In this episode, we are exploring the nuances of ‘crushing’ as a rite of passage along the journey of knowing thyself.

We break down the experience of desire as being first sweet and then bitter, as not being about the desired person but about the complexity of the person desiring, and as a journey that leads to self-growth rather than attainment.

Understanding the operation of desire facilitates self-realization and self-actualization.

Blessings/beannachtaí,

Sarah

Cover photo: The Rape of Europa, Titian.

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I swam in the sea. And it was exquisite. More pleasure. Finding the pleasure in my life while this upheaval takes place. This reconfiguration of identity. Deep in the quantum mud of the liminal, peaking and troughing like waves. Jellyfish undulating. Allowing that to move me, taking pleasure in it in fact. More pleasure, more pleasure, more pleasure.

I’m swimming in the liquid created by the total dissolution of the identity-body. I’m inside the chrysalis that contains the caterpillar soup. I am the soup—and it’s kind of gloopy. I like it but I didn’t like it before. Before, I resisted it. And it’s interesting now. I think that’s because I can observe myself there. Neutral, non-judgemental consciousness. No opinion. I am in between old and new and I cannot argue with what is. There’s not a more virtuous perspective to take. Right/wrong, good/bad—futile in matters of universal law. We die and we are born, on the subject of identity. That is fact. Might as well go along with it.

Back to pleasure. Why not attune to its presence in every moment? It’s possible and gratifying when we do so. Bliss is the fabric of life anyway. It’s only the density of the body that would tell you otherwise. What happens then? We break out of the mind cages that enclose self-perception. We stop identifying with the shitiness of whatever it is that we’re experiencing. The tether to ego-lens is cut.

That feels good. Very good lightness around my chest as I write that.

I think I’m starting to hear music again.

Sarah

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Blessings/beannachtaí,

Sarah

(Cover photo by Anton Bruehl).

All elements of Nature instinctively move toward equilibrium. Balance is energy efficient and life-sustaining. Like a tree that forms new bark around an infected area, all living organisms reorganise themselves to preserve their wellbeing. Conditions are adapted to as a means to create the greatest possible coherence given the conditions, enabling homeostasis within the organism.

Humans are no different. We adapt to our environments—our homes, cultures, economies, natural world, by assuming different traits of identity, belief systems, values and behaviours so as to thrive within the given ecosystem. Our life experience and degree of sensitivity determine the severity of the adaptation. Some traumas are bigger than others and require greater adaptation.

We adapt to survive when a distressing experience cannot be processed in the moment it takes place. These adaptations distance us from our true nature because they are compensating for a need gone unmet. Even though the adaptation is an intelligent survival strategy, the internal world is reorganising itself around the wound and not the authentic self.

The child who was left out of the game because there were “already too many people playing” may interpret the experience as an inherent flaw. Because he cannot see it as circumstantial, it is internalised as personal. The adaptation can look like the embedding of a belief that says it’s safer to keep to yourself and not risk rejection. The wound then becomes a force that is expressed as the unconscious pursuit of belonging and inclusion in every group they encounter. Likewise, the child whose artistic aspirations were laughed at for their fantastical nature may adapt with the suppression of their creativity and visionary ability. Indeed, this adaptation protects them from further ridicule but ultimately alienates them from a core part of themselves. They may continue to create but always remain within the confines of safety, throwing adventure and boldness to the wayside—becoming the shadow artist.

We compensate when our natural and instinctual expression comes into conflict with the conditions of our environment. When what’s instinctual rises in contrast with these conditions, we react in a way that reduces our discomfort and ensures love and acceptance. Something goes underground. These are trauma responses, wounds that want to be healed. We know they want to be healed as we unconsciously seek out environments and people for their familiarity because they reinforce our notion of identity, our beliefs, our values, and so on. We are pulled into reenactments of our trauma because experiencing it is the only way to heal and release it.

As children, adaptations and compensations are essential as our awareness is less than that of the adult, so we can honour and appreciate our beautiful childhood adaptations expressed through our personalities, struggles and joys. However as adults it is a different story as we now have more awareness of moments that trigger conflict and discomfort. We can orient to choice of response in challenging circumstances and environments. If we do not choose to acknowledge our agency in these moments, we end up adapting and compensating, willingly sacrificing a part of ourselves. But for what or for who? We are no longer vulnerable children.

If we do not bring awareness to the adaptations that shape our beliefs, values, behaviours and responses, our lives become governed by reaction.

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Response versus reaction:

Responding is intentional, mindful and elicits connection to yourself.

Reacting is automatic, fast and fuelled by unconscious patterns.

Why is this important? Let’s return to the analogy of the natural world. Nature wants to find equilibrium, but if the conditions are not there to support that, it will compensate in whatever way it can. If restoration is not possible, adaptation is the only suitable solution to imbalance. When the growth of a tree is hindered by a large rock, it doesn’t stop expressing its innate impulse to grow and flourish, but simply organises itself around the rock.

This same analogy can be applied to human behaviour. The nature of the human is also to find equilibrium. When we react to unpleasant feelings, thoughts and circumstances, we are experiencing a pendulum swing. We bypass balance because we are not taking the time to sit with what we are experiencing and choose how to integrate it and respond to it. Instead we react. As humans, the invitation is to become aware of and to consciously respond to uncomfortable circumstances so as to direct energy in a way that aligns with our perception of the highest good. If we do not take time to connect to ourselves in this crucial threshold, the sadness/frustration/resentment/anger/disappointment we feel gets directed somewhere unsavoury.

