“Sustainable living” as a green meme has recently caught like wildfire to the last bleeding shreds of Gaia’s womb tomb anomaly. There seems to be no question or debate that green living is absolutely the way to go if we intend on saving the planet and sustaining life (or what’s left of it). The question remains: if to live is to love, and to love is to let go, might some non-attachment be necessary while trying to save planet Earth?
If we as a species cannot achieve sustainable love, then I don’t want to be on this planet: trees or no trees, ice-caps or no ice-caps. Humans are so mind-blowingly destructive towards one another, and I’m not even talking about our blaringly obvious incompetent and imperialist government waging wars on oil-rich Middle-Eastern countries. The kind of destruction I speak of is the subtle emotional destruction we wage on our most intimate partners and acquaintances, which is hugely indicative that our ideas about love need some serious adjusting before the planet can even think about beginning to heal itself. Earth has a mind of its own outside of human consciousness.
None of us are immune to the pitfalls of so-called love. We have been saturated with mass-media depictions of romantic love and monogamy myths- as if one person could cut out our sexual desire for other erotic options and assure us some kind of emotional security blanket. Such teaching is derived more from shame and fear over one’s desires rather than being indicative of true love. Some people who have gone the polyamorous route forget that the word by definition means multiple loves, not necessarily multiple sex partners. If sexual activity is a natural extension of this love, then so be it and let’s explore all the multifarious ways to be sexual with each other, intercourse not mandatory.
Intimacy, honesty, personal responsibility, self-knowledge, love, cooperation, and the mutual respect for boundaries are paramount if we stand a chance at achieving sustainable love. Too much karma is exchanged during sexual intercourse to warrant continued casual sex without a solid basis of friendship an acceptable meme for conscious beings unless one doesn’t mind unintentionally swallowing someone’s etheric load. Who wants to be carrying around someone’s karmic burden when you just wanted an innocent orgasm? The length of the relationship determines how much karma is exchanged, and the shorter the exchange, the easier it is to dispel the karma. It sounds like too much work and wasted energy if you ask me. We have bigger tasks to focus on than getting caught-up in sticky erotic entanglements that don’t have the bigger picture of our life paths in mind. Let us free erotic agents bask in nurturing sexual energy without getting too off-track. There’s a lot of work to do right now. A huge part of that work involves re-learning how to love each other on romantic and sexual terms of our own choosing.
Previous generations didn’t leave a great example of how to love each other in ways that make any sense to us now. Most of us have grown up with terrible examples of how to love- modern family dynamics being strained by a lack of communication and inability to cope with the fact that most of us our not hard-wired to fall into white picket fence fantasies where Mommy & Daddy live happily ever after. Nor are most of us cut out to be genitally focused swingers who are okay getting it on with whomever whenever. Jealousy is nasty bug, and one most of us aren’t acquainted in dealing with constructively. In the generation that came before us, the script by and large was one of a stoic and bread-winning father or male partner: responsible, stern, and dominating. However, he left much for his female partner to be desired emotionally. The woman often played the martyr or victim in these types of arrangements, in parallel to the giant martyr the earth is making of herself in order to accommodate an out-of-control patriarchy, including dominating styles of loving. The masculine has run amok on this planet. We are past the point of blaming either gender as the cause.
The quintessential woman of the past played emotional manager in the relationship (she often still does), sifting through feelings for both partners, perhaps even experiencing feelings for her male partner since society has deemed it unacceptable for a man to feel vulnerable. She often winds up hating him for his inability to do her emotions any justice and punishes him for it or stays silent about her resentment because she doesn’t want to lose him. Attachment breeds resentment which is actually internalized anger. The only emotion men were taught was acceptable was anger. Women often feel victimized by outward displays of anger while their emotional concerns are all but completely ignored. Does anyone else see the warped feedback loop playing itself on echo as one gender’s position justifies the other’s position and nothing is learned but more relational trauma?
