The Lie And The Shadow Self

The story of the night in shining armor has a shadow side that we often prefer not to look at. 

I was one of those people-pleasers who grew up with all the right family dynamics to bring this trait out in me. What begins as a desire to make the life of a depressed or bereaved parent or sibling’s life better can set up a pattern that gets carried into relationships later in life. Most of this is unconscious behavior, so it is neither recognized as it’s being felt or acted upon nor experienced. This is most often experienced as what some call the “karmic merry-go-round” where certain behaviors and personality types come into our lives repeatedly (hint: we are attracted to them without fully knowing why…and this is why I say “karma creates chemistry” for all you twin flame and twin-souls out there).

 For every man who wants to come to the aid of a damsel in distress, there is a woman who wants to be saved. Notice I didn’t say “needs to be saved.” We do these things because they satisfy a deficit in ourselves. The deeper problem is that there is a brokenness in both people, allowing themselves to be drawn into a relationship that is highly codependent. The question becomes, why does that “knight” need to save anyone, and why can’t the woman save herself? The answer, or part of it, lies in our inability to be truthful about how we feel. The man probably feels innadequate in some way and saves people to make himself feel better about himself. The woman, incapable of accepting her own feelings of inadequacy, relies on others to fix things she believes she is powerless to affect.  Both are relying on someone else to give them what they lack within themselves. I don’t need to tell you that such relationships don’t end well unless both are equal in their respective need or dysfunction. The moment one grows or changes is the moment this delicate house of cards can fall.

It’s common for us to point to childhood as the genesis for these behaviors, but this is short-sighted when you bring in the issue of karma. In all of my experience in releasing karmic blocks, all of them emerged from a central point within not just me, but within my larger being on a reincarnation-based scale. What I am saying is that many of these glitches come about not through a linear progression of lifetimes lived, but outside of time and most often trouble multiple lives at once.I say this because I have had access to numerous lifetimes and I have seen how these issues often repeated in some lifetimes (but not all). The themes predate life here, ad in going to their root, I did not find a Genesis here, but “elsewhere.”

 It appears that we come back over and over to work through a number of different themes, some which can be very different from each other. 

Some cycles in reincarnation can be fairly straightforward in the sense that a soul comes in as a woman, man, father, and mother. These encompass the entirety of our possible relationships (including siblings when we are a part of a family). For others, a soul with a more expansive interest will come back in a variety of cultures in order to get a larger perspective. It’s possible to develop many major currents in karma as well as sub-currents.  All of these come in with you while the soul is drawn to the very factors in life that will help activate these patterns, even when they are negative. Once a soul on the planet begins to be self aware, these deeper patterns begin to be more noticeable and they can be worked through. Healing these patterns actually can have an effect on past lives as hard as that might be to believe. I have seen this happen in my own experience when my spiritual guardian awakened me in the wee hours of Good Friday seven years ago to show me a vision of how all my past junk was being shoveled out through my lifetime now. I stood outside in the cool night air at 4:00 a.m. as he motioned for me to look off to my side. I saw a long hallway appear going off into the woods behind my house. He told me to watch and the hallway tilted downward while the other end tilted up and I saw the doors to each room (a lifetime) fly open and the refuse contents all came sliding out. Hopes, dreams, fears, upsets, all repressed emotion the self was unwilling to deal with, all of it, came sliding out. Sandalphon turned to me and explained that this was part of why I had come here, to be that life where this material was cleared for lifetimes. This wasn’t just from my life as a child, this was from my soul, a pattern that was being made right again. If you understand how something you do here and now can impact your existence both forward and backwards in time, its easy to get very “hungry” for wanting to clean that kind of mess up in your life.

The result of these changes I was going through in the early stages of my awakening put me on a collision course with my then-spouse who was unsteadied by the forces at play in my awakening. Angry over the changes taking place that made me less reactive to her codependent behavior, I had to move forward with the forces in my awakening regardless of the ramifications it might have had for my old life.
I learned that I was drawn to these damsels who, I would learn, were engaging in a form of destructive behavior known as projection. Projection is a type of lie we tell ourselves, a lie that we completely believe….

