Are you seen? Do you see?

In the film, Avatar, instead of saying “I love you,” the Navi say “I see you.” The Navi experience and cherish all of life as connected and interwoven, so the statement “I see you,” indicates an intimacy that recognizes and cherishes the individual beyond the collective connection.

Today, I was reading an interview with Barbara Taylor Brown, an Episcopal priest and successful writer on seeing the spiritual in everyday things.  She comments on the meeting of another, a stranger, “The moment I turn that person into a character in my own story, the encounter is over.”

Real intimacy is about being seen in your individuality and your differences and seeing the individuality and differences of the other and it’s about being one of the characters in a story written by the “being of the relationship.”

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Much of learning about and developing a capacity for intimacy is becoming awake to the failures and absences of intimacy. Shining the light into the shadows and finding the courage to find oneself hiding in the shadows as both a victim and a perpetrator.


I want to give you a framework of four ways of not being seen and what it means to be a character in somebody else’s story or script. Sadly, this often occurs in our childhoods, leaving wounds that distort our intimate adult relationships.

You are not seen except as a character in another's story when you are
idolized
demonized
utilized
marginalized

As a character in the stories of your naive and often well-intentioned parents :

You are the divine child with amazing talents that reflects light on the others sense of self. You are the dark, wild child that needs to be controlled and suppressed in order to living up to the their need for the good child.
You are the dutiful child prematurely burdened with taking on the parent’s tasks, often caring for the parent.
You are the forgotten and lost child living on the margins of the parent’s life rarely seen, understood or held.


Each of us has experienced degrees and mixtures of all four of these. It is so liberating to reflect on these experiences and the self-defining feelings that resulted and to speak the truth of the failures of intimacy you have known, even living through now.

So often we miss out on intimacy because we idolize, demonize, utilize or marginalize our partners or let them see us in one or more of these gestures. I speak with the authority that comes from living, not from theory.  I played the idol, the demon, the servant, the excluded in my childhood and my key intimate relationships and I have done this to my partners - until I realized it - till I saw the framework.

The framework names the failures and in knowing their names we find the possibility of healing, of liberating and of empowering our relationships.  With consciousness, relationships become creative and rewarding for all concerned and engaged.

Now I take the responsibility to celebrate and honor instead of idolize, respect differences and set boundaries instead of demonize, express needs and make requests with gratitude and a sense for the other’s needs instead of utilize, and to pay attention to, include and appreciate deeply the presence of the other instead of marginalize and neglect.

And I know when I am not seen, when I am just a character in another’s story. I can forgive this, work with it, challenge it, end it.   I speak up with compassion and calm courage about my feelings.

You can, too.

I had a great therapist years ago that said “Know it. Catch it. Change it.” It’s true.

Imaging and Creating Intimacy -The Fundamental Schooling in Being in Conscious Relationship is full of the “Know it.” epiphanies. You will leave the course knowing a lot about the twists and turns of intimacy. Then you will need to start catching them and changing them. You can do it.

Intimacy is an art and a science and requires a living creative tension - it is not a magical romance, a gift from the gods to be idolized, then demonized, diminished to merely conviently useful, or pushed to the edges of your life. Intimacy requires energy, focus, imagination, conservation and innovation.

Join the course and bring a more fulfilling, more responsible intimacy to all your relationships. Register here for the webinar.

Though I have taken the intimacy. program before--twice, I think:  once solo

and once with my husband--I am considering registering again.

Though I know the content each time is similar, you always have

something new to think about and work through or to see through

different eyes.  All of my relationships, including my relationship to myself,

benefited from taking a deep inner look at  relationship history

 and how past experience colors the way

we relate in the present--particularly in deeply intimate relationships.

This brought about a beginning point for greater trust, and therefore,

greater capacity for intimacy that is free of demands and 

one-sided expectations.  Marilyn Dixon, Baltimore, Maryland

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I want to clarify some questions about the partnering aspect of the course.  I assign conversation partners among the participants. I pair you up with another participant. You do not need to share the course with your existing intimate partner, best friend or sibling.  I am sorry this wasn’t clear. 

Inner Whitsun

Hello dear Friend,

49 days after Easter and the Resurrection is a day known as either Pentecost or Whitsun. This day celebrates or acknowledges a mysterious event: the gift of the Holy Spirit.

