Book Excerpts
Introduction
The Fertile Darkness
The Naked Heart
First Impressions
Faces in the Mirror
Dismantling Negative Patterns
Shakti
Union
Sexual Communion
The Essence

Articles
- The Secret of the Sexual Dance

First Impressions

There’s no cure, except the retreat into love,
for the suffering of subtly afflicted hearts.
-Rumi

Many of the dynamics we experience in our spiritual partnerships have their roots in our family of origin.  Our childhood home is our first school, and our parents are our first relationship teachers.  Like a good Zen master, their mode of teaching is often not what they specifically tell us about relating, but how they live it on a daily basis.  As children, we watch and internalize the behavior of our parents based upon our interpretation of what we see happening around us.  For this reason, most of us who want to become conscious of the powerful, underlying forces at work in our lives and intimate relationships will make the journey back into childhood to revisit our early experiences. 

Traditional spiritual practices like meditation, prayer, and yoga, though important aspects of healing are not always adequate for releasing the debilitating primal wounds incurred in childhood.  To navigate our way through life and our relationships, we need a clear understanding of our family of origin’s pattern of relating, as well as the programming we received when we were young.

Basic Goodness
Many of us who have taken various paths to enlightenment have found ourselves having to investigate our Western culture and our families as part of our quest. It is not always an easy passage. As we mature it can be humbling—and healing—to accept that we may not be able to change the programming we received in our families, even though we’re aware of it. As well, too much analysis of our past can result in our feeling flawed.  This is because the ego attaches itself to negative experiences of the past (bad parenting, schooling, etc.) to justify the avoidance of relationship in the present.  A challenge arises: Can we skillfully investigate our psychological roots without ending up feeling defective? 

We can…if we take one small step beyond the ego and sense that, in the moment, life feels remarkably sane, integrated, and whole. We can come to understand that there is a basic goodness to life, a kind of fundamental perfection at the heart of everything. Traumatic childhoods, messy relationships, bad teachers, suffering and pain, all fit into a fundamental—if inexplicable—pattern.  When we view our family history from this wider perspective, there is nobody to blame, not even bad parents.

There is a remarkable passage in the spiritual classic I Am That, when the sage, Nisaragadatta Maharaj, says in a dialogue with a student: 
For anything to happen, the entire universe must coincide.                               It is wrong to believe that anything in particular can cause an event. 
Every cause is universal.  Your very body would not exist without the entire universe contributing to its creation and survival.

How does this relate to our childhood?  What happened in the past, happened because it had to happen.  When we remove blame and judgment from our life equation, we remove the thought that we—or anybody—are fundamentally flawed. From the ego-transcended view of our essence and the Beloved, everything simply is as it is, free of judgment and fear. This does not mean that we avoid looking at difficult issues that might arise.  It is not an excuse to remain blind.  A superficial understanding of basic goodness can be used to justify denial and passive or negative behavior, and to avoid facing the full impact of painful events.  The intent here is just the opposite.  Accepting the idea of basic goodness allows us to investigate our conditioning free from the sense of wrongdoing and blame.  It provides a neutral context to evaluate our pasts without reinforcing the already tenacious emotional attachment to our personal story.

In the journey inward many discover that a wound, once fully welcomed, becomes a doorway out of the ego and into the heart, a way into the recognition of our intrinsic wholeness.  Viewing our lives from this perspective, nothing is out of place.  We realize that without the wounding we would not have gained our present understanding.  Gratitude replaces the sense of being flawed.  Acceptance replaces judgment and the need for punishment. 

The Wounding

Nobody goes through childhood without getting wounded.  It goes with the curriculum.  We may have been invalidated with statements like: “You should be ashamed of yourself!” or “Stop your silly crying! You have no reason to feel that way!”  Perhaps our trust was subtly violated each time we experienced the incongruity of our parent’s words and their behavior.  Or maybe our hearts were silently broken each time our parents withheld their love from us out of anger or punishment.  In cases of sexual abuse the wounds branch out from the genitals and groin, up to the heart and then out into the vast world of our relationships. 

Like Jesus nailed to the cross, children are often crucified by the unexamined fear of and pain brought on by the adults they love.  The cultivation of intimacy both with oneself and others can require a careful, merciful, unraveling and mending of these wounds. We cannot deny our personal history and expect to find intimacy with another.  When we do deny it, the unresolved traumas from our childhood return to haunt us like ghosts.