
Being in love with someone can be very tricky territory. Things are truly simple and easy when one holds the heart space. But with such a swirl of good feelings and frequent interaction with someone, it’s very easy to fall asleep into an ego dream of love and have zero awareness of having fallen from the heart to the head. After all, when newly in love, the head has such beautiful, yummy, and fresh memories to play with to make us feel as though we are in our heart when we contemplate these experiences from our head. Sometimes we just keep dreaming the happy dream without realizing it …until we bump up against something that rubs us the wrong way or hurts. At which point, let’s hope to God we have the presence of mind to realize that the reason we got hurt is because, somewhere along the way, we lost track of how to dance in the now with ourself and our partner.
One such toe-stubbing incident happened for me, and gratefully turned out to be rich with lessons. I had recently found a cozy intimacy of being in love with a man with whom I shared earnest spiritual passions. Ours was a case of long distance relationship, so all communications went through the phone at the time. On this particular day, we texted warm hellos as my day got started. He then tried video calling but didn’t get through as I was on a call. When my call was done, I video-called him back even though what I really needed to do next was walk my dog. I had a schedule to keep that day to make sure I had time to prepare for a class I was teaching in the evening. I got a “declined” message for my video call attempt. Our timing wasn’t jiving. So I texted that I was going to walk the dog, and had things going on but would be happy to connect with him. And let’s communicate about timing, if he’s around for that.
He wrote back and we agreed I’d ping him when I got back in a half hour or so from walking the dog. So, I got back. I pinged him. He wrote me back, “Give me 5 min.”
I made good use of those five minutes to set myself up in a private space, comfortably propped up with a snack and some water handy. I had a really nice cuddly feeling inside for him, and I felt good about making a space for us to be together in the budget of my day.
He seemed to running a few minutes late, which I thought to myself could be par for the course considering that he typically had to hunt around for a spot to get enough reception for a video call. I picked up my latest spiritual read while I waited for him. I got lost in a good passage for a while. Then I noticed that actually twenty minutes had passed from when he’d said five minutes. So I texted to find out what’s going on... “Is it still a good time? Or better sometime later?” I wrote.
Another few minutes later, I heard back from him, “Hehe sorry. Am on call with my frnds, on spirituality” Crazy face icon. “You plz go ahead” Prayer hands.
What? This did not land well with me. I know unexpected things come up that may need to be handled on the spot, and these can change logistics. But this? This was a choice. And he didn’t seem to care or notice that he had basically stood me up. It sure looked to me like he had blatantly disrespected my time and my feelings and just didn’t care that much about it. That’s just how the material evidence added up in my mind. And as good as I was feeling toward him and as preciously as I was treating those feelings and him that day, making time, and communicating that I was busy but was making time… this sense of being carelessly disrespected, really hurt.
Now, to be clear, it’s no big deal to me that something else came up other than having a video call with me at that moment. I’m easy-going. I sincerely want everyone to feel their own flow, and I don’t take changes in flow personally. But don’t make an appointment with me to share my time and then decide to do something else instead and just leave me hanging without telling me. That’s rude and disrespectful. And I wanted an explanation from him of how it happened because it would be nice to know if it was somehow an accident and not actually as careless and rude as it most certainly looked.
So I wrote back, “I will go ahead. But what happened to your five minute idea… did you lose track of time? I was sitting waiting.”
He wrote back, “Am so sorry” with a long string of prayer hands.
Still no explanation of how or why it happened.
So I was stuck with filling in the gaps on something I didn’t understand but that appeared to me like a lack of emotional interest, in spite of the intimacy we had shared up ‘til then.
I did not respond. Instead, I walked upstairs to my office to do my next thing, leaving my phone behind in the other room. It felt balancing to remove myself, and I didn’t have anything else clear to say at the moment. I was angry. I felt disrespected. And it hurt to be treated this way by someone I trusted to share intimacy with.
It was hard to concentrate on work in my office because I was quite emotional from the hurt; there was a heat of anger in my gut. But what I was really angry at was the fact that here I was again in a situation like I had let myself be in too many times before… where I had risked to have feelings for someone who ultimately did not reciprocate. I felt like: How the frigg did I get here again? Everything felt clear and balanced and shared leading up to this point.
I had, in my past, put a lot of stubborn energy into trying to make loving relationships out of unrequited situations. I hurt myself a lot doing that. It took me a long time to wake up to the fact that I did this because, subconsciously, I believed turning an unreciprocated situation into a beautiful love relationship, was the only way I could prove my self-worth. People who loved me easily didn’t count in my book because their love was cheap. That’s seriously the way I saw it down deep, and I went for a long painful ride acting that out.
But eventually, I recognized how wrong all that was, and I let it go. I woke up to the fact that my real problem was that I was not reciprocating God’s Love within myself. I was not showing up for the real love relationship… the one waiting for me within my own heart chakra, which was the true source of self-worth. So I started showing up for that within myself, and things changed for me. I no longer waited or wanted for a prince so I could feel like a princess in love. I was in love inside myself, and I didn’t need or want anyone else. The only reason this relationship arose with this guy, was because it felt right from following my heart, and feeling his. So, to suddenly land inside my old unrequited-love-relationship paradigm with this guy, was a nasty surprise, and I felt really angry about it.
A couple hours passed and I figured that him having had no response to his apology probably left him feeling some degree of concern. I imagined he’d probably have texted some additional attempts at repair, and here I still wasn’t responding. I softened and wanted to release my grievance and repair the communication between us. I went downstairs to my phone, only to find that, in fact, there were no additional messages from him. I spun out again in feelings of unrequited emotional investment, laying quietly tearfully on my bed.
