When it comes to the interactions, things turn even more vague. Giving way to a cyclist or holding the door for someone may just feel like the right thing to do at the time, but ultimately, they are small but important acts of kindness that make someone’s day that little bit more enjoyable. Being the giver may leave a small seed of joy in service for a while. Being at the receiving end of such attention may feel ambiguous to many. Holding the door for a woman is often seen as sexist behaviour and outright refused. Holding the door for a man seems to elicit surprise most of the time. To me, it’s just giving a helping hand when I see it’s necessary. Nothing more, nothing less.
What does this have to do with ‘love’? Well, I’d like to see love as something very vast and vague at the same time. Forget about love = romance for a moment and let’s consider different equations: love = consideration, love = support or love = connection. I’m sure you can come up with different forms of love altogether that make sense to you. Many such forms of love can lead to giving love to someone, but will they be aware of it? That brings us to the REAL issue: can we receive love if it takes so many shapes that it’s often hard to even be aware of it being given? Maybe it’s necessary to open our hearts to more than just one vibration of love, that ‘one love’ we all seem to be looking for! There are so many ways to express love we are aware of, why would we expect that love to come back in only one single form? Of course it won’t. I’m ‘guilty’ of the same thing: not recognising love when it comes my way. And I have decided to open up all my senses so I can register when it hits me from all kinds of angles, in all manner of situations, and then accept it fully and bask in it for a moment. That’s not to say I’ll change overnight – and neither will any of you – but keeping the sensors open increases the chance of love being able to make a difference in me. And in you.
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And just like that, kindness really is present in anyone, but it sometimes needs a bit of a wakeup call to become more pronounced. That may be the realisation that someone did something for you when you were unable to do so, or witnessing another person being helped or giving assistance. Those moments make us realise that there is more to life than looking out for yourself, although that IS an important element in life, too.
Kindness is closely linked with the concept of humility. Being humble allows you to extend a hand to those in need, without the expectation of being given something in return. Rarely has the saying “a good deed is reward in itself” been more true: being kind to someone just like that has an infinite potential to make you feel better and happier yourself. It’s one of the few moments where through your actions you give yourself a pat on the back at the same time, without even realising you are doing it. The effect is instantaneous: you will feel better about yourself. At the same time, being kind to others is a perfect recipe to overcome worries of your own. That little injection of positive energy is going to put issues in your own life into perspective. That insurmountable problem you faced may just look a little less daunting in light of the problems of that other person. The amazing thing is this: kindness increases not just from receiving it, but also from giving it! Kindness doesn’t cost you anything, but it will change your mindset before, during and after the act. You may have heard the term ‘karma points’ that you can gain from such actions. I dislike the transactional nature of this saying, but I do acknowledge the effect to some level: it doesn’t matter if you believe in karma, you will be changed in some minute way by each act of kindness. That change comes in many shapes and sizes: maybe it’s a buzz from being there for your friends, a sense of achievement from helping with a chore you weren’t sure you could do, or a learning experience from holding someone’s hand when they needed it. The notion of ‘karma points’ implies you can exchange those for something else, but ultimately you’re not paying into a savings account here: being kind instils kindness in others who may just pay it forward in some other form. Next time you get a chance to show kindness, just do it. Don't hesitate to be good.
Similarly, envy tends to come up when someone owns something you desire, making you feel like you are not trying enough. Sadly, that guy with the big shiny car only has that one thing to show off and present an image of success, while at the same time he starves himself to death in order to pay off that same car that is far above his pay grade.
What many of us don’t realise: the image someone presents is often nothing more than that: an image they project for their own internal reasons. The trouble starts when envy sets in at the receiving end of that image, because we take everything that is presented at face value, without wanting or being in a position to question what is being shown. And that leads to envy over something that is – more often than not – far from real. That build-up of envy also points towards an internal process within ourselves: we desire something that others present as desirable, but do we really want or need this thing? Are we being led to assume that we do, or is it a real desire? One way out of envy is simple: find out what you REALLY desire and stop being envious of anything else that may not even be on your Christmas list to start with. The same applies to conscious sensuality, of course. We often see people engage in ways we cannot wait to experience, and we get envious because it doesn’t ever quite happen in that way for us. I have found that it’s wiser to let go of such expectation and stick with what comes, what you already have, and what makes sense for you. That big car may be just as much of a burden for you, that thoughtful caress may come with verbal abuse at other times. The envy is directed solely at what comes across as good and lovely, but it clearly neglects any downside that is part of a full picture. Envy is about the unreachable, the dream, the wishful thinking. The best thing to do when you realise you develop feelings of envy is to take a step back and find out why you are envious rather than going on feeling inadequate or needy.
