angelwithabullet
Trust female - 46 years
Blog / Tags / love
Blog messages with the tag 'love':
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Let Me Sing You A Waltz
Let me sing you a waltz
Out of no where
Out of my thoughts
Let me sing you a waltz
About this one night stand
You were for me that night
Everything I dreamed of in life
But now you’re gone
You are far gone
All the way to your island of rain
It was to you just a one night thing
But you were more to me
Just so you know
I don’t care what I say
I know what you meant for me
That day
I just want another try
I just want another night
Even if it doesn’t seem quite right
You meant for me much more
Than anyone I’ve met before
One single night with you
Is worth a thousand with anybody
I have no bitterness my sweet
I’ll never forget this one night thing
Even tomorrow in other arms
My heart will stay yours until I die
Let me sing you a waltz
Out of nowhere
Out of my blues
Let me sing you a waltz
About this lovely one night stand
Celine's Song in Before Sunset (2004) -
Loneliness
As soon as we are born, we are separate. We are ripped from the womb and our connection to another human being is cut at the cord – literally. That applies to every living thing on this planet (unless you can figure some out that are joined at the hip – apart from those who are … joined at the hip, head or heel through a bodily mis-hap in the womb – ok, let’s get off this subject).
So, the bottom line is, we are born to be an individual. A person in our own right.
Why then, is it so painful to experience loneliness?
Loneliness – an experience in and of itself – is not wrong. It’s the emotions that rise within us that cause the pain. The overwhelming surge of emptiness, as we stare at the floor a gaping black casm opens up before us. That ‘wanting’, that ‘needing’ – it doesn’t seem to go away. It grips your heart - and your stomach – and tickles it spitefully.
Loneliness is not the same as being alone. There have been many times when I’ve enjoyed my alone-time. My ‘Me Time’. The time I use to re-coup and recharge my drained and flat batteries. I’ve even enjoyed it, found pleasure in my own thoughts, sights, sounds and aromas that enter the very being of me.
The worst type of loneliness is when you’re in a relationship and it’s dead. There’s no love there. No giving. No receiving. No tender touch in the quiet of night. And I’ve been there too. I’ve experienced that kind of forlorn emptiness.
The type of loneliness I’m experiencing of late, is an unbearable feeling of being apart from all those who I love. It is affecting me quite deeply. My skin hungers for the brush of hair against my fingers. A finger on my neck or the small of my back, sends shivers along my spine and I want to embarrassingly lean into it.
I don’t feel abandoned, or rejected. I’m not experiencing depression or insecurity. I’m not anxious and I don’t feel unworthy or that my life is meaningless. There is no resentment in my heart for those who have what I don’t.
My situation is quite odd.
I’m surrounded – daily – by hundreds of men (and to a lesser extent, women). Yet I don’t get to be with any of them.
I don’t think I’m an unloveable woman. I don’t have low-self-esteem.
I know quite a few people on this site that are lonely. They use the networking facility to chat to people who, ordinarily, would be out of reach. And I applaud their bravery.
Their loneliness has been useful in that it has seeminly led to some rather fantastic creative bursts that appear to be leading them into a brilliant future. Poems, paintings, photographs, music and writing. An outpouring of beautiful gifts presented to the world that would not have been shown to the light if it had not been for their loneliness urging them to make a connection with others.
I have Bud and Blue to keep me company. Bud forces me to go out into the open, come rain or shine. I’ve met some rather interesting people while out on adventures with my four legged pal. Blue, on the other hand, wakes me in the morning with his delightful little chirps – as he flies out of his cage and onto my pillow to nibble gently on my lashes, he also sits on my tray while I eat my TV dinner (in front of the laptop) and nicks the mash from my plate.
But, dear and valued though their company is, it doesn’t compensate for another human being. It cannot.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not yearning to any great capacity, for something that I can't have. I’m not desperate or dying because human touch is denied to me. Loneliness came to me early, so I guess I should know now how to cope with it. As a child, I was alone most of the time. After my parents divorced, I shoved myself into a world of written words, where people could not cause that painful pang of rejection and neglect to return again. Surrounded by sisters and brothers, I buried my mind in books – in stories of other lands and lives. Love in another kingdom, a kingdom where anything was possible, if you dreamt it to be that way. I withdrew from the real world.
I lived in a big city where, I am told, there are the loneliest people on the planet. Because of the big concrete buildings, the harsh realities of drugs and violence, people are seemingly cut off and out of life. They immerse themselves in crowds of black coats so they won’t be identified or singled out, or picked on.
There are more people living alone today than there ever has been throughout the history of mankind. Big statement. Perhaps a true one? Over a quarter of the American population live alone. That’s over 30 million by my reckoning (but I’ve always been crap at maths, so correct me if I’m wrong)!
I should be grateful. Many lonely people turn to alcohol (oops, better watch that my Strongbow consumption doesn’t get to be more than one can a week!). Loads of people lose sleep over it (I get more than my 8 hour allocation every night – apart from when Blue wakes me up with the dawn chorus). Men, who are lonely get to have a higher risk of heart disease – because of the higher levels of a chemical in their blood that leads to higher blood pressure. Why? Because men live longer when they are with a partner, than when they are alone. Women don’t. Or so I’m reliably informed.
Then I think of those who have been put into cell blocks that offer a punishment – isolation. Or even those who are in padded cells because of madness and insanity. Or those who have been snatched from the streets and taken as hostages or to work as slaves. Or those who are locked in their own little houses as they can’t get out – because of a phobia of some sort. Or even those go out into the desert, or ice caps or mountains, or those who bury themselves in the ground in order to ‘find’ themselves – alone. What gives there?
But if I’ve not experienced any of those debilitating illnesses (depression, anxiety, fear, phobias), I’ve not gone on a madcap adventure, and I'm not on a search to know who I am or where I belong or where I am – what am I supposed to do to take away this aching in my heart?
I understand the cause: I’m away from home, family, friends and I have no intimate relationship.
I understand the reasons: I decided to accept a new job.
I understand the symptoms: aching, overwhelming emptiness, tears, thoughts of being alone for the rest of my natural days on earth.
I understand I have a support system: my work, my employers, my animal friends
I understand I have opportunities: I’m joining the clay pigeon shooting club tomorrow, and the gym in two weeks time
I understand I have a wonderful doctor: I took on a course of ten sessions of accupuncture treatment a couple of days ago
I understand the universe is abundant with rich life that never stops moving: it has already given me what I’ve asked for, many times over. I only have to ask again, and I will receive.
So, what am I to do with this aching inside of me? How can I put a stop to these tears that keep falling without warning?
I need to understand that I am human and I have been told that loneliness is an important part of being human, to be alone, to experience the depths as well as the heights. It’s all part of the rich pattern of life.
It’s not the challenge, but the way you handle the challenge that defines the person you are.
So, we’re born alone, live alone and die alone. Shouldn’t we used to it by now?
Off to bury my mind in a film ... "Step Brothers" should neatly take me out of this serious frame of mind...
