SEXUAL RESPONSE DOES NOT LEAD TO CONSENT

Countless articles on google, scientific studies too on sexual response and consent. A lot written about sexual assault and arousal, i’m not making this up, but I am wanting to really show the link to how important this fact is in a world where ‘we’… and I say ‘we’…. because there’s probably no one reading this that doesn’t want the world to heal… and for the world to heal means everyone is included in that healing process. No man left behind, although there are always leaders that start the movements.

In the new age realm of sexuality there’s an underpinning issue being brought up. I personally know of some hidden tantra groups for women traumatized in the tantra world by men, where they get to speak their truth.

This to me is a sign of a bigger problem, it lays around sexual response and consent. Also comes from power dynamics too. Typically polarity related if you understand that. +/-, dom/sub, masculine/feminine or what have(i’ll also include people that start moving into the tantra realm, even if you don’t realize it, you’re playing with power that can overpower the brain, but this is any power dynamic… teacher/student, police officer and girl in convertible, lawyer, therapist, shaman, fuck the list goes on)… When we have a power dynamic sexual response can overpower the conscious brain.

I mean we can’t help when we are horny. But then is it still the same consent if we are acting from the mind of our primal urges rather than the mind of consent. We start getting into a grey area. I want to sit in the black and white area.

I don’t want to step on anyone’s toes as i carve my path. But that doesn’t mean I won’t make mistakes as I learn. We all do, shit happens, but i’d rather bring the white elephant to the table and lay it out for people to keep in the front of their brain.

So as we move forward, lets start to pave a new paradigm. Inclusive to every ones bliss, to every ones safety, even those that think and act a lot different than you might around sexuality. Because everyone deserves the bliss that you might find.

Change through growth: SHADOW WORK FACILITATOR TRAINING

Wow, 4 days into the teaching, without digging into my own shit. My shit is surfacing. It’s a comfortable realm for me, learning, growing evolving. My brain is expanding through pushing boundaries.

A week ago I stepped off a plane, rented a Van and have been camping around Maui ever since. This trip was different than my last, more of a sense of purpose. Digging deeper into my own ability to self reflect and educate what I’ve already learned through my own search for….. well i don’t really have an answer for what I was searching for in the first place. Being as rad as I can? I’m sure biology and evolution have pushed me this far. Situations in life has opened me up this much as well.

So i’m glad to learn these tools to facilitate in this realm, it’s a hard realm for me to learn about because I want people to make self realizations on their own. I guess that’s why i’m here.

On that note, I am making my own. Today it started with the lover piece. We are all born in lover, it’s just natural, I’ll add a picture later. We evolve from that, men typically get forced into ‘being a man.’ Which has some good qualities but also some bad.

Women are better at maintaining that lover quality. Lover inherently needs safety. I’m going to use this piece when we start working ourselves through our own processes for practice.

Safety is stillness, staying the same, conservative. I have however managed to create safety in my little monkey mind through change, through evolving, through moving. And i don’t mean some yoga exercises. My safety comes from living in over 30 places in my life, riding my motorcycle across the country, living and moving around in a motor home, starting an eco-village, getting a pilot license, becoming an electrician, learning and practicing in the realms of bdsm, then into tantra/sex magic, starting a company, working in Iraq, getting into renewables, now learning to facilitate in Shadow Work, the list goes on, I thrive on not just movement, but my movement has me getting into realms the aren’t all in alignment(ie yoga, meditation, kundalini yoga, tantra) those feel like safety for me, falling back on a backbone of spirituality. I find i can get even more if I step out of what’s normal for me, reading books was a challenge but i’ve overcome that hurdle. And yes, at times a shitload of yoga.

But herein lies a key to my reality that i must look into. If the lover desires safety, and i offer change and evolution, i’m inherently at a subconscious level, not on the safe side for the lover. It has nothing to do with lack of commitment, but I have no problem evolving and changing. These are the messages we get at a subconscious level, the conscious mind may not even be aware of it. If a relationship relies on that safety that the ‘relationship’ won’t change. What is a relationship at this point?

My commitment is to evolve, to grow, to see what the deeper realms of my consciousness show me. I’m here to relate with. It’s not to be feared that I won’t be here tomorrow, because your happiness does not depend on mine and mine not on yours. We can dance, we can make love, we can dance and we can fuck like the animals laying in our shadows. Because this is life, love and lust. Not to be feared, to be embraced. My safety doesn’t come in the form of a blanket to protect you. My safety is offered with the tools in my tool bag, to help empower, to love, but I can’t control how you evolve, that choice is up to you.

