Clarity contractions

This is a long post, but it is hard to overstate the importance to me of the ideas it tries to express. I will be fascinated to come back to it in a few months and see what I've learned. Where I was right and where I was so, so wrong. Bring it on.

Like most people in the modern secular West, the conceptual paradigm in which I was raised was one in which reality consisted, approximately, of:

• me, a physical entity (albeit one endowed with a mysterious consciousness) whose boundaries were transcribed by the visible edges of her physical body; and 
• everything and everyone else, a series of persons and objects separate from me and from one another, out there in the world. Mostly inanimate. 

I don’t know how I reconciled this with the felt experience I had of belonging in some numinous way to the land and the things living on it, being part of a greater whole, exchanging tangible physical energy with a range of things visible and invisible, and so on. I suppose I just didn’t think about it. 

Well, this year I’ve thought about it heaps, and it’s changing a lot of things for me. I feel like I’ve come to see what most of humankind, for most of our history, has always known – that any ontological paradigm that instantiates a person as an isolated self-contained entity moving through a world comprising largely inanimate matter makes a profound mistake about what kinds of thing exist and the relationships between them. 

Even the way I think and speak about the relationships between things has often assumed an illusory cohesiveness of each so-called object, and a mistaken separateness between them. (In my early 20s as a student of metaphysical philosophy I agreed with Ladyman and Ross, for those who know the theory; I just didn’t get it.) 

I’ve also realised that the inner-child psychotherapy work I was doing was cracking open a doorway to things spiritual. That loving myself fully would, for me, turn out to be a spiritual practice, because of who I am. 

I’m still coming to terms with this whole “one with everything”, “reality is animist”, “the universe contains a lot more than you thought it did” thing. I’m constantly noticing habits of thought and speech that no longer feel right, and adjusting them. I’m introducing new practices and abandoning others. Occasionally I’m getting fully freaked out by my tarot pack. Compared to other major life changes I've been through, I’m burning more incense and fewer cigarettes. 

But to a surprising degree I’m just doing out loud and with intention what I’ve always done silently and by instinct. And I’m feeling layers of uncertainty and shame and self-doubt fall away from me, as I experience the power that comes from this deeper authenticity. 

Today I want to write about how I’ve come to see that the idea that we are fundamentally separate from other people and things, moving alone through a largely empty and lifeless world, is one that feeds a particular conception of romantic love. 

This paradigm encourages an understanding of romantic attachment and partnership centred on the idea of completion, of healing, of finding one’s other half, of making-whole through connection with another person. A conception of love that has at its heart vacancy, absence, hunger, need. And one that involves being (especially, but not only, for women) in a metaphorical state of waiting, sleep, dormancy, almost of suspended animation in certain capacities of one’s heart, until we are awakened, arisen and elevated by being chosen by our soulmate. 

If you are taught that romantic love will awaken and complete you, then of course you crave it. I have craved it all my life. 

These days, I am wildly in love with my life and with Spirit and the Divine Mother and the trees and the birds and the sky and the stars and the universe and everything in it. And increasingly I understand that this means also being wildly in love with myself – being, as I am, one with all those things. It means knowing and believing that I am perfect and I am beautiful and I am sacred and I am whole. That I dwell in a state of grace, not because I am without sin but because Spirit is infinitely loving. That I have everything I need, not because I am magnificently self-reliant but because of what is unconditionally available to me through the web of life that holds a trillion stars.

This new understanding isn’t steady for me yet. It comes and goes. I described it to a friend as being like having “clarity contractions” – not always painful exactly (though sometimes they hurt like hell), but always energetically intense and, in their way, thrilling. At first they came to me in the middle of the night or in fever. Now that I know how to create intentional space for them, they come to me in dance, in trance, in meditation, in singing, in running, in breathwork. 

My clarity contractions are becoming longer, and stronger. And the gaps between them are getting smaller. Something is getting ready to be born, and I think it’s me. 

As I feel the truth of these understandings in my body, the idea of what it means to fall in love with someone inevitably starts to shift for me. I am becoming aware that I cannot see myself as perfect and whole and yet still love in the way that I used to love. It just doesn’t make sense. I cannot feel fully nourished by my present reality and still want to lose myself in the dream of another person. I cannot realise how blessed and loved I am and still feel like only another person has the power to make the sun rise in me. They can still do it, but now I know that I can do it too. 

I will never stop loving, but I think maybe – famous last words – I’ve fallen in love for the last time. The first time I fell in love, it felt like it changed my life, and obviously in some ways it did. But despite how it sometimes felt, Patrick didn’t bestow on me the capacity to feel what I felt for him. My feelings were the expression of a change in my capacities that had already taken place. Maybe the same is true of the last time; it felt life-changing, but perhaps it was an expression of an earlier change. Not the creation of a new truth but the living-out, the culmination, of an existing one. 