A simple example: when you have an argument with a loved one and she says something cruel that hurts your feelings, you want to react from this place of hurt by saying something that hurts her feelings in return. But you would likely regret this reaction in hindsight as your knee-jerk response is sourced from a place of insecurity and wounding. By reacting, you end up hurting both of you which is not conducive to restoring harmony within the relationship. A balanced response might look like taking a deep breath before replying, allowing the heightened emotion of the moment to be alchemized into a response that arises from greater self-awareness and wisdom.

The Pendulum Swing

The pendulum swing represents our movement from one extreme to another. We carry adaptations that once helped us survive but when we react from a wounded place, our energy is siphoned to maintain the existing pattern rather than to transform it. If we do not consciously direct the energy that arises (usually in the form of emotion), we swing back and forth, caught in the same feedback loop of reactivity, swinging past the fulcrum of inner peace and dissolving the potential for harmony and homeostasis.

The Conscious Conduit

Back and forth and back and forth until we finally realise that we are the one swinging the pendulum. Returning to centre begins with awareness. When we become aware in any given moment, we grant ourselves the ability to make conscious choice. We then become the conscious conduit, choosing how we want to respond to difficult circumstances in a way that nurtures harmony.

Essential here is understanding that we do not bypass emotion. Anger/upset/frustration are there to be felt and consciously expressed. The invitation is simply to notice it arising and channel it in a way that is not destructive to you or to another. We do not hold on to the emotion and suppress it—suppression is in essence reacting to a belief that maintains that self-expression or said emotion is bad. It is counterintuitive to suppress emotion and the body will simply compensate in the form of illness.

What if we could consciously direct the energy by sitting with the discomfort of conflict and digest it by addressing the feelings evoked and working with the nervous system to integrate change? What if we, rather than becoming overwhelmed by the excess of energy available to us, could channel it toward something that enables alchemy and breeds and nurtures balance?

When we react to discomfort, we create from discomfort. What we create from discomfort is rarely fruitful or peaceful. Each reaction pulls the pendulum toward another extreme. We may believe we have escaped the previous pattern, but we have merely swung to the opposite pole. Back and forth, back and forth, until we find our sovereign free will to wield outcomes.

The pendulum swing is tiring for the soul. The soul will be restless until equilibrium has been achieved and the original wound integrated. Adaptations need not outlive the conditions that required them. The tree doesn’t grow around a rock that has been removed.

Blessings/beannachtaí,

Sarah

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This is my first ever episode and it has been a long time coming. I can’t wait to see where we take it.

In this episode, we explore how the philosophy of desire (Eros) converges with the subconscious mind.

When desire is understood through this lens, it invites us to embrace suffering as a source of insight and to reflect on why certain hardships continue to emerge in our lives.

The subconscious mind contains the beliefs and paradigms that shape our perception of reality. By bringing these unconscious patterns into awareness, we create the conditions for them to dissolve, allowing us to consciously create anew.

This is a deep and sustainable manifestation ‘technique’, if you will, because it begins at the root of our being. Rather than attempting to change external circumstances alone, we transform the internal structures that are not coherent with our true nature. As these structures shift, our experience of reality naturally begins to transform in ways we could never have anticipated.

This episode delineates the theory. It is platform from which we leap as future episodes will go further into certain topics I touched on, such as:

• the nature of beliefs

• awareness as pattern disrupter

• the void of infinite potential/the creative unconscious

• the reenactment of trauma

• relationships as mirrors

Please leave a review, like or comment if these words in any way hit home.

Blessings/beannachtaí,

Sarah

The notion that we can expand our awareness is exciting to me. Why? Because in this moment we can become aware of our lack of awareness and this changes everything. We can look back and see how our self-awareness has expanded over the course of ours lives and assume that it will continue to. Further, when you engage with this notion, you grant yourself the means to consciously expand your awareness. And what does this do for the one who truly receives this information, not as concept, but as inner experience? It creates space within that renders fertile the mind and opens the heart. The child is called forth and the wisdom of lifetimes comes alive.

The expansion of consciousness does not know a final destination. It is an eternal journey because the soul is eternal. Perhaps life is like a series of arrivals and departures. This does not elicit fear in me but engages that part that yearns to embrace it all. I find grounding in the reality of impermanence. It asks for presence so that I may see, and awe so that I may indulge. What is sense perceptible (perceived through the five senses) is but the tip of the iceberg by comparison with all that lies beneath it. The feelers know this. The ones living neck-up struggle with this. We are infinite souls experiencing the finite. There is so much beyond what we think we know. That life is finite is exactly what makes it interesting. Indeed, we come to terms with our inherent limitedness when faced with our mortality, but don’t we also realise this with the confrontation of every other limit? Every dream not lived out, every word retained in fear, every challenge unmet? The feeling of stuckness, struggle, despair. A personalised combination.

These restrictions of the body and the mind. Through them we discover the boundaries of the finite, and in exploring them, we get glimpses of the Unlimited that feels just beyond our reach. The threshold between reach and grasp is the threshold of arousal.

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There are things I want to share with the world because I know there is a need to relate on topics that run deep, deep beyond the midnight zone of the heart. There are also things I want to share that test my boundaries. Some edges I meet and choose to not to challenge, and others I can cautiously move past to satiate my curiosity to know what lies beyond. Hold my hand as these edges reveal themselves. The fine architecture of sensitivity.

The abode of the heart. These words, sometimes the words don’t do it justice. For the ones that feel it all, you know it is hard to put language to a depth that somehow eludes language and linear forms of comprehension. I perceive in shapes and abstraction, so when the depth of the heart is in question, I can only translate it through metaphor or simile or movement. To convey how this thrumming body experiences the world, I could say it is like the raw, pulsing organ of the heart, moving from room to room, person to person, little to separate it from all that it encounters.