Let a giant swathe of amnesty salve the romantic and sexual wounds of people who unintentionally succumb to warped psycho-sexual and romantic scripts by no other fault than they don’t know any better and are doing the best they can with the information given to them. These individuals- of which I have been one- are not so much to blame as is a society that beats the ability to feel and be vulnerable out of men from an early age, forcing them to take their aggressions out in more forceful ways or to not recognize their emotions at all. A society that says a man’s worth is measured in money and that a woman’s worth is measured by good looks and lady-like behavior. A society in which co-dependent romance is considered idea. Overly attached love claims to be true love. If you think you have completely transcended these scripts, I dare you to take an honest look at the mirror of your programmed history. Of course, society is made up of individuals, and now it is each individual’s responsibility to learn how to love. Men must learn to open their hearts and communicate better, developing a right-brained intuitive capacity for intimacy and cooperative togetherness. Women must learn to override their programmed victim script while maintaining the ability to be receptive. Women need to re-learn how to be emotionally independent (though inherently we are all interdependent). We also need to learn how to communicate beyond the “I don’t want to hurt him” or “he needs to be punished” polarity. It’s called empowered yin, and unfortunately, most women and men lack it.
In more homophobic societies such as America and the Middle East (I love grouping those two cunt trees together), there is great work to be done in clearing mens’ root chakra or the less elegantly deemed anus. Gay mens’ natural sense of femininity and receptivity has been demonized by the male heterosexual community and has energetically blocked the root chakra of most heterosexual men. As the one opening of sexual receiving as opposed to giving, the anus is the key to mens’ feminine receptivity from both a physical and psycho-sexual perspective. To most mens’ minds, an open root chakra would peg them as gay and incur insult from their male friends. It doesn’t matter if they’re exploring their bottom with a woman; the very reference that they might want to explore their bottom at all raises a red flag that questions their very masculinity. Female partners who shame their men for wanting to explore this area only make the matter worse. “I don’t want a gay man!” they say, defending the overly macho disposition that in other areas of the relationship they may demonize. The average hetero root chakra is now a storage bin for fears, sexual shame, homophobia, and survival issues. Wonder why men are so obsessed with money?
There exists an energetic blockage to pleasure and energy flow in mens’ prostate gland for fear of being seen as gay. It’s no wonder that prostate cancer is the second leading cause of cancerous death in American men. The prostate gland is the male equivalent to the goddess or g-spot in women. Self-actualizing men can do themselves a great service by overriding their programmed sense of fear and non-receptivity by taking the time to clear the blocks in their root chakra through the study of tantra- or any method of sexual healing. Female partners can do their male partners a great service by helping him clear and give pleasure to his root chakra and prostate gland in a safe container of love, support, healing, and empathy. Margot Anand’s Sexual Energy Ecstasy is a great place to start if the route of sexual healing and empowerment appeals to you as a route to personal liberation. The root and sacral chakras are the basic centers of our kundalini life force and the building blocks of our enlightenment. There is no hope for opening up the higher centers until the base and sacral chakras are cleared. It’s like expecting the branches of the tree of life to grow without first planting its roots in fertile and procreative soil. Try growing a tree in polluted soil and see how healthy the fruit is!
Women must strengthen their wills (solar plexus) and clear any imbalances in their base and sacral chakras as well. The first two chakras in women are the microcosm of universal creation; the power of these chakras when balanced and cleared should not be demonized. The resulting desire becomes the basis of tantric union and relationship between all of life’s material and non-material manifestations, a profound appreciation for the matrix of 3rd dimensional creation while providing a basis for union in higher dimensions. Both men and women need to take the introspective effort to understand, develop, and strengthen their own feminine power. Through the balancing of opposites and the re-birth of the repressed feminine that has destroyed the Earth, men and women will develop an angelic androgynous nature making them whole and balanced unto themselves. What basis for true union as equals is there if we are not first balanced within ourselves?
Sex and gender roles don’t even take into account the trauma and outright toxicity that a lot of us have been exposed to growing up in the dark age of so-called civilization. I myself have been challenged in learning to live in an internal environment that supports sustainable love as I grew up in an environment of consistent physical and emotional danger. My real father was a drug-dealing philosopher eventually murdered at the expense of finding fake enlightenment through methamphetamines- the most instant means available to him- while exposing me to home-alone burglaries and nights of wondering where daddy was and what he was doing.
