Complete and Perfectly Whole

Maybe you can just play this time around... fulfill your duties, but not worry so much about hoity-toity accomplishments. 

Maybe you've earned a rest, from further back than you can assess in the recesses of your mind. 

Maybe you're meant for a different kind of living: taking it slow when you're tired and fast when freedom's bursting from your being. Marveling like a baby when someone's spirit catches yours. Or crying when you have bodily needs that are clearly being ignored. 

Maybe the hectic nag of your ego can go for a walk down the street to the café. Maybe she can stay for hours longer than she should, shoulder to shoulder with other youngsters dressed up like adults, afraid that they, too, have not created enough to do in this world, this life, this stuffy city of busy busy busy. 

Maybe, together, you can talk some forgiveness into each other. You can learn how to not apologize for the particular shape or size of your energy. 

Maybe you can begin to trust that you really are enough. That nothing matters more than making peace with your unique core in this wildly diverse world. That you don't need to be at war with yourself. That you can simply sink in, begin believing that you wouldn't have arrived in this way on this day if some other calling needed or wanted you more. 

Maybe you can love yourself--I mean really, really love yourself--as you are, as you truly long to be, underneath all that false need to prove yourself as someone worthwhile. 

Maybe you can learn to know that deep in the center of your soul rests only goodness, only wonder, only the very best material of all. And it needs no one's approval or permission to exist. It needs no improvements, there are no requirements on it. It is just what it is: a magical mystery of dusty delight, not something to fight, but a miracle. 

Maybe you can begin to see yourself as complete and perfectly whole.

a big thank you to philip and hope for letting your inner-kids out to play with mine. i'm so grateful for you both in this life. 

The Convenient Truth of Transformation

Simple and easy are not the same thing.

But simple is simple, and it simply takes commitment. 

Over the past year, I've developed for the first time in my life what some might call a "spiritual practice". More important than the word "spiritual" is the word "practice". I have solitary intentional rhythms that root me, that I love, that make me feel safe and held. And I live inside of them. I breathe them. I dance them, sometimes I scream them. But without them, I'd be doing any number of things: floating, willing, doubting, floundering, forcing myself to be somewhere I'm simply fucking not.

When I meet new people now, they tell me I exude spirituality, sensuality. I think I wish they knew me two years ago. I wish they could've seen my resistance the first time I was told to pray, asked to sing in a sweat lodge, invited to dream what seemed unreasonable. I wish they could've seen my HAIRCUT, my body, my bras.

For most of my adult life I was the first in line to get-shit-done. Self-starting projects all the time. Forcing myself to finish. Berating myself for the natural way that some things fall away. I was also hiding my feminine beauty, magic, mystique.

It's taken nearly a year to unwind the spool of stress and sink into divine desire, deep intuitive listening, humble acceptance of the call I actually hear, as opposed to the one my ego craves.

Here are the most important things I've learned about transformation:

• If you don't create a regular routine of checking in with yourself deeply, you run the risk of skimming through life on the surface of yourself, walking your life in dissonance. Ouch. 

• If you set aside an intentional daily time to be intimately connected to what's below the surface of your conscious mind, you will tap into the force of your limitless being. It's unavoidable. When you give it space and attention, it shows up, grows. 

• And when you grow your life-force from the inside out, one day at a time, small practice by small practice, eventually, you have more might than you ever would've imagined, and you find yourself emerging with clarity and ease into the dreams you barely thought possible before.

You sign up for adult circus camp. You heal your sexual trauma. You make your art in public. You let yourself love in a totally new way. You earn the big bucks because your work has real resonance. Your body shapes itself to match your actual spirit. Really.

It's so simple. Be intimate with your spirit 20 minutes a day and your spirit will wield wild authenticity in your life.

But that's what makes it hard. It's not easy to shed the shallow, known parts of yourself, for what's real and true, and living in an unknown land. It takes courage, faith, trust.