When it comes to the kind of confusion that makes you wonder about the deeper questions of life, this is not entirely unexpected. And yet those are the kind of questions that have the potential to throw us into a spiritual conundrum. Let’s face it: we have more time to ourselves these days and maybe this encounter with confusion is a normal result of our brains finally picking up on ideas we simply have not followed up on in the past.
These deep questions make us consider ideas in ways we may not be completely used to or equipped for – because for most of us it’s such a rare occurrence that we think about the bigger picture. Many of you may not even have the right vocabulary to express the ideas that pop into your heads. Or you feel silly bringing some stuff up in casual conversation because you get a sense that either you have gone a little crazy or the people around you may not understand what the hell you are talking about. All these things add to a sense of being alone and lost and without the necessary tools to dig yourself out of that enormous rabbit hole again. And so you stay surrounded by question marks, by big ideas that may not quite fit your world view, and experiences that you are having trouble lining up with what you consider normal life. Well: which ‘normal’ are we talking about here? The ‘old normal’ (pre-Covid) seems to be a thing of the past and one can only hope we’ll all take elements from the ‘new normal’ into the synthesis that the ‘future normal’ will turn out to be. Everything is currently in flux, so why wouldn’t your thoughts and internal processes be affected by it? Let’s consider your options here: you can either stay worried about that understandable confusion, or you can embrace whatever makes sense to you and leave the rest to simmer for now. Personally, I’d rather see the opportunities that this mental shake-up brings me than run myself ragged from remaining confused over things that may ultimately sort themselves out through the simple expedient of living with them for a while.
This all sounds really depressing, right? And yet I find that I’m surprisingly proactive and creative with what I am able to do, and at the same time much more in touch with my own feelings than usual. I guess that I’m just more in touch with them because there is more time for them to develop and for me to experience them. I’m not busy all the time and can allow myself to go off on an emotional tangent. I guess that describes pretty much everyone around, but are they also embracing those emotions?
Personally, I’m feeling tearful more often when I watch movies: more than once I started crying in the middle of film that I usually wouldn’t be too fussed about. And it’s not limited to sad feelings: I also feel strangely good about things that I would otherwise brush off as ‘I did an okay job with this’ or ‘yeah, that feels kind of good’. These days I find myself laughing out loud or getting all giggly from things that don’t affect me at all in ‘normal times’. I believe that all this has a lot to do with the availability of time to myself, in addition to having less pressure from work and having accepted that there is only so much I can do to keep busy professionally. For the first time ever I feel that I’ve done all I could rather than ‘I should do this as well. And that, too!’, and that gives me the right to take time off. Where does bliss come into this? It’s quite simple, really. Giving myself allowance to experience emotions more often and more fully naturally leads to heightened senses and bigger emotional outbursts. Going into certain tantric exercises or simply allowing yourself to experience touch fully will automatically have a bigger impact. It’s all down to being more open to the experience than otherwise. Feeling anxious about the future opens a channel that works for sorrow but also for joy, it’s really up to you to use it either way: you choose the direction this goes, and whatever you choose is going to be enhanced. And that works for embracing bliss fully, of course. Mindset is everything when it comes to allowing emotions. If your mind manages to steer you away from the sad ones and towards the joyful ones, you are on the right way to finding bliss and enjoying it.
Most of us can deal with a low level of anxiety by either accepting it or brushing over for a while, and doing what we do each day without too much interference by that anxiety. Obviously, this is not the proper way to DEAL with anxiety, but it helps getting through the day. One day at a time.