When my dad got shot in the head and was left to rot in the desert, I had a step-father to take my real dad’s place. Unluckily, he was a rageaholic with no emotional boundaries whose unexpected outbursts I was exposed to on a consistent basis while making strange sexually verbal come-ons about how he’d be my boyfriend if he was younger. Throughout my adolescence from 12 to when I moved out at 20, he drilled into my head the idea that if I had just talked to my real dad, I could have saved him from being murdered. Such ignorance and carelessness on his part engendered the belief that I am an emotional, if not a physical murderer of sorts. I had a guilt complex larger than a blue whale’s cock.
Such warped conditioning with the primary male-caretakers in my life was bound to effect my way of dealing with men in ways I could not have foreseen. In my early adulthood, I have been co-dependent, guilt-complexed, sexually vampiric, and an emotionally destructive martyr- revelling in opportunities when my lover screwed up so I could drill into them how truly useless they were to me. In the process of transformation, my neuro-linguistic alchemical mold-to gold has turned co-dependence into interdependence, guilt into personal responsibility, and martyrdumb into admitted vulnerability that seeks protective men. More often than not I sublimate my need to destroy by fighting art battles and destroying memes while providing an emotionally destructive shadow self a playpin in the consensual world of S&M as a dominatrix. The dark maggots of my psyche occasionally get caught in a present synapse from where there temporarily seems no escape but the imagined slate of death to wipe away all conditioned memory. I await the affection of a lover as a doomed woman would her executioner’s blade. I remind myself that this feeling too shall pass and to not be overly identified with my innate doom response. Emotions and thoughts are so fleeting in this infinitely recursive hall of mirrors found ad infinitum in my beloved’s reflection.
The storybook nightmare of early adolescent tragedies led me towards more intense and less obvious aspects of divinity and love as I awoke to my spiritual calling. The Hindu Goddess of destruction, Kali began to make herself known in my dreams. On my altar where I practiced magic stood a Kali painting that my ex-husband had painted for me. Magic gave me a feeling of empowerment that I had so lacked as a youth. As I began to put my attention on ways to extract myself from the dead hand of history- both on a macro and microcosmic level- the universe gave me exactly what I needed to heal.
One night, I left a candle unattended on my altar. The gorgeous flame of the fire licked up the sparkling gold, glitter, black and blue Kali, burning her to a Kali-fried crisp that nearly burnt my apartment down with it, leaving a smoke angel on the wall where once she stood with her scythe. The image of Kali that my husband had painted for me completely burnt through and left ashes of our attachment to each other with an empty frame. A fireball jumped over the carpet and destroyed a comforter that I had bought with a misogynistic ex-boyfriend. The ashes wafted over the dirty mirror of time as a voodoo quantum portal opened and left my mind agape at what kind of warped rabbit hole had just opened. A month later I wound up in bed with my dead father’s namesake William IV. William IV was the name of my real father (number and all).
On the wall of William’s bedroom was an ash mark left by an unattended candle that a ghost had wrenched from its metal candleabra and wafted against the wall. William didn’t believe in ghosts, but distinctly heard voices and saw shadows that literally bent the metal of the candlestick holder, as if proving to him the ghost’s existence. I saw the ash mark on a night I was partying with some girlfriends and synchronistically wandered over to his place next door. In his bedroom, I immediately recognized the ashen burn as the mark of Kali. William revealed a tattooed “IV” on his wrist while we lay in bed together, and I knew that this was where the portal had led me. William IV opened up a portal of grief I had never dealt with when my father was murdered. The two William IVs even looked similar with similar personality traits and shared Ayn Rand as their favorite author. In the midst of my newly enflamed year-long grief, my then husband and I ended our marriage. I left my husband for my dead father’s namesake.
For awhile I thought I was dating my real father’s ghost. You can imagine how that might have freaked out my new boyfriend, whose house I would drive to in the middle of the night to cry the loss of my dad in his arms. We provided each other sensual and emotional comfort. To add to the warped stinkronistic ghost story, my new beloved’s nickname was “Zombie.” I play the queen of the zombies in his movie where I sing alien opera to Mozart’s Requiem recorded in his mother’s closet who couldn’t accept it when he came out of the closet and revealed himself as bisexual. Reality truly is stranger than fiction.