Projection is an observed behavior that both Freud and Jung wrote a lot about. Jung ascribed the need to project to the Shadow Archetype in the self, a part of us that does not reflect on itself. Jung explained that when the person affected by their shadow self has a deep enough fault or a deep enough misgiving about a fault they have, they will turn this on others and believe that the fault lies with the other person. This is more than blaming, it is the result of a rift within the shadow self that can make this possible. While we all appear to project from time to time, those with neurotic tendencies or who are pathological, will most often do it regularly. For people such as this, projection becomes a way of life. I know because I married one and because of how traumatizing it was, I was drawn to yet another person a few years later who had all the same traits. Because I was awakened, the karma fueled a powerful connection which I attempted to work through a number of times with no success. People like this woman who are serial projectors are said to have either narcissistic tendencies or have a condition known as Borderline Personality Disorder. My first clue about this was when I drove with a friend to a neighboring state to pick up a car she had bought online, and while we were going, I talked about my ex-wife. My friend, who was a licensed counselor, said that my description of her behavior was consistent with BPD and narcissist tendencies. 
As a result of our discussion I did some research into these designations and found that I had not just one run-in with this kind of person, but two. Remember that merry-go-round I mentioned earlier? That’s what I mean. I was drawn to another person who would repeat all the same behaviors as my ex-spouse! And the crazy thing about it was after a few weeks of knowing this person and seeing how she let down her guard and began showing her true self, I had already begun to suspect, even was able to predict what range of behaviors I was likely going to see come from this person, assuming at the time that this was a karmic connection modelled on my ex-spouse. And I was right. To make all of this even more entertaining, I actually thought I needed to work this karma out with this person so I could put an end to this extremely hurtful pattern once and for all!

One of the most difficult part of being with these kinds of people are the lies. In fact, when I saw how both of these women were psychopathic liars, I was accused of being a psychopathic liar. Living with someone like this is like living in a hall of mirrors. Everything that is theirs gets put onto you and then they begin isolating you and trying to alienate the healthy people in your life so your relationships with them are ruined. 

My wife said I didn’t love my children and said this directly to them numerous times. It was a cycle of denigration that had a destructive impact on my life, my sense of wellbeing, not to mention how it effected my children and how it strained, unnecessarily, my relationship with them. It was a nightmarish kind of experience. This second person said I was online seeking to seduce women using my “kundalini powers,”writing publicly and creating an air of drama and conspiracy.  These were the tame lies, and they got worse from there. All of the lies she told appeared to me to be efforts at character assassination in order to isolate me from friends and family, or from colleagues professionally. The really crazy part to all of this was how this person worked in a professional capacity dealing with issues of harassment in the workplace. Talk about a fox in the hen house. 

What makes these lunatics believable is how functional they appear to be. How can they be psychotic when they hold down jobs that require a degree of responsibility? In truth, the narcissist and the Borderline personality type have a public face and a private face. No one saw how the Borderline personality would behave at home, ranting and raving at family, or at themselves. “I talk to myself like this to calm myself” she would say when we would get out of public and into private. The truth was, for as composed as she seemed, she was really repressing a huge amount of emotion second by second and on a few occasions would simply go into a temporal meltdown that would be the reason why she would have to leave a public place because she couldn’t hold it together long enough. 

All I ever saw was that this behavior and the words she used were not about finding peace, but as a way to keep the tension in place. We say that venting helps, but all venting does is it serves as a way for us to justify our upset. If venting is done without being defensive then, yes, it can help release stored anxiety. But this wasn’t what was happening. She was putting her neurosis onto me.When she claimed I was hiding her presence in my life by not friending her on Facebook, I was instead not wanting her to have access to my friends for fear she would use them as she had used me in her need to shirk her responsibility for her feelings and reactions. I feared that she would do to my friends what my ex had done to my children. She complained about my not introducing my family to her, but the truth was, I suspected she could use them the same way my ex used my own family members to try and distance and alienate them from me. The jealousy I’m talking about here is beyond anything anyone would call within normal bounds. It was scary. The “clusterfuck” of emotions she claimed marked my emotional state were the result in large part to her own raw emotions and upset, which was vented directly at me. She would get upset if I looked a female cashier in the eye and thanked her by name for checking out my groceries. I was dressed down for being playful with wait-staff at a restaurant. Behavior that was just me being nice suddenly took on a sinister tone. I found myself being punished for being me. What was happening was that she was putting her own hard emotions on to me , the guy so eager to help. The result always felt like having someone pooping on you and then saying what a mess you are. It was beyond upside-down.