Here is what happened about two thousand years ago. All those who had been with the resurrected Christ in the 40 days before the Ascension had gathered together. These included the Twelve Apostles and maybe 144 others. The Holy Mother or Virgin Sophia enters the gathering and everyone forms a circle around her. A mighty wind rises and a dove appears bringing a new force of spiritual energy. This dove is the way we experience the Holy Spirit and have come to recognize as a symbol of peace and new beginnings. This sacred energy radiates into the Virgin Sophia and out to the Apostles causing tongues of fire to appear on their foreheads at the place known as the Third Eye. Following this event those present found the Apostles could speak to and hear each one of them in the language of their birth.

What is the meaning of this event for the human soul and the evolution of consciousness and self-awareness? Why does it occur at this time of year? Why should anyone, not Christian, be interested in this celebration? And how can we celebrate Whitsun in a modern and meaningful way that cultivates a desirable experience in our souls?

I have such a feeling for this holy day. I love it like I love the flowers of late Spring. The joyful love of and for all souls blooms irrepressibly within our being.

If Easter is about redemption and resurrection, Whitsun is about universal and intimate love. When you know through loving another soul intimately enough to speak the language of their being or are the object of such a love, you know the gift of the Holy Spirit. This speaking of the native language has nothing to do with the geographical place of birth. It is the language of the self, of the native essence, of the truth of the individuality.


Whitsun reminds us to know one another intimately. I mean deeply, compassionately, unconditionally, completely, unselfishly. The flame of Whitsun is the energy of the Third Eye chakra, the two petalled lotus seeing wisely and without prejudice all that lives in another’s soul.

Pentecost in the Hebrew tradition was a feast of the first harvest. What can you harvest from your Inner Year practices? We began with the new seeds of selfhood of Inner Nativity and Inner Epiphany. We cultivated the soil of our soul through Inner Lent finding new freedom. We brought new life to our soul through Inner Easter. Now with Inner Whitsun we begin to harvest the fruit of Inner Living, new love.

What are the practices of Inner Whitsun? How do we grow wise in knowing/loving the other?

Read a great biography or autobiography. Study another’s life. Do a google search on an individual, read a number of posts, look at the images - not out of curiosity, but out of willed love or devotion. Invite a friend or several to do the same. Get together and share your perceptions, perceptions arising out of reverence for the individual.

Write a poem about a friend. Could you describe the true nature of your friend in 13 lines or 13 stanzas? Twelve lines or stanzas each presenting a perspective of your friend and the thirteenth being a metaphor for the place where all twelve perspectives meet. Don’t write this poem from your intellect, write it from your heart — your heart’s wisdom. Like the Virgin Sophia, the heart is both wise and innocent at the same time.

Have a love feast. I do this at the end of the biography workshops I lead. I have a love seat that each participant sits in silence, with arms and legs uncrossed. All the other participants take turns speaking of their admiration, respect, and love for the person in the love seat. So invite a few of your friends over and give them each and yourself a chance to sit in the Love Seat and receive the language of love that arises out of their friends wise heart.

Pick a place on the planet and love it. Yes, choose a different culture/language and bring love to it. Pick your place and do a search online or at the library. I suggest you just work with images as text tends to drive us from our heart into our head. God bless Google and Wikipedia for giving us quick access to the strange, the different, the other. Another possibility, much more difficult, is to lovingly speak and lovingly hear the language of an opposing political perspective. Somehow I feel that both Hillary and Barack would love to be actively loving each other rather than competing and attacking. What would at Whitsun election look like in the USA or any other country?

Practice ho’oponopono. Have you heard about ho’oponopono? This is very much a “Whitsun deed.” that works with the language of the shadow. Here is a link to a brief description of the work http://www.reuniting.info/wisdom_hooponopono_buddy_system. Just doing this practice for five minutes feels good (good as in goodness, not good as merely a pleasant feeling).


The next festival I will be writing about is St Johnstide which falls on June 24th and is connected to the Summer Solstice.

If you just read these thoughts on Whitsun you will be opening up to a very sacred part of your being. Having a sense of the cycle of the Natural Year and its impact on the Inner Year is a great step in self-awareness and personal development. Do what you feel capable of doing and love yourself.

Feel the power of the Third Eye, not just to see, but to love.