We are living in times when it has become a lot more difficult to just brush those anxieties away, of course, and it has become less easy to disregard them now. If you already are afraid for your life, becoming infected with a potential death threat, keeping other anxieties under wraps is becoming harder, if not impossible! We need to find ways to lower the general level of fear and anxiety overall and there are a couple of tricks (yes: tricks!) that can help with moving forward healthily. I’m not claiming those will help you extract and get rid of anxiety, but they may just help with keeping you a lot calmer. Stop binging news and talk radio! There is a fine line between ‘keeping informed’ and ‘getting a full whammy of everyone else’s anxiety thrown at you 24/7’. Stick to how you would have followed the news in the past: maybe watch a news bulletin once a day – preferably not in the evening but early on so you have a chance to digest and not fall asleep with worries on your mind. Read your one newspaper and leave it there. If something important happens, you’ll know! Make sure you have a proper daily routine. Regularity makes everything more predictable and gives you a chance to disregard the irregular things that create upset for you. Anything you KNOW is going to happen is helpful at this point. Meditate at least once a day. I realise that anxiety makes this more difficult, so why not incorporate some guided meditation into your day? There are lots of options on YouTube and there are Apps available that can help with it. Taking your mind off your worries is worth a try, isn’t it? Don’t stay all on your own. There are ways to communicate that you can explore, from text messages all the way to video conferences. Admittedly, this is different from meeting someone face to face, but it will have to do. You’ll probably find that just talking to another human being will make you feel better (don’t forget to stick with uplifting subjects and not go down the rabbit hole of each other’s worries). Reach out to others. You may be one of those people who thrive on helping others. By all means, keep doing this, any way you can! Be good to yourself, more so than ever before. If you share your home, be good to them, too! Take time when you need it, most things are not quite as important today as they were just weeks ago. I hope some of these suggestions will be of help to you. I’m not personally all that anxious most times, but they keep me from seeing any anxieties develop in front of my own eyes.
Sometimes I’m surprised by my reaction to the contents of a novel and how pertinent to tantra some of these descriptions are. I recently picked up ‘The Master Butchers Singing Club’ by Louise Erdrich, a book I had already read a couple of times and came across the above paragraph. I was flummoxed by the sheer intensity of the scene, and how it describes in just a few words the notion of not just energies rising within both Delphine and Cyprian, but how they exchange that energy through an intimate connection made by eye contact. It seems to me that the author is describing a deep connection that consists of two elements:
First of all there is the eye contact. Conscious sensuality keeps pushing the eye gazing exercises and experience and this is one of the best examples I have found to show the power of that connection and how it connects the two partners on what can only be described as a mental, even spiritual level. What’s going on is completely non-corporeal, focused on an energetic connection between the two, bringing a long-standing yearning to a climax that keeps going. The physical, sexual connection the two have is both a source and a result of those moving energies within each of their bodies. On the one hand, they have this bottled up sexual urge and restrictions (I recommend you read the book to hear more about this) that now come to the fore and ignite the energetic connection. On the other hand, the continued eye locking keeps the energy going, makes it go round and round, and intensify with each cycle. Now THAT’s what I call Tantric sex! It’s not just the fact that it keeps going, but it’s all about the connection between the two partners, they are conscious about their sexuality, about the connection they have, and they are as one. And yes: this is a heterosexual couple but the same connection is innately possible between any two partners, of course. This is one of the best images I can conjure up to explain how all the breathing, touching, moving and communicating comes together to form something that is clearly larger than the sum of its parts. Consider this: have you had a connection that relates to the one described above? Try and find out what made it so special and take the lesson with you next time you have sex…
Insecurities are all around us. ‘Will I be able to keep my job?’, ‘Will I run out of money?’ and ‘Will I get seriously sick?’ are just the first level of worries you’ll likely have. What about worries about others? ‘Is mum okay?’, ‘When will I see my grandchildren again?’ and ‘Where can I find toilet paper now?’ are further lines of worry you may be thinking about.