It’s hard because people like this do not see how they are creating the crisis they claim others bring to their lives when it’s all their own doing. In fact, the victims of this form of emotional abuse often wind up being enablers by being afraid to speak out against these kinds of people. I was accused of having sexually assaulted “all” of my female art students at my work. When I confronted her with this lie, she pointed out how she had not used my name which is the definition of slander and libel. She then said that had a Constitutionally protected right to write anything she wanted. I have the email. 

The problem is that in our society when a woman makes an accusation like this, people tend to believe the woman. In this case, it was another in a long line of lies. People don’t stop to consider the pain that this causes men who are often stuck in roles that expect them to just “suck it up” and go on. It’s a deadly double standard that assumes women don’t lie about these things. My experience has been that they do, and do so in spectacular fashion.

So how do you make sense of all of this? How do you deal with people who project? What are some of the symptoms and the backgrounds of people who engage in behavior like this?

Projection is a psychological defense mechanism in which individuals attribute characteristics they find unacceptable in themselves to another person. For example, a husband who has a hostile nature might attribute this hostility to his wife and say she has an anger management problem.
In some cases projection can result in false accusations. For example, someone with adulterous feelings might accuse their partner of infidelity. Considering how much the woman I knew engaged in affairs while being with other men, it began to make sense that she was putting on to me her own inability to control her sexual appetite. She claimed that I had broken up her marriage when she actually said to me privately that she divorced her husband because she was not happy with him. She said that you don’t go looking unless things aren’t alright at home to begin with (I have screenshots of those texts). Months later, she was blaming me for her own broken marriage. She was also claiming that I too was married at the time, but I was not. I had been separated for over two years by the time I met her and my divorce was finalized the following year.

According to the psychiatric community there are types of projection. Like other defense mechanisms, projection is typically unconscious and can distort, transform, or somehow affect reality. A classic example of the defense mechanism is when an individual says “She hates me” instead of expressing what is actually felt, which is “I hate her.”

There are three generally accepted types of projection:
Neurotic projection is the most common variety of projection and most clearly meets the definition of defense mechanism. In this type of projection, people may attribute feelings, motives, or attitudes they find unacceptable in themselves to someone else.

 

Complementary projection occurs when individuals assume others feel the same way they do. For example, a person with a particular political persuasion might take it for granted that friends and family members share those beliefs.

Complimentary projection is the assumption other people can do the same things as well as oneself. For example, an accomplished pianist might take it for granted that other piano students can play the piano equally well.

What Is the Purpose of Projection?
Sigmund Freud believed projection to be a defense mechanism often used as a way to avoid uncomfortable repressed feelings. Feelings that are projected may be controlling, jealous, angry, or sexual in nature. These are not the only types of feelings and emotions projected, but projection most often occurs when individuals cannot accept their own impulses or feelings.

In modern psychology, the feelings do not necessarily have to be repressed to constitute projection. Projection can be said to provide a level of protection against feelings a person does not wish to deal with. Engaging in either complimentary and complementary projection can allow people to feel more like others or relate to them easily.
It is fairly common for people to engage in projection from time to time, and many people who project their feelings on occasion do not do so as a result of any underlying issue. In some cases projection can contribute to relationship challenges. Projection may also be a symptom of other mental health concerns. In my case, projection was part of a personality disorder.
Projection and Mental Health Concerns Projection, one main mechanism of paranoia, is also frequently a symptom of narcissistic and borderline personalities. A person with narcissistic traits who does not respect their partner may say to the partner, “You don’t respect me or see my true worth.” Some individuals with borderline personality may be afraid of losing the people they love and project this fear by frequently accusing friends or partners of planning to leave. However, individuals who project their feelings in this way do not necessarily have either of these conditions.

A person in therapy may be able to address these projections with the help of a qualified mental health professional. When a person can explore the reasons behind any projected feelings, it may be possible to prevent or reduce occurrences of this behavior in the future.

