ALLIES in LOVE RELATIONSHIP WORKSHOPS

ACCEPTING THE UNACCEPTABLE / Relationship Breakdown 'Nothing lasts for ever'

I feel empty today. The rain pours down, soaking into the parched earth. I feel very alone. I’ve lost the best friend I’ve ever had, who was also my lover for 20 years. I’ve lost my mate, my life partner; the woman I created Allies In Love with. Nothing ever went wrong, we never fought or even disagreed. We always shared deeply from the heart our innermost feelings, vulnerabilities, longings. Who would have guessed that she was unhappy, that she would fall in love with another guy? So there’s nothing to work out. No dispute. Just . . . this other guy. That’s it. It’s all over. Just the bitter taste remains, and waves of hurt and anger. I try to convince myself that I don’t care, but I do. Part of me is dying. The vision of our family, all the shared dreams, the shared projects, shredded. There’s nothing left now, just emptiness. And the rain. There’s no closeness left. It feels like she closed her heart off to me. There’s no love left. What is love? She feels like a stranger to me now. Who have I been living with for the past 20 years? That woman has gone and taken her toys and candy with her. I don’t know the new one. The new one buys fancy clothes and wears makeup. She doesn’t really show herself to me and now I just want her to move on, move out, fuck off. It’s been nine months since she started with this guy, this engineer. I’m really ready for her to move out now, to stop torturing me with her presence, her sexiness, her unavailability. My grief is bursting over. Tears fill my eyes. Like the rain, rivulets run down my cheeks. Waves of feelings, sometimes the bitterness and anger and hate and betrayal. Then the sense of freedom breaks open and the unborn possibilities of the new thrill through my being. The pleasure and the pain, cycles of life. I try to transform the pain, accept the situation. I want to be loving, trusting, open, friendly. This is my nature, goddammit! Then I realise that I must accept the feelings, the grief and the anger as well as the situation itself. This is my truth. This is my heart. My mind is so persuasive, so clever. It tries every angle to convince me to be nice. How can I find that loving friendliness that I miss to much. Again my mind reaches for what if instead of what is. Accepting the unacceptable. The betrayal (layers of acceptance – develop this concept).

These feelings are very uncomfortable. I watch my mind trying its various ploys to escape from them, projecting into the future. It’ll be okay once she leaves. Latching onto the acceptance of the situation so I can be loving again. Loving again with whom?

I’m tired of being the nice guy. The friendly, accommodating, chatty gentleman that my upbringing trained me to be. This is part of what I have to let go of here in my transformational freefall. Who do I need to be loving with? Myself, of course. Without compromise. This is a big edge for me, because my habitual racket is to allow my energy to fall out towards the other. Why not just be friendly? Because I’m feeling bitter, goddamit! I’m feeling betrayed. I’m hurt and angry and empty. There’s a big hole in me that needs love in here. I need to accept all of this in myself and be loving towards myself. Then I can stay open to my kids, to life, to the new. It’s very challenging to be out here on the edge. To be wandering, lost in the unknown. Very lonely. I am grateful to my friends who have stepped forward to support me, to listen and give reflections, my new Allies. I feel like I really need a helping hand through this unfamiliar territory. Just talking it through really helps, being real, allowing my feelings to engage. I am grateful for this available attention, the gift of the Ally, to listen with heart and reflect with insight.

This takes maturity and inner development. This is the training of the Ally.

Rage ripping through my body now, my heart pounding, my hands quivering. I’m shaking with anger. This is not okay. This is the line in the sand. I won’t accept being treated like this. My wife’s turned into a selfish bitch. ‘Sacrifice leads to revenge’. I hear Enigma’s line. So true. This is the end game now. The last few days of our marriage, living together. It takes a lot of anger to sever the psychic bonds of 20 years. Now I’m over it. I’m ready for completion of this phase. We’re still business partners and co-parents of young children, so there’s a lot of relating still to do. But the co-habitation is nearly over. In my steaming fume of fury I marvel at the miracle of change. Nothing seems fixed, or permanent, any more. It’s like the universe dropped her clothes, her disguise, and I see her naked for the very first time. And she is a bubbling, seething cauldron of change.