How people respond to me reveals this. My desires reveal this. The people I choose to have around me reveal this. The people who question my way of being reveal this. The mirror, the mirror. I look and all I see is a being that wants to love and be loved. The mirror reveals where I attempt to grasp for love that cannot be given. It has also shown me where my capacity for unconditional love is strong because I receive it from others coming toward me in cascades. Sometimes the love I give out ricochets back to me and knocks me out. Those ones hurt yet show me where I am seeking from a place of need and not taking from the oasis of love already within me.

This oasis of love. Where have I self-abandoned, looked for a saviour? Where in my romantic desiring life have I given from a place of needing? There have been a handful of times, many times maybe. I look at the part-takers, co-creators in great moments of intimacy and what hurts is letting die the fantasy of them. Them, as a symbol. Them, as a face associated with what I created. I am the portal from which the intimacy emerges.

When you have gone deep into the depth of your ocean, deeper than they have gone into their own, in you, they encounter something new. What they experience in this encounter is new inner-territory that they have not yet explored. It is unknown, cast in shadow, an abyss waiting to meet the sun. It will be embraced or it will be violently evaded. They will allow themselves to be taken by the current as it meets yours, or they will seek a return to the land of predictability and shelter. They go forth, a question left unanswered, the unresolved residue of adventure lingering in their subconscious mind.

Oh but the digestion of this requires resources that can only be found within. Discovering them, we uncover a knew layer to sovereignty and unconditional self-love. When you realise that the hurt is written on the manuscript of your soul, carrying messages that speak to your love, your sight, your creativity, your courage, you cannot but see how you chose the hurt because your truest and highest Beingness is unconditional self-love. Your pain is your invitation. Indeed, each of these encounters was a catalyst for the fruition of your greatest becoming.

To become that. Is this not what we seek?

I long and I learn and I do not condemn desire. Because each desirable thing is a vocalisation of the soul’s yearning to be fully incarnated. Calling your attention back home. It is true. Every time I realise this, love bubbles up from deep within and I am in love. And the image in my mind’s eye? Nothing and everything all at once. And the direction it takes? All of them.

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What repeats in life is not random. It is generated from the structure that informs our perception of the world—the subconscious mind. And what exactly determines the content of the subconscious mind? Conditions and programmes that were instilled in us, usually in the early years of our lives, as we moved through various institutions such as family, education systems, religious or spiritual contexts, societal structures, and so on.

As we move through life, what we believe about ourselves and the world shapes what we experience, becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Many of us are not aware that our reality is a direct projection of our consciousness, and we therefore accept our reality and who we are as absolute truths. This is who I am, and this is simply how the world is.

I am not saying that we see ourselves and the world in a purely negative light, no. But more than likely, we hold beliefs, including positive ones, that shape our perception, and this perception is inherently limiting. In fact, all beliefs are limiting because they filter our reality into conclusions, leaving little room for exploration and fluidity. We are constantly evolving and learning through direct experience with the world. When we conclude that the world is a certain way, or construct a belief around who we are, we are ultimately restricting experience. We close off to all that there is to be discovered in the moment. Our curiosity becomes stifled.

The goal is to become more self-aware so that we can embody more of who we actually are. A doorway into discovering who we truly are is identifying what is repeating in our lives to our dissatisfaction. All that repeats stems from a function running in the subconscious mind, and it has a root. When we identify the pattern, we disrupt the function and create the opportunity to uncover the root. When we uncover the root, we see clearly the belief that created the perfect conditions for the pattern to thrive.

THE PATTERN

What is it that repeats? The same intrusive thought? The same unpleasant emotion? A repeating circumstance? All of these tell us something about the bank of limiting beliefs stored in the subconscious mind. There can be many iterations of the same core belief. For example, you may hold the belief that you are not worthy of love. This can show up in your external reality as ending up in relationships where your partner cannot meet your needs in some way—they are not present with your feelings or you constantly feel under-appreciated. It can also show up as a manifestation of an inability to meet your own needs in how you present yourself physically—not believing it worthwhile spending money on beauty products or never booking yourself a holiday for the sake of pleasure.

Every experience, be it as an internal thought or emotion, or external circumstances can be traced back to a root that gives momentum to it. Once you go looking, you cannot unsee, because once the pattern in mapped, the core belief can be revealed.

THE CORE BELIEF

Your set of core beliefs is what stabilises your whole reality. Once we become acquainted with them, their power dissipates, and render ourselves capable of creating something different. This is the reason we venture into the subconscious. We are frustrated, exhausted, or confused by what seems to repeat on a loop. The objective, then, is to dislodge what is misaligned with our true selves from the subconscious. By becoming conscious of what was otherwise unconscious, we can see how the belief filtered into our reality, our thoughts, behaviours, and circumstances. We can see how we were unconsciously perpetrating our own suffering. Knowing this, we can extend compassion to ourselves, for the content of the subconscious mind is arranged in such a way as to protect us and equip us with beliefs that make the world liveable, as is essential when we are vulnerable, impressionable children.

Now, as adults responsible for ourselves and necessarily accountable for our lives, we have the opportunity to expand our awareness so that we may experience ourselves as we actually are at our core. We can see how we have adapted to what is no longer a threat and choose otherwise, transcending limiting frameworks and activating dormant parts of self.

WELCOME TO THE VOID

Once the limiting belief has been conquered, fertile ground for creating anew emerges. This fertile ground or void is an extremely impressionable place. The intention you set and action you take determine what manifests thereafter.

The void is structureless. There is no direction here. This is why intention, embodiment and aligned action are important in creating the new. But this is not about setting a new belief, it is about listening to the lower wisdom centres of the body as the compass pointing you in the right direction.