In the end, there is no “working” with a person like this. Instead, you learn when enough is enough. I thought I could heal a troublesome pattern, but I learned that this is not possible with someone with neurotic and delusional traits. In the end, it was far more productive to work out my stuff instead of tossing my junk into a cauldron with another person’s junk and expect anything good to come of it. But I knew this already. I was stupid. I was foolish. I learned you can only do this work quickly and productively on your own. Everything else is an invitation to the tar pit of karmic entanglement no matter how much that karma revs up your pranic engines. The result is I am genuinely happier, feeling safe, free, and ready for the next big adventure I’m about to embark on, and it finally looks like a dream come true.

References:

American Psychological Association. APA Concise Dictionary of Psychology. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2009. Print.

Corsini, R. J., & Wedding, D. (Eds.). (2007). Current Psychotherapies (Eighth ed.). Brooks Cole.

Perry, J. C., Presniak, M. D., & Olson, T. R. (2013). Defense Mechanisms in Schizotypal, Borderline, Antisocial, and Narcissistic Personality Disorders. Psychiatry, 76(1), 32-52.

Projection. (n.d.). Changing Minds. Retrieved from http://changingminds.org/explanations/behaviors/coping/projection.htm

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Awakening The Divine Within

We are taught to look heavenward for the best in us but I have always found that the best in us resides with us here and now. Our divine nature, the source of all our seeking lies nestled within us waiting for the moment when we are ready to see it. Our limited humanness, that often reviled part in us that we have collectively felt was what we had to transcend, holds the infinite in its deep and often unknowing embrace. By awakening, the vessel yearns to know what is filling it. Rather than looking to the heavens, look to your humanity because the answers all lie in wait in all of your impulses, no matter how dysfunctional you may think they have become. You might see as I have seen that instead of our being the result of a “demiurge” or a “fall” from grace, we are in truth expertly made and have everything we need to realize the divine within us….but we have tended in the past to have loused it up a bit, and this has led to notions of our being fundamentally flawed. So I’m going to talk a little about a dynamic that has been a part of our past that we can each heal in order to turn all of this around. Thankfully, it’s already happening for many people!

This is the challenging part for so many, which is trusting that our desire is designed to bring us closer to the divine. Or that our impulses, which we have used to wreck our lives in the past,  can be used to actually save us. It means being brave and diving right into what the forbidden and the taboo is in order to liberate and heal those feelings and beliefs so that love can flow unhindered. This is what all taboos do to us when they serve to limit us. This also happens to be central to Tantra in its purest form. Before you think I am referring to s-e-x, please know that a central tenet of Tantra is how a direct realization of our true nature brings bliss and bliss heals the self of a world of shame by unhitching us from our shame and guilt, in large part because the bliss is stronger than the pain encountered in our shame. This is an experience not unlike diving straight into the briar patch of our spiritual mess or tangle. Unfortunately Tantra in the West has become synonymous with sex which is putting the cart before the horse. When we accept taboo’s without thoroughly understanding their purpose, we can become bound by a convention of behavior that distorts our authentic nature. So often a taboo does more harm than good. “Oh really?!” you might be thinking. I’m going to give you a few examples and see if you don’t see how these things twist us around. The central stumbling block of taboo is that it serves to direct behavior in an uncritical way while making it so you may not be listening to your own inner compass. It is this compass that everyone has and is in truth your very own seed or connection to the divine. When you follow a rule without fully grasping why the rule is there to begin with, you aren’t following your inner compass, you are simply taking the lazy way to being, which is a life that doesn’t understand authentically. Life becomes a shadow of what it was because your deeper connection to your inner divinity is lost, or buried. But a life that reflects vividly on this inner compass is one where one knows and acts in accord with the one true stream of guidance which is itself a river of life full of realization and boundless wonder.

