Living Your Real Life
love, sex and legacy
True love
Sex with love
A love affair with self
Hearts -- broken hearts
Love takes the risk
Legacy of love
Monogamy
True love
True lovecomes through the true Self. The perfect conduit for love is an honest person, pure of heart, healed of trauma. For love, originating from God, the life force, to come through us with out distortion, we must not be barricaded by defenses or poisoned by wounds from the past. We must be a clear vessel for love to come through truly.
If we are not living out of our true Self, but from a defended, distorted reality, we will fail to love truly. If, in childhood, we have hidden our true Selves from the crippling clutches of our parents and a world that would crush us, our expressions of love will be distorted in adulthood. Until our true Self is redeemed, love will be filtered through our child’s murky memories of terror and betrayal and will always have a hidden agenda, a secret need, an unconscious need for rescue or revenge. We can not love purely when we are emotionally crippled and will be incapable of affirming the fullness of life in those we claim to love. We will even doubt our own lovability and withhold affection from ourselves.
The source of our compromised ability to love is rooted in the necessary defenses that we built in childhood to protect our pure essence from the compromised love we received most significantly from our parents. Until we carefully dismantle our defenses through a painful grieving process, they will cloud and distort our expressions of our love and life-force. If we refuse to heal, our attempts to love will never be true, but filled with need – or revenge.
Certainly we Gay men need to heal to love honestly. When parents and society attempt to snuff out what is brightest, best, and Gay in us to preserve the “values” of the family and ancestral customs which include fear of growth, the outsider, the homosexual, our Gay love-ability is distorted. In turn, we deceptively misuse love to manipulate others to fill an abyss of need, neglect and derision left gaping from childhood. Or we may avoid love altogether and seek death through addiction, depression and other forms of self-destructive futility.
If we deny and perpetuate the neglect that crippled us as children, our love will never be true. Only those healed of childhood wounds can love truly.
Affirm: I express true love through my true Self.
Return to top of page
Sex with love is the ideal. Sex in the service of love is a powerful and optimal use of this primary and pleasurable physical function. For sex to be wholesome, love must come first. Love elevates the physicality of sex to a spirit-filled communion between the two love-makers. We must seek emotional and spiritual intimacy before sexual intimacy for sex to succeed and find its proper place in our lives and our relationship.
Sex is a highly pleasurable, yet neutral physical function. But for complex humans, sex is readily the carrier of psychological themes, for better or worse. Sex is easily usurped by secret agendas, especially if they are repressed, denied and exploitable traumas from the past, buried in the psyche.
If we have not dealt with our childhood history, which for us Gays was so often troubling, we will play out these repressed scenarios through the conduit of sex. Sexual distortion, fetishes, compulsion, s/m are all examples of unresolved childhood material played out in the sexual arena. Underneath all the frantic, perverse and at times chillingly dangerous sexual behavior in the Gay world is a wounded child seeking the approval and attention of mother and father -- or conversely, a wounded child seeking to exact revenge for the lack of parental love, attention and approval he needed so desperately growing up.
Once our childhood history is reconciled and past traumas grieved, the life-force flows through us uninhibited, and honestly enlivens all aspects of our lives including our sex lives. Loving sexual expression flows naturally from a healed person for the distorting lenses of the childhood trauma have been removed.
At last, no longer haunted by the past, sexual expression takes its proper place in our lives. Even if we are single, even if we are celibate with no overt sexual contact, sex and our sexuality no longer torment our minds, but enliven our spirit. Certainly loving sexual expression enhances our love life with our partner. Sexuality infused with love, and freed of a perverse agenda from the past, endorses the life-force of all -- celibate, single or partnered.
Affirm: Freed of the tangles of the past, I make love with my sexuality -- not war.
We need to have a love affair with ourselves. We must walk in our own nurture, cherish quality time alone, and court our soul that awaits our attention and affection. We must delight in the pleasure of our own company. Then we can love others without strings attached. When we’re in love with ourselves, we can approach others without neediness or a hidden agenda – the expectations of rescue.
If we were neglected as children, we enter adulthood as love cripples. As Gay boys, who were not cherished for our unique individuality, nor given the proper witness in order to develop into the truth of our being, our love-ability is compromised.
We must take the time alone, without the distractions or projections so often a part of having a partner, in order to love the damaged child within. We must take the time to connect to the love and its affirmation of life glowing within us. We may need guidance from a guide in therapy to learn the ways of love. A love-guide who witnesses our true value may be the first experience of true love we’ve had. If we yearn to interact in our world in a loving manner, we must first have a love affair with ourselves and feel secure in our love-ability.
We may avoid self-love by a misuse of others. We may project our damaged inner child onto another. His wounded nature calls for our attention. We see his ache but not our own. In fact, we dismiss our own cry for love, as we project our pain outward, seeking to cure another instead of ourselves. Or, we may take a different tack to avoid self-love and try to seduce and manipulate love and attention out of others narcissistically, unable to give ourselves our own nurture.
Love begins at home. If we refuse to see our own need for self-love, our attempts in love will always have a secret agenda. Love becomes a manipulative bargain when self-love is missing. As I take myself into my own care, I can then love my neighbor as myself, and without a secret agenda or expectation.
Affirm: I must love myself first before I can successfully love another.
Hearts -- broken hearts
On Valentine’s Day, we celebrate love and lovers. Symbolically, the heart is the seat of love. When we are in love, our heart is full. We are affirming life in our Selves, and in those around us. When we experience love’s loss, our hearts break. But a broken-heart is not a dead heart -- it is painfully alive. A broken-open-heart is ready to grow -- into fuller love, understanding, and compassion.