Kaye -
Guilt v Desire
Nothing on this earth forces you to feel the emotion of guilt within you. You do something bad - and you choose to feel guilt. It's the guilt that kills you - not the deed that you've done.
Definitions of guilt: the state of having committed an offence; remorse caused by feeling responsible for some offence.
It's a code of conduct that we place upon ourselves. This code of conduct ensures that we don't cause any harm to others - without inflicting upon ourselves some repayment for it. We experience the emotion of guilt to 'punish' ourselves. At it's heart, guilt is intended to improve our social behaviour.
Whatever you do in life, guilt doesn't have to play a part in it. Guilt, itself, is not an expression of love. It doesn't heal anyone or anything - particularly not ourselves.
Desire, on the other hand, is an expression of love.
I know, we've all been taught the exact opposite - that to desire something you 'can't have' is bad for you. It causes frustration and pain, jealousy and anger. All those horrid emotions that harden your internal organs (particularly your liver and gall bladder!).
And they are right. Desire that leads to those particular feelings is not an expression of love.
Definitions of Desire: the feeling that accompanies an unsatisfied state; to want strongly; an inclination to want things.
But - hang on a minute - when you really think about it - how are things created?
Through desire, of course.
We find a loving partner through desire. We build a family through desire. We get the life we want through desire.
You have another option: you can do something bad and, instead, choose to learn through love and reason. -
Dumping Ground
WARNING: SOME LEWD LANGUAGE APPEARS IN THIS BLOG. PLEASE DON'T READ IF YOU ARE EASILY OFFENDED.
Hey, wanna know a funny thing? I like being taught lessons. I like the rollercoaster of life. I like fighting through the challenges it presents to me. Why? Because I know they will make me into a better person. Hopefully.
In 2008 I had a lot of lessons to learn. Namely on the dating scene. I had six men after me at one point. Six! Yeap. Little old specky me!
Prior to those guys arriving on the scene, I hadn’t had sex for five whole years (keep saying it Kaye, you might just believe it.)
Now, how many do I have?
None. Zero. Nada. Zilch.
What am I doing wrong?
Am I expecting too much? Am I putting out too early? Am I playing the ‘Virginal Card’ to coyly?
Must be something to do with a New Year clear out …I don’t know so much about that, as they all dribbled away like some other sticky fluid I didn’t get much of a look in at last year. But what I do know are the facts, as follows, in no particular order I might add …
It’s kind of cruel to say this, but I had never experienced being dumped.
Last year, though, I was dumped pre-sex, post-sex and even, would you believe it, DURING sex!
Yep, laugh all you want me hearties, but let’s face it:
That taught me a lesson I’ll never forget.
Being dumped is the pits.
Being dumped really puts you in your place.
Being dumped makes you realise that the whole of your life isn’t really all in your hands. And, yeah, Karma really does come back like a whacking great boomerang to smack you in the ass.
On the odd occasion (more often than not) I have all of these strange yearnings deep inside of me. They whell up like an ugly walrus lolloping ungainly on a stony beach.
For a while there, I didn’t know how to handle them. So I just went with my gut feelings and ‘told ‘em like it is’.
Didn’t do me much good though.
“Honesty”, my granny always said to me, “is always the best policy”
I think I’ve proved her wrong on pretty more than a few occasions.
You see, I couldn’t do a darned thing about those emotional rollercoasters that I’ve taken a ride on during the past year, ‘cos I’ve come to realise that it may be that I’m not a woman who can date like a normal woman.
In my minds eye (and, believe me, I have a few of them), all I really want is great passionate sex.
Just sex. The kind of sex where you get really sticky with sweet sweat and you feel all raw and smelly and filled up with lurve in the morning, like only a woman who’s been fondled by a man, can.
You know the sort of fling thing, the no strings attached kind of relationship that makes you feel free - and yet wanted at the same time.
But – and here’s the big but guys - that kind of sex for me, has to be with a man that knows what he’s doing to, for and with me. Or it’s no good.
You’d think it would be easy to find, wouldn’t you?
But it’s not.
You see, we all seem to be hung up on this ‘soul mate’ scene. It keeps darned well gettin’ in the way. Even with the men I date who want nothing more than just the frollicks with their boll**ks or to wrap straps round my paps.
Some of the men I’ve dated, dated me because they wanted to ‘get me into bed’. And that’s fine by me. As long as they abided by my granny’s code, and they were honest about it.
But somehow, somewhere down the line of least resistance there’s this secret message that lurks in Neverland time … it’s like this unwritten code that we’re all supposed to know without having been told it.
I know I’m not supposed to date married men. I know that. Truly I do. I shouldn’t steal another woman’s man … well, excuse me for asking, but is she keeping her man happy at home? If so, then why is he wandering away from her bed – without telling her? More importantly, without telling me?
Who’s to blame for that?
I’ve dated three of them in the past year.
One who said he was separated.
One who said he was getting divorced.
One who said he had an open-relationship.
Well, before long, there was one question I learned to ask myself before I got any deeper into the relationship I had with them and slightly before any danger-line was walked upon:
“If that’s the case, why did I never get to meet your wives guys?”
The thing that kicked in with me was not the ‘soul mate’ scenario that those guys thought I was hung up on, but more akin with the Karma thing.
I didn’t want its stick to whack me on the back of the head. So I wised up and wailed a resounding
‘NO!’
It was sad for me to do that. I was pretty cut up for a couple of days. I mourned their loss. I thought of their kind eyes, their gentle touch, their soft comforting voices. Their beautiful soft, downy mat of hair on those broad chests, those gorgeous shoulders and strong arms that wrapped around my body ...
However, I really didn’t want to be taken for granted.
I didn’t want to be walked over.
I didn’t want to be thought of as something of a thing that could be had whenever, however, wherever.
Really, that’s not me.
Guys get frightened of the real me.
Why?
Because they think I’m the kinda woman who wants more than just a fling kinda thing.
Can’t say why I give that impression (I put blame it on the spectacles and brown hair – comon’ everyone takes those seriously – don’t they
.
But hey, who am I to understand the workings of a straight man’s mind? If you hang on a minute – taking that subject and running with it - the workings of a man’s mind, and a woman’s heart - I do believe there is someone for everyone. I sincerely do.
Do you know what the really sad thing is?
It’s that there is only one of me - and so darned many of those delicious bodies out there to play the games with.
I have only a finite amount of time left with which to play the game of love. Let’s face it, I’m not getting any younger! So, I’ll date, if they come my way, but I’m not going to go out of my way to make a man-trap to catch them in.
And, if for some very unfortunate reason, someone fancied the guy who I fancied, I would have to just hang my head low, cast my heart down and stand aside. My feelings about him, shouldn’t get in the way of what could be good for someone else. Should they?
