Loneliness

In the middle of August I did my second hook suspension with my Faerie tribe in California. My intention for this big, powerful ritual was to step fully into my power, to start becoming all that I am destined to be.

Time and time again I’ve found that, when I do a big ritual with the right intention for that moment on my journey, the shifts are vast and powerful. This often feels intense, sometimes overwhelming, because it is affecting changes at the core of my being. This suspension was no exception. (I wrote about the whole Faerie Gathering, including the suspension, in a post called Namaste, Motherfucker.)

Soon after returning from my trip, I did a terrific workshop with Robert Silber. During it heaps of challenging feelings arose, including many I misguidedly believed I’d already dealt with. In fact I discovered that these feelings had simply been buried: rage at being ‘the fat kid’; self-loathing; anger towards women who loved me (but not that way) when I was a teenager; guilt for some bad things I did in my early 20s. During the course of two intense and wonderfully scary days with a brave group of beautiful souls, the energy moved. Clearly part of stepping into my power was to let go of these ghosts and relics from my past. To put it another way: for my light to truly shine, any crust around me has to fall away.

A few weeks later I did an ancestral healing session with Avi Esther – another amazing experience in which I plunged into the depths of my being to shift energy that had solidified many years before. This was around my childhood and even earlier – connecting me for the first time to the pain and grief that my ancestral line carries.

After the session Avi gave me homework – to speak my forgiveness and love for my mother 3 times a day for a month. After a few days of doing this I found a massive bank of resistance coming up; after a week I simply ‘forgot’ and stopped doing it.

Not long after that I did 6 days of professional training with the amazing Barbara Carrellas – yet more powerful, life-changing, high-energy intensity. The days were blissful and I learnt loads about myself, my practice and the ways I relate to others. At the same time more deep stuff was being shaken loose. The process was like repeated soulquakes fracturing the bedrock of ‘who I think I am’ – each one making cracks in the illusion of solidity, allowing more and more to bubble up from beneath.

Next on this roster of enormous experiences was two days training with Joseph Kramer, part of a week of events I produced and hosted for the great man through Sacred Pleasures. I love Joseph’s approach to ‘learning sex’, which is very different from others I’ve studied with. Joe’s emphasis is on practice – the regular repetition of specific activities in our sexual life. There are two reasons for doing this: one, to learn our pleasure somatically and to discover how our own sexual energy moves; and two, to develop a embodied sexual practice – one that works with the body rather than a need to connect with someone else or the use of external stimuli like porn.

I had no idea that this last workshop would be the most profoundly triggering, challenging and important for me. I was expecting it to be fun! But no, it touched something really deep in me, opening up an awareness of something profound that’s missing in my life right now.

Right around the time that I was beginning to piece this all together, two things happened to help me become clearer on what I was getting in touch with. First I got an email from a friend saying that she often holds herself back from stepping up because of a deeply held belief that ‘it’s lonely at the top’. And second I reconnected with ex-lover P____, and during our beautiful intimate time together she acknowledged that her desire to find someone to share her life with came from a place of being lonely.

Pennies dropped! CHINK! CHINK! Suddenly it was obvious why I’d been feeling less and less joyful over the past few weeks, and why this sense of being alone was creeping in at the corners of my consciousness.

By carrying the thru-line of my strong intention to ‘step up’ through these powerful workshops, I gained access to something deep inside me: loneliness. This is not everyday loneliness. It’s something much deeper, a profound feeling of being all alone at the core of my being. The crust of ‘who I think I am’ has been hiding this, but it was built on a faultline and it was ready to crack. And now that I’ve made contact with these deeper feelings, I understand that this loneliness is something that’s always been there.

This feeling underlies many of my desires and drives many of my actions. Glimpsing this core wound has already opened up many revelations. It’s revealed the reason I so often seek solace in a lover or partner. It’s highlighted why I get attached to lovers so easily, and why I find it devastating when they leave, even after a short time together. And it’s helped me to see why I find it so hard to break up with someone, even when the relationship isn’t serving either of us.

This core feeling is the movement of the figure in the cave; the everyday loneliness is the shadow he casts. It is only now that I can see where this shadow of loneliness comes from that I can start addressing it.

So here I am – away from The Pot for a week, staying with my dear friend and soul-sister Katie Sarra in her country cottage in Devon. And it’s just what I need – space for myself and time to think. (Weirdly, I often feel less alone when I have more time to myself.)

And I’m about to do something drastic. Inspired by Kramer’s approach to learning sexuality, and also by Dossie Easton‘s story of choosing celibacy for a few months in her late 20s (in The Ethical Slut), I’ve decided to dedicate the last two months of 2011 to myself. During this time I will not connect sexually with anyone else (except clients); instead I will focus on developing an embodied solo sexual practice. As much as possible I’ll do this without external stimuli – in particular avoiding my imagination, my version of pornography.

I do not enter into this choice lightly. My intention is to plumb the depths of this loneliness, to discover what it is and what it means. I don’t want to step into any more loving relationships without this awareness, because I know that doing so will result in me repeating the same cycles and patterns again and again. I need to go deeper into myself before I begin connecting with others again.

Right now this new journey feels exciting, scary and important. I’ve touched something profound, discovered new layers of my experience of being human. And now is the right time to begin investigating this deep sadness – with love, honour and respect for its connection with the very depths of ‘who I think I am’.