Healing core wounds takes a tremendous amount of time, energy and conscious awareness of oneself. I share my journey on line to help those who are interested in making that journey. What I share here is geared towards men issues as my vessel is male. However, I suspect that many women can also relate to what I wrote here. My latest installment in my journey unfolded last night and into this morning as I was working with a dear female friend on some core issues I've struggled with for my entire life.
May the energy and spirit of this lesson spread across the planet because it is big!
When I started on my healing journey in 2001, I learned a lot of skills on how to have healthy relationships with myself and others. But it did not teach me everything. I walked away from that process healing many addictions but one seemed to linger on despite all my efforts to deal with it. That addiction was sex. Despite all my efforts, I continually struggled with demons in my head. At the time, I thought it was a weakness of mine and something that I would just have to manage for the rest of my life. But the internal turmoil continued to grow and fester. Something was wrong and it was taking more and more energy to maintain my code of conduct around women. How can I continue my work if this blows up in my face?
As usual, Creator provides the opportunities for learning and growth.
When I joined a tribe about a year ago, I found a group of people that I could connect with. Everything seemed to be going very well. Then I met a lady and my demons started acting up again, this time with much more vigor. How can I have a close intimate relationship with this woman and not violate my vows, relationship and commitments to my wife?
To answer this question, I will turn back to the medicine wheel as a tool to show what the core wound actually was.
Let this medicine while show in pictorial form a representation of me (center) along with the four areas of my life where I search for meaning and connection with others. I'm in the middle as I AM and always will be responsible for meeting my needs or finding people who are willing to help me. When my wife and I got married and more specifically when we reconciled our marriage in 2002/2003, we spent many hours a day for months and months working out the boundaries within our relationship. I represent that with the green circle in the image below. All the areas within that green circle is my responsibility and where my wife agreed to help meet my needs, and visa versa where I am willing to help her with her needs.
What I found through that process is that my wife was not able to meet ALL my needs and to be honest, it would be very unhealthy and unfair for me to expect that she do that. This required that I look outside of my relationship with my wife and form other relationships to help fill in the gaps that I found. This is where my struggles really started to manifest because I went into all these relationships with a foundational flaw in perception and comprehension.
That flaw was a manifestation of an issue I had growing up as a little boy. I was not taught how to have healthy relationships and I did not have all my emotional needs met. In fact, I was so shy, timid and alone, I withdrew and struggled with most of my relationships for most of my informative years and well into my 30's. I found connections with women through sexual activities and that was reinforced for many years. That flawed belief carried forward into my marriage and right up to last night.
I could hold a healthy emotional relationship with other men and most women. But if I found the ladies to be beautiful, my old programming kicked in to sabotage those relationships. Despite nearly 20 years of dedication to working on healthy relationships, one type of relationship alluded me and it was literally driving me crazy. The pain, turmoil and conflict that ran through my mind was unbearable and needed to be resolved.
So I sat down with my dear friend who triggered my internal hell on earth and we got really honest, blunt and open about everything. That is when my friend said something that changed my world. She suggested that I don't actually have a sexual addiction but rather I am searching for emotional connection and that I'm confusing the two.
What she was getting at is that I was associating sex with emotional connection when in fact the two are separate forms of energy. When I tried to make an emotional connection with her or others, I would connect sex to it and sabotage the relationship. If I try to process emotional energy through my physical body via sex, then I am not honouring or processing that emotional energy and I end up feeling lack of emotional connection while driving myself crazy with sexual thoughts or fantasies. As a result, I end up with energy piling up that required processing but I lacked the proper tools to process that energy. I turned to having more sexual encounters to try to fill in the gaps and end up not feeling emotionally connected and wanting for more. It is a vicious cycle that was driving me crazy.
On top of that, my code of conduct that I use to govern myself demanded that I not breach the trust that I worked so hard to build with my wife. Having sexual thoughts about other women with whom I'm attempting to build an emotional connection with, violated that code and threatened my relationship with my wife.