Listening to the body puts us in touch with the most expansive path we can take. It communicates what feels comfortable, uncomfortable, and all that is in between. It distinguishes our edges and tells us if those edges can be met and transcended. The body must be the guide because the nervous system will not be able to contain the desired manifestation if it is not primed for it. And what feels good can make itself known in the body before the mind can understand why. In fact, perhaps the reason will always elude the mind.

Undoing limiting beliefs is not about replacing them with other more positive beliefs. It is about journeying from the mind as the captain of the ship to the whole body as a unified guidance system. The signals are constant. All we have to be is present and willing to listen.

To rely on the mind as the ultimate source of guidance is to limit our capacity to create the life we want. This is why we do this work. We want to look at what is playing out in our lives against our best interest and journey into our abundant intelligence beyond the desires of the conscious mind.

When the core limiting belief is witnessed, intention, embodiment, and aligned action are essential for creating the structure for what is to come. Drawing from the infinite void of possibility, we design what comes next, and our guide is the ‘yes’ resounding deep within. Over time, the quiet whispers of guidance can become gospel choirs, singing us into the life we desire.

A gentle disclaimer: it is likely that reality will not immediately exhibit proof that the work has been done. We must therefore remain steadfast in our trust and not resort to what is familiar.

It is a deep, deep process. A process of becoming more attuned to the body and more refined in our awareness.

Blessings on your journey of self-discovery xxx

Breaking rules is essential to realizing your dreams. These rules can be explicit, put forward by the institutions of our society, such as laws and regulations, or implicit, such as social, behavioural, or familial norms and standards. We unconsciously internalize these which shape our sense of self and our perception of the world. This, in turn, determines our values and moral framework. It forms the paradigms in which we exist, a structured system of programmes that dictate the beliefs we hold and give rise to patterns of thought, emotion, and behaviour.

Early in life, we are most impressionable. This is when programmes most significantly embed themselves. The life journey then becomes one of returning to a place of openness and neutrality, the time before the body and mind absorbed messages coming from outside of itself, messages that alienated us from the knowing of being unconditionally loved by the Creator, from our purpose on the planet, and from our unbreakable connection to Source. The child is forged into something he is not. He must realize that that programming is a rite of passage of being born into a society built on social and moral frameworks. He must realize this in order to remember his original nature.

Essential to the child’s remembering of his divinity is fostering a robust and intimate connection with the communication of the body and the unconscious mind. The child becomes estranged from both as family and cultural institutions try to instil the ‘superior’ value of their logic over his intuition. For example, at a certain point during childhood, imagination and play begin to be discouraged as the child must learn to become useful to society, or how I like to see it—a cog in the normative, homogeneity-perpetuating machine. He must learn to become a well-functioning adult who contributes to society in a ‘valuable’ way. But ‘value’ is not fixed; it is constructed and enforced by the very institutions that benefit from it, making it inherently subjective.

Consider those who have been labelled as different have unsettled various institutions over time: LGBTQ+ individuals within religious spaces, neurodivergent people within educational systems, and spiritually attuned or highly sensitive children within environments that fail to recognise or understand their way of experiencing the world, and so on. Being his unique self, following his internal guidance system, or honouring and enjoying his connection to unseen realms are often discouraged by those who remain unaware of their own conditioning in order to preserve the status quo. Compliance is rewarded, and the child learns to associate love and belonging with adherence to rules.

Breaking rules is the very tool needed to disrupt the pattern of amnesia (the forgetting of one’s true essence). The pattern is so deeply embedded and multifaceted that it must first be recognized that one is programmed in order to deprogramme. Once this first step is taken, an ongoing spiral commences, whose purpose is to unite you with the divine self. It reveals where you have been fragmented by programmes, inviting you into painful situations so that you may see more clearly what is congruent with the highest version of you and what is not. It heightens your sensitivity so that you may become more attuned to the body. It tests your faith in the Unseen as having a divine plan for you. It catapults you toward your greatest fears that dwell in the darkest depths of your being, so that you may understand yourself more deeply.

How do we know what rules to break?

We will come up against myriad structural limitations as we move through life. The ones that call to be challenged are the one’s that you feel limited by, the one’s that want to dim the fire of your passion and lust for life. Crossing this threshold opens you up to a space of infinite possibility, where all of your hopes and dreams can be realised, including those you’re not yet aware of.

A lot of the time we are unaware of the structures we hold within that shape our perception of ourself and the world. However, it is within the architecture of the subconscious mind that we may discover the programmes that were embedded in the early stages of life or passed on ancestrally, so that we can reconfigure them to create anew.

Part II will explore ways we can identify structural limitations that have eluded our consciousness until now.

Blessings xx

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I am a qualified sex educator, but the most illuminating things I’ve learned in the realm of sexuality have come from being curious and unafraid to get lost in my own quest to discover my sexuality, truly. I’ve had an array of experiences that have led me to this point in my life: until recently, I was celibate for a year and a half, and a year and a half before that, I was celibate for the previous year. How I’ve arrived here is a story with many chapters, perhaps a story for another day, but the reason I share any of this at all is to open up a conversation around sexuality that I feel isn’t being had.

Sex is far from straightforward. It is a conversation happening implicitly between two entire bodies, minds, and hearts, each carrying their own stories, wounds, and desires. I think we forget this. We’ve adopted a blasé attitude toward it. I see this as a kind of collective expression of an avoidant attachment style. To use the word ‘sacred’ might be alienating to those who are not spiritually inclined, but how can we not consider it something intrinsically special, far beyond the mundane, when it is the very act that brings humans into the world? I hesitate, aware it may sound ascetic or devoutly Catholic, two things I am not (it is far too late to be saving myself for marriage). However, if we are to relate to sex with this level of reverence, coming into right relationship with something as ubiquitous, desired, and complex as sex requires first cultivating a deep intimacy with yourself.

