Dear Richard,

In my session with you today you asked me, "What female qualities are you suppressing?” My answer came in three dreams and a torrent of insights.

I dreamed that I had to take my children to therapy or some kind of doctor because there was something wrong with them and there we discovered that my sister and I were witches. In another dream my skull was broken in pieces and I knew it was very important to glue it back...even the smallest part could not be left out...it needed to come together with the whole. In a further dream I knew I was suppressing tenderness.

I am suppressing the quality of tenderness and the ability to be gentle towards myself and others... to be soft and patient. I am suppressing the quality of patience...sometimes it gets overshadowed by the pull or energy to get things done. I am suppressing the quality of taking the other in, without wanting to better them or change them... taking them really in just as they are, this also applies to myself and to situations. I am suppressing the gift of really listening to Life or the other... sometimes it gets obstructed by the impulse of telling people what needs to be done. I am suppressing the big part of me that loves to hug, to say loving nicknames, to hug, to caress others. When I make love I am suppressing the enjoyment of foreplay... it almost always gets lost in favor of the urge to come to climax and get it over with.

Richard's reply:

This is not a woman's world. It is a man's world. For so long now the male qualities, the baser male qualities, have predominated. The world is not peaceful and it has not been at peace for a long time. The world is combative, conflictual, it is power-based. When the basis of the world is power it cannot be love. There cannot be love. Love is not really acceptable. When love is not acceptable then neither is acceptance. When acceptance is not present neither is tenderness.

The world, this world, the modern-day world, is so dominated by base male principles that there is no place and no context for a woman to express her naturalness, to be herself truly, and to live into the mysteries of true womanhood.

Your first dream: I dreamed that I had to take my children to therapy or some kind of doctor because there was something wrong with them and there we discovered that my sister and I were witches.

The doctor is the patripsych. The patripsych represents that part of men and women who in the modern day have taken in (or introjected) the male principles of domination and power. We measure our attitude, our success or failure, our performance and our lives against the gauge, the judgment, of the patripsych. He is the dominant one, the embodiment of our collective and individual fears. The child (or children in the dream) is the promise, that part of you that is not yet grown, that harbors your potential. She is brought before the patripsych and it is because there is something wrong. The judge is the patripsych, who decides what's right and wrong, the dictator of morality, the one who tells you how to be and subordinates you to his will. The children are wrong and you and your sister are witches. Witchy energy is feared by the patriarchy, because it is the embodiment of woman's mysteries. Witch energy and attributes are the ones we so desperately need in the world today. Witches are the rebels against the patriarchy and against the patripsych in each and every one of us.

Your next dream: In another dream my skull was broken in pieces and I knew it was very important to glue it back...even the smallest part could not be left out...it needed to come together with the whole.

The broken skull symbolizes the male mind, the egoistic mind of separation and division. In this analytical, separative mind everything that is whole must be broken. Look at the world today, look around you, division is everywhere in the world of the patriarchy: religion against religion, gender against gender, race against race, men against women, mind against body, and so on. This is not the natural way of relationship, of acceptance and confluence. In order to reassemble the parts of the whole, the female principle which is innately all-inclusive, accepting, and preserving of harmony and co-existence must include everything and all, even the smallest parts, nothing can be left out, since all is a part of the whole. It is this very wholeness that we hope in time can heal the world, bring together our parts in all their diversity and variety, accepted and included, to create a future of mutual tolerance, cooperation, and lasting world peace.

The last dream: In a further dream I knew I was suppressing tenderness.

All the female qualities, deepest nurturing and life-preserving traits and behaviors are suppressed in the culture, in our inner and outer worlds. It takes great courage to stand against this tide of inner and outer destruction and say, in effect, I will be true... to gentleness, to love, to true caring and warmth, to compassion, to nurture and nourishing and extend kindness to all my fellow life forms, my brothers and my sisters, to animals and life forms that are in distress, discomfort and fear and suffering. Perhaps the word—and it is a mighty word, a strong word—that summarizes all this so well is... tenderness... [to be continued next week]

Is the search for a primary love relationship the same as the search for a spiritual teacher?

In a way it is and in a way it isn't. The primary love relationship occupies one of three levels. First, it is a projective relationship in which I unconsciously see myself in the other. Through a dynamic process of exchanging inner objects I enter into a relationship of personal attraction to you, the one who embodies, possesses, and conceals those qualities, both positive and negative, that I do not own in myself. This level of primary love relationship is really a low level psycho-physical love or attachment and its objects are survival, procreation, comfort, and nesting, in any combination.

The second level of primary love relationship concerns growth, inner and outer development, and the predominance of heart feeling and emotion between the two partners. Most people have some awareness now of the development of pop psychology and the availability of ways and means to improve their relationship and grow both as individuals and together. But notably even these ways and means now made freely available do not seem to have improved our ability to stay in relationship and develop through deepening layers of personal intimacy.

Third, the primary love relationship may develop into a partnership with the two individuals in the couple pursuing their own sacred-spiritual paths. The relationship now takes the form of a deep adjunct to spirituality, an alliance of friendly souls, perhaps committed to each other and comprising a powerful loving foundation to healing sadhana and realization in the field of space and time.

Clearly this last level most resembles the relationship with the spiritual teacher. However it is different. We may say that the closest relationship that resembles the teacher-disciple relationship in the human realm is falling in love. But when we say this we only mean that it is like this, not that it is the same.

The essential difference is that a primary love relationship is a relationship between human beings, two individuals attracted and attentive to each other and wanting to be together in one of the three ways I have described.

The spiritual teacher is not a human being, not a personality, and not a character. He or she is a vehicle, a psycho-physical organism surrendered to the transmission of the Divine. No relationship as such exists between the devotee and the teacher. They are One.