Either way, the whole “maybe romantic love looks permanently different to me now” thing is a big trip for me. I’m one of the most romantic people I know. I have spent years pursuing love, and mostly enjoying the pursuit. I have often said, during the times I’ve been single, that whether or not I find what I’m looking for, no one can deprive me of the fun of looking for it, and indeed looking forward to finding it. And the search for a partner has often made me a better person. I’ve asked myself, “What kind of person would someone I would fall in love with, fall in love with?” And I’ve tried to be that person, and it’s made me kinder and braver and more interesting, and has helped me to live my values more faithfully. 

The idea that I might be changing in a way that will deprive me of all that is confronting, to put it mildly. Who am I if I’m not that person anymore? What am I questing for, if I’m not questing for a life partner?

When I am spiritually at a low ebb, I feel the loss of the promise of romantic fulfilment is a big one. Letting go of the dream that one day I’ll meet someone who will fall in love with me, and I’ll fall in love with them, and everything will be sunny forever (or at least until it isn’t anymore) – that feels like more loss than gain. What if I feel the same loneliness about being unpartnered as I used to, but can no longer get high on the beautiful hopium that made it endurable?  

But when I feel good, when I’m powered up, which, miraculously, is an increasing majority of the time, I feel really good. I mean, feeling perfect and whole is incredible, especially when it starts to also feel natural and familiar. At these times, I think: Of course my life will remain a wonderful adventure. Of course I will continue to strive to be worthwhile company for cool, creative, smart, reflective people. What does it matter if I’m unpartnered? Does that sentence even make sense? How can I be unpartnered when I have all of this <gestures mentally at self, friends, universe>? Why think I won't experience romantic fulfilment, just because I won't lose myself in a love object?

Because friends, to be clear, I would still love to have a lover and companion to travel alongside me. I don’t think I’ll ever stop feeling like that would be a beautiful addition to my life. It’s just that the kind of connection I will now be motivated to make, the kind of connection I suspect I cannot compromise on in fact, will be so different. Our hearts are not going to merge into one (ugh) but our souls are sure going to touch. Not graspingly, but tenderly. I will be choosing my commitment to them from a place of peace and contentment. 

And they will be doing the same for me. Because I think it has to go both ways. I might eat these words, but right now I feel like I would rather be single for the rest of my life than dedicate myself to someone who believes that I complete them. I’ve been that person, and I know how despite your best intentions, the deep fear of losing your partner – losing the thing that makes you okay – censors and changes you in a way that limits and harms you both. I don’t want that. I want my relationship with my partner to be as healthy as my relationship with myself. And that means I want love and care, sure, but I also want growth and challenge and a whole lot of honesty, even when it’s hard. Especially when it’s hard. I offer that, and I want to receive it too. 

I expect I will continue to attach deeply to people I love, and sometimes what I feel will be unrequited and I will be hurt. But I think – I hope – that broken or asymmetric attachments in future will be less painful than they have been in the past. I think I will no longer (or at least, only transiently) harbour the belief that I have been abandoned to subsist on inadequate resources, or that I’m fundamentally unworthy of love. I’ll still have a sadness to grieve, but I think I won’t feel like the loss tells me anything deep about my value or safety. I’m already feeling that shift and I hope it is sustained.  

And if I am single for the rest of my life? Well, Spirit doesn’t make mistakes. Not all wonderful stories are mine to live in this one short lifetime. I surrender to that possibility. 

Even as I’m carried along on this narrative wave, I ask myself: Is this really a profound shift toward a higher truth, driven by a genuine spiritual awareness and growth? Have I seen some kind of light? Or is it a clever illusion of my subconscious, designed to get me through unrequited love with my ego intact – a self-imposed spiritual bypass? 

The nature of self-deception being what it is, I can’t offer evidence either way. Only time will tell. 

I don’t think I can un-learn the strong felt sense that I am whole, that I am perfect, that I am connected to Source – even if I have protracted periods where I don’t feel any of those things. My body knows what deep contentment and spiritual connection and self-love feel like now. It brings me back to that knowledge over and over, even if sometimes it takes a little time. 

It is tempting to say: with that knowledge holding me, how can I fall again? 

But I want to stay a bit humble here (against form). Romantic narratives and ideas come to me reflexively at particular times and in particular situations, every day. The paths in my mind along which these thoughts ran for so many years were well-travelled and well-maintained, and no matter how strong I feel right now, they will not be overgrown in a matter of weeks. When I’m not paying attention, I slip into them automatically, though I’m getting better at catching myself when I do. And every day, nature claims back more and more. 

Maybe one day I won’t be able to tell there was ever a trail there at all. It will just be a riot of wildflowers.