Over the years, I’ve come to an embodied understanding of desire in the realm of sexuality—why we want sex and how we want it, and how the state of mind from which we are desiring reflects what’s going on in our deepest depths. Since I’ve been sexually active, I have had genuine emotional connections that involved sex, drunken ‘casual’ sex, and some not-so-pleasant encounters. I began to notice the states of mind that preceded each, and saw that my desire for sex was often a compensation for something unfulfilled inside me, masked as desire. Drawing on poet, Anne Carson’s theory of desire, desire entails a kind of metaphoric ‘reaching out’ from oneself—to claim something that feels missing. This awareness shifted the way I relate to desire entirely. It became less about the act or the other person, and more about understanding the part within me that was calling for attention, nourishment, or integration.

Here’s the point—we have a collective desperate need for intimacy, and we mistake this desire as something that can be satisfied by hooking up with someone in one way or another. Before I go on, let’s be clear: yes, sex is intimate in the sense that it involves two naked bodies coming together, but the intimacy I’m referring to here is something that precedes the removal of any clothes. It is emotional, sober, and felt as safety within the body. Our society is largely devoid of this kind of intimacy—we sexualise touch, struggle to look each other in the eye, and repress emotion for myriad reasons spanning the scope of internalised masculine and feminine roles. We experience our sexuality under the covers with a bright screen in our faces or when intoxicated, and so on. It’s no wonder we struggle to truly connect with one another because we have become estranged from our own capacity for intimacy within ourselves.

Personally, this ‘reaching out’, or desire for sex, signified a lack of physical intimacy in my life, not necessarily sexual intimacy. I come from a family that hugs a lot and I have always had friends like this too, but I realise I have a large cup to fill and that this cup also wants to pour into others. I have learned this along the way. So, in searching for this depth of connection through various sexual experiences, I often felt as though I was abandoning a part of myself. My desire to be touched would take the driver’s seat, leading me towards people with whom I didn’t feel emotionally safe or deeply connected beyond physical chemistry, sometimes even that was absent. What is reflected here is self-abandonment and a lack of self-awareness, as I somewhat desperately attempted to reclaim a missing fragment of myself. However, I’m not sharing this from a place of shame nor am I judging these past versions of myself. I did what felt right at the time, and I believe this is how it should be for everyone. Sexuality is a portal to self-realisation—one that I believe everyone must move through in their own way. I would not be where I am today had I not trusted myself then. If I hadn’t tried to tend to my own fire by seeking warmth in others, I wouldn’t have learned to view desire as a mirror. I wouldn’t have learned that retracting my energy serves to strengthen intimacy with myself. All of this is to say that the abundant, thriving relationship I now have with my sexuality was born from embracing the turbulence along the way.

The only thing that appeals to me at this stage in the evolution of my sexuality is to be met at the depth of my whole person. My relationship with myself is deeply intimate, and it has required sitting with my wounds so that I could cultivate the kind of connection I once sought outside of myself. Fulfilment in intimacy begins within. When it is consistently outsourced we become susceptible to suffering because when it is taken away, who holds you?

A deeply intimate relationship with yourself means you can hold yourself no matter what, because that is the baseline. There is no self-abandonment, nor self-victimisation. From this place of embodied love, inviting another in is both beautiful and deeply satisfying.

The intimacy you seek is available to you, but the only way to truly experience its depth is by being willing to get to know yourself. We might start by considering why you want what you want.

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Really, truly looking at yourself can be daunting. It can open you up to confusion, despair, sadness—not such pleasant things. But you see, if we do not decide to go outside of our comfort zone, to traverse untouched territory within, to become an explorer of our own inner landscape and to be open to all that we discover, we will not ever really, truly know ourselves and how beautiful we are. And we will not know the beauty of the world, hence. The most courageous people I know do not stick their head in the sand in the face of adversity and turmoil within or without. They go toward it with curiosity and an open heart, ready for a dose of reality as they know they are strong enough as they are not afraid to feel.

Many will read this, read the words, and not attain the true meaning. Many will say ‘yes, I am courageous and sovereign’ and yet blame others for their sorrow. Many will dislike components of their reality and point the finger anywhere but toward themselves. And it is those who remain enslaved to the system and they do not even know it.

I have written about your beauty, not in the name of love and light, no. Not trying to convince you that you’re beautiful as though my words can make you believe. Meaningless, pointless. Realistically, beauty is subjective and the beauty I see in you says more about me. You are beautiful but what I mean when I say that is that the Holy Spirit lives within you and that there is a divine design to your life. And you have a choice—an important one—that says you can either experience yourself as beautiful or not, but choose wisely because that choice determines how you experience yourself in the world. And if you do not know: of the 8 billion people on this planet, your journey gets its own unique colours, contours and flavours because you are a unique expression of God-consciousness and there is literally no one like you. What’s more is that you get to co-create with God. No, we do not have free will, but the will of God is that you experience the bliss that you seek. So relax and let joy guide you—that’s your part to play! How can we not indulge this fact by living on the razor’s edge of life, boldly being and doing all that makes your heart sing? How can we not fuck around and find out in a way that is meaningful to us?

If ever there was a time to unplug from the machine, it is now. For thousands of years, we have been on autopilot, allowing ourselves to be manipulated by the artificial forces on the divine video game. It is time to take back the power that we have unconsciously given away. The deep joy and fulfilment we seek is within our grasp but we must first choose to accept that.

