This suggestion to have a mother graduation party is a shock to many mothers. After eighteen years of reading from the same script, some mothers are afraid to discover who they are when their life is no longer defined by their high drama theatrical role as “the mother.” For example, my mother never took off the title or the role. She had three sons, and even when all three moved out of the house, set up their own lives, and created jobs and families of their own, my mother continued to play out the role of being “mother” to “her three boys.” You do not have to do this. Sticking to the role of “mother” avoids the greater responsibility of being “woman,” and possibly also the greater joy of Pirate Sorceress Warrioress Queen Goddess Woman in the world at large. That a woman would choose to avoid these pleasurable and challenging grand adventures is an example of the Box’s “free will” occluding Archetypal opportunities.
You cannot stop being a child’s mother like you can quit being a man’s wife or a company’s manager. The suggestion to have a mother graduation party is no invitation to stop loving or respecting your child. The party is simply a ritual intended for consciously and elegantly deflating your “mother” character, thus giving you more space to explore other possible adult roles. At the same time, those people who used to be in your custody as children are freer to begin creating through their own adult roles. Boy children, especially, benefit by having a better chance of “taking their balls back” and entering their own manhood – a procedure that is not well supported by our modern culture and can therefore use all the help it can get.
To Fathers, About Daughters
A girl transitioning into adult womanhood requires the guidance and impetus of a feminine rite of passage that our culture does not provide. If the transition to womanhood occurs at all, in our present culture, it occurs inaccurately or incompletely, or more likely both. Certainly the onset of menses initiates a female body into a more mature relationship to nature, birth and death, but womanhood encompasses far more than physiological shifts. Engaging adult womanhood is stepping through a one-way door into an entirely new relationship to the world – a world of radical creative play, of uncompromising responsibility, and the possibility of life as Pirate Sorceress Warrioress Queen Goddess Woman.
One of the confusions surrounding the transition from girlhood to womanhood comes from the father. Fathers are not provided with the clarity they need to enact their part in the transformational high drama that unfolds a woman from a girl. Unnecessary pain and residual perplexities could be avoided if men played their part with elegance and sensitivity, but men are neither informed nor trained in how to do this.
Instead, many fathers suddenly abandon all connectedness with their daughters at the first sign of budding breasts or bloody tampons. The daughter’s shock of being abandoned, at a time when her father’s steadfast admirations and appreciation is most needed, can leave lifelong emotional scars in her trust of and relationship to all future men in her life. Women need to experience – in all four bodies – that they are still appreciated, respected, admired and loved, even if that body is making wild changes that are beyond their control.
A father who abandons his daughter at adolescence usually does so out of his own confusion and embarrassment. The daughter thinks that her father suddenly rejects her. The father thinks his little girl has vanished and has become that mysterious and dangerous “feminine thing.” He thinks she would prefer total privacy, instead of the warm fatherly hug he used to give her, when in fact her hesitations are only timidity about revealing her new form. He thinks his daughter intends the separation that is happening, when, instead, she is only testing his steadfastness toward her in her more mature condition. When the father stops playing catch or tag with his daughter, stops tousling her hair, stops listening to her stories of her new interests, stops paying attention and holding a fatherly space for her, the shock of his abandonment destabilizes her shift into a bigger world. She needs father’s continued fatherly support as much if not more than ever during her adolescence. This is when father should not let go of his daughter.
Other fathers blatantly ignore any changes at all while their daughter grows up. As the girl turns from nineteen to twenty to twenty-one years old, goes away to college, starts seriously exploring relationships with men, establishes herself in an interesting and enlivening career, and enters the adult world, the father still treats her like his little girl. He pays her bills, fixes her car, demands to know where she’s been last night, and tells her what will be happening over the weekend. She may have moved out of her father’s house, gotten married, started her own business and had several children, but the father still calls her by her childhood name and treats her like his little missy.
A father can never stop being a father even if he can quit being a husband or a consultant. But a father can recognize and contribute to his daughter entering adulthood. As the father, he can continue to represent the strong arms in which his daughter can always find comfort, information, encouragement or protection.
The father-daughter connection may also be inappropriately secure. If the father does not make the shift at the right time from being father-to-daughter to being older-manto-younger-woman, then his daughter suffers silently with resentments, or suffers more perceptibly by cutting him out of her life so she can have a life of her own. Taking her center back from her father is a daughter’s work. Her father cannot give her center back to her, just as the mother cannot give the balls back to her son – he has to take them. And yet there is an appropriate time for a father to hand his precious girl out into the world, to let her go, come what may, prepared or not, for better or worse. And, in that releasing, the man graduates from his role as responsible daddy and enters new roles as proud father, playful grandfather, Archetypal Pirate Magician King Spiritual Warrior Man, and respectful admiring friend of an amazing woman who used to be his child.