Dance with me, i’ll be here until I am no more.

Now we’re stepping into my gold.
Relationship anarchy today ~ Fearlessly Relating tommorrow.

Mahalo
Sprout.Love from Maui

Risk Management: the amygdala vs the cortex

The psychology of the shadow.

Each even in our life appears on the radar screen as a blip with a certain shape. Now, your brain has collected millions of blips from your past. In fact, every emotional response you have ever had is permanently stored in a part of your brain known as the amygdala. From here, your brain can retrieve them, even unconsciously. In this way, your radar tracks the most painful blips. In fact, your brain has arranged the painful blips into patterns, or threat-profiles, so that you can recognize them early, in order to avoid them.

Your inner radar operator then compares each new blip on the screen with he data bank of threat-profiles from your life. If a blip on the screen seems to match a threat-profile, then your radar operator is responsible for sounding the alarm, and alerting your defenses. This is how your mind manages risk.

So when you have the experience of becoming extremely defensive in a situation that is, in fact completely harmless, you know your risk management is at work. This inner radar operator saw something which seemed to match a significant threat-profile and alerted your inner ‘fighters’.

It is irrelevant to your brain that it turned out to be a false alarm. The mind is not so discriminating, because it is the part of our minds devoted to protecting us from re-experiencing the painful situations from our past, and warning us if something seems to be risky.

As we grow up, and inevitably suffer the slings and arrows of life, we learn which things help us and which things hurt us. However, these assessments about the realities of life are often made by a child’s mind, and can be startlingly inaccurate.

Digging deep <3

What is it that prevents us from expanding our boundaries?  I could be wrong, but essentially this is fear, fear of the unknown.  To remain in what feels comfortable is….  well easier.  We create a line, we define ourselves, essentially as a safety mechanism.  I can’t handle giving myself labels, at the most subtle of levels it is limiting my experience.  By validating my definition, I re-enforce that behavior, which prevents me from expanding myself, expanding my heart, to see what capacity I truly have.  I know for many this lesson won’t stick, but it’s also easy to validate your own experience, maybe, just maybe, i’m onto something.   The road we walk is whatever we choose to weave, but our whole existence has created patterns we typically never choose to unlock, even when we do start to unlock, we stop ourselves when we make an achievement and find, ‘we’ve already done the work’.  Truth is, the work never stops.  Change is the only universal truth.  What’s your path?  ~ Fearlessly Relate

Does guarding our heart serve us?

It feels like a conundrum, the idea to live in fear only further pushes that negativity. To delve deeper we must understand that there is really only 2 possibilities. The yin and the yang, love and hate.  Neither more important but both in alignment to our choice.   There is no half in, half out.  If we aren’t living in love, we’re settling for the latter.  Our hearts beat.  Our hearts bleed.   It’s not so important you understand my lessons, there is no way for you to judge without experiencing all that I have.  Witness, without judgment, view the beauty and reflect back your own self love.  The world is so fearful and always looking for an understanding and when we don’t understand it becomes hard for our logical mind.   But sometimes it’s not about me understanding, more so about me trusting!  This is the universe.  Beautiful in both simplicity and complexity.

LOVE and CONNECTION through One-ness

Because if we all realized our oneness, stopped comparing and competing, what we could achieve if we worked together is unimaginable.

~ Kat

Directly from her:

I was thinking the other day and this just kept repeating in my head “there is no meaning to life, it is our job to give life meaning” over and over until I expanded on it and thought “it is our sole responsibility in life to raise our consciousness as much as possible, and the consciousness of the planet, because if we all realized our oneness, stopped comparing and competing, then what we could achieve if we worked together is unfathomable”

I am not unique.

I’m human, i’m fearless; only the embodiment of the lessons I’ve learnt during my lifetime.  Maybe more but that’s not so easy to understand.  The information I have, that I share, is already in the cosmos, I have a brain.  With neural pathways that may connect dots differently than others.  Does that make me unique?  I have my doubts that makes me any more special or less special than anyone else.  That being said, I might have a way to view life that is what is needed for you in this moment, or forever, or maybe not ever.  Possibly not today but in the future?

Uniqueness may be of the ego, sure I feel i’m rad as fuck and I wanna hang out with myself.  But it has nothing to do with me, nothing does, i’m but a blip on the radar as is everyone else in existence, but we all make up the world we know.  Be real, spread a message, if you’re doing it to be cool, your ego is definitely talking.  Who am I really, just a man living for unbounded love, not only for myself, but for the planet.  ❤

Fearless Relating 101.

I’m not here yet