Dive 2 DARE TO BE YOU!

Dive 2

Dare to be me: Warrior Love

As I sit looking down the mountain and at the deep blue sky I ask myself:

Do I really want to change and grow, or am I too fearful of what I may find? The answer comes:

Dare to be you; not what you think others may want you to be!

This is where a retreat into your wisdom and love can begin. This book is from my heart—nonacademic and written in simple language. It is about what I have learned to love, especially the power within, which watches my negative self-destructive thoughts and behavior, and feeds my intuition positively. It invited me to “come out” to Crete (before I leave this training ground called Earth!). So here goes. Hold onto our magical carpet and fly with me!

Don’t die wondering—life is a series of lessons

What if you and I left this life knowing who we are and that we are full of love, kindness, and creativity? What a wonderful thought! Imagine … no bitterness no regrets. No unnecessary disease. We learn to open our inner power to see life as constant learning and a loving place to be.

I know I am not perfect, and I have made mistakes. The mistakes attract tough experiences, yet I see everything as lessons that teach me about authentic compassion and self-compassion. This, in turn, carves out my unique path towards consciousness and transformation.

Now imagine being at our own funeral

I ask myself: “How will I be remembered and spoken about at my funeral?” I immediately think that joy and inner peace would radiate to all who spoke about me at my funeral. Yes, there may be some people who might say, “What a lovely rogue he was,” yet it would be said with love for my imperfections. Because I allowed myself to love myself from a place of authenticity, I may have been hurt. I may have transferred my pain onto others, risking the path of loving and being loved! I may have hidden parts of my life from those close to me, and I might take this with me to my maker! Some people may stay silent for fear of offending my name and others may gossip their opinions. Yet no matter, I would have lived with love in my heart.

Well, I make a clear choice to share those hidden thoughts with you in this book. I ask you to go deep into resonating with your own life as I unravel mine. I sense, then, that the hidden forces, faculties and talents, become alive as I discover myself in being truthful, without fear of criticism, gossip, shame, or blame.

Risk loving you

Now, to risk loving means loving my more permanent self enough to be truly human and at times become excruciatingly vulnerable and intimate with the images that the mirror of life reflects back to me. Yet I do so with self-compassion. I know I risk everything I have ever helped to create back home by being truthful. I am not writing this book to hurt anyone. I am writing it to, just maybe, help you, the reader, be more open to change and go within to experience with me some realization of:

Who am I?

What do I need to learn?

What have I deep inside to give?

What is my real purpose in this life?

Often I hear from people what they don’t want; yet not what they love with passion, the latter I believe, can expand our capacity for unconditional love. This is probably the only capacity we take to our next life in spirit. That may be a little advanced for you to comprehend at this stage; indeed, when I first heard this I said, “Get real. Life is tough. It’s not about learning unconditional love!”

Yes, that was my first reaction to being asked to love me, a man! All I know is that, when someone suggested, “You can learn to love you just as you are,” I scoffed so hard I choked. My resistance was so full of cynicism. I thought I was a hardened, “street wise” man with life’s knocks to prove it! I loathed being open, and I had no real emotional language or intelligence. I was a “man!” Ah! What a limiting belief! Ring any bells, men?

So now on day one of a thirty-day quest in Crete, I start this book sitting in an isolated villa, high above a town in the southern part of the island, with the morning sun warming my typing fingers. Outside, Konstantina, my landlady, is gardening with her beloved longhaired black collie dog, ReBell! The villa took ten years to complete… that’s Greek time… slowly, slowly! In Greek, ciga ciga!’

First Morning

At home in the UK, I begin the day by sending, a text—a positive affirmation each day—to a hundred people or more. It’s a lovely action that inspires me. Now being abroad, I give a positive affirmation to myself from Louise Hay’s pack of Wisdom Cards. The card says, “I can heal myself on all levels!” And on the reverse side it says: “Healing means to make whole and to accept all parts of myself, not just parts I like, but all of me.” How appropriate. And then I open her book, You Can Heal Your Life to a random page and read: “My life doesn’t work.” I am reminded how I used to wake up saying, “My body, finances, and relationships don’t work!”