Sons into Men’s Culture and Daughters into Women’s Culture
The difficulty with fathers bringing their sons into Archetypal Men’s culture and mothers bringing their daughters into Archetypal Women’s culture – even though such a transition is so crucially important – is that Archetypal Men’s and Women’s cultures do not exist in our present modern Western cultures, and we do not naturally know how to create them ourselves. Instructions for bootstrapping yourself into your authentic Archetypal gender culture are beyond the scope of this book. But instructions do exist. Brave men and women are experimenting at the fringe of our culture. With diligence you can find them, work with them, and together you can build a bridge into Archetypal gender cultures for yourself, your family, your friends and your colleagues. Keep making efforts. Whatever you try is assuredly better than the present state of affairs, which may include giving up before you start.
CHAPTER 19
What If It Is Not Working?
Relationships die. Love never dies. So, relationships do not die from lack of love.
Popular folklore leads us to believe that we can fall in love and then fall out of love. This is nonsense. The idea that we can stop loving someone is an idea that does not relate to Archetypal Love.
Human love can be given and taken away like attention, like money, like a wedding ring. We love someone. We hate someone. Our ordinary human feelings can change in a moment. Hate is not the opposite of Archetypal Love. Hate is the shadow side of ordinary human love. If we hate someone we are still involved with them; we still exchange energy with them. Behind the exchange of love-hate energy in ordinary human love is always Archetypal Love. Archetypal Love never dies.
Archetypal Love cannot be given or taken away. Archetypal Love exists far beyond the reach of human control. Archetypal Love is a force of nature, a radiance, the most abundant thing in the universe. The fact that we think we can love and then stop loving reveals the severity to which the human mind is subject to a schizophrenia that we all pretend to ignore.
Once we step through the veil of the ordinary human illusion of separat
ion with another person, once we spontaneously cannot refuse to say (or cannot stop wishing to say) “I love you,” there is no going back. The bond is made. Archetypal Love does not undo itself.
We are usually not prepared by education or demonstration to understand that love never dies. We may want love to die. We may want to put up a brick wall where the veil vanished and where Archetypal Love first flowed through. We may want to forget and we cannot forget. But still we try. We get senile and try to forget. We feel victimized and try to forget. We get sick and try to forget. We get psychotic and try to forget. We die and try to forget. But the veil never returns and Archetypal Love never goes away. It may be that human beings are naturally designed to open to Archetypal Love with more and more people, one by one, until it becomes too painful to continue to deny that all there is, is Love.
Think of how many women are physically beaten or psychologically tortured by their alcoholic husbands and still stick around being co-dependent. Think of how many men are used as emotional trashcans or psychic punching bags by their semi-borderline wives and still stick around being co-dependent. Think of how many children have been raped, beaten, abandoned and betrayed by their modern parents and still can do nothing but love them. Think of the silent things left within you from all of the times your heart desired to say “I love you” and you did not deliver the communication. That message is still in your heart wishing to be heard. Love does not vanish.
And, still, relationships can come to an end.
SECTION 19-A
Build Common Ground
Relationships do not die from a lack of love. Relationships die from a lack of common ground.
If we have built common ground, then being in communion with our partner within the common ground creates heart and soul food for the relationship, and the relationship lives and grows. If common ground shrinks away, then the food supply dwindles. Communication breaks down, the relationship starves and eventually can no longer be sustained. What do we do then?
Common ground does not mean that you both love to play golf, although that could be included. Common ground does not necessarily mean common interests, projects, hobbies, friends, films, music, food or work habits, although these could be a part of it. Common ground in relationship means a common level to which we are able to be intimate.
Notice, the definition for common ground is not “the common level to which we are willing to be intimate,” but “to which we are able to be intimate.” Here is where the question gets interesting. What is it that determines our ability to be intimate?
Is the level of intimacy to which we can go volitional? Or is it structural? Sure, we can theoretically choose to be as intimate as we want, just as we could theoretically choose to be as authentic as we want. But, in actual practice, the level seems to be set by something other than our conscious choices. We can only be as intimate as we can be. Yet somehow, over the years, our yearning for intimacy can change.
What factors affect the level to which we are able to be intimate? For each individual the factors seem to be unique because we each have a unique past and our past experiences leave “footprints” on us. These footprints are still with us and can be seen immediately by someone who has developed their ability to scan for them. To summarize what we’ve emphasized throughout this book, the footprints that we carry influence the shape of our Box, and the shape of our Box determines the level to which we are able to be intimate. If we make successful efforts to change the shape of our Box, then our ability to be intimate can change. But, in each moment, the Box factors that produce intimacy include:
• Our Stories. We remember what happened to us and we make a story about it. We use our story to substantiate our decision as to whether what happened was “good” or “bad.” We are certain about our stories; we hold them indubitable. No one can challenge the validity of the stories we make about what happened to us. Then these stories create expectations in us. Our basic expectation is that whatever is happening now will be the same as what happened back then, good or bad. Expectations take us out of the present, and the present is the only place where intimacy happens.
• Our Decisions. When things happened to us we made decisions about ourselves, about other people and about life in this world. Those old decisions still influence our lives today. When the old decisions pertain to intimacy, such as, “If I open up I will get hurt,” then the old decisions limit our capacity for intimacy.