The brew of mother nature, tsunami earthquake flood avalanche, these are the real agents of change. They are also the metaphors for the human passages of initiation. I feel the fire of this anger burning through what I thought was solid and permanent, vaporizing my attachments to who I thought I was. I am already dancing on the ashes of who I used to be. As I feel deeper into this anger I discover that what I’m really pissed off about is that she’s the one going off and having fun with a new lover. My mind judges her as selfish, but I see that it’s all a big projection, because I see that is really what I want to do. After 20 years of devotion, commitment and parenting I long for the fun and freedom that I see my wife enjoying. So I’m not quite dancing on the ashes yet. I’m still in the fire. There’s this image of myself as the devoted committed dad/husband that is burning. It’s this image that keeps me stuck in a cage, safe, defined, unavailable to other women, complacent, arrogant, protected I thought from the waves of unpredictable life (that rock the boats of others). I am stuck in this image and I have my wife case in her image of the loyal committed partner. In my value system, I unconsciously traded a juicy sex life for stability, family and a co-creative Ally relationship.

This was the unspoken, unconscious contract that has now been shattered. I can see also that underneath I wanted the concept of Allies In Love to protect our marriage. I believed in the one partner for life myth. Now I see that it’s just another belief that the mind clings onto to make safe the journey through the storm. It’s worked for 20 years. I have no regrets. Now it’s time to move on, dissolve these old images without creating new ones, feel the wind in my hair. I am reclaiming my life in all its dimensions. That’s not to say that I won’t continue to be a devoted, committed dad. Don’t get me wrong. The difference is I’m not going to define myself through that image any more. Any image will limit my full potential for manifesting. This is my edge.

These are powerful truths pouring from my heart. Passionate realizations gleaned from deep feelings. I feel a zen emptiness now, nothingness. Very humbling to shed these images. I feel I am only just beginning to bust some of these images I’ve created, images that define and limit me. I’m a dad. I own this business. I lead workshops. I’m alternative. I support sustainability. I’m a country boy. I’m a radical. I’m a world traveler. A pilgrim. Endless images of self. There are two kinds of world I inhabit. The one I dream about and the real one. In my dream world I create images out of my imagination, although I don’t usually recognise that’s where they come from. They blur into the soup of mental concepts swimming through my mind. In the real world life happens. Stark realities occur. But immediately I create images and concepts, I tell myself stories about what is happening; approval, disapproval, my mind full of opinions, holding out for pleasure, pushing away pain. My experience of my life is the interface between these two worlds, my dream world and the real one. I bring another person into my world and then we’re both creating images of the other and it happens that our relationship is not really between two individuals but between two images formed by each of us about the other. This is one of the causes of separation that leads to a sense of isolation even in a close relationship of many years. Images are formed out of the mind mish-mash, when there is a lack of attentive awareness.  Images arises out of conflict and conflict arises out of action. One person does something that bothers me and an image based on self interest is created. These compound over time, without being communicated often enough (can’t be communicated without knowing self) or brought under the microscope of awareness.

IMAGE CREATION
Tell ourselves stories about who we are and what we need and co-opt others into those stories. We see others not as who we need them to be but our fantasy of who we need them to be (I want). the other receives our need as well as our fantasy. Hologram – light shifts as I move around the prism. I can only see what I can see. Courage is journeying the unknown, into the darkness with a light that flashes on and off.

DEFINITION OF EDGE – liberating and terrifying

These images ultimately lead to resentment, which leads to separation then isolation then loneliness, whether you’re in relationship or not relationship. All the while, life happens in the parallel real world, without blame or guilt or pride or regret. We forget we are part of life unfolding. We think from a place of separateness, of other, rather than feeling the connectedness that we all share with sources, nature, existence, god, universe, great spirit, the mystery, life, whatever we call it. This is the energy that makes the grass grow, the rain fall, the sun come up, new life to be created in the womb. This is the magic of birth and death. Try as we might we will never understand this mystery. It will always be incomprehensible to us. We are such a small fragment of the whole, a humble hologram that creates images of importance and separateness and personal do-ership. We forget we’re all part of this magnificent miracle of life unfolding.