So maybe my mind’s eye peephole isn’t what I should be spying through. Maybe it’s my heart’s eye that I should be seeing with. Maybe it isn’t ‘just passionate sex’ that I want. Maybe those guys who want to play around are right to be frightened of me. Maybe I have to face it and realise that I am like (almost) every other woman on the planet and that I do want something more, something deeper, something more akin to friendship sex.
Sex with someone who doesn’t text someone else while they have chosen to honour me with their company.
Sex with someone who remembers to turn up when they said they would and doesn't leave me waiting alone all dressed up with no where to go.
Sex with someone who doesn't pop in for 'just a cuppa' and then promptly invite himself up into my room.
Sex with someone who doesn't expect me to w*nk him off and not expect to do anything to, for or with me in return.
Sex with someone who does stop to consider the turmoil my body is going through while I'm throwing up my guts down the loo at 3 in the morning.
Sex with someone who doesn’t say to me that they've just realised they actually do love someone else – while in the sexual act with moi!
Yes, sex with someone who cares as much about me as I do about him.
Sex with someone who values the woman I am and all that I can honestly give.
Will I ever find that? I don’t know. But I shall have some fun finding out.
So, yeap, the funny thing is that I'm still looking forward to 2009 and it's lessons. I'm looking forward to the next rollercoaster ride - this time I'll belt myself in tight! -
Sx Education 8-C: Marriage - Intimacy & Separateness
In the past few months, I’ve read an awful lot about relationships. Namely, to find out where I went wrong myself. And you know what I found out? That relationships are a two-way thing. Shucks! Yeap, it takes two to tango alright. Even though, when we enter a relationship, we want to share everything with that special someone, the key is to learn to respect the differences, to indulge in the unique bonds of togetherness, but also to respect the separateness that is man and woman or masculine and feminine.
You’ve probably noticed that men and women are different not only in body shape and hormonal instincts, but in brain waves too. The way our brains are wired up are distinctly different. In those differences lies the key to making a commitment - and keeping it.
But what is commitment?
Is commitment love?
Heck, what is love all about?
Throughout all my endeavours to write these blogs, I’ve been told by a great many people that love is being able to entrust your heart and soul to another – knowing that they will never willingly wound you.
Well, if that’s all it’s all about, I may as well leave the building now. My work is done.
However, we still have a great deal of trouble in the marital quarters – not just those who undergo the ritual of standing in front of a holy man to make a public promise to each other, but those who decide to share their lives in other ways – I deem a marriage as a ‘partnership of two people’ – whether that be with a ring on your finger or not. Whether that be with opposite or same sex partners. Either way, marriage is defined as a partnership of two people.
Commitment though marriage is only partly to do with love.
A commitment is a promise that two people make to each other when they want to enter into a marriage.
When two people know they want to spend their life with someone, it’s because they’ve found qualities in the other person that they know is just right – for them. They know they will be able to entrust their love to that individual because of the qualities they have match with theirs.
It doesn’t matter what those qualities are, or what that person has found to be special. What matters is that a person in love learns to know that there are going to be times when they will not be able to agree on certain things in life’s great adventure, and that they need to find a way to agree to disagree - agreeably.
Now, I’m a great pioneer for getting needs met. Material needs are there to make your life easier, but they don’t necessarily make it more fulfilled.
Emotional needs, on the other hand, do both.
According to a typical relationship counsellor, commitment is not about needs, it’s about the wants. Needing someone means being dependant upon them. Wanting someone is loosely interpreted as a deep desire for someone. They determine that when a woman ‘needs’ a man, she wants him to be thinking about her all the time, needs him to help her pay the mortgage and to look after the children. The general consensus is that ‘needing’ someone is what kills the relationship and wanting them is what enhances it.
In some way, this right. In some way this is wrong. I know what I'm talking about, I went through six months of relationship counselling myself - with my lover. Needless to say, that counselling method failed (we had to find things about each other that we didn't like and focus on 'improving' them. In reality it just emphasised them horrendously and got us blaming each other). So we went our separate ways.
Anyhow, I’ll get to the point soon.
Marital v Material Needs
In my endeavours to find out more about relationships and why so many of them are failing, when they really should be succeeding, I unearthed a few remarkable finds. Chiefly, that there are known to be five generally accepted phases that couples have a ‘need’ to go through in order to succeed in a relationship. In the instance of a relationship, and keeping things together, it’s the emotional needs that need to be experienced and met, not the material ones.
In broad terms, when emotional needs are met a couple can work through any material needs that are lacking. Usually, if the emotional needs are not met, then the lacking material needs place a heftier burden on the relationship – and that’s when things start to sour.
So what are these emotional needs that need to be met in order for the desire to be kept alive? Well, I've created one of those 'acroynm' things and this one is my SPACI SPACE ... the words in bold below spell it out ...
In general, a man needs to know that:
• he has a sense of status as a result of others’ knowing that he is doing things well
• that his life has a purpose
• that what he’s stretching for is achievable
• that he has a degree of control over how things go
• including having his intimacy needs met through his woman
In general, a woman needs to know that:
• she has a secure place to live
• she is able to have some privacy when she wants it
• she can give and receive attention freely with other people
• she has a solid relationship while having a sense that she’s part of a wider community
• while also being able to have a calm demeanour and manage her emotions
Of course, these needs are not set in stone for each of the sexes – I know a good few women who need to have a sense of purpose to their lives - and a good few men who want to give and receive attention! Anyway, it would be a pretty good thing if we could get all of those needs met. But none of them show us how the mortgage will be paid, or the housework will be shared. Together, however, they go a long way towards helping a couple understand that anything is achievable – if they understand how to go about it throughout their life’s journey.
The one thing to understand here, is that a couple will go through several phases of their ‘togetherness’ on their life’s journey. These phases are specifically designed by good old Mother Nature to keep us on our toes, to keep us moving on so that we can fulfil our roles in the circle of life.
Mother Nature has always shown us the balance that needs to be lived in life. The yin and the yang, the dark and the light, the masculine and feminine. It is here that we need to see a balance needs to be met in our relationships. That balance is found in the way we interact with each other and how we define our roles.
I’m not a feminist! Please don’t think I’m shouting that out because I want to tell you something about male and female roles … however, the way we live our lives in Western society today has blurred the lines between acceptable behaviour of men and women. Women do a lot of the things that men were always expected to do, and men are taking on more of the female role.
This is not a bad thing. But we can begin to see that in some instances, we are in danger of losing our focus on the natural abilities we have to hand. The list of needs is only a guideline, but it seems to fit the male/female roles.
It is with this list of needs in mind, that I’ll take you on the five phases on the journey of love towards knowing and keeping up with a healthy balance in sexual intimacy – and in turn, creating a deeper and greater love between the sexes – for much longer than we seem to be able to as a society in this day and age.
Phase 1: Rose Tinted Glasses
We all know that when people get together there’s that iky-sickly, gushy, mushy and (all in all) a wonderfully romantic phase that makes one feel so alive with life. It delights the senses and sex is at an all-time high.