Now I have manifested a beautiful villa with a magnificent view of a winding snake-like road between sun-scorched mountains and the sea. I can hear goats—their bells are ringing. And I can hear dogs barking. The most precious gift is time to think and write this book, away from all family and friends. It is my retreat to all my earthly senses and with the unseen inspiration calling me and guiding me. Let me dive in the deep end. As Dr. Deborah Anapol wrote, “Love is its own law.”

I accept love is a mystery and most people want love.

Here is what I have learned over years as I have grown to like and gradually love me and life, that I call warrior love.

·      I have confidence in my ability to communicate to a whole range of people. They often share their secrets and their willingness (and resistance) to love themselves.

·      I am learning to be giver as well as a receiver of love, with a high degree of compassion and self-compassion.

·      I do my best not to judge or gossip. The effect of gossip is so destructive; when I see myself do it, I do my best to stop.

·      I am a person learning to have pleasure, including sex, without shame.

·      I am allowing others to love me in deep platonic friendships. This was one of the most difficult changes, because I never thought or felt loveable.

·      I am learning to take back my power to earn good money doing work I love. I realize now how important this is toward building self-esteem, self-worth, and self-love.

·      I am learning to say positive affirmations in the mirror about my mind and body and soul, including my sexuality. I love playing audio principles of success daily, especially when I find myself reverting to old negative habits.

·      I am learning to follow my intuition by meditating.

·      I am willing to learn from teachers who cross my path.

·      I am learning to turn my negative beliefs into positive affirmations: An example:
“I am open and receptive to all good!”
“I am safe.”
“I release the need to be right.”
“I am at peace. I love and approve of myself.”

·      I am learning, gradually, to let people know who is behind the masked, hurt adult and releasing the “genius” child. I believe this genius is in all of us—when we choose to love ourselves by developing a nurturing inner parent! A parent that loves us, even when we make mistakes—especially while we learn. This makes warrior love a reality.

·      I am willing to let go with love, relationships that constantly criticize and try to control me through guilt. I ask myself: What in me attracted this experience? I take responsibility to do some work to change and heal me.

·      I am learning gradually to tell the truth by courageously owning my story.

·      I realize that, as I learn to love myself, I can forgive myself, especially when I take responsibility for my mistakes.

·      When I look into a real mirror or a metaphorical mirror that reflects what I have attracted to me in experiences, I can now learn patience and believe myself when I say, “I love you, Roger, even when you make mistakes.” I am learning to be patient—not an easy family pattern to change. So often I have wanted to jump a whole series of lessons, because my ego wanted everything now without doing the work.

·      Most importantly, I ask people I have hurt to forgive me, and I ask this with authenticity.

·      I am learning that, when I invite the source of love to help me, even the toughest experiences are transformed into healing.

·      I am learning to handle anger, jealousy, guilt, shame, and grief, and see each of these emotional states as an opportunity to learn.

·      I am learning the difference between man-made laws of love and natural laws of love.

·      I see more clearly that to have a real relationship with another, I need a shared life purpose and similar spiritual values.

·      I am learning what I need in a relationship. This is an emotional resonance of appreciation for self and each other based on being true to self and the other person. Then criticism is so rare, and each day can be full of love and happiness.

·      If the relationship is built just on sexual attraction, and an unwillingness to truly love one’s true self, then the relationship with self and anyone else is a co-creation of unhappiness.

·      I am willing to live on my own and be happy rather than accommodate fear, guilt, shame, and resentment from another.

And now, I dive into that part of me that wants to stay secret!

How to let go without making me wrong or me right

Now my aim is to manage the change and transition with my primary partner with deep gratitude, love, and integrity. Some of those changes are personal to us. Simply, we have changed, and we need to go our different ways and do what our spiritual paths guide us to be. Like many partners, we gradually learned to take each other for granted. We did things often separately; we lost the zest for being together. Our hobbies were so different. What we agree on, however, is that we want the best for each other. If I am in a prison of self-righteousness and the other is wrong, then it’s still a prison! I want to be human not right!

For years I have loved and sat listening to my partner, and she has done the same for me. We always gave the gift of deep listening to each other. We have talked at length in the later years about our relationship and whether to “open” our marriage to others, which I later suggest can be such a gift of love to similar-minded partners. The problem is, when we have been conditioned to monogamy, then being open can be so hard, because thoughts of guilt, fear, and criticism, can erase love of self and our own self-compassion. I loved faithfully as a monogamous man, until some years ago. And somewhere, I chose not to tell my primary partner that my capacity for love was expanding in a way that was new and not fully understood by me. As I write this book, I still love her deeply. Yet our energy vibrations are so different, and our way of understanding marriage has changed.

