup gets so hot, we have to jump out or ask someone to please help us out of the pot so we can create another context.
Some people say we “need” a relationship to reflect our patterns. I say we can create a reflection of ourselves no matter what our relationship status and I’m filled with enthusiasm for what I see and learn in my personal discovery. Because I was in relationship pretty much constantly between the ages of 18-41, I have that perspective. Twenty-three years of couple-dom and now, 13 years of single-dom. In any context the reflections are usually indirect anyway, so who really cares if they come from our spouses, our friends or the glass door.
Some of my relationships were short-lived and not healthy. I am in good company, as most people have brief and disturbing relationships. When unhealthy, the longest lived relationships are really just enmeshments in which no one “gets” who they are.
I would love to be in another loving relationship with a man some day, yet I am not pining away for any aspect of that. First I’d like to find my own balance of masculine and feminine inside of me and then will attract the same in a man. I will not give up who I am, who I have become, to drop back into a dynamic without boundaries and individuation. I’d rather be single!
And because I’m not perfect (I say this a lot because no matter how much “work” we’ve done on ourselves, there’s always more to see and do), I’m telling stories on myself, exposing some recent discoveries about how the program’s tributary of distrusting men has come to the surface of late.
Like almost everyone, my program is still active and especially visible these last few days. I recently recognized a different connection between the plumbing in my rental unit and the emotions inside me (you can read about it on my blog site). That was a clearing of sorts, yet really only served to expose an even deeper layer of the program as it relates to trust…actually distrust that men will follow through.
Follow-through is very different from expecting a knight in shining armor, by the way.
As I’ve mentioned in my past blog posts, my mother was abandoned by my biological father which led to my ultimate adoption. The father I lived with and have loved all my life is a wonderful man, successful and very dedicated to our family. He gave me absolutely no reason to distrust men; in fact he only gave me reason to love and feel safe with them.
Instead, as the program seems to manifest itself, the distrust and fear was transferred to me in utero and in the birth canal through the placenta. My biological father married my mother when he found out she was pregnant, immediately disappeared, never to return. Because of this, my birth mother was in incredible emotional pain and survival as I was growing in her womb and making my way into the world. She was lonely for the man who had promised himself to her, and at 19 years old, she was naive, quickly learning to distrust men. They didn’t cross paths again until a high school reunion when they were 40 years old!
What a blessing that I am alive and well here on the planet to learn about life; to complete my soul. Thank you, all my parents, for your love and willingness.
Everyone has a similar experience, absorbing the emotions and mother’s state of being. This is the nature of the program. Please understand, I’m not blaming anyone; not my biological mother nor my even my father. Everyone has embedded patterns that come from early development, and they often manifest as fear and distrust. Unresolved programs are precisely what created my father’s departure and my mother’s loneliness.
Your story is different, yet has the same mechanics and it’s own qualities, specific to you.
So, all these years I’ve been on the planet, 54 to be exact, I’ve carried this anger, loneliness, distrust, fear and anxiety in my cells. Not only about my birth mother who I chose by the way, it all ties into my soul’s journey. I also chose that when I was on the threshold between life in the spirit realm and this beautiful school on the earthly plane.
Ultimately it was and still is my choice to create it, and my responsibility to handle this pattern. No one else is involved in its making. Like the responsibility I learned to embrace while at the retreat in Sedona about infancy, birth trauma may be transferred by our mothers, yet ownership and clearing is all ours.
Presently, I see very vividly that I distrust men at some level in nearly all circumstances. This is part and parcel of my initial step into single status, although not the reason I continue to remain so. The distrust simply surfaced enough to be noticed one day after a long residence deep in my bones and now I choose to put a magnifying glass on it.
It’s been easy all these years to dismiss my intermittent feelings of angst toward men, my sometimes edgy interactions with them and the wall of protection I create because the meetings are few and far between. I don’t live with male input on a daily basis. Today I can see that I have always found a way to make the man out to be a bad guy: stupid, chauvinistic, uneducated, rigid, too left-brained, unfeeling, violent, aggressive, even misogynistic. Hidden deeply, the list is huge.
Funny that it was never obvious to me or them, and I have had so many male friends over the years. Better said, it was never overt, yet lay in the darkness, covertly acting on everything in my life. That’s another story altogether.
Maybe because I don’t have many ongoing relationships with men right now, I can more easily blame them for how I feel. They aren’t there as regular mirrors. Usually these feelings of distrust are so light and airy, they float away. I can barely capture them in the moment, much less hang onto them for study. Other times these feelings are so overwhelming and situational, I just know it’s “not about me!”
That’s the false reality of the mind and it’s made up beliefs.
I ask constantly for information about my lack of desire for a sexual and even a romantic relationship, begging to confront what might possibly be denial. The fact that I haven’t received much input from the heavens nor many outer reflections has led me to hold the falsity that I don’t need to look in this place for shadow material.
There is such heavy unconsciousness at work here, and it’s very tricky. We can always find someone to reflect a lie in our own defense.
The mind tells us a lot of lies. I’ve spent the last several days interacting with my mind’s idea of men in a few different circumstances: my plumber’s lack of communication and follow-through; the homeowner’s association manager who just won’t listen to me (only me, not other women on the board); my osteopath who talks at me and doesn’t want to know how I feel; a friend who looks incredibly arrogant in his objectified demands on women; another male friend who treats women like projects.
Catching and documenting these thoughts over the years would have filled a tanker ship and left me old and gray without a legacy. Instead it became one of those tapes that plays so very softly in the background. At this point I could easily write a series of novels using these exciting dialogues. It would most likely be about men who are unavailable sloths.
What an embarrassing thing to acknowledge, much less to share here. It’s another one of those lonely moments when I know I am out on a weak limb without a net. And although I haven’t totally owned this yet, my precarious position is all part of the clearing process. I’ll know I’ve shifted the reality when I trust the plumber to finish the job, when I am unattached to being heard in a board meeting, and know my osteopath is connected to divine guidance. Even more than that, I’ll know the pattern is on it’s way out when I can actually transmit in the moment, “hey, I have something important to say!” and just say it without the angst ridden drive behind it.
Another thing I always say is “these things seem so easy and trite.” Although it could be, and I do believe in miraculous recovery, it’s just not that easy. It takes awareness, commitment, courage, willingness and so much trust in ourselves. It takes openness, conscious knowledge and conscientious follow-through to get there from here.
