First of all this applies to women just as much as men.
But over 75% of the breathers I work with are women. I am privileged to share such special moments with the feminine as we do during and after a breath session. Our conversations and explorations have been a great teaching for me.
What I posit here may not be easy to read or digest. I am called to warn you, that once you know certain things there is little you can do to rewind in search of blissful ignorance again!
An alternative may be to deny what I am about to share. But before I start, let me climb off any perceived pedestal, and say from the outright that I have spent the major part of my life unconsciously hurting women. I was so driven in my past to unite with the feminine – actually the mother I could never quite possess – that in my blindness I even managed to convince myself that I was a gift to girls. I would collect the amount of orgasms I ‘gave’ them like trophies, especially with women that had never had the pleasure.
I had no idea that the female orgasm had little to do with my skills…
and much more to do with the ability of a woman to know herself and trust herself. So techniques aside, being driven by an unconscious need exposed, I realized how little I had to offer the feminine at all as a realized man.
I entered a period of celibacy for a year upon advice from a friend. I had been celibate before by ‘force majeur’, but this was a conscious choice which opened me to a new realm of understanding. When a woman was no longer the object of my desire, she would come much closer to me. As soon as I said I was a celibate I could see her relax. She felt safe, and I felt more intimacy.
I didn’t grow up with a sister and had always held the feminine as something remote, mysterious and very, very tempting. Had I female siblings my view may have been more worldly, but I grew up in boarding schools for boys only, my understanding of sexuality and its mysteries even more thwarted. My younger years were spent in blind pursuit of female company. I would fall in love with anyone who would have me. I thought I was a generous lover, in service of their pleasure, and on a superficial level this may have been true.
What I didn’t know was how much damage I was doing.
My adolescence was accompanied by the bells of sexual ‘freedom’, the break-out from a European post-war mentality. No longer could we be constrained by convention, or controlled by an authority wielded by people so devoid of feeling. Making love and not war was a ticket to liberation, and we celebrated our newfound possibility with reckless joy and innocence.
Little did we understand that our damaged little beings could not heal just by making love and not war. We needed guidance that wasn’t there. We chose the opposite of what we had been taught, and had no concept of cause and effect.
A friend once said ‘Beware, lest what you boast of in the first half of your life becomes what you need to keep secret in the last’. Mid-life gives us a chance to re-evaluate our past, to look at the construct we have made to cope with our pain, and get along in an unfriendly world. That it is a crisis for many is understandable, as one can be faced with a long list of transgressions that weigh heavy on the soul! But it’s also an opportunity, it offers the chance to come clean, set off on a new a path of atonement, seek to make amends.
I was shocked when my partner of 6 years refused my advances.
She called me a brute! Offended, I found reasons not to believe her. I wasn’t rough, or violent. I was caring and gentle. But I was also a brute. For to truly be a man, my task is to draw a woman back to her truth. If it is the short skirt or the sexy body that draws me and I fall into the honey trap, I am not honoring her but taking advantage instead.
It takes strength to resist, as a woman is taught she needs to catch her man in any number of ways. These days a girl grows up thinking she has to be a certain way, and her true beauty becomes disguised by her need to feel worthy. Our program is that we don’t belong so we find ways to fit in, stand out, or anything in between.
As we grow up we leave our true origin archived away so deeply that we forget who we really are. We look in the mirror every day without really seeing.
A student of mine told me a short while ago that she looked into the mirror every day for a month and said “I love you.” I liked the idea so I tried it. As I repeated it, I saw the unworthiness from the outside. Sometimes the words wouldn’t come easily. I would look away, then look back and see the pain flash across my face.
Next time you check yourself in the mirror, try an “I love you’ or two. See how it feels. What if the measure of difficulty you experience is the distance you need to travel to your own authenticity?
Soon I am to be married to a woman that looks at me, and is not attracted by anything other than who I am. I am getting to be an elder now, not as fine of form as I used to be. I know my glitches! But she sees me beautiful, because I don’t play the games I used to. She won’t stand for less, and neither will I. Our task is not to settle for the superficial lest we lose s sight of a whole new realm that lies underneath.
Next time you sense you are using artifice to attract someone in your life, take a few breaths. Settle into stillness and calm, and know that the only way to love deeply is to reveal who you are – under the cute clothing or the colors you have chosen for the day.
And next time you feel someone approach you with a sexual agenda, stand up for yourself and your gender. What you really deserve is that person’s naked authenticity, and if you are going to be a man or woman to the fullest you have every right to request nothing less.
By Anthony Abbaggnano