Constant self-criticism, I believe, kills love

I saw constant signs of my partner not loving and accepting how beautiful she is, and her self-criticism hurt me so much. No matter how much I appreciated and loved her, I came to feel that the blame she accepted of herself was my fault. What I experienced was growing anger inside her, especially when her mother died.

Insight: When you have experienced anger and criticism for, and from, a parent that is unresolved, you may bring this emotional pattern into intimate relationships. I did blame my parents, and I take responsibility that this negative emotional pattern developed beliefs and emotions that I allowed to control me. I now choose to forgive my mother and father and not stay in blame. I cannot change anyone else, especially my partner. I need to change and be a person congruent to my beliefs. Hopefully, I am choosing to love, be loving and loveable. Constant criticism in any guise creates a vibration that brings ill health and constant resistance to loving self.

The mirrors

I consistently do a lot of mirror work, seeing what in me made my partner so critical of herself and, at times, of me. Now I accept that my love was not honest and good enough. I was not impeccable with my word. Sometimes I certainly took things personally, and I did not always do my best. And I made the assumption that I could go elsewhere to meet some of my needs.

So now I recognize that there is a beginning, middle, and an end in our intimate relationship. I recognize that people come into our lives for a time and then leave at the right time. It has taken us, as happens with so many couples, a personal crisis to separate. We agreed for most of our relationship to be monogamous. Then as both of our needs changed we grew apart and we met our needs in different ways. My partner clearly wants now to stay monogamous. I choose differently. I want to be open to whatever happens that is wholesome and does not make me wrong or my partner wrong. That would come from such unresolved pain and limiting beliefs. This is work in progress. I want to be gentle as I learn from our parting. I don’t want to stay in the role of guilty person. Love for me cannot be turned on as a reward. It cannot be turned off as a punishment.

I would choose to live on my own and be happy rather than stay in a relationship where we both feel wrong

This is one great benefit of living by myself in a retreat and seeing the negative emotional patterns more clearly. It’s painful to admit this, and yet so freeing. I just picked up The Seven Natural Laws of Love by Dr. Deborah Anapol and read: “You are the source of love. You! Not your husband or your wife, not your lover, not your parents, nor your guru... love is within each of us and radiates outwards.”  Over the years of struggling with where and what is love? I realize it’s an inside job! that can be a truly worthwhile journey.

A lighter story! (But let me be clear—I am now not looking for the perfect woman).

A Sufi Story

Nasrudin met an old friend whom he had not seen for twenty years. They sat together in the cafe and talked over old times.

“Did you ever get married, Nasrudin?” asked the friend.

“No, I’m afraid I didn’t.”

“Why not? I’ve been married many years, and I’ve never regretted it.”

“Well,” said Nasrudin, “I was always looking for the perfect woman. I wanted my wife to be beautiful, intelligent, and sensible.”

“And you never found her?”

“I thought I had, when I was twenty. Her name was Ablah. She was beautiful, just the kind of woman I like, but I’m afraid she wasn’t very intelligent, and her language was atrocious! I was embarrassed to be with her! She certainly wasn’t the perfect woman.”

“Was she your girlfriend?”

“No. When I was twenty-five I met a woman called Bahira. She was good looking and intelligent, but she wasn’t very sensible. She spent all my money on frivolous things, and she couldn’t even boil an egg! She wasn’t the perfect woman either.”

“Were there anymore?”

“Only one. At thirty I met Haddiyah, and she was truly a gift from God! She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen, and the most intelligent. What’s more she was prudent and sensible, a good cook, and a brilliant conversationalist.”

“She sounds like the perfect woman you were looking for!”

“She was the perfect woman I was looking for.”

“Then why didn’t you marry her?”

“Unfortunately, she was looking for the perfect man!”

Insight: I admit I was, in the past, looking for the perfect woman to marry and be monogamous for life; I thought the “perfect woman” would make up for my deficiencies and make me happy! I wanted to be the dominant male and have no competitors from other males. Oh what limiting beliefs! I needed to do a whole lot of work on my father-son emotional sexual patterns. I’ll talk about this later.