Right before I met William, he had disavowed women as a sexual option. I assisted in helping save William’s sexuality with women utilizing black tantra (in my mind I was saving my real dad and releasing the karmic burden of feeling like I should have saved him the first time around), while he showed me that sometimes people fight and it doesn’t necessarily mean that they are evil psycho-erotic killers. If they are psycho-erotic killers and femme fatales, that’s cool too! (whereas before I would feel guilty about being an emotional killer since that role was so closely linked to guilt over my father’s murder). I also cleared out my guilt complex internally dictating that I needed to save men in order to keep them from sexually harming or otherwise vamping women. That script was taught to me by my step-dad.
William IV held space for a few of my major freak-outs when I literally gestalted (permit the word’s use as a verb) that he- or my step-dad’s psycho-erotic reflection as seen in him- would attack me in my peak moments of sexual vulnerability. Through William’s stoic non-reactivity (a quality that I had previously judged in other lovers) and our mutual pheremonal chemistry, I acquired an orgasmic capacity that I didn’t think possible with more passionate men who I did not trust not to emotionally attack me. These men also never turned up the chemical heat of my own internal sexual barometer, though I’d wind up in long-term relationships with them. In retrospect, it seemed as though I was sexually punishing myself and ensuring my eventual sexual martyrdom at their hands. This gift of orgasm (hallelujiah!) with William IV- whose weight bench bore an Irish cross and rosary with my name- has lasted with male partners even after William and I broke up and became creative collaborators and friends instead. William was the first lover I had who showed me that I could be a femme fatale and continually chop off my lover’s false heads and negative ego if they are willing to come back a better man for the slashing.
During my own near death experience a year after my and William’s affair the first time around, my real father’s ghost actually did come to visit me. At the time- I was playing out ad infinitum my betrayal complex with men. William (the young alive version) came back to me after complications from burst ovarian cysts left me a bleeding corpse of a woman who had seen way too much for her 27 years. Though he made some signs of trying to take care of me, he couldn’t or wouldn’t deal with me this time around for more than a month. This was not the time to give me a false sense of hope. The sense of betrayal burned like a stake in my heart. When my real dad’s ghost actually did show up one night in the midst of angelic visions and suicidal fantasies, he sensed my insecurity at being able to feel his presence, and responded telepathically, “you have a gift.” I was surprised to hear myself say to him, “How the f**k could you leave me?” and then burst into a torrent of tears while he sat next to me. He told me that he had sent William into my life to help me sort out my complex and that he would not be rectified until I was rectified. This was not an easy psychological fix. I still see 12:20 on the clock whenever I am obsessively addicting on a lover. 12-20 was my real father’s birthday. Every day is my death day if I’m lucky- death to the encumbering scripts of the past that give birth to my present erotic free will. Will-I-Am.
I truly thought if I spoke to anyone about some of the stuff I was seeing, hearing, and thinking during my near-death trip, that I would be locked up in a mental institution and that they finally would destroy my mind. Believe me, this is not far-out thinking considering our culture’s current response to psychological malaise and Western medicine’s inability to deal with indigo children and starseeds. Fortunately, I found a psychic clairvoyant for a therapist, an acupuncturist, homeopathist, and an Arcturian healer, who quickly penetrated to the core of what was happening. With one session, my Arcturian healer cleared my six year struggle with candida. My female organs were harbinging chronic yeast infections and systemic malaise as a form of sexual protection, having been date raped years prior due to very poor boundaries on either end of another train-wrecked love affair. Until I cleared my martyr-attack complex on all dimensions (I also fell prey to a non-embodied 4th dimensional succubus), I kept on attracting lovers to whom I always played the victim, justifying my need for physical sexual armor to keep men away.
