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What Lovers Do
Healing hearts in western society of the twenty first century involves uncovering the archetype of the lover. And make no mistake: the lover is not cute or friendly, he is a sleeping dragon. Do you want to love and be loved fully? Your relationships, friendships and families to be fulfilling? Love fiercely. Say it. Feel it. Do it. Love without asking for permission. And do it both ways, too – demand love, show your desires fearlessly and enjoy life riding the dragon of the lover.
Loving essentially means to take somebody else – a partner, a coworker, a child – as part of yourself, taking its needs, interests, boundaries, desires and wishes in, unconditionally, and processing them through your system as if they were your own. It is natural for humans to do that, if it weren’t for the upbringing, that nearly hundred percent of us experience as children, that completely messes with that process.
For us average western digital individualized people, loving unravels in three stages.
Like most things, it starts in the head. The intellectual love is the easiest for most of us. You decide to love somebody. This goes beyond fluffy feelings, butterflies and compulsive behavior. Love is not an instinct, it is a decision. You decide to take responsibility for more than just yourself, you take another person’s needs and best interests closer to you and you say ‘I love you’. For most of us, sadly, this is as deep as it gets. You basically have the conscious part of you – the tip of the iceberg – working towards love, and your unconscious – the 99% of who you are – probably working against the good intensions. This is why all relationships start beautifully and end soon, suddenly and painfully and nobody feels in control of what is happening.
Stage two happens for a few of us, those who do the work needed to uncover emotional trauma that has become so standard in our society. Those who recognize that a human being has an emotional body and that emotional body has needs and hungers that can only be fulfilled by another human being that recognizes the same. For those of us lucky to have the opportunity to heal our hearts and to learn how to work emotions through our system – we become ’emotionally available’. Lots of unconsciously inherited conditions get untied and the love sinks from the head into the heart. We are capable of not only saying that we love somebody. We actually FEEL the impact of that decision: tears of joy, deep gratitude, an expansion in the chest saying ‘I am MOVED by this human being.’
Being on that journey there comes a stage where this is not enough either. You begin to realize that even getting ‘out of the head’ and ‘into the heart’ is not the end of the story. You realize that your physical body is not just a vehicle, but that it has a curious intelligence of its own, one that functions in a completely different fashion than the intellect or the heart. You starve for embodiment and awaken the dragon. At this point, you get in touch with even more demons, do even more healing, deeper healing, weird healing that is hard to talk about, hard to grasp and put in words. But it frees your connection to your desires – not just the shallow ones, the real ones, the big and juicy ones, those that make you shiver, shake, tremble, shout and fight and run for your life. At this point, you meet your CORE and realize that you do not need permission to love.
At stage one, you do not really have the capacity to be there for another human being. There is too much preoccupation with your own life, the vessels for connection are clogged. You might say things like ‘I’m here when you need me’, but you don’t REALLY mean it; you say it because you get something from saying it.
This is what lovers THINK.
At stage two, you are conditionally capable of being present. You say things like ‘I’m here when you need me.’ because you are. It is true that you are, but only when you are asked for it. Your heart is open, but your body does not yet feel safe enough to have a full-body ‘yes’ for another human being.
This is what lovers FEEL.
At stage three you don’t say anything, you are fully present and you love others with all you are. It is profound. It is intense. Most people cannot take the full dosage of who you are at this point, not because you are ‘too much’, but because they are not yet ready for you to reveal to them what they need to heal in order to receive the gift of embodied love.
You might trigger people.
This is what lovers DO.
–Archie del Ray