The hormonal chemicals are throwing each other around to such a degree that there’s no disagreement and only love in each other’s eyes. A couple in love, only finds things in common with each other and they adore each another. Their behaviour reflects that of caring, loving and nurturing.
The chemical in the brain responsible for this is called ‘oxytocin’. It bonds a couple together by hiding any behavioural traits that they may find irksome.
Sadly, nature deems it necessary to end this stage at some point - it varies in length for different people, but six months is the usual - so that another stage can begin.
Phase 2: Marry in Haste – Repent at Leisure
This is where term ‘disillusionment’ comes into play. For those who get married quickly during the falling in love stage, there’s a tendency to become disappointment with the partner when this feeling of elation comes to a natural end.
For all the love that was experienced, all the wonderful sensations that were indulged in, the reality soon hits home as our brain’s cerebral cortex begins to notice that things are not as perfect as we once thought them to be.
• She begins to feel rejected when he doesn’t tell her what he’s feeling anymore.
• He can’t understand why she criticises everything he does.
This is when men and women begin to think that they are not married to the person they first met and that things have changed.
They are right. They have. Biologically and, as a result, emotionally too.
This may seem unfair of the brain to do this to us, but apparently it is necessary so that we can learn to ‘merge’ together our different lives and different ways of thinking.
Let’s face it, our life paths are never truly identical and when we get together with someone, we are bringing together two wholly separate lives and trying to fit those puzzles together.
If we manage to get through Phase 2, we enter the next stage.
Phase 3: Power Struggle?
This is when we begin to want our partner to change back to the person they were during Phase 1. But we need to learn that our brains are sexually "different" from each other. Men and women think, act, behave and even love quite distinctively. We have to. It’s in our nature to do so. The sex hormones (testosterone and estrogen) are responsible for giving us these feelings.
If a couple stay focussed on the power struggle between them, then they won’t recognise the important element of this phase - that learning and understanding each others differences gives the keys to a long-term marriage.
This is the time to bring the needs into play and understand that:
• men need more independence – and to find a purpose for his life
• women need more emotional satisfaction - with a wider social network
The idea that first marriage tends to end after 7 or 8 years (hence the 7 year itch), is said to be because this is the specific time that Phase 3 begins to take hold.
If we get through this stage, then a deeper love awaits us.
While we go through each of the first three phases, what happens is that we begin to rub out our separate identities. We get too close and we try to merge within one another. We want to be like one another and do so many things together so that we are not apart at any time.
In those phases, a man may see that his woman’s fussing with the housework as a ‘waste of time’. What he doesn’t see is that she needs to keep her house clean for when her friends visit, and she needs to express her emotions through talking. This is just a small way in which her need for social emotional being shown.
She, on the other hand, might see his wanting to escape with the lads for a drink, going out to football matches, or even working more as being selfish or denying the relationship a chance to grow. This is just his need for independence being shown.
So, commitment, in the sense that two people need to be together is a little bit chaotic because it does tend to kill off the relationship.
What is needed is for the couple to recognise that they need to be committed to each other’s abilities to make the family a better environment to live in. In order to do that, a couple should realise that the male and female are designed biologically and emotionally, to ‘complement’ each other with their separate abilities.
Phase 4: Deal or No Deal?
In Phase 4, a couple who begin to wake up to the realization that they've been too close to each other in unhealthy ways - now emotionally separate. Not through the divorce courts, but through striking an agreement with each other.
When rational thought takes over, the brain is able to override all the typical emotional upsets that cause all the arguments.
Finally, men begin to see that women are right! That relationships are doomed if there isn't enough togetherness. Women, too, begin to see that men are right!. That relationships are in trouble if there is not enough freedom.
A couple learns understand that if they are too far away from each other, there’s no point in the relationship – it won’t survive, there’s no point, the woman won’t feel safe and the man won’t feel wanted. But, equally, when one half of a couple doesn’t allow the other to be themselves, the partnership will suffocate – through not allowing that trust through love, to grow.
It is in understanding the complementary roles that men and women can offer to each other that the key to a successful relationship are found.
Phase 5: Eternal Bliss?
The balance between men and women and the way we relate to each other with love, is widely known as
“Intimate Separateness”
When a couple recognise this, the power struggle fades and a mature love is allowed to grow.
In remembering this, we need to recall the needs of both men and women: his need for a sense of status and that his life has a purpose, that he’s achieving what he’s stretching for, and that he has a degree of control over the way things are being handled, including his intimacy needs.
She needs to know that, she has a secure home with some privacy when she needs it, is able to give and receive attention, has a solid/safe relationship and is able to get involved in a wider network, while also being able to understand and manage her own emotions.
Couples who are aware of these needs, and can see how these phases are being entered through their lives, live longer together. They find themselves able to raise children with love and know that they are loved in return, for their different abilities and individualities as male and female.
Here’s a very brief list that may help you recognise where you can agree to have ‘separate intimacy’ …
• bonding rituals (date nights, family dinners, talking on the phone, writing letters or e-mailing when one of you is travelling)
• practice kindness and politeness for, to and with each other
• resolve arguments, apologize for meanness, solve conflicts
• appreciate each other's eccentricities and differences
• develop different friends (men for men and women for women) and encourage each other in these friendships
• allow each other different marital domains (if a hobby, a sport, or a way of socializing is very important to one, the other helps to understand that and promote it)
• have fun together, with special time for great sex, and support each other
• know that your feelings toward one another are likely to change over time and that change is normal – and it doesn’t need to be scary– it can be exciting too!
The biology of your brain plays a vital role in defining the complements of male and female chemistry - so there's really no point in fighting it.
ps I’ve borrowed heavily from my books on this blog. kx -
The Orgasmic Mind: The Neurobiological Roots of Pleasure
Rather than approach this subject on my own, I decided to let the eminent scientists show you how it's done ... "oh to be involved in research like this" (she says whistfully!)
Achieving sexual climax requires a complex conspiracy of sensory and psychological signals—and the eventual silencing of critical brain areas. An article by Martin Portner of Scientific American Mind
Principles of Pleasure
• Sexual desire and orgasm are subject to various influences on the brain and nervous system, which controls the sex glands and genitals.
• The ingredients of desire may differ for men and women, but researchers have revealed some surprising similarities. For example, visual stimuli spur sexual stirrings in women, as they do in men.
• Achieving orgasm, brain imaging studies show, involves more than heightened arousal. It requires a release of inhibitions engineered by shutdown of the brain’s center of vigilance in both sexes and a widespread neural power failure in females.
She did not often have such strong emotions. But she suddenly felt powerless against her passion and the desire to throw herself into the arms of the cousin whom she saw at a family funeral. “It can only be because of that patch,” said Marianne, a participant in a multinational trial of a testosterone patch designed to treat hypoactive sexual desire disorder, in which a woman is devoid of libido. Testosterone, a hormone ordinarily produced by the ovaries, is linked to female sexual function, and the women in this 2005 study had undergone operations to remove their ovaries.