But if you want the deep, juicy, sexy, scary stuff, surprise is essentially required.

~~~~~~~

If you know you're longing for a spiritual practice, but aren't quite sure how to go about creating one, I work specifically with each of my coaching clients to help them develop personalized meaningful practices. I'd be honored to work with you if you're feeling called. Shoot me and e-mail and we can get the ball rolling: rachmadlove at gmail dot com.

Welcoming the Wildness of Love: 25 Lessons from A Year-Long Adventure in Dating

1. It doesn't have to be tit-for-tat. Richness can come in uneven packages. Soften your grasp on equality. The universe takes care of karma, not you.

2. Sex can complicate the fuck out of a beautiful connection. You can actually request taking it off the table (for now, for a while, for good). You can love what works and leave the rest behind. This is easiest when you don't have the pressure of monogamy demanding that everything intimate come in one package from one person right away.

3. Tell the truth and tell it fast. Even if it lets him down or causes you to risk losing attention or affection. The quickest way to activate another's insanity is by keeping them in a guessing-game about where they stand with you. No one wants to be misled, used or strung along. Jot your notes. Rehearse on a friend. Spit it out. It's called respect.

4. Strategy is an important form of self-love. A year ago, such words would have never left my lips. But I can tell you now, strategy matters. A framework that you're playing inside of. The edge you're intentionally leaning over. Your life lines. The ways you intend on keeping yourself grounded. 

5. Assume the best of our species: that we are mature beings, capable of non-conventional relating; that we want to be connected in ways that work for everyone.

6. Leave room for surprise. When you brave conversations that assume the best in everyone and tell the whole truth, you give love a chance to sing a new tune. It could be anything. Stay open.

7. Let your longing and loneliness grow you from every angle. Your darkest days point to the chance for a new practice. Poke around. That's what the lonely is for.

8. If it's on, it's on. You can feel the flow. Simple.

9. Drink the muddy water at your own risk. Incessant doubt, worry and deliberation... if they don't subside within a few interactions, you may be hooked on false hope. No matter, though. Every experience has its silver lining. Just be prepared to listen for it.

10. The wisest people are total fools for love. When you feel it, go all in. It's okay if you end up being the only one standing there. It feels good to be so alive. And heartbreak is something we're able to survive. This much, we're all learning all the time.

11. The wisest people love themselves by not contributing to their own destruction. They admit when it's no longer love, or never was from the start. (Even when it disappoints them). They don't linger too long in the land of old hope. They mourn their losses, then trust possibility. Hard.

12. Approaching dating as an evolutionary calling is good for society, and your conscience. Will I practice being in this natural disaster of desire without pillaging the next town over? Will I be compassionate even when the norms suggest I don't owe it to anyone? Will I call someone out when what went down was truly harmful? Will I put in the effort, for the sake of everyone's transformation? 

13. Make this decision: to be on the evolutionary edge of sexual liberation and joy. Be ready for your play-partner to waltz right into your life. Call up the sex-toy lady. Host the salon. FAQ each other like the future of sex depends on it. Because it does. 

14. The 100% rule is a smart convention. They talk about it in Cosmo (according to my 13 year-old friend Madeleine who teaches me tons about dating). Basically, all connections add up to 100%. Ideal dating connections are anywhere from 40:60 to 50:50 ratios. Once things start heading toward 30:70, the scales are tipping a bit too far and someone ought to rebalance them if a healthy connection is desired. Lean in or step back. You know where you fall in the spread.

15. Let there be space. 

16. Solitude is essential. There's no replacement for laying in bed alone, happy to be at home in yourself. 

17. You invite the lessons, the heartbreaks, the heroes you need. Say thank you to each of them. Really.

18. No one can save you from yourself. I repeat: No one can save you from yourself.

19. Love is like the wind; you grasp, it blows. Here are two reminders. 

20. Consent trumps convention. You can have it how you want it. Age. Gender. Orientation. Race. The number of people at one time. Your unique expression of love is needed in the world, belongs.

21. We're in the tangle of sexual trauma together and we're all needed in order to unravel it; to explore the difficulties of sex and power in all their nuance and subtlety. The courage thing, the honest conversation thing, the evolutionary calling thing: they definitely apply here. As well as therapy, healing relationships, naps, lotion, baths. Sentences like, We can do this.

22. Sometimes, people need time to catch up. Sometimes, you're the one chasing the wisdom-bus. 

23. It's helpful to think of the ones we date as our best teachers, to lean into each other for answers. Because the truth is, it's one big experiment and there are no real rules of play. We're all we've got. If we want to evolve at loving, we've got to teach each other the very best lessons we know. We have to let ourselves be clueless, ask vulnerable wobbly questions.

24. Be forgiving. We all fuck it up.

25. Humans are wild. Sometimes we forget, but it's true. Deep down, we're not asking to be caged by lofty rules on love. But we still want some insurance that it's out there for us, like the world is a place where we can offer our hearts and be received, like we really do belong all the way. And experiencing love with another is one way we can feel ourselves fall into belonging. But it's not the only one. There's also meditation. They go together, solitude and connection. Discovering that nothing's disconnected. Feeling it in your very own breath. Walking it in your very own step. Finding a whole world of life in yourself--ten thousand ringing bells in each one of your curls; an infinite song you can't erase if you try. We are all together in an infinite spiral, learning to love our scary wild aloneness. It's okay. We're safe here. Together and alone. We're okay here. Here we are.


~~~~~~~~


What are your most treasured lessons from the wondrous adventure of looking for love? I'd love to know. We all would.

The Life Cycle of... Becoming. Anything at all. (Or A Short Summary of Growing Up).

You didn't know what to call it then, but you can look back now and call it what it was: innocent idealism and a fuck ton of work.

You can't blame a young person. In fact, you should applaud her. She'll need the echo of trust after she wears herself thin, decides with her body that she's meant for something else, and then plunges, accidentally, into the terror of liminality, teetering between faith and doubt, not knowing how or when she'll land again, two feet on the sturdy ground of love.

Hovering is a particular kind of suffering; a forgetting that you belong.

It can last far too long.

And then there's what comes next: remembering, beyond your mind, that which you have no proof of actually knowing, but can feel in your bones. The pulse connects the clues like magnets. Magic. You are pulled back in.

Nameless and easy. Like breathing. Like dying. Like the rising sun again and again. Like that which doesn't depend on should but is born from a raging mystical desire. The energy of fire, burning all that's not truly alive.*

It strips you down until it fits. So well you can wear it like a calling.

You move into warrior-realism. You survive in your finest for the dignity of your tribe. Asking the buffalo to lay himself down, offer himself for your consumption, you exchange his energy for your creation. The simple and difficult and profound.

You risk wanting something honestly enough to embody it. You aim for the third eye of mystery. Pull the bow. Shoot.

You're not afraid to devour your destiny.


*Goethe: I praise what is truly alive, what longs to be burned to death!

faith / renaissance / faith / renaissance

i would make a toast
if i knew what to say
other than, how?

but this is not the time for questions of western minds

screaming, kicking, crying her way out
needs no how?

give her a god damn wow

before her fight
to come back to life
she killed herself
without any certainty
that she'd be better off
this time around