AIR LOVER – Completing Incomplete Relationships with Compassionate Communication
We are in Air week in the Sensual Shaman Immersion exploring the lover archetype. In the element of Air, we explore our communication, self-expression and discernment in relationship to our hearts, ourselves and the inner and outer lover.
As we move into the element of Air in with the Lover Archetype, we explore speaking and not speaking, choosing and discerning our words rather than reacting with our words. Do our words articulate our love even when there is pain? Do they work to create more love and openness? Do they open us and others? Do they close us and others down? The six week Immersion series is never easy and it brings up everything that source says we need to look at to support our intentions and return to right relationship with ourselves, our hearts and our communities.
This week as a group we examined the places where we’ve been hiding from the lover archetype in anyway, changing our words or withholding them in order to downplay the full expression of our self, our emotions and the full expression of love. This week we took the opportunity to have transparency and/or completion conversations with any previous or current relationships in our lives that we felt were holding ourselves back from being the fully self-expressed radiant lover we are meant to be. This included dialoging with the inner lover and also examining those places where we have hidden, hardened or poisoned our hearts from ourselves and others. We examined where we held residual vibrations of guilt, shame, fear or regret around past or present relationships and moved forward in our week with completion conversations. Let me give you an example.
This past summer, I was exploring my relationship to divine masculine energy and where and how I needed to heal my inner relationship to this energy in my own body. As I slept one night, I was shown in a very powerful dream all the times I had been in any way intentionally or unintentionally cruel to any male relationship in my life. In a particularly poignant chapter of this dream, I was brought back to a time in high school where I was dating a beautiful artist and gypsy musician named Oliver. Oliver was a year younger than me, I was a senior in high school and he was a junior. Everything about Oliver’s presence intrigued me and set fire to the poetry of my soul. He was someone who found magic in every moment while I at the time was seeking to suppress the magic within me. At the time I struggled with finding the right words to articulate everything I felt in our relationship. I felt so many emotions surge up when I was around him including forbidden passions that he seemed to effortlessly express through his music and art and that I had bottled up and were slowly destroying me. Not having a conduit to channel my bottlenecked emotions, I began to take out my suppressed feelings on Oliver. I did this by withdrawing and retreating from him, avoiding him in the halls, not returning calls and not speaking to him because the emotions stirred too much up in me and were too much to process at any given time. I had no channel for expression of these emotions and no form for the use of conscious loving language. I was in a space of teenage romance but the feelings within me did not know how to express themselves. I had no model for intelligent emotional communication. There was no class that was given in our public education system that said here’s how to have a love-centered conversation with someone during times of emotional turmoil. I eventually pulled away, retreated and disconnected from Oliver in what is considered typical emotional abandonment because I was in fact abandoning my own emotions and tumultuous feelings at the time.
After I was shown this dream, I reached out to another healer and colleague. I told him about the dream and asked for his advice. He said I should reach out to Oliver. I of course knew this, but I was terrified. I waited weeks and then I found Oliver on Facebook. Below is what unfolded in our correspondence. I wrote this email with no expectations other than to simply complete what I had not been able to complete with Oliver and to honor the time we had spent together and the very true genuine love and affection I continue to carry for him in my heart.
Dear Oliver,
I’ve been putting off writing this letter for a few weeks now. A few weeks ago I met you in a dream and was shown very clearly how painfully I treated you in high school. In this dream I saw how much I struggled with communicating clearly and compassionately and my absence of integrity and regard for you feelings in our relationship. I write this to apologize for, in the plainest terms, being cruel. My own confusion and inability to properly articulate and express my emotions for someone I deeply cared for came out in a jumbled mess of outburst and withholds of affection and love. I am truly sorry for any hurt I caused you. While I would not be presumptuous to assume that you even remember these moments or had a similar experience to the one I perceived, I want to apologize for any pain or hurt I caused you by my words, actions and own confusion. Oliver, I cared for you deeply, was in awe of you, intrigued by your gypsy mystery and magical nature and at the same time found it scary, elusive and intimidating. This welled up a huge amount of insecurity in my own system that I misdirected into our communication and relationship. Oliver, I am so sorry. From the depths of my being and deepest subconscious places I am sorry. Thank you for being you, in all your beauty and magic. I honor you. I adore you. I wish you all good things.
With Warmest Thoughts & Much Affection,
Isis
Oliver’s Response:
Isis,
I apologize for taking a few days to respond to your kind, thoughtful note. Thank you for writing to me to express these feelings. Not to freak you out, but I remember our times really well, and while there surely must have been a period of being somewhat confused or bummed, I really can’t recall it well. It’s not what sticks out. It didn’t take too long for me to understand that you were going through some things and needed something different. We were young, crazy and such, and if we had to be held accountable for our past actions instead of present intentions, every human animal would be screwed. From my end, I deeply apologize if I treated you coldly at any point thereafter and left that hanging. Had we been who we are, perhaps we could have done better. I felt like I had to protect myself for a while, but soon I moved on and had good friends, including my guitar, who all helped me navigate my end of the emotional stuff.
The thing most imprinted and perhaps the only one that has ever popped into my head is of standing in the parking lot outside java dave’s, cafe cubana, or whatever it was at the time and kissing for what seemed like hours, just standing there in the parking lot and repeating this in perhaps other public locations. just stuck together, stock still for a very long time. I think about this because I wrote a song about it a long time ago, close to 10 years now. Not sure you came across it or if I sent something out when I made the recordings, but here’s a link: http://oliverorion.com/track/what-was-required The song began from that memory of those times, and that’s a fair trade to me. Thank you for writing! -Oliver
When we speak the words that need to be spoken, we create a place of completion and reshape our reality. We can move forward in our integrity. We can re-pattern the wounded lover, the overwhelmed lover, the distant lover, the scorned lover. When we do this, we free up the poetry of our soul to express itself and invite the inner lover to dance with us once again.
Today I am in a place where instead of retreating from relationships with big emotions, big feelings and big processes, I can witness my impulse to do that and grab my inner scared cub by the scruff of the neck and put her back in front of the big emotions that make her scared. This does not mean that I do not close down. I am opening and closing all the time, only now I am aware of it and my inner big mama grizzly is there to corral her bear cub and say “Stay. Listen. Speak. Hear. Bleed here with your heart open. Do not run from it.”
I am so grateful to Oliver for giving me permission to post the above exchange and share his music. I hope you enjoy!
thesensualshaman 