After 12 weeks of the trial, Marianne had felt her sexual desire return. Touching herself unleashed erotic sensations and vivid sexual fantasies. Eventually she could make love to her husband again and experienced an orgasm for the first time in almost three years. But that improvement was not because of testosterone, it turned out. Marianne was among the half of the women who had received a placebo patch—with no testosterone in it at all.
Marianne’s experience underlines the complexity of sexual arousal. Far from being a simple issue of hormones, sexual desire and orgasm are subject to various influences on the brain and nervous system, which controls the sex glands and genitals. And many of those influences are environmental. Recent research, for example, shows that visual stimuli spur sexual stirrings in women, as they do in men. Marianne’s desire may have been invigorated by conversations or thoughts about sex she had as a result of taking part in the trial. Such stimuli may help relieve inhibitions or simply whet a person’s appetite for sex.
Achieving orgasm, brain-imaging studies show, involves more than heightened arousal. It requires a release of inhibitions and control in which the brain’s center of vigilance shuts down in males; in females, various areas of the brain involved in controlling thoughts and emotions become silent. The brain’s pleasure centers tend to light up brightly in the brain scans of both sexes, especially in those of males. The reward system creates an incentive to seek more sexual encounters, with clear benefits for the survival of the species. When the drive for sex dissipates, as it did with Marianne, people can reignite the spark with tactics that target the mind.
Sex in Circles
Biologists identified sex hormones such as estrogen and testosterone in the 1920s and 1930s, and the first studies of human sexuality appeared in the 1940s. In 1948 biologist Alfred Kinsey of Indiana University introduced his first report on human sexual practices, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, which was followed, in 1953, by Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. These highly controversial books opened up a new dialogue about human sexuality. They not only broached topics—such as masturbation, homosexuality and orgasm—that many people considered taboo but also revealed the surprising frequency with which people were coupling and engaging in sexual relations of countless varieties.
Kinsey thus debuted sex as a science, paving the way for others to dig below statistics into the realm of biology. In 1966 gynecologist William Masters and psychologist Virginia Johnson—who originally hailed from Washington University before founding their own research institute in St. Louis—described for the first time the sexual response cycle (how the body responds to sexual stimulation), based on observations of 382 women and 312 men undergoing some 10,000 such cycles. The cycle begins with excitation, as blood rushes to the penis in men, and as the clitoris, vulva and vagina enlarge and grow moist in women. Gradually, people reach a plateau, in which they are fully aroused but not yet at orgasm. After reaching orgasm, they enter the resolution phase, in which the tissues return to the preexcitation stage.
In the 1970s psychiatrist Helen Singer Kaplan of the Human Sexuality Program at Weill Medical College of Cornell University added a critical element to this cycle—desire—based on her experience as a sex therapist. In her three-stage model, desire precedes sexual excitation, which is then followed by orgasm. Because desire is mainly psychological, Kaplan emphasized the importance of the mind in the sexual experience and the destructive forces of anxiety, defensiveness and failure of communication.
In the late 1980s gynecologist Rosemary Basson of the University of British Columbia proposed a more circular sexual cycle, which, despite the term, had been described as a largely linear progression in previous work. Basson suggested that desire might both lead to genital stimulation and be invigorated by it. Countering the idea that orgasm is the pinnacle of the experience, she placed it as a mere spot on the circle, asserting that a person could feel sexually satisfied at any of the stages leading up to an orgasm, which thus does not have to be the ultimate goal of sexual activity.
Dissecting Desire
Given the importance of desire in this cycle, researchers have long wanted to identify its key ingredients. Conventional wisdom casts the male triggers in simplistic sensory terms, with tactile and visual stimuli being particularly enticing. Men are drawn to visual erotica, explaining the lure of magazines such as Playboy. Meanwhile female desire is supposedly fueled by a richer cognitive and emotional texture. “Women experience desire as a result of the context in which they are inserted—whether they feel comfortable with themselves and the partner, feel safe and perceive a true bond with the partner,” opines urologist Jennifer Berman of the Female Sexual Medicine Center at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Yet sexual imagery devoid of emotional connections can arouse women just as it can men, a 2007 study shows. Psychologist Meredith Chivers of the Center for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto and her colleagues gauged the degree of sexual arousal in about 100 women and men, both homosexual and heterosexual, while they watched erotic film clips. The clips depicted same-sex intercourse, solitary masturbation or nude exercise—performed by men and women—as well as male-female intercourse and mating between bonobos (close ape relatives of the chimpanzee).
The researchers found that although nude exercise genitally aroused all the onlookers the least and intercourse excited them the most, the type of actor was more important for the men than for the women. Heterosexual women’s level of arousal increased along with the intensity of the sexual activity largely irrespective of who or what was engaged in it. In fact, these women were genitally excited by male and female actors equally and also responded physically to bonobo copulation. (Gay women, however, were more particular; they did not react sexually to men masturbating or exercising naked.)
The men, by contrast, were physically titillated mainly by their preferred category of sexual partner—that is, females for straight men and males for gay men—and were not excited by bonobo copulation. The results, the researchers say, suggest that women are not only aroused by a variety of types of sexual imagery but are more flexible than men in their sexual interests and preferences.
When it comes to orgasm, simple sensations as well as higher-level mental processes probably also play a role in both sexes. Although Kinsey characterized orgasm in purely physical terms, psychologist Barry R. Komisaruk of Rutgers University has defined the experience as more multifaceted. In their book The Science of Orgasm (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), Komisaruk, endocrinologist Carlos Beyer-Flores of the Tlaxcala Laboratory in Mexico and Rutgers sexologist Beverly Whipple describe orgasm as maximal excitation generated by a gradual summing of responses from the body’s sensory receptors, combined with complex cognitive and emotional forces. Similarly, psychologist Kent Berridge of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor has described sexual pleasure as a kind of “gloss” that the brain’s emotional hub, the limbic system, applies over the primary sensations.
The relative weights of sensory and emotional influences on orgasm may differ between the sexes, perhaps because of its diverging evolutionary origins. Orgasm in men is directly tied to reproduction through ejaculation, whereas female orgasm has a less obvious evolutionary role. Orgasm in a woman might physically aid in the retention of sperm, or it may play a subtler social function, such as facilitating bonding with her mate. If female orgasm evolved primarily for social reasons, it might elicit more complex thoughts and feelings in women than it does in men.
Forgetting Fear
But does it? Researchers are trying to crack this riddle by probing changes in brain activity during orgasm in both men and women. Neuroscientist Gert Holstege of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and his colleagues attempted to solve the male side of the equation by asking the female partners of 11 men to stimulate their partner’s penis until he ejaculated while they scanned his brain using positron-emission tomography (PET). During ejaculation, the researchers saw extraordinary activation of the ventral tegmental area (VTA), a major hub of the brain’s reward circuitry; the intensity of this response is comparable to that induced by heroin.
“Because ejaculation introduces sperm into the female reproductive tract, it would be critical for reproduction of the species to favor ejaculation as a most rewarding behavior,” the researchers wrote in 2003 in The Journal of Neuroscience.