I cried and it moved because it was never mine and if only we could all feel our feelings then maybe the world would be a less violent place.

You drew me in, I faced it, the thing I didn’t even know I didn’t want to face, and it hurt. It fucking hurt. But I understand. You did it out of love.

God, you are so God-like, eros. Drawing me into that thing that is pretending to be something nice only to reveal it as a lesson to learn and integrate.

You are God-like because you are God because all desiring urges are expressions of God and I only want to merge with God, I realise. That’s why I came here and that’s why I try to remember as much as I can.

And I know this is your objective—eroticising my trauma so that I go toward it instead of away from it. So that I can excavate its residue that weighs me down so that I fly, light, light, so light.

All part of the great plan to purify me. To activate my Ka body. I see!

Ah yes, this liminal, ambivalent life infused with eroticism which is absolutely intentional and euphoric, it would seem.

It began with a nap after work. I woke up devastated, with a knowing that things were about to change, that some sort of goodbye was pending. In my body I felt both a refusal to budge and an acceptance, because this body knew change must be allowed, regardless of how hard that letting go might be.

I felt it beginning, and I began mourning—truly grieving something I could not quite put my finger on. I tried to understand it by looking to my external reality, assessing what appeared not to be working, hoping for answers that would satisfy a curious mind and soothe a feeling of unease. I cried on the bus, on the phone, in cafés, at work. My body was releasing, and I have learned to bow to the body when what is there demands to be felt. I have learned to embrace the vulnerability of feeling helpless. I have also learned to witness the intrusion of unkind thoughts that say I shouldn’t express these emotions, especially in public, and especially at work.

I guess the death, gestation, and rebirth period took about six weeks. It’s strange to put a timeline on it, but that nap seems to have marked a turning point in my life. Now I find myself at another pivotal moment, able to see more clearly what has occurred and to feel how things have changed over this six-week-ish period. As I sensed when my death began after that nap, what was unfolding was a death of identity: a violent shedding. And I found myself again in the liminal space where the discomfort of dissolution and decomposition occurs—prerequisites to a rebirth.

This kind of death is, in fact, an indicator that a new self is preparing to come in. It is necessary, because if things were to stay the same, our expansion into our fullest potential would not be possible. When we do not allow it, oldness burdens us, whether we are aware of it or not. We feel sadness, get stuck in fantasy, grow frustrated, fall into victimhood, and so on, because we cling to what is no longer us. Self-induced suffering born of a fear of the unknown.

We do not know what lies on the other side of death, and that is why we must trust in the divinity of Nature. We must remember that life and death are fundamental and inevitable in this existence. We must let go of the old self just as we must, one day, submit to leaving our bodies.

As I describe this death, I realise that the death-and-rebirth process can only ever be spoken in abstraction. It can only be told through metaphor, because we are dying and being reborn in every moment, on every level of human existence—the death of cells in the body, the rewiring of beliefs and the relinquishing of old ones, the transmutation of emotion, the ending of relationships, the expansion of consciousness, the soul’s transition from the physical body into another plane of reality. Death is omnipresent in our lives, and no single death is separate from another. A death in one area of life signals a total rebirth. And it is happening all the time.

I was going to say ‘manage longing’ but that felt very wrong. It is absolutely not about managing longing—longing cannot be told what to do and it doesn’t care much to suppress its potency as a vital force in our lives. Desire is aware of its power so to try and dominate desire is to self-destruct, to blur the path, to live in fear, dare I say. To allow longing, omitting suffering, to flow with it, pleasantly, is to not put it in a box, label it, and pop it on our shelf for later analysis. It is far too strong a force to be squeezed between filofaxes. You’re popping the desired thing on the shelf along with all of your little and big wounds around relating: your attachment styles, your not-always-so-wholesome self-perception, your unique idea of the world in all its colours and textures and flavours. How do we feel about that? Feels quite brutal to me, the shelfing. Because does desire not reveal the divinity of our wounding? Does desire not code the threshold where ugliness bears fruit? Is desire not your strongest communicator and most exciting friend with whom you’ve embarked on every adventure? Joy! Desire is loyal. Desire is steadfast. Desire is life-force—going nowhere.

I’m getting more friendly with desire. More aware and more embodied in my divine longing. More at peace navigating this unpredictable energy. Unpredictable because it has surprised me a lot recently. What I desire, how it suddenly shifts and takes new form, how it incites death, dissolution and rebirth, how it tries to throw me off-balance, succeeds and turns out to be the best thing for me, how it always seems to work in tandem with my own personal evolution in consciousness, how it seems to form the undercurrent for all action I take, revealing insight that nudges me (sometimes roughly) back into alignment, or revealing insight by whispering softly, gently, and still I hear.

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The Triangle

When we desire, a fragmentation of the self occurs, as desiring something is predicated upon the notion that we do not have it. We seek to fulfil something that feels like a missing part of self. A reaching out occurs. We look to fill a void. We can understand this concept if we understand that desire is triangulated.

Desire has three points and if any one of the points disappears, so does desire itself. Let me explain: you are the subject—the experiencer of life—the first point of the triangle. The object, the second point, symbolizes what is experienced as wanted, introducing separation from the object and the notion of lack. The third point represents the psychological, physical, emotional, or spiritual distance between you and the object. This distance is the threshold that sustains desire—the space in which longing, imagination, and projection arise. It is the arena in which your curiosity is stimulated.