When our hearts break with a loss, break-up, rejection, or death, our suffering is great. A door slams closed. A dream we hoped for, prayed for, yearned for, is not coming true. A person or situation we cherished and loved deeply is no longer a part of our lives. The loss is painful. Our heart is broken.
A broken-heart is not a dead, but living, growing, aching, not only in its loss, but in its yearning to expand and understand the meaning in loss. We search for the promise of good in our painful experiences. We seek to piece together a deepened identity from the shards of our brokenness.
Our heart was broken because our love capacity needed to encompass more. As we grieve, we realize that our heart was encased in too small a shell. We needed to grow, to move on, no matter how meaningful, or dear the person or situation was that is no longer a part of our lives. Now God can fill the space that was recently vacated.
We offer up our brokenness and wait for God to come to us. Our cries are heard. Our tears are acknowledged. Our brokenness is God’s opportunity. Our broken-open-heart is an empty receptacle ready to be filled with a new depth of love for ourselves, for others, and most importantly for God and our true Self -- and we become compassion.
Affirm: My broken heart opens me to a greater capacity to love.
Love takes the risk
When its time to grow, to move into a bigger world and a fuller sense of Self, love takes the risk and leads the way. Acknowledging our fear, we take a deep breath, fill our hearts with love -- and go out the door and into a new dimension.
When we faced our emerging sexual identity, the prospects of love, honest sexuality and the promise of greater involvement in life urged us to cross the cultural taboo against homosexuality and come-out. Love and its kinship with the life-force gave us the courage to enter a new psychic terrain with love’s promise of fulfillment. At last, we felt there was hope for us sexually, emotionally, even spiritually, since accepting our orientation freed our spirit to love.
When we encounter any dilemma in life that requires us to grow -- a break-up, a health challenge, rejection from our parents, a crisis of faith, even our own mortality -- we can let love lead the way. Love buffers the edges of uncertainty and fear of the unknown. We can use our coming-out as a reference for entering any new life experience. As we came-out and entered the new world of our orientation, we were frightened, but we felt the promise of love taking our hand and leading us forward into a greater involvement with life. As we remember this rewarding transition, we can use our coming-out as a paradigm for moving into any new, if frightening, life-expanding venture.
Love, and its affinity with life, allows us to take risks. With the assurance of love, we take the next step into the unknown. We understand the treasures we received by coming-out. As we face this new venture and fear wells up in us, we can take a deep breath and let love take the lead.
Love sees in advance the advantage of living life more fully. If we don’t take risks, life stagnates into a deadened routine – and opportunities remain locked in the closet of repression and fear. Love opens the door to fuller living.
Affirm: Love leads me through the valley of fear, even death, to the Promised Land.
Legacy of love
We may be concerned that we make a mark in life, so that we can face our final moments with satisfaction. We have used our time on earth well, and now we may die fulfilled and at peace. To leave a legacy that honors our existence is a wonderful goal.
But as our lives unfold, we may feel many of our goals remain unfulfilled. Fame and fortune have eluded us. We’re Gay and we do not even have children to carry on our name. What can we leave behind of value to mark our existence?
We can all leave a legacy of the most important sort, but it requires a particular talent, a gift God gives everyone at birth -- the ability to love. As we foster life in other people, in plants and animals, and in all that exists, we do the work of love. As we cherish life in all its forms on planet earth, and most importantly in ourselves, love becomes our legacy.
Love is the life-affirming energy that comes through us -- if we allow it. If we remain psychically crippled from a traumatized childhood, it is difficult to love freely and fully. It is imperative that we investigate our history and grieve the injuries of childhood, if we wish to love with conviction. Healed of our past, our life-force, our love-force, flows freely through us.
Every quantum of love-energy that we emit is recorded in the universal log of life. Every incident of life affirmed, of illusion shunned, of a person nurtured into his or her full potential is registered. Every time we affirm the love and life within us, we add to the evolution of consciousness. The greatest legacy we leave behind, after a life well-lived, is the legacy of love. Love is the most profound legacy of all.
Affirm: As I love, I write my name in the ledger of immortality.
Monogamy
Lovers, like consumate artists, must honor the rigors of form to express meaningful content. As artist in the art of love, we must honor the discipline of sexual commitment and monogamy so that love, passion and the inspired growth of two souls can create a masterpiece of consciousness.
Partners in love must feel the safety of form -- of commitment and sexual fidelity -- if the content of intimacy is to develop. If we are to reveal our selves, our vulnerabilities, our dreams, the violations of the past, the ways we violated ourselves and others, our deepest secrets and our sacred dreams, we must trust our partners to be faithful and consistent. We must form a solid pact with another adult who is capable of the same and sees the value of disciplined commitment.
If we squander our trust with other sexual partners, the bonds that hold us to our partner are undermined and the poison of infidelity and distrust enters our relationship. We no longer feel safe to share our depths. There is an energy leak when sex is squandered in indiscriminate contacts outside the primary couple. The safe space is violated – and intimacy can not find a home. This queasy feeling may be familiar – perhaps a sad replication of our childhood home where boundaries were weak and intimacy impossible.
We will always find others attractive outside our committed relationship, but we don’t have to act on these feelings. But as far as sexual contact, our commitment to our partner is sacrosanct. Unless we are stuck in a dead relationship, which would require emotional investigation, not sexual acting-out, we need to honor our sacred sexual trust. As we use our sexuality to honor the love we share, we do not violate this covenant by squandering our sexual energy by being unfaithful.
Sexual monogamy is an outward sign of a deep loyalty, not only to our partner, but most importantly to ourselves and to God. Before monogamy is possible with another, we must be faithful to ourselves and our own values. Monogamy with another, to be real and not just empty form to obey religious rule or social pressure, must be an extension of a deep fidelity to ourselves.
Affirm: I am faithful first and foremost to myself.