There are so many of these taboos and they are almost always made as a result of fear and often out of ignorance. It was in many cultures, at various times in our history, taboo for a woman to show her body. Some cultures still hold to this way of being that involves covering the entire body of a woman. Have you asked yourself why this is so? Or maybe how it was a taboo for a man to show his emotions beyond anger and aggression? When we created these restrictions we act surprised that men became physically aggressive instead of emotionally tender or sensitive? Women, on the other end of our dysfunctional past have given up their natural aggressive nature’s and have chosen a different route. Instead of brute force women learned how to manipulate their environment by way of subtler means: through emotion.  In Renaissance Europe, arguably a hotbed of liberal thinking, women were expected to go to church and to the market; it was unseemly to be seen hanging out with friends in the city square. As for middle eastern countries, it got much more repressive. If you think about it, human kind has been in this arrangement for a long time all because we have worshipped fear over freedom. Every one of us have been affected by this, and every one of us can choose to no longer be affected, too. Change is coming fast now and we have seen a lot of change over the last 100 years, but there is still more that we can do that favors listening to our inner compass instead of a rule that was created perhaps thousands of years in our past when our ancestors were at a very different place in their spiritual and cultural evolution.
The deeper truth about our divine nature is that we are not divided but contain within us aspects of both the feminine and masculine. We have each lived lives, whether we remember them or not, as women and men. Inwardly, we are composed of both and we carry a capacity of both. You can’t know your inner compass without first knowing this important truth. By reaching peace within on this one point, you can know a greater peace in your life because it grants you a more direct access to that golden compass where anything can be known.

The elephant in the room is how the masculine and feminine is in all of us. We have somehow forgotten this.  Our sexes even show how divided we appear to be. Our behavior belies a fear of being the “other.”
For women who have exaggerated beliefs about femininity and the taboos that have been in place surrounding how they feel they need to behave (often responded to as what society expects of them), one predictable outcome is that their natural traits of aggression have been conditioned out of them. More accurately, they are repressed. Women have for a long time feared using their innate masculine power for fear of reprisal and a concern that it would make them seem less feminine. In the past, great value was placed on being female and this resulted in exaggerated beliefs that then served to shape the body. Just look at how values have changed and you can see how doggedly we as a species have stuck to a narrative for all women.
In the Victorian era, women were their most fertile when they had some weight to them. In fact, skinny undernourished women skip periods, don’t conceive readily, and have trouble taking a baby to term. So naturally the “Rubenesque” woman was prized by all of human kind during a large swath of our history.  If you fast forward to the turn of the century, you see women active in fighting for, and obtaining rights like voting, as well as being able to free themselves from being baby making machines through the advent of birth control. This, and a growing awareness and desire for greater rights helped to bring a change that resulted in the evolution of the perception of the feminine form away from the voluptuous and chunky earth goddess to a thin and more svelte version of herself. I am not suggesting that all of this was good, just that this change came with a swing of the pendulum and that we are working through the value of it. The change of the idealized female form has in large part been driven by the fashion industry, but it takes a public to buy onto this look in order for it to take hold, and take hold it did. Whether thick or thin, the changing face of femininity is drawn along by our own changes brought about by each of us individually and en masse. In either case, the value placed on women being submissive and tender remained even as how the physical image began to change. The change that women fought for, which was for better equality was itself an expression of women’s more aggressive nature, and only came about because women were willing to tap this nature that was and is always within them. Women in this way began stepping out of the shadows.

The same is also true for men, of course, but in opposite fashion. Men remain hard and stoic because of conditioning and taboo’s about men showing emotion. What is true, at the core of all of this behavior, is that men suppress their feminine sides because they fear that when the feminine energy is joined consciously to their masculine that they will lose themselves, which of course is true.
Women were also doing exactly the same thing out of a fear that they too would appear less feminine. But it is only the fear of this unknown state that men once projected onto women and sought to control and limit them as has happened in our past. It’s more than just men fearing women’s power to nurture new life, it’s that men fundamentally were uneasy with what this kind of creativity involved on a spiritual or energetic level within themselves. This fear was then projected outward onto women. Any time anyone is unable to deal with an inner fault they project it onto another person. This tendency has been widely observed by psychologists such as Freud and Jung. In this  case, the fear that they could not face was projected onto women. The same is also true for women, and both sexes have done their part in keeping the sexes divided inwardly and outwardly. This type of division no longer serves us, and we are seeing a much greater flexibility in sexual roles and identity as a result. None of this has destroyed what it means to be male or female, it has enhanced it.
While you might wonder what I am getting at, I am not suggesting an end to male and female identity. I am suggesting that our roles don’t serve us as humans as they once did, which was a more limited perspective in our past. I am for the change that happens when the curtain is pulled back and we can be really honest about who we are deeper down. I am for being aware of our compass, which leads us to our divine nature here and now. This isn’t about wrecking the past and destroying our future, but getting honest about who we really are. When we do this, in the words of the ancients, we do not taste death but know life in abundance. We are, in truth, emancipated from our prisons of belief.