The scientists also saw heightened activity in brain regions involved in memory-related imagery and in vision itself, perhaps because the volunteers used visual imagery to hasten orgasm. The anterior part of the cerebellum also switched into high gear. The cerebellum has long been labeled the coordinator of motor behaviors but has more recently revealed its role in emotional processing. Thus, the cerebellum could be the seat of the emotional components of orgasm in men, perhaps helping to coordinate those emotions with planned behaviors. The amygdala, the brain’s center of vigilance and sometimes fear, showed a decline in activity at ejaculation, a probable sign of decreasing vigilance during sexual performance.
To find out whether orgasm looks similar in the female brain, Holstege’s team asked the male partners of 12 women to stimulate their partner’s clitoris—the site whose excitation most easily leads to orgasm—until she climaxed, again inside a PET scanner. Not surprisingly, the team reported in 2006, clitoral stimulation by itself led to activation in areas of the brain involved in receiving and perceiving sensory signals from that part of the body and in describing a body sensation—for instance, labeling it “sexual.”
But when a woman reached orgasm, something unexpected happened: much of her brain went silent. Some of the most muted neurons sat in the left lateral orbitofrontal cortex, which may govern self-control over basic desires such as sex. Decreased activity there, the researchers suggest, might correspond to a release of tension and inhibition. The scientists also saw a dip in excitation in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, which has an apparent role in moral reasoning and social judgment—a change that may be tied to a suspension of judgment and reflection.
Brain activity fell in the amygdala, too, suggesting a depression of vigilance similar to that seen in men, who generally showed far less deactivation in their brain during orgasm than their female counterparts did. “Fear and anxiety need to be avoided at all costs if a woman wishes to have an orgasm; we knew that, but now we can see it happening in the depths of the brain,” Holstege says. He went so far as to declare at the 2005 meeting of the European Society for Human Reproduction and Development: “At the moment of orgasm, women do not have any emotional feelings.”
But that lack of emotion may not apply to all orgasms in women. Komisaruk, Whipple and their colleagues studied the patterns of brain activation that occur during orgasm in five women with spinal cord injuries that left them without sensation in their lower extremities. These women were able to achieve a “deep,” or nonclitoral, orgasm through mechanical stimulation (using a laboratory device) of the vagina and cervix. But contrary to Holstege’s results, Komisaruk’s team found that orgasm was accompanied by a general activation of the limbic system, the brain’s seat of emotion.
Among the activated limbic regions were the amygdala and the hypothalamus, which produces oxytocin, the putative love and bonding hormone whose levels jump fourfold at orgasm. The researchers also found heightened activity in the nucleus accumbens, a critical part of the brain’s reward circuitry that may mediate orgasmic pleasure in women. In addition, they saw unusual activity in the anterior cingulate cortex and the insula, two brain areas that Rutgers anthropologist Helen Fisher has found come to life during the later stages of love relationships. Such activity may connect a female’s sexual pleasure with the emotional bond she feels with her partner.
Pleasure Pill?
Disentangling the connections between orgasm, reproduction and love may someday yield better medications and psychotherapies for sexual problems. As Marianne’s case illustrates, the answer is usually not as simple as a hormone boost. Instead her improvement was probably the result of the activation or inactivation of relevant parts of her brain by social triggers she encountered while participating in an experiment whose purpose centered on female sexual arousal. Indeed, many sex therapies revolve around opening the mind to new ways of thinking about sex or about your sexual partner.
Companies are also working on medications that act on the nervous system to stimulate desire. One such experimental compound is a peptide called bremelanotide, which is under development by Palatin Technologies in Cranbury, N.J. It blocks certain receptors in the brain that are involved in regulating basic drives such as eating and sex. In human studies bremelanotide has prompted spontaneous erections in men and boosted sexual arousal and desire in women, but the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has held up its progress out of concern over side effects such as rising blood pressure.
Continued scientific dissection of the experience of orgasm may lead to new pharmaceutical and psychological avenues for enhancing the experience. Yet overanalyzing this moment of intense pleasure might also put a damper on the fun. That is what the science tells us anyway. -
Flowers Fade - Chapter 1
This story is about two women and a man who loved them both.
CHAPTER 1
Beneath the dappled shade of her big straw hat Tully’s face, though only slightly withered with age showed contentment, which was unusual considering what she had done.
Satisfied her apron was tied protectively over her favourite cream dress she carefully tipped an egg cup of powder into the steel can.
As the familiar swish of water began to froth and bubble up in the dark confines of the vessel, thoughts began to invade her mind. She knew why flowers faded. Knew that all they needed were three small things to survive; the warmth of sunlight upon their faces; a gentle breeze to caress their leaves and a mild drench of cool water to tickle their roots. To lose either one or all of these meant they would wilt through neglect or die, as though snubbed by nature’s callous confidence.
Only, nature wasn’t at work in this greenhouse: Tully was. Having trapped these beautiful plants in an unnatural state, imprisoned within a pot to stand for endless hours beneath the clear glazing, she knew they depended on her. Totally. And that was why she attended them so purposefully.
Her thoughts seemed to focus more on the summer of 1970; a hot, sticky season that had forced her to make a decision. Forty had been a good age. It was an age that brought confidence to know where you stood in life. And hadn’t her friend, Sally, mockingly told her, “Life is supposed to begin at forty, Tully.”
Sally had sucked on her long cigarette, raised a finely pencilled brow and smiled her deliciously wicked grin. Sally was apt to such mannerisms that hinted at depths deeper than any abyss. Very dramatic was Sally. With all that flaming red hair and those gorgeous green eyes she couldn’t hope to be anything else.
Flowers poked their pretty heads into Tully’s face and she breathed in their spicy scent by way of a precious gift.
Slowing the flow of tap water, she tipped the excess from the can and began to understand what it all meant. Flower power and peace. They were the shiny new symbols of the preceding decade, secret messages that had wrung the neck of the family unit dooming it to uncertainty, spurred on by the frustrated, passionate outburst of the country’s educated youth.
Tully’s thoughts turned back to the time when, even before the sun rose, she would slip from beneath her sheets and into her wool housecoat. From there she would stroll into the garden, over the cold stone paving that weaved its way between the herbs, with one purpose in mind; to welcome her beautiful flowers into the new day.
She would carefully choose from her varied range of secateurs, as a doctor might a scalpel. There were several of them, all shapes and sizes and each for a specific job within her garden. She would pull her stiff gloves over her hands so they fitted snug around her elegant fingers and, once she had pruned any dead leaves or unwanted plant from sight, the can would be filled with water and a scoop of plant food. After the torture they had endured, that would invigorate them.
All this, before she saw to Trevor’s needs.
Poor Trevor. He didn’t know how she felt because she didn’t tell him. She often wondered how good it must feel not to be subjected to your emotions. And yet it was hard for Tully to comprehend how a man who proclaimed to love could wander through life not noticing how his behaviour – or the lack of it – affected another’s. Particularly one as close to him as she.