This sense of Oneness of course is craved in interpersonal relationships -- craved but also resisted. The merging, when it does occur, actually relates to the birth and early life experience, not to spiritual Oneness. Nonetheless, the confusion we feel means that we mix up the two. But remember one is remedial, backward -looking, and in need of healing, while the other is spiritual in nature, takes great courage, and cannot be faked.

As I often say to seekers, if possible have a therapist who you trust and who knows you well and a close interpersonal relationship. These are the two "big guns." Between these two the process of personal growth and development are accelerated and deepened with great quality and immediacy. Once you have worked through the character and personality defenses and facade, the world of heart-centeredness calls to you and if you are fortunate enough to be with a partner who can join you there you will have a wonderful experience, an unmissable feast of the heart and fulfill the kind of life that most people merely wish for and dream of.

Over and above this, however, the spiritual teacher waits for your earnest engagement, your willing sacrifice, your relinquishing of all that is partial in your life for the All.

To return to your question: there is no search. Neither the loved one nor the spiritual teacher responds to search. Nothing and no one need or should be sought. For you have everything ready. This may not be so apparent in a primary love relationship when it is involved with the passions of loving, loss, and longing, but it can show in the deep experience of home-coming and intense relief when you realize the spiritual teacher is right in front of you... and has always been here, present and welcoming you with the open arms of acceptance and recognition.

BLOG entry #14

In time I am intending to publish a book entitled The Kitchen-Table Counselor. The idea, the central idea, of the book is that people care and that they talk to each other with the best of intentions the whole time. You speak to your lover, your husband, your kids, your friends, your relatives, your colleagues at work. And yet, much the same as many well-intentioned counselors, you may not be doing as much good as you would like to.

Something insidious and highly disempowering happened to humanity over the past couple of hundred years. It's called professionalization. Read the wonderful book Disabling Professions. The author is Ivan Illich. He will provoke questions and enquiry in you. The basic idea in the book is that people must be invalidated in order to maintain a professional workforce and create a hierarchical class construction.

The people in power in our world today have been and remain terrified of the billions of individuals who comprise the so-called masses. In Sacred Attention Therapy we seek to empower the individuals that comprise the masses. Just think what a great number of heartfelt, genuine and compassionate, intelligent and wise individuals could do in our world today. I don't hesitate to say that there is not one single politician, political spokesperson, religious leader in the world that deserves the backing and support of intelligent people. Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and power in the 21st century has become an enormously complicated shadow play of puppets and ignominy and unfairness, subjugation and callousness to the degree that only the most thorough and complete scouring of the toxic hierarchies of power will be sufficient to bring about any manifest change.

We—you and I—are not without power and influence ourselves. You and I should, must, if we are to possess hope for the humanity, tend the light. We can do it in the most simple, direct, and influential of ways. Encourage and allow yourself and others to awaken to consciousness. The outside world is a direct reflection of the inner world of the individuals who live in it, who witness it, who relate to it.

One of the most potent tools when you sit with someone in distress is this: listen, learn to listen, listen with all of yourself. Allow the other to find their way. Don't try to help—enable, then empower them. Trust their inner process. Get out of the way and let them learn about their own innate humanity, inner wisdom, guidance, intelligence, their spirituality, soulfulness, their compassion and their love.

Now what would happen if everyone did that?

BLOG entry #13

The world of form:

The miracle is I place one foot on the ground and then the other. I walk and, bending my knees, propel myself forward, swinging my hips. I fill my lungs and belly with life-giving air, as the blood pulses in my heart and veins. My arms swinging easily at my sides, I look about me and take in the world and all I see.  The miracle of life is this. I am human. I am existing. I am a wonder wondering at wonders.

The world of formlessness:

The miracle is I place one foot on the ground and then the other. I walk and, bending my knees, propel myself forward, swinging my hips. I fill my lungs and belly with life-giving air, as the blood pulses in my heart and veins. My arms swinging easily at my sides, I look about me and take in the world and all I see.  The miracle of life is this. I am human. I am existing. I am a wonder wondering at wonders.

BLOG entry #12

You often hear how an artist feels that they would die rather than relinquish their art. Singing, painting, sculpting keep them sane. Without the creative outlet of writing or poetry or dance they would pack life in altogether.

When it comes from a mediocre talent we are wont to smile at the innocuousness of the water color artist or minor sentimental poet who, rather than resort to pharmaceuticals or excessive alcohol, has found a creatively harmless method of retaining their sanity. When it comes from a major talent, our favorite artist, singer-songwriter, or classical musician, well, that's another matter of course.

All things arise out of the matrix of Consciousness and resist their inevitable demise. Having children, leaving memorials in our name, or works of art to remind existence that we once were here are in reality all symptoms of ego-aggrandizement. It's really very obvious, isn't it? The need to retain our sanity in creative expression and the sublimated catharsis of life is merely the resistance to non-existence. As such it stands in the way of liberation.

We often confuse the means with the end. Art in and of itself is merely means. Art in and of itself bridges the worlds of inner and outer realities and at its best and most sacred builds bridges between the material and the invisible, the mundane and the miraculous, the human and the divine. As such it is nobody's possession. Art is not mine or yours. It is as divinity also is: impersonal, void of personality, of individual form. It is both no one's and everyone's.  It should simply be left impersonally, as you might leave a path without expecting that no one else may follow you there.

There are two possibilities and they are both sacrificial in nature and spirit. Relinquish your art form for the Divine, offer it up, and allow it to infill your life in breath and movement and speech and sacred living. If you retain it, offer it to the Divine Source, allow yourself to receive the guidance to consecrate and purify the act of impersonal creation and integrate it into your life effortlessly without personal interest.

BLOG entry #11