Then somehow, being so lost at sea, awakened my observer perspective. I looked around at what I was thinking and feeling these last few hours and assessed myself. I was like, WOW, I am really lost. This is a total ego dream. How ‘bout I feel my heart.
So inside my feeling sense, I descended into the center of my chest and focused only there. All else was excluded into silence. Gratefully, it only took about ten seconds for my focus to genuinely land in my heart and for my heart energy to ignite. In years past, it would at times take days if I was even able to do it successfully. But discipline and hard-won wisdom pay off eventually.
When I felt love energy in my heart, the dream of hurt and anger that I was in, parted like the Red Sea. Literally. The clouds and swirls of emotion receded like waves crashing in reverse. The energy of my heart space was a warm, gentle sunshine that brought emotional peace and mental clarity wherever its presence touched. I no longer felt upset. I no longer saw myself inside any relationship drama of any kind. It vanished. And inside the sunshine of peace and clarity that had dawned within me, I suddenly knew that the nature of my friend’s behavior was that of an innocent fumble. I could feel his energy, steady in its warm attitude toward me. I basked in and marveled at the complete transformation of my world from the light of heart energy.
The only thing that wasn’t totally cleared up was the answer to my original question to him: so what did happen? How did that mistake come down? In the lightness I was feeling, I still felt right about asking him for that answer. Because why shouldn’t such simple clarity be easily requested and offered among friends? That’s how bumps in the road get resolved. That’s how communication grows. And that’s how people get to know each other better. By asking questions when things don’t add up, instead of making assumptions or leaving things unresolved. So I knew to myself that I would ask that question again when he and I spoke next, even though all the emotional drama that had surrounded it for me had proved false.
In the hours of experience digestion that followed, I found myself flipping back and forth between two ways of “thinking.” One was feeling my heart and letting that energy radiate and permeate through my whole mind, and seeing and feeling whatever I would see and feel in that way. The other was, I would mull something over with my imagination, assisted by memory, and see how I felt about it. Fresh from the parting of the Red Sea in my mind, my senses were heightened to how thought spreads directionally into feeling. I could feel that when I prioritized feeling my heart center, my internal thought experience started with listening inside my heart, and then from my heart grew an awareness in my sphere of feeling, and then that grew into understanding. Whereas when I ruminated and wondered on something in my inner vision in the space behind my eyes, the sensations of reality that grew in my feeling would be activated from my head… the reverse of when I prioritized feeling my heart. Just in managing my mind while digesting my experience, I switched thinking modes back and forth several times, and the reversal of direction in my feeling sense from one way of thinking to the other, was pronounced and pretty trippy.
I was grateful for this experience because it clarified a question I had early on in the intimate developments with my friend. This was my first foray into any kind of intimate relationship exploration since I had committed to my spiritual heart. I was well aware that all my relationship “skills” were ways I had learned to do relationship before I knew the heart space. I had noticed right away that there were times that I thought much about my friend and whatever our recent sharing together was, and I could feel very intense energy while gazing or ruminating on these things in my mind. This energy felt much like the energy I had felt in the moment with him. And I had wondered to myself when this first came up: Is this okay? In other words, I’m committed to walking in the now in obedience to the beautiful and joy-inspiring voice of my heart. And of course, it’s natural also to ponder experiences to digest them. But what am I doing now? Am I using my mind in a way that is in alignment with my goal to walk in devotion to the love in my heart chakra? Or am I getting side-tracked and dazzled by an effect that has come from this walk?
Well, this experience helped me recognize a clear distinction about when I’m on track and when I’m off track. I became perfectly clear that when the direction of radiation in my feeling sense is from the center of the heart out to the rest of my mind, I’m on track. Whenever that gets reversed, I’m off track. Simple …as long as I stay awake to feeling my mind energetically.
The other beautiful gift that came out of this experience for me, is that I was really impressed with how clear and accurate the vision given to me by my heart space was. And likewise impressed by how crazy my headspace was… like a closed-loop system of self-hypnosis that could just spin itself off wherever, and believe itself to be right. But it made up so much shyte, and it was so wrong.
The next morning, I got with my friend, and we took some time to talk things over. Indeed it was an innocent fumble of getting caught up in the conversation with his friends and forgetting about our appointment. And he apologized again. And then I shared with him my journey into craziness and my home coming into the heart. And he shared that he had asked himself, What’s going on with her? And realized to himself: Ah, she is in her head. And she is feeling something. I will let her be and she will find her way back to her heart again. I appreciated that that was ultimately how he took it in the thick of things.
We came to share a beautiful heart space again that morning, the issues of misunderstanding fully resolved. And I felt a deep appreciation for the way of the heart. Because I knew how real my head trip of hurt had felt to me. And I’ve seen other people treat each other the way I would’ve treated him just trying to deal with and resolve the pain of my own head space, and the way he would’ve treated me back from feeling controlled and unfairly accused by what came up for me and how I felt I had to deal with it. But when both parties understand the sunshine within that clarifies and brings peace and light to all things, it’s a very different story to work something out that comes up… a much saner and more civil and beautiful story.
This author is just starting to deepen her understanding of how to relate in an intimate relationship from the heart-space instead of from the old-habit perspective of her ego-structure. She recognized a lot through this experience. And there is more for her yet to see. She felt good about her friend since early in the day of this story; but in fact she was already off balance without realizing it. The first indication in the story of her being off balance is when she missed his video call and called him right back even though talking to him right then would be out of rhythm with her own flow. Right there is a hint of a struggle going on in her awareness. The good feelings stimulated in her feeling sense around thoughts of him, are competing with her awareness of her own flow of right... Login as member to read the whole explication