That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart. - Matthew 5:28
This is where my freedom was finally found. When I was confronted with my false idea that sex equals emotional connection, I had to contemplate separating the two and seeing them as two completely different forms of energy that required two completely different approaches. When I saw this for the first time, I quickly realized how deeply I was lying to myself and why I struggled with my relationships with some women. I was able to make those deep, meaningful emotional connections with a small hand full of men who are capable and willing to connect with me at that level and some other women, but the results were not consistent. I can now see why I could not form intimate emotional connections with the other women in my life and as a result of this revelation, I found the lustful thoughts quickly disappeared.
I also found out that most of the women in my life don't connect sex to emotional intimacy. They see those two energies as being completely different. But when they are around men who connect the two, then the women struggle to be emotionally intimate with them as they are afraid that sex will quickly follow. As a result, mistrust and fear become normal feelings when they are around men who connect the two energies together, whether consciously or not. A lot of men act inappropriately because they use sexual energy to drive their relationships and this is a huge mistake. Despite all my work, my wife saw this within me but was not able to articulate these issues until now. That caused a disconnect within our emotional connection and put strain on our relationship. I compensated with sex, where the solution is found in working through the emotional energy instead.
In the end, I am fully responsible for my actions, needs and desires. I am also fully responsible for all the relationships that I engage in as well. I've partnered with my wife on this journey and we work together to fulfill each others needs. In the areas where we are unable to do that, we reach out to friends and tribe members. Our off grid living fulfills my physical needs more than I ever would have imagined. I love this life style and I feel physically fulfilled. My writing, research and activism fulfills my mental needs very nicely. The mental energy is balanced and healthy. The work that I do with my tribe as an elder and steward of this land as I explore my ancestors customs and traditions more than fulfills my spiritual needs. That is especially true as I write about that journey in great detail on my blog.
But my emotional connection was lacking because I did not comprehend what it truly meant to make a healthy emotional connection with women. Sure I was able to do it with a few men, but now that I've disconnected the sexual energy from the emotional energy, I can now connect with women far deeper than I have EVER been able to do before. I feel a great burden and weight has been lifted off my shoulders as I found this revelation has quieted that demon in my mind. I no longer have to consume so much energy controlling that devil as I can now look at my relationships from a whole new paradigm.
Emotional energy is not sexual energy and it should never be confused with each other. Most men don't function on this paradigm and as such they fail to have all their needs met. As my dear friend Lorene (@goddesseslair) said to me today when I was sharing with her:
"If men could connect to their emotional needs, there would be no violence" - Lorene Lund McRobb
That is a profound statement and could literally change the world. I would add to the list their physical, mental and spiritual needs on top of that as well as the women too! If we ALL could connect to our needs and have them met within our relationships, peace would break out all over the world. If peace broke out, the grip of the cabal would abruptly end as well.
There is a disease going around this planet and it has to do with a lack of emotional connection with one another. If we spend the time to really get to know somebody and connect with them on a deep, intimate, emotional way, we would do everything we can to love, honour and protect that spiritual being. We are all suffering from emotional deprivation and skewed invalid modalities to deal with it properly. It is extremely difficult to make that level of connection on line or through a book. What is required is that we start spending time with one another, face to face, in safe circles. It is time to get to work to heal our core wounds and find ways to start connecting with one another.
I am associated with the Goddesses Lair and Lion's Den as an elder. We hold retreats on a regular basis to help people heal their wounds and connect with one another. We have witnessed miracles unfold before our eyes as a result of this physical, mental, emotional and spiritual work. We are also starting our own group called TribeUp and we will be doing similar work starting in the Athabasca area so that we can build tribes willing and able to connect with one another and be in service to each other!
I love my wife and that love is deep, personal, intimate and romantic. I love my brothers and sisters. That love is deep, personal and intimate with no romance. I get it now and I see the difference, deeper than I've ever seen before. I deeply love you all and I hope all the men in my life can learn from my experience so that we can build tribes where the women feel safe from sexual advancements, inappropriate behaviour and lewd comments so that they can form true, deep, meaningful emotional connections with the men in their life. I also look forward to building deep, personal and intimate emotional connections with the men in my life. I yearn for that deep connection as it is so rare and it should be much more common!
Men, it is up to us to build those safe containers and govern ourselves appropriately within those containers. When we do that, the ladies can get do their magic and together we can change this world faster, deeper and more profoundly than we could possibly imagine. That energy has now been released into the ether for spirit to distribute around the planet. Help spread it far and wide.