• Our Emotions. When things happened to us in the past, we might have been able to experience and express feelings about it at the time. But, most likely, there was no one there to listen to us, so our feelings were uncompleted. Unexpressed feelings become emotions. In order to be intimate, we must be present and in our bodies. As soon as we get present and in our bodies, the unexpressed emotions that are locked in our bodies become present too. If it is not okay for us to feel and express these emotions now, we cannot get present, and again our ability to be intimate is blocked.
• Our Resentments. When things happened to us in the past we may have felt hurt, disrespected, abused, or betrayed. We might quite understandably carry these wounds around as a bodily memory for protecting ourselves, even if the incident of the wounding is outside of our present awareness. This is resentment. Resentment is a hook in our heart keeping the wound open as a constant reminder to avoid getting ourselves into a similar situation where we could get hurt again. Resentments keep our heart wounded and thereby block us from intimacy. And so on.
Many factors limit our ability to be intimate. Hopefully the examples above indicate how significant and longstanding these factors are.
Each person represents a unique set of these factors that, taken together, create the shape of his or her Box. Most of these factors remain completely unconscious until such time as we, for some reason, wish to enter a deeper intimacy or greater authenticity. And, in the moment we make a gesture toward greater vulnerability, these and other factors raise up their serpentine heads like Loch Ness monsters.
Of course we are surprised and shocked by the immensity and ferocity of these protective intimacy-devouring monsters. Who are we to do battle with such creatures? And for heaven’s sake, what for? Best to leave the heinous serpents alone, undisturbed in the deep, we think. And who could argue? Sure, we could be more intimate, if we succeed in the wrestling match with the prehistoric beasts. If we don’t succeed, then our level of possible intimacy will be strictly defined by the Box’s psychological makeup.
The ordinary strategy is to find a partner who has an equivalent intimacy factor and to get together with them. Our marriage vows include the tacit agreement that we will leave our monsters untamed and our partner will do the same. But this strategy assumes we can outsmart evolution, which may surprise us with unforeseen increases in our need for intimacy. As a result, we end up reading a book like this to try to figure out what is happening to us. If the book has worked, then we are already doing responsible experiments that develop our capacity for feeding relationship with greater intimacy. But, studying and experimenting creates further openings to the forces of evolution.
SECTION 19-B
Evolution and Relationship
Once you get together with someone, and a few years tick by, a new factor arises that can again seriously influence the “balance of intimacy” equation. That factor is time. At first, or even later on in our relationship, we might find ourselves faking a level of intimacy either greater or less than we can actually sustain. We do this to match what we think our partner wants. Such a strategy does neither person any good in the long run, and time itself gradually wears the strategy away. Remember, the “run” may not be as long as we think. Life has a tendency to slip by no matter how we play it out, so why not take the full risk of playing it out as authentically as you can? Time’s invitation is to stop wasting time pretending to be something you are not. Use the time you have in daring to be more and more who you are. The journey of being who you are is a dance with evolutionary f
orces.
Evolutionary forces can be simple or sophisticated. Examples of simple evolutionary forces include an interest in reading self-help books, writing in a diary with fierce introspection, forced health or diet restrictions, hiking or camping trips in nature, classes in martial arts, meditation, theater or singing, training with bow and arrow or sword, learning handicraft or circus skills, and so on. Examples of more sophisticated evolutionary forces include extended travel in third world or seriously foreign cultures, participation in certain personal development or training programs that provide deep emotional processing and / or new mental clarity, attending regular study groups or meetings with high-integrity teachers or healers, following your teacher’s instructions to run your own workshops, taking a leadership position in projects that are bigger than you know how to handle, and so on.
Exposure to either simple or sophisticated evolutionary forces over a longer stretch of time is almost guaranteed to deepen the level of intimacy that a person is able to engage. If one partner in the pair enters a faster track of evolution than the other, an imbalance in the ability to be intimate is sure to arise. In fact, only an illusion of the mind makes it seem that any two people ever have the same speed or direction of evolution. Don’t believe the illusion.
Evolution tends to direct itself to transforming whatever is the most important factor that blocks the flow of life force. Even longterm or very shadowy blockages can be digested by evolution and changed into doorways of discovery. When the ability to intimately meet the being of the other is imbalanced in a couple, one, or more likely both, of the partners go hungry and the relationship starves. If you find yourself in a starving relationship, first consider that it may be your Box at work furiously defending against changes that would take it out of familiar territory. The Box’s free will alone is strong enough to resist or evade even the most powerful forces of evolution. As one partner starts a meditation practice, for example, the other may resist this change with all their might. That is natural. But if your Box is afraid of the reaction of your partner’s Box and has you adapt to their resistance, then what can evolution do for you? It can only wait. This is why results from all of the conditions that we have been speaking about are individual and in general unpredictable. There is no general formula to guarantee how relationship will grow, or die, or succeed. A lot is up to you personally, you and your Box.
Radiant Joy Brilliant Love Page 74