I’m about to take a leap, here, and I want you to bear with me…

 

The Role Of Bliss In Healing The Rift

We call orgasm “petite morte” because it involves a deep letting go of control of the self. This is what we do when we die, it is the same. Of course, we don’t really die, we merely shed the body.  It isn’t a conditional letting go, it is a deep release and a subsequent encounter with the larger self and all that it’s connected to (all that is). In Tantra, for example, work often leads to losing fear of death for the simple reason that one stares in the face of it so often when experiencing the bliss that can be found in such a deep state of letting go.  Many teachings discuss how those who are not ready to let go in this way suffer through death and often wind up as ghosts, stuck in an “in-between” realm for various reasons.  This bliss also just happens to be an energetic state that accompanies awakenings (once you can get the hang of it), and bliss is a powerful way of allowing our emotional armoring to fall away so that the inner self can shine forth. This is what is central to Tantra as a way to heal very quickly (if you are ready and honest in your approach). It is here that I give you The Man, whose channel to his own bliss has been so incredibly attenuated….
Men have learned to be controlled in order to survive. It may have served a purpose once in the past but it no longer serves us now. But this kind of death is what men are uneasy about. When men come close to women, they can behave badly for the very reason that they have become so estranged from that part within themselves that could give them, moment by moment, the same thing they feel when they behold or are near a woman: death. This death, for those who live in it is known as orgasmic bliss. In an awakened man, this bliss can be constant, but in everyman who is not awakened, it is experienced as a brief explosive event that he can only get with a woman, and it is much more physically encountered. In truth, he can and does get it alone (sometimes multiple times in a day in his younger years!). The desire for something when it’s forbidden only makes the desire riotously  powerful. Add to this a man so estranged from his feminine side that the only way to feel it is to be in the full embrace of a woman, and you can perhaps see just how all of this has conspired to create an unhealthy situation for all involved. Pile onto this the double standard of women needing to be chaste and virtuous and you can begin to see how hilariously messed up that we have all become! Men sow their wild oats and women are to be virtuous and chaste! Pray tell me; how is this supposed to work?
Once a man awakens, he gets the briefing from the energy which shows him that this energy has arisen in him because of the forces of opposites now merged. I’m joking here because there is no “brief” as such, just a self that comes to the truth of the matter, which is a significant event in a man’s life. Orgasmic bliss is now no longer limited to those fevered moments beneath the sheets, but now pours all through the body in a continuous stream as a direct result of the union of opposites which is the source of the power of kundalini or awakening. As long as we don’t try to fiddle with the cosmic switches inside, we will feel a continual flow of this energy.
Women will experience much the same, but from the opposite end of the social/sexual spectrum. To awaken is to join the masculine and feminine currents in consciousness together, which will bring bliss. This is nature’s way of rewarding you for taking one more step closer to being a full person, a more whole being!

In fact, all traditions that have awakening as an understood experience (nearly all), you will find a balancing effect as a result of of its activation.  In the Hindu tradition the awakened person is shown as equal parts Shakti and Shiva, merged right down the middle of the body.  The Taoists more obliquely refer to this in the Yin and Yang.  In the early Christian texts this is called a syzygy.  This is an equal part male and female person who has awakened the sleeping energy of transformation.  They were known as androgynous in a spiritual sense.  During awakening the lines between these two aspects blur and they merge more and more as the awakening unfolds.  This does not confuse sexuality, but rather informs it in a deep and substantive way if the person so affected allows for this to creep into their awareness.