Desiring the Other

Possessing the object eradicates longing as we cannot desire what we already have or know. If there is no unknown, eros is vanquished as eros is founded upon mystery. The lack of eros in long-term relationships is one of the reasons for why we see their failure: as intimacy increases, eroticism often wanes. Sustaining eroticism when you know your partner inside and out becomes a conscious pursuit requiring intention and attention. Eroticism must be consciously cultivated if desire is to thrive and this is done by means of disrupting familiarity. Things like shaking up daily routines, adding novelty to date-night, changing sex position and/or spending time together in a new setting can suffice to bring new dimensions of romance into the relationship and facilitate eroticism. Similarly, when we develop a crush and indulge the desire by going on a date or hooking up, the erotic tension often dissolves. You may discover that it was not the person themselves who generated the excitement, but the unknown territory they rendered alluring.

Embracing the Triangle

Once the threshold of the third point is mapped, erotic tension loses its charge. That is to say that desire is predicated upon the unknown, and as more is revealed to us, either about the other person or ourselves, intrigue may dwindle. Understanding the mechanics of desire can enhance the desire between two individuals or it can be a tool for inner-illumination—it depends on the intention held. In essence, desire functions as a triangle across all dimensions of our longing lives, and once embraced as such, we may become acquainted with a vitality that resembles ecstasy. However, when we experience desire without awareness of how it functions, we can easily fall victim to its destabilising nature.

Unresolved longing is not an issue but harm can come from the condemnation of desire. When you see an unappealing version of yourself reflected in the absence of the desired relationship, it is an invitation to withdraw your gaze from the other and turn inward. Often we carry embarrassment or shame around unfulfilled desire for another.

We must come to terms with the fact that desiring is not shameful—desire is meant to be felt and experienced in its totality. In fact, limerence can serve to eradicate any lingering shame that we may carry around longing by means of feeling all that it evokes. But we must be willing to feel. Allowing yourself to meet the depths of the shame you hold is a necessary prerequisite to releasing it. Desire is meant to be revered as a tool for inner-illumination whereby we learn more about ourselves and what we want from our lives. It is meant to enrich our humanly experience—not induce suffering.

Allowing yourself to desire is a testament to your own open-heartedness and to your courage: by experiencing limerence, you are holding space for the beautiful thing that it is to envision a partnership in its highest expression while also courageously holding space for the grief that ensues from not being able to realise it with that person.

The more you can love the pain of longing, the greater your capacity for absolute joy and passion in your life.

Limerence part I

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Limerence, a term coined by Dorothy Tennov, refers to an intense state of romantic longing for another. It is marked by idealisation, projection, a heightened sensitivity to ambiguity, and emotional dependency on signs of reciprocation. It is far more complex than ‘unrequited love’ as the foundational premise of limerence is desire which is inherently ambivalent and exists in the liminal space, the unknown. When it comes to desire without gratification, the feeling of longing becomes intensified because it is not grounded in embodiment – true feelings are not openly shared, even if they are mutual, and desire is not expressed in the physicality of the bodies.

Limerence is painful because it would not exist if not for the absence of expressed reciprocation. What limerence feeds on is desire when it is blocked; it thrives where desire meets obstruction, not where there is an absence of mutual longing. In some cases, pure rejection diminishes desire. In other cases, rejection maintains limerence because the intuitive knowing is felt that even rejection may not convey the truth of the feeling the other carries.

You may yearn for the other and feel that they yearn for you too. This is especially true for those with strong intuition. You can feel that they experience desire for you but for whatever reason, do not act on it. It gives you a feeling of being left suspended a foot above the ground. The feeling of ‘almost’ landing is intoxicating. The psyche tells you that you are close and the nervous system is left in a state of anticipatory arousal. The imagination becomes activated, taking every route possible to figure out how to land, searching for signs from the other than landing in imminent. Dopamine levels stay elevated in expectation of reprieve. The feelings of disempowerment and vulnerability are painful for landing feels wholly dependent on the actions of the other. Desire presents its dual nature as addictive, bearing ecstasy and pain all at once. Destabilizing at its core.

A distinguishing factor between limerence and love is that limerence is not founded on desire for union. Desire often dies once consummation occurs. Desire simply wants to be embodied and the mind wants permission for desire to land. Once embodied, the fantasy collapses and desire is diminished. We become infatuated with our projection, our idea of the other. But it is not the other that we want, it is our idea of them. We obsess with what ‘could be’. That’s not to say that all that we experience of them is false, but rather, the build-up of erotic energy with no outlet for expression rises to the mind where we create an idea of how it might be. But that is it: it is a creation of the mind.

Limerence is desire felt, mirrored yet perpetually deferred. The other becomes the carrier of eros – a symbol, rather than a person. It is struggle without release, a grasping toward something with no promise of attainment. Suffering ensues until this energy is redirected back toward oneself and you rediscover your sovereign centre where desire can be witnessed and healthily embodied via myriad other avenues, which we will explore in subsequent essays.

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Eros and Antinomian Behaviour

Eros and antinomian behaviour are fundamental to many branches of tantra. Eros is the indwelling energy of the feminine face of God in our bodies (also known as kundalini energy) that wants to unite us with the masculine face of God that resides above our head. Eros is the energy of soulful passion, driving you toward your highest and truest potential. Antinomian behaviour is behaviour that transgresses rules and norms. When you break rules and challenge norms in the name of soulful passion, you are engaging the energy of eros. However, staying small for fear of the consequences you might suffer, essentially quells the potential of realising your dreams.

Breaking rules because you have a deep desire to be who you truly are is profoundly sacred work. And this work can be as simple as marrying someone your family disapproves of; quitting your job even though it pays well and ticks many but not all boxes; changing career path even though you don’t know if you’ll make a living’ from the one you truly want to pursue; refusing to people-please, and so on.