The angelic opening to other dimensions through nearly dying was worth the intensity of all I experienced and everything I learned. I am humbled by the intensity and all-encompassing nature of spirit’s love for me. Death and resurrection have brought such sweet surrender to the moment-by-moment intensity of romantic love, whether it lasts for a year or just for a week. How often is romantic love supposed to fan the fire of existence anyway? Once a week? Twice a month? Every day for a year then not at all? I have no idea. What I do know is the inherent immortality of all souls and that when people die, they become angels who look over us from the other side. During my near-death spell, everyone began to look like an angel, a strange side-effect that restored my faith in humanity’s ability to ascend. I visited the Valhalla cemetery on one of my morbid self-therapeutic jaunts through the land of the dead and heard a ghost named Ted tell me, “Appreciate your loved ones while they’re alive.” Most dead people have many regrets- all except the children and babies who seem to retain their angelic nature. I could feel that in the childhood part of the cemetery.
As one might imagine, preservation in the form of sustainability is not something that makes much sense to me. Creation and destruction, sex, death, and art, are where my consciousness largely prevails. It was Vishnu who came to me in a dream and said that preservation would find a way into my life through the laws of reason as they pertained to enlightenement’s rationality. I often hope for something to give me a sense of stability; certainly it is not the materialistic aims of 3rd dimensional reality. I hope that the source of some emotional stability might be sustainable love, knowing full well that love is the essential ingredient to be able to hold the necessary frequency to live in the 5th dimension to which enlightened souls are ascending.
The Native Americans won- not because they lived- but because they ascended to the light and now reside as 5th dimensional beings of love and space holders for the earth’s bounty to be realized by all those who truly love her. Death does not mean defeat, though the white race who took their place would have us think otherwise. Let us not be fooled by the multiple layers of illusion posing as power. Love truly does conquer all. Those who rape the Earth now will be re-located to other planes of existence that are less evolved after they die. The Earth has made a conscious decision to shift dimensions; that shift does not support cosmic vampires. Ascended masters, angels, and enlightened E.T.s are ensuring that our planet is protected with love.
On my road to self-discovering sustainable love, I am learning that the love for universal principles must be greater than the love for individuals who start to deviate from those principles one holds most dear. Forgiveness and compassion for those stuck in the dark of conditioned responses becomes the crucial medicine to override the default victim script dominant in our love relationships. Love never means compromising one’s own values to accommodate a lack of integrity because one is attached to the object of their affections. Principles don’t necessarily make cozy bedfellows, but they certainly leave one with a clear conscience! By holding close to our values, we attract other people in line with those values. We continue to swim in the infinite tidepool of the beloved’s reflections past the necessary break-ups and ego-deaths along the way that often force us to part ways with our companions who we no longer see eye-to-eye. Loyalty between good friends has always provided my own heart a more lasting love remedy, whereas romance seems so fleetingly inundated with sex, death, and the fire of passion that eventually burns me and my beloved back to the void from whence we came.
Sometimes we need to take stock of what kind of accumulated emotional and sexual baggage we have collected and work on getting rid of as much baggage as we can before we are able to attract a partner who will not keep us spinning in self-induced trauma. Who on the road to self-actualization cannot say that they learned incredibly valuable lessons from all of their major romantic partners despite the suffering (or even because of it)? The realizations from those partnerships are immortal, even if the relationship is not.
Sustainable love has nothing to do with the kind of lock and chain romantic scripts we all had hoped would work. Sorry to burst that over-worn illusion if that’s what the title of this article seemed to profer. There is no getting around the inevitable void that leaves us existentially isolated agents with temporary earthly companions, even if they are lasting friends or lovers immortally bound by dharmic mission and universal love. Love these days seems to be as complex as quantum physics, and equally as difficult to figure out!
After I graduated from my post break-up resentments and grief over my ex-husband and both William IVs, a huge amount of creative energy was liberated- energy that my partners and I would previously dump into our endless drama. I needed to forgive both of them and understand their points of view so that I might have compassion for the hurt engendered on either end. With my husband, the intensity of our passion (both the positive and negative) equated in our minds to the depth of our love. I realized in retrospect how life-negating the drama that passed for passion was and how I needed to cut the cords with my own over-identification to romantic tragedy in order to not be constantly dragging my emotional intestines behind me.
My ex-husband admitted to me afterwards that I had pretty much been his main art project while he and I were together, and I was living under the illusion that I needed a single male placeholder in my life to keep me grounded and take the place of my dad. In the wake of grieving my real dad, for the first time in my life, I’m able to accept the stream of love and lovers who course through my life without trying to control the shape or course of the river. We as a species have a lot to learn about not controlling love. The surrender that comes in the wake of giving up control is testament to our ability to keep on loving despite the challenges with which we are faced that may tell us it is not safe to love someone. We must use our individual wills to harness the shadow of our doubt in love without letting doubt be the driver of our erotic and romantic automobiles. Most of us have our doubts about whether true love is possible. That does not need to be the guiding factor in determining whether or not surrendering to someone is a wise idea. The heart must guide where the mind finds only stop signs. If the heart says yes, have trust that you will learn from this person what you need in order to become a more integrated individual while slip sliding in the grace of love’s unadulterated reflection. We learn so much about the nature of our own wills by relating to others.
A relationship metaphorically gives birth to an etheric child and affects everyone who comes into contact with that child. No physical procreation is required in order to give birth to new life as seen through the eyes of love. I am often inspired by spending time with a loving couple, even if I don’t have a romantic partner at the time. I allow myself to be moved by the outpouring of love these two people have for each other that is literally extending its boundaries and inviting others to take part. How can this kind of love not heal the cracks in the Earth through extension? In a tantric world view, everything is interconnected and in relationship to everything else. The love we create in our intimate relationships will naturally filter over into other projects, including elevating consciousness and saving the earth. If we do not value this basic interconnectedness of our human companions, what hope do we have in saving the biggest lover of them all in the form of an 8,000 mile diameter globe floating in outerspace?
Sustainable love seems to have more to do with deprogramming (making die) relational scripts in one’s inner environment as opposed to fixing or changing people in one’s external environment in a vain attempt to make up for the hole in one’s soul or gain some false sense of security in someone else’s reflection. I would be remiss if I did not mention my observation that a lot of peoples’ sexual and emotional shame and guilt gets inverted and projected onto the whole sustainable living trip as a messianic complex, with there being only “one” way to save the world and everyone else buying fossil fuels and eating meat doomed to hell in a really long line at Walmart. “Saving” one’s lover seems to be the warped mirror parallel of the false promise messiahs promote that saving anyone is possible. We may act as catalysts for another person to choose to save themselves through the attention and devotion of our love, but that is all.
If our liberation resides in non-attachment to ALL areas of life, we must at least entertain the notion that the things and people we hold most precious in life- including our Earth- are the things we must let go of in order to truly be free. Real love cannot be destroyed, only temporarily tarnished. There is caution to be had in the tendency to become attached to saving the world or seeing our partners as karmic burdens to effectively manage in the process of ascension. The propogation of the human species posing as a mission to save the planet for love of future generations is questionable at best. Perhaps homo-sapiens are not the last stop of living organisms this world will see in order to evolve according to her own principles- without our tinkering. The shape of our surrender and trust in grace for what’s to come will carve out the necessary niches for evolution to occur. If we really do love the Earth, let the love for her bounty and beauty be the guiding force in saving her and not selfish anthrocentricism and survivalism.
Strangely, when we put our attention on deprogramming ourselves instead of holding on to love or life, the environment around us seems to rearrange itself in a way to support the kind of reprogramming that comes from the void of one’s non-expectant emotional landscape. We begin to attract people who align with our most deeply cherished intentions and values. We accept the death of our so-called love and planet as we would a caterpillar who consumes a leaf with no apologies. The rose of immortality will arise if only we are willing to water the fertile soil of our own graves with hope and laughter for what’s to come. Death is not real. And somehow, as peak oil mounts with love’s entropic heat-death, our passions will all be turned inwards towards the eternal flame of imagination that guides each one of us to shape the world’s reality according to our own wills. The barrier between thought and reality is disappearing in Earths’ dimensional 4th to 5th dimensional shift. Anything is possible.