This is a moment by moment experience of bliss pouring through all parts of the body, it is not a singular event like a physical orgasm. It is a “standing wave” that does not crash, does not subside. It endures. And the reason for this is because those who know this experience are in varying degrees learning to awaken and merge their twin energies of both their masculine and feminine in their bodies and in their consciousness. Men, though, have been fearful of even going there. Taboo. They had to be strong. They had to provide by using muscle to hunt and create from the land. They believed there was no way they could survive and let that feminine flow into them. Men who were seen as effeminate were picked on. Gay men were known to be lynched, tied to fences to die, or beaten up in alleys outside of gay bars. The fear and programming went hand in hand. Somehow, we each have persevered through all of this. And what men refused in themselves they refused in their world. The way they created themselves was how they created their world. The pressures placed on women were no less restrictive than their male counterparts. Both were taught to hide their opposites while expecting the house to stand. The way we have managed this traditionally has been for the man and the woman separately but together to hold each other up. While this has had asocial function it has extremely limited use spiritually and personally.

Our society in the last 15 years has been going through a sea change as it relates to greater and greater equality for people from all walks of life. Women have become more assertive and are beginning to see greater equity in the work place than a hundred years ago (we have more to go!) has I think been concurrent with men realizing they don’t need to be the sole breadwinners but can be a stay at home Dad. Men are learning that they can be more sensitive and nurturing while still retaining their masculinity. Gays are not beaten in the streets or killed, and we are experiencing an opening, a flowering which is in its early stages still, but will help to push society to a much more egalitarian place. What it will do is it will fuel more and more awakenings for the simple reason that we won’t fear touching the opposite in our nature’s. Men won’t lose their masculinity anymore than a woman will lose her femininity by embracing the opposites within themselves. They will open the channels so that bliss will pour through.
This is to my mind the briar patch we should dive into, not fearing it or what it will do to us. This will happen when we stop listening to what the collective has created on a mass scale and begin listening to our own inner compass. When you are a woman and feel attracted to a man, what man is moving in you? Is it the man in front of you, or is it the man within you? No man makes you feel, you alone must participate and become moved by your own innate understanding of what this glorious energy is about and be willing not to make the man in front of you into the man who is really the one you feel that is inside of you. If you do this, you risk projecting onto the man before you the image and presence that is not with him but that is with you. In the same way, men must be careful not to put onto the woman before him the woman who is inside him, lest the two  not fit well, or will be forced together in a hopeful effort made by both people with the likely result that no peace and union can hope to endure. A woman, just like a man, will feel innately the force of your expectation that they should be something that they are not. Why make chameleons of ourselves? Are we not perfect within? Are we really afraid of seeing our gloriously human and divine selves in their truest light?
This is precisely what is brought to bear in so-called “twin” unions. The energy is often so strong because of the subconscious (now more conscious) desire to merge with an inner unrecognized aspect of the self (our opposite) that is projected outward to another person. While these can work, they will always labor under whatever karma and inner issues that remain and they will be felt more keenly. This is good for people willing to engage in rapid healing, but such change can mean that each are left without a common point of reference once the karmic glitches are healed. The reality is that twins DO NOT heal in perfect synchronization.It isn’t that love goes away, it is more that the change when one heals a glitch can be so profound that the foundation for that love can change faster than what most people can keep up with. One twin can, and most often does, move more quickly than the other, resulting in one feeling left behind in one way or the other. In the myth, the two live happily ever after, but in the reality they are having to deal with every emotion highlighted and amplified. Every challenge can then be so much more of a challenge. In a world such as this, there is often a gulf between the real and infinite potential. We often mistake the potential as being what is real in our world, which isn’t. We must work to create in such a way that this potential manifests itself, and this can only happen through radical self honesty. In the end, the true twin resides within each of us as a misperceived other that we seek to project onto a loved one.
Perhaps, for now, the wise approach might be to honor and see ourselves as we are and see others as they are and begin to learn a new way which is to appreciate each other’s wholeness as precious and love based on that instead of our yearning to touch the opposite that resides within. Perhaps  we then merge our individual yearnings  together in what might be an utterly new arrangement with regard for our true selves instead of allowing societal rules and taboo’s to guide us in a unknowing and unnatural way. When we follow our compass fully, we become innocent and cease being contrived by our ideas about how we think the world wants us to be.