By transgressing rules and norms (antinomianism) in the name of love (eros), you manage to transcend frameworks, thereby filling you with a sense of empowerment not previously known. Going beyond these boundaries and structural limitations leads you to a realm of pure potential and freedom where everything that is in alignment with your highest potential can manifest. It is a path driven by uninhibited soulful passion and requires embracing the unpredictable and a feeling of unsafety.

Following soulful passion entails confronting structures that, by design, limit you. Overcoming the structurally imposed limits, while often uncomfortable, sends you deeper into fulfilment where you may witness limitations burning away. And just like that, you become the orchestrator of your own life.

Drawing on Theory from Georges Bataille.

The dance between homogeneity and heterogeneity has been a recurring theme throughout my life. It depicts the contrast between the 'predictable' and 'everything that lies beyond it'. When we talk about homogeneity, we are talking about the rational, logical nature of the field in which we play physical reality. It is the arena of work, social norms and productivity. The heterogeneous, on the other hand, is all that which challenges frameworks and appears beyond logic. It is engaged through ecstatic, erotic, and overwhelming experiences i.e. sex, death/violence and spiritual experience. The heterogeneous denotes a ‘wasteful expenditure of energy’, as perceived from the logical, rational point-of-view. However, this expenditure of energy is a necessary component to challenge social structures and frameworks that keep human beings limited as cogs in a machine of social order, maintaining the status quo.

Real Life Integration of this Theory

Ecstatic and erotic experiences can be seen as profound moments of bliss. They are not limited to sexual encounters or overtly spiritual experiences; rather, they arise whenever something captivates you so completely that you feel weightless, as if you could take off and fly. In other words, when your erotic energy (eros) is stimulated. This stimulation is what Bataille would describe as a ‘wasteful expenditure of energy’.

You have a dream, yet you live within a society built on frameworks—different institutions like family, education, law, religion, and the economy each impose their own sets of norms and expectations. Within this structure, your dream may either fit neatly into the mould, causing little disruption and disappointing no one, or it may create friction, stir chaos, and leave more than a few people in your life unsettled. To realise our truest dreams, we must learn to see beyond these socially constructed frameworks. This often requires a deep faith in the unseen—a belief that precedes sight. Sometimes we know exactly what our dream looks like; other times, we are simply following a feeling, drawn toward an unknown destination. Regardless, there is always a fire in our belly or a voice in our mind urging us forward, beyond what logic can explain. It is our internal guidance system, leading us toward our highest timeline. When you notice that inner signal growing louder, it's a sign that you are closing in on your bliss.

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Sometimes I find myself addicted to timeline collapse and manifestation, simply because it’s cool to witness your innate power to shape reality unfold right before your eyes. But I believe the addictive quality comes from the doing side of manifestation. And when you get caught up in the doing, you begin to wait in expectation for your physical reality to prove (instantly) that you’ve taken action. You start craving the dopamine hit you get with the confirmation that your action has worked. (Enter despair when it does not.)

Yet the essential component of manifesting your highest and greatest timeline is not in the doing, but in stillness—in the being aspect. As we move into the new Earth, the way we create our lives has shifted. The states of allowing and receptivity have become the true foundation for creation. There is no efforting, no urgency—only trust in the divine design of our lives. Indeed, we can become aware of where we direct our attention and consciously hold our intention, but we then must submit to the loving authority of the divine to take care of the rest. And we need not fear, for everything is exactly as it’s supposed to be: God always catches us.

Only when an action has been taken, the intention set as to what you want to create, and attention wisely oriented, can the desire really anchor in. Waiting with bated breath, eager and unsettled, repels that which you seek. Reacting to the lack of confirmation (as proof that you have done the work) by falling back into the old version of yourself, is an assault on the soul and stalls your evolution. You must be steadfast in the unknown. Get comfortable in the abyss. It is from the darkness that the new emerges. And is it not the new that we seek?

Maybe the impulse to seek confirmation in the physical world is not about manifestation at all, but about the body’s search for dopamine in a dysregulated state. If this is true then I feel called to become an even stronger sacred witness to the discombobulating effects desire can have on the body. To find peace in resisting the demands of the body. To love the body more in its feeling of need and lack and want.

I, thus, vow to hold the intention of highest timeline for myself and all of humanity. I devote myself to meeting the world in unconditional love and I forgive myself for the times that I do not. I take action when I feel the hit of intuition to do so, and I surrender to the divine orchestration of all of this Earthly creation in taking care of the rest.

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It is the emptiness that ensues the ending of all things. It is the collapse of structure, the destruction of paradigm, essentially your death. Pivotal is this threshold as it holds the potential for designing what comes next—your creation. The intention you hold and the sharpness of your awareness are the foundations for structures created thereafter—the new patterns that stabilize based on the beliefs that you hold.

The kind of freedom I refer to here is not the kind that is characterized by good feelings, sensations, direction and certainty. It does not necessarily feel like being connected to oneself. Rather, it can incite a feeling of instability that only those committed to being the sacred witness to one’s own path can withstand. And if one crumbles in the void, the opportune freedom is vanquished.

Freedom is found in emptiness, for total dissolution is essential to creating the new. Your rebirth, your reconstruction into that which ignites inspiration within you—your eros—rests entirely on your own shoulders. This is where we can either embrace the responsibility of our own lives, become sovereign and empowered, or we can outsource our power and fall back into the old and restrictive, yet comfortable. The former requires steadfastness while experiencing discomfort; it requires faith and responsibility. The latter denotes a clinging to comfort (which is transient), certainty (which is illusory), and a disempowered version of oneself (which is unappealing).

Freedom endures, born from the essence of our unfixed and ever-shifting consciousness. It can be called upon anytime. It lives perpetually within.

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