All of this leads to a situation where you will think that you have to DO a lot of stuff right away because the apocalypse is around the corner and you may run out of food. Of course, different people will react in different ways, more or less keep control of their reactions or break down completely from anxiety. This sounds very much like PTSD and in a way it could be, we just have not quite reached the P(post) of PTSD quite yet. I predict a lot of trauma and need for therapy when this is over, but you can do yourself some good with one simple action: Be good to yourself and stop running for a moment! I have found myself reacting to the crisis in a very particular way: I became super productive out of what felt like necessity. Since all or my income streams are people-based and required personal contact, I made work of shifting the bits I can to virtual assistance and then found even more ways to keep myself busy after that was finished. But then I saw some of my colleagues who have partners and kids showing signs of overwork from the sheer exhaustion of being around them all the time on top of trying to salvage their business. I took a good look at my situation and soon realised that I had poured all that anxiety into business planning (which was necessary, but not necessarily right now) and stopped in my tracks. I didn’t need to do any of this right now. First of all, I had to take care of my own mental and physical health – especially since I showed symptoms of a cold/flu/corona infection and needed much rest. Coming out of two weeks of constant activity I now felt ready to let go and – believe me – my mind was so happy to just settle into ‘doing nothing’ for a change. Yes: I still had to make sure I had food in the flat (friends supplied that and I’m eternally grateful), but it turned out that I had no need to keep running. I had overcome the knee-jerk panic reaction and allowed myself time to reflect and bumble. What does bumbling look like? Well: I’m doodling a lot, listen to music (avoiding talk radio and the news to a large degree), spend time cooking nice meals with what’s on hand, and speak to friends and family whenever I can. I urge you to try this: slowing down does wonders for the soul.
When an exercise is physically demanding, your blood flow will increase and your lungs will work more to accommodate your body’s needs for oxygen. In a meditative exercise, the body may not be doing this on its own and you’ll have to make a conscious choice to breathe in a different way to enhance your meditation efforts. That said, breathing differently on your own can feel a little far-fetched, but give it a go.
Circular breath is one of those simple exercises that is very easy to learn but is extremely helpful with drawing your focus away from the daily routine and all the stuff that’s going on around you and in your mind. It’s easy, once you get the drift of the process. When you breathe normally you would breathe in, stop for a moment, breathe out, stop for a moment. Rinse and repeat, forever. Circular breath is just that, but without the stops. Here’s how: start with an in-breath and when your lungs are full and you feel the urge to stop taking in more air, don’t stop and slowly let it out again until your lungs are empty. At that point, don’t stop either, but gently take air in again. Circular breathing means that you gently move from in to out and vice versa without a perceivable switch. Imagine a circle: you breathe in upwards and slowly reduce the speed and volume reaching the top, then drop down the other side right way by letting out the first bit of breath – and keep going. Same process at the bottom. And then keep going. This gentle virtualisation and motion of air flowing in and out is sure to keep you focused and will help you get into that meditative, reflective, calm mood you are looking for. And your energy has shifted to a less hectic, more relaxed state. Even in ‘real life’ we are making use of breath in similar ways: when someone needs to calm down we usually ask them to ‘breathe slowly’ or to ‘calm down and start breathing again’. That is in fact just the same thing in a non-meditative setting. Now try this: think of times and situations when your breath registered as unusual and look at just how your breathing pattern has been affected and why. Bring this learning to your meditation sessions and use it to make magic happen! There is nothing wrong with making use of what you already know is working…
There is something to be said to maintain a sense of wonder and a need to discover new things and – dare I say? – new men and their special wicked ways. I guess you have been at that point where you need to find out if what you perceive as daily drab proceedings could be turned into something more exciting, right? You may be on the right path.
Whatever your brain is telling you, there are always other ways to try, and while there is something to be said about being happy with the status quo, we are all explorers at heart and like the thrill of the new and unexpected. Let’s assume you have a partner who is open to experiments, there are many options to try and most of them come in the form of workshops rather than chance encounters in a darkroom, bar or on the dance floor. Let’s consider things like kink parties, for example: at first sight, those might be suitable for the advanced students only, but don’t be mistaken, most of them are fairly organised affairs with a high level of supervision and security, providing a safe place to start exploring the things you come across. It’s also very likely you’ll find someone to show you the ropes (literally!) or introduce you to pleasure created by light flogging or keeping you out of your comfort zone in other ways. If you have a partner in crime – be it a life partner or a friend you trust completely – you may even play with being blindfolded while he guides you through a bar you are otherwise familiar with. That could go as far as allowing him to guide others to touch you in certain ways or going even further than that. Ultimately, all those things are based on trust and a sense of feeling safe. That feeling can be based on having a friend making sure nothing happens to you that you have not stated as ‘this is okay’ to your friend ahead of time (they will have to supervise closely, of course). Your safety is usually in good hands in specific clubs for particular kinks as they allow for clear rules. Safety can also be created on the basis of trust and clear discussions before playing with someone. All those steps demand clear boundaries that are discussed ahead of time – or during – and an obvious way to stop proceedings with the understanding that a STOP is final and has to be obeyed by both parties. |
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September 2021
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