Many Years Ago, I Entered a Lovers Meeting That Changed the Direction of My Life
The story of how I learnt to know my divinity
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Many years ago, I entered a lovers meeting that changed the direction of my life.
It was not quincidental that this meeting happened, in any way. I had been praying to Existence for a long time for somebody to come along and give me a helping hand. My life was falling apart. I had just left my partner for ten years. I had lost my work. I had changed my home. I had got sick. And I knew that my time had come for everything to change.
And into my life came a man. He was roughly built, this man. Hair like a lion. Intense energy. A lust for all that is good in life: food, sex, motorbikes, beer, trancelike music, women. We had already known each other for a little while, but I had felt apprehensive about him. He felt a bit… too much. And then, suddenly one day, my attitude changed. I felt curious.
And so, we became lovers.
A Divine Invitation
My new lover was a deeply spiritual man. He was nothing like the men I´d met before, neither in look nor in behaviour. He felt like… a man. Rather than the boys that I were used to see around me. At the time I thought he felt different because he was a bit older than me, and because he had spent much of his life abroad. But today I know that this is not why my lover felt to be a man. What I perceived to be his manhood, was my recognition of his connection to divinity.
My lover had invested most of his adult life in dissolving the lies he had felt he had been taught. He aimed to live his life unbounded by unconscious norms and collective expectations. He had devoted his life in service to Spirit. And as an extension of this devotion, he yearned to explore Spirit in the meeting with a woman.
George Frederic Watts - She Shall be Called Woman. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Oh my, what an invitation. Here was I, dissatisfied with my life to the verge of wanting to die, and there came this handsome man who was looking for someone to explore his divinity with. Who was interested in knowing the ME who I was at my core, a ME who existed before all the madness I had trained myself in taking on. Yes, I was on board.
Armour
We had only been seeing each other for a short time, when I started becoming aware of that the essence whom my lover seemed to enjoy in me, was not really the ME who I was used to thinking of as myself. It was as he saw in me a deeper being, a piece of the universal feminine, a partly divine creature. A goddess. She was me. And yet I was not always her.
Some days I could feel flattered by him seeing me like that. Then, at other days, I would feel annoyed. Couldn’t he just love me as I was?
I could feel myself vacillating between different modes of myself in his company. Sometimes I felt soft, sweet, true. Other times, it was as I put an armour around the sweetness that I felt to be myself. I took on a toughness that was not me. In this tough mode, I caught myself pretending; pretending to be smart, to be luscious, to be joyful, to be kind. It was like I was making everything I did, into a game. A game that prevented both myself and my lover to get to know the one I truly was.
Why did I put this armour on? Why did I play pretence like that?
“Lover”, I pleaded him when we were together, “take my armour away. This armour makes me feel to be a liar, a liar both to you and to myself. A liar cannot love, she can only make pretence. I hate watching myself doing life like that.”
I raged at myself. I longed to escape my prison of pretence. All I yearned for was to be true with both myself and with my world. But my frustration only served to strengthen my armour, making it higher and thicker and impenetrable. “Just relax, and the toughness will go”, my lover said. “There is no need to defend yourself with me. Take your charge off the armour, and explore the woman hiding beneath your armouring instead.”
“But it's hard!” I explained to him. “This divine essence of mine which you tell me is my womanhood, she feels so delicate, so vulnerable. If I were to put a picture on her, she feels like a nearly invisible string within. As Im attempting to align myself with this thin piece of string, its like balancing on a tight rope. And I don’t have much experience. Most of the time, I'm just falling off. And sometimes, this rope is so refined that I cannot find it to balance on at all!”
I was frustrated. I felt at loss to understand. I dreaded that I would never be able to recognise my divine essence, and that my lover would leave me, and that I would be left forever with this unsatisfying feeling of NEARLY coming to know myself. I could see my life unfolding in full blown misery in front of me.
“Right now, your connection with your divine essence may feel thin”, my lover said, “but its just a matter of trust. Being true to yourself isn’t close to how impossible you are trying to make it”. He didn’t want to hear my excuses.
“I'm just attempting to explain to you why I have been putting on an armour all my life”, I mumbled.
“Yeah yeah”, he replied, but he had stopped listening to me. I didn’t really understand. I didn’t know whom of us who were right, him or me. Or maybe both of us were right, or wrong, in our way.
Was I just afraid to step into my divinity, because I was yet to fully recognise it as myself? Was I afraid of my own womanhood?
And who was she really, this divine essence of myself?
My God Within
I could not think of anyone who had shown interest in my divine nature before. Myself least of all. But now, my curiosity was awakened. Through our lovers meeting, I began to ponder about the more subtle flavours of myself. Who was I, beyond the one I had thought to be myself?