Yet Tully was not his wife. Nor was she his girlfriend or even, come to think of it, his lover. The days of yearning for a sparkling ring had long since dulled. They had tried hard to rekindle the passion they had experienced in the first thrilling months of togetherness, they both knew that. But their time had come and gone in a whisper of a moment and she thought of him now, sitting there alone. Silent and waiting for her to come to him.
She stood among her flowers and looked at her life in her mind. It presented a sad picture. In fact, she would go as far to say it presented a miserable failed reflection of her former self. -
Sx Education 5-B: Love. Come Again?
“You make my Vagina tingle …”
The Free Love of the 60s is back!
Well, it is according to some free spirit gurus who want to spread the lurve in London.
Under the guise of self-help therapy, people have gathered in a room, stripped off and made statements to other people about their bodies and how they make them feel (strange, but they never did that on the last course I attended … would have added an interesting slant to the proceedings, I guess).
Hmm. Well, this is certainly a different approach. Forgive me if you don’t agree with what I’m about to say on this subject, but I can only describe my own personal experiences ...
Of course, people have indulged in this kind of ‘free love’ behaviour for years. Regardless of whether you think that going away for a couple of weeks on a course to ‘find your true self’ has some kind of ugliness to it (to the partner left at home perhaps), it is still going on in the name of spiritual enlightenment. And in the name of love.
But is it love? Is lust a type of love? A love of the self? Is it a way of being able to satisfy yourself sexually without fear or guilt or shame? What is the difference between love and lust?
Surely, it all boils down to one thing – sex?
Here’s an interesting statement:
“Love making involves the experience of sensing the other’s subject state: shared desire, aligned intentions, and mutual states of simultaneously shifting arousal with lovers responding to each other in a synchrony that gives the tacit sense of deep rapport. Lovemaking is, at its best, an act of mutual empathy, at its worst it lacks any such emotional mutuality”
So says Daniel Stern, a psychiatrist at Cornell University School of Medicine.
Bit of a mouthful, I must admit. But he is a psychiatrist, so that’s to be expected.
Anyhow, the latter comment (at its worst) explains how people are able to bring their bodies together with no feeling whatsoever. The former comment (at its best) goes a long way to helping us understand a little more about love and all its complexities.
However, I do question the bit about the ‘no feeling whatsoever’. As, when you bring two bodies together, there is always a sensation of some kind. Whether that is a pain or a pleasure, there is always a physicality to it and physical involvement brings on sensations that touch the nerve endings – and it can’t only be skin deep, as the heart is pounding away in a concerted effort to keep up with the antics being played out above it.
So, the question that plagues my mind is: does lust derive from sexuality and love from sensuality?
To be sexual is to hold the body, alone, in awe – as is lust. Love, however, is likened to being sensual and involving all five senses (or six if you’re a particularly sensitive person). Both sexuality (lust) and sensuality (love) can include the subject of sex with the body fully involved.
Without this ‘love’ thing getting in the way, there would be only lust. I don’t believe lust, in itself, is a bad thing. After all, it’s that drive that brings us together in the name of love. However, I can understand how lust, on its own, could lead to a compassionless, dull experience – notably so if all it leads to is nothing than a romp in the sack.
So, can lust and love be described? Can they be defined?
Lust first.
Rather than make a statement that lust it is all about desire and wanting and trying to get to the ultimate goal (into someone’s knickers), lets try to describe the physical sensations at play here.
If you’ve ever lusted after anybody’s body you’ll know what it’s like (men - brains in particular - are especially adept at this sort of thing, so an expert should be consulted perhaps ? ). Taking a quick tip from the previous blog, if the RODS in a man’s eyes focus on a curvy breast or bum it will create a big enough stimulus to get his brain’s ATTENTION GRABBER on alert, so that his ALARM SYSTEM rings several bells, urging him to act immediately on the information being handed to him. A woman, on the other hand, upon receiving a ‘welcome’ flirty word or two, her DATA CONNECTOR can run into overdrive, to such an extent that she stumbles over the words that stream in an uncontrollable dribble from her mouth. Obviously, her CONTROL CENTRE needs very much to be putting the brakes on at this point, but the NEURONS in her brain are firing away, making her blood flow faster fuelling her THOUGHT processes.
Leaving that aside for a sec, if we take the rest of the body into consideration, there’s a burning fire in your belly (and a ‘tingle in your vagina’ ), it’s kind of like a burning heat, a form of energy building up in your body, a sensation that takes over as your thoughts rage on the fantastic possibilities that are available to you. The brain’s MEMORY PROCESSOR is REMEMBERING the emotional triggers from a time before (or instinct is kicking in there) so her imagination plays a big part in how that surge of tingling, jumpy, energetic sensations touch the nerve endings deep within her body. Ewh, enough already!
It feels so bloody darned good (personally, I can’t understand why it’s been classed as so wrong).
Shall I take that ‘fire in the belly’ thing a little deeper? From my point of view, it can be anything as flippant as a yearning for precious moments to a hot fervency for deep penetration of the body. A desire to be inflamed, ignited, electrified, super-charged.
You want it so badly that when you get it you can erupt into a dance of ecstasy – so much that an explosive orgasm can come so easily.
Hang on a minute. So we’re onto the subject of love now then – ‘cos that’s what that is about, isn’t it?
Not quite.
Love is a sort of gratitude that you feel inside, for all that is being given to you.
So, by that measure, lust is a kind of physical pleasure? And love an emotional pressure?
We’re getting there.
Clearly, sexuality is expressed through energy. A pleasurable energy. A force that is vibrant, it can be expressed in the contortions on your face or the way you carry your body or both. When you feel sexual, your body and voice says to the world (albeit indirectly) “Open all your doors – I’m coming to get you!” (a bit like Davina on Channel 4’s Big Brother).
The sex act itself is a powerful force – a force that many still don’t understand. When you think of the energy that is used and the friction created in physical act of sex, you begin to understand the magnetic forces at play. Getting physical with another body can actually draw you closer to it and, inevitably, to the person that lies hidden beneath the skin.
While your nerve endings tingle and fluids mingle – oddly enough emotions start to merge. Your heart pounds within its cage of bone and blood, and begins to move the fluids faster. Everything around you becomes magnified and intensified. Sounds can appear and disappear in an instant. Looking into your lover’s eyes can be such an emotionally loaded and intimate moment - yet it can make you feel so distant too.
If we leave the moment for a second and glance back to another time - way back in time – a time when the ancient philosopher’s words were adhered to by the ever faithful. It was said that “if the person you are exchanging bodily fluids with, brings the pain of the past with them – you will feel it too.”
And it’s true. You can’t help but do that. You’re so close to them. Touching them, rubbing against them, sliding in them, feeling their skin against yours, moving in yours, smelling their sweet sweat mixing with yours. All these sensations merge to create intense feelings beyond the simple pleasures of a cup of tea and a scone (I don’t care what Boy George says!).
So is lust wrong? Are the devout followers of the world who live their life by the guidance of one big book, right? Is love all there is to abide by? Should we forgo lust at the alter of love? Do we have to deny what is inherently our animalistic right to the pleasures of the physical flesh – simply to stop ourselves from the possibility of being hurt by the act of lusting after someone?
But, in what way can lust after another body hurt us?
As we all know, being sexually repressed can lead to pain in a myriad of ways. People get frustrated, frustration leads to anger, when bottled up anger causes a tremendous amount of grief. Sex creates the greatest source of energy, and thus relief, from all these emotions. But I’m told that sex without love can attract all sorts of bad types of passion: guilt; anger; fear; resentment. Strangely, though, these emotions all come from a place of love. Or rather, lack of it. Of wanting love and of being unloved.
As a result, does this mean it all boils down to the simple explanation that lust that leads to sex relieves emotional stress and eventually ends in this thing called love?
Sex can free you from anger buried deep inside - until compassion wells up and you meet another on a level that is comfortable for both of you. But there’s one ingredient that needs to be present in order for that to happen. It’s what lust, ultimately, is all about.
Desire.
Not only a desire to share another body – to change from one body to another.
But a desire to change.
To alter what is within you in order for you to be free from the fear, the guilt and the anger of past hurts.
However, it takes courage to admit that change is needed. Shifting your life, from one place to another, has to come from yourself first – there is no way you can change another person (ladies take note!).
When you find yourself in a relationship that seems to be going nowhere or where the flames of passion are pathetically trying to flicker in a fire where only embers smoulder, it takes guts to admit that what you have is not what you lust for, not what you have already got.
My gran always told me that “Courage is ‘being afraid – and going on’, regardless of what the future may hold as a result of your decision to change.” She was a wise and strong woman. Having been through a few relationships myself, I begin to understand what she means.
When you resist change and accept what is in your life as it stands, this can only bring more pain - extra anger, increased guilt and an intense fear that can only intensify.
But what is it about the act of change that is so frightening? The fear of change itself? Or the fear of what that change will lead to? Is it the fear that your situation might be worse, instead of better, than it was before you took the leap?
Take heart. Change almost always brings us mountains to climb … err … sorry … challenges. Challenges give us more choice. Through the power of choice we gain in confidence. So, change can either help us to grow into bitter or better people. We can either view the challenge as a mountain or as a molehill. Either way, if we make the effort to take the first step towards it, it can help us look inward for the answers and, ultimately, learn to forgive.
When you think on that a little more, that is what lust is all about.
It is a burning need, or a desire, inside to change what is. Lust is your body’s physical message urging you to change your mind from its present state and to make a decision: to bring two bodies together and make love happen?
Therein, lies the ability to ‘make love’.
When you open yourself up to making love, you can be freed from the fears that plague you through the thoughts of lust and you can have sex without judgement. Sex without fear.
Lust and love combined can allow you to be free with a loving partner – a partner that you can trust and have faith in, and a willingness to explore. With that kind of partner, sex can be simply fantastic.
Therefore, are we to assume that making love with only lust in our eyes is far from lacking any emotional mutuality? For lust, it seems, stems from one another’s shared desire to “align intentions” until a sense of “deep rapport” is achieved. So, rather than lacking any “emotional mutuality”, instead, it appears to be the beginning of the feeling of empathy required on our journey towards love. Eat that Daniel Stern!
From this point of view, sexual desire and lust is a wonderful experience for us to go through. It keeps us alive. Lust gives us the courage to get up and get out, get moving and going along a path that to who knows where it will lead. Desire gets our minds thinking and our bodies shaking. Whereas love gives us strength, it helps us to be staunch in our efforts to change. Lust is in the mind. Love is in the heart. Neither of these sensations nor body parts need be separate. They simply need to merge without fear, guilt or anger being allowed to enter in.
Both lust and love can bring us peace and unity. Together they can bring us that spiritual enlightenment that we continually search for - that inner yearning to find ourselves complete. So, there really is no need to get naked with a stranger and tell them that they make you tingle in your most private of all parts, in order to find yourself.
We simply need to acknowledge what part lust plays in the game of love.
While we leave the subject of lust and love, I’ll give you something to remember that the Queen of the Bedroom (Madonna) has said in one of her songs …
“Don’t play with something you should cherish for life”
No prizes for guessing which album that was from! But it gives me the topic for the next blog (5C) in this series: What makes us fall ‘in love’. -
Think of me ...
Can anyone turn this into a song?
It's one of many that have been in hidden away in boxes for years ... I don't profess to be a poet or a songwriter (although I wish I was!), it doesn't rhyme, as it's more to do with sentiment behind the words. Hope you like it anyhow.
Think of me …
Think of the time I grace you with as a holiday
A sanctuary of solitude
Where you can unwind, unseal and undo
A refuge where the worries of the world pass by
Think of my body as an island
A shore of safety
Where you can escape, explore and enjoy
A coast that satisfies your innermost carnal desires
Think of my mind as a mirror
A silver screen
Where chaotic reality retreats, recoils and repents
A picture of images floating away in an ever flowing river of dreams
Think of my spirit as a crystal
A radiating gem
Where hope, healing and harmony abide
The essence where your soul can dance free and deny bitter lies
Think of these things I offer
As a natural gift
Where you can recharge, restore and ready yourself
For the battle you face outside of my garden
Think of the earthly enchantments
You discover
In the harbour of my arms
And I shall only ask of you …
Your sweet scent to breathe in
Your animal body beneath my skin
Your quiet, mindful presence deep within
2001 (c) Kaye Bewley -
Think ...
A blind girl hated herself because she was blind. She hated everyone, except her loving boyfriend. He was always there for her. She told her boyfriend, “If I could only see the world, I will marry you.”
One day, someone donated a pair of eyes to her. When the bandages came off, she was able to see everything, including her boyfriend. He asked her, “Now that you can see the world, will you marry me?”
The girl looked at her boyfriend and saw that he was blind.
The sight of his closed eyelids shocked her. She hadn't expected that. The thought of looking at them the rest of her life led her to refuse to marry him.
In tears, her boyfriend left her. Days later he wrote a note to her saying: “Take good care of your eyes, my dear, before they were yours, they were mine.”
Think
of someone who can't speak - before you say an unkind word
Of someone who has nothing to eat - before you complain about the taste of your food
of someone who's crying out for a companion - before you complain about your husband or wife
Of someone who went to early to heaven - before you complain about your life
Of someone who is unable to have children - before you complain about yours
Of the people who are living on the street - before you argue about your dirty house you don't want to clean or sweep
Of someone who walks miles on their feet - before whining about the distance you drive in your car
Of the unemployed, the disabled and those who wish they had a job – before you complain about yours
Before you think of pointing the finger or condemning another - remember that not one of us is without error
When depressing thoughts seem to get you down - put a smile on your face and thank God (or whoever/whatever you believe in) that you're alive and still around to make a contribution (however small) to this world