Heavenly and Earthly Love (1850) by Ary Scheffer. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
I started to turn my attention within to investigate my potential womanhood on a daily basis. I studied corners of myself that I had never consciously explored before. And one day, as my gaze lit up my inner worlds, someone deep inside of me responded.
Hello, she said. I've been waiting on you.
What shall I call this one within? I'm calling her My God Within. She has many names though. I've heard her by the name of Spirit. Or by Essential Self, Our Divine Nature, The Mother. Or simply: God. (Although someone tends to think that God exists outside of us. That's why I like to call her My God Within.)
What an irony that I had gone for more than 30 years, and never inquired about My God Within before. When she was all I yearned to live for! And here she was, patiently waiting for me to come looking for her.
The bridge between the worlds
As I met My God Within, an entirely new portal opened up within me. For the first time in many years, I saw my fulfilled life. There was only one problem though. My God Within seemed to be a little shy. She was not immediately keen on being called forward. I would nearly say… that she seemed to refuse to be touched upon.
In sex, I started feeling her deep inside of me, and I wanted my lover to reach in and meet her where she was. But she was repeatedly hiding herself just out of distance from where he could go. It was as My God Within always was an inch away from where anybody, myself included, could fathom her.
I started dreaming of the day that my lover would find his way to walk that extra inch inside of me. I pictured that as he did, he would tear my armour open, so that My God Within could expand and embrace all that was me, once and for all. And that I from that moment, would always dance with my world; as Divinity embodied.
But the months went by, and the inch was still there. The inch felt like a broken bridge over the void between two worlds: my three-dimensional reality and the vastness of the spiritual Universe. My God Within seemed to be unwilling to enter physical reality. And so, I started pondering if maybe she – or me - was not supposed to cross that bridge at all. Maybe she would stay outside of physical reach, forever.
If that was true, how could I then come to embody her?
Intimacy
I had so many dreams during this period of my life. At one point, at the end of the summer, I went camping with my bicycle in the woods. As the evening came, I put my tent up at the banks of a little lake in the middle of the woods. I feel deeply asleep.
As I woke, the sun was rising. I had left my tent open, and as I stayed where I lay, I could look out and see the lake outside. The sky was layered in multiple shades of pink. And the lake was filled by swans, hundreds of them. They were enormous swans, as if they were from the age of dinosaurs. Dinosaur Swans. The sight of them was sheer beauty. And the woods were so peaceful. Just the swans, the lake and the vast pink sky. I felt blessed by Grace.
I fell asleep, and awoke again. It was a dream. And yet, it felt so true.
As I took down my tent, got back on my bike and continued through the woods, I almost got myself a sunstroke. The sun that day was strong, and as I courageously strayed away from the path, I ended up messing around in the woods for hours, unable to find back to the beaten track. Finally I lifted both my bike and my luggage over a slope, so that I could get myself to another little lake - and find shade from the heating sun.
Edvard Munch - Madonna (1894-1895). Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
I allowed myself to drop down on the bare ground as I arrived in a little clearing next to the lake. I was exhausted, but not more so than that I could recognize how beautiful everything was. I was lying under this huge grandfather tree, there was a slight comforting breeze and water lilies on the lake. Not a single human being in sight. I fell asleep.
When I awoke a bit later, I was laying on my stomach, my nose buried in the ground. I smelled soil. And in that short moment between wake and sleep, there was a deep sense in me of intimacy. Intimacy with myself, with the forest, with the earth.
In this moment, My God Within was the closest to me as I've ever felt her. And she was different. She was not sweet. Neither especially delicate. Where I layed at the ground under the grandfather tree; she felt tenacious, dark, demanding.
I tried to save my feeling of tenacious intimacy for later, but within minutes the feeling evaporated. A week later, my experience was just a memory. I pondered on the irony: how insistently I was yearning for my God Within. And yet, as I forgot to look, how close she was. In the silence of the woods, as I was too tired to chase her, she appeared to me – most willingly.
The birth of ME
There are few words that can describe the birth of our God Within. And maybe words are not even supposed to grasp this birth in its entirety. An expression of our physical reality, language does not always expand to grasp the vastness of the spiritual worlds. It's as language too - in its attempt to make structures that allows our mind to understand – is also lost in crossing the bridge to the unfathomable.
Really, the only way I know to touch our God Within, is not to think or talk about her. Our God Within can only be FELT. Intimately. Courageously. Some of us discover her on our own, and are confident enough to trust her subtle feeling as something true and deep. Others, like me, need a guide to initiate us into the mysteries of our divinity.
And at the time - as I was cycling through the woods, or making love with my lover, or walking to work and realising that the world was much less solid than I originally had assumed - I could not really explain what was happening to me.
All I knew, was that I was experiencing something new. I felt as a seed that had just experienced the first touch of sunlight in the spring, and were preparing myself; to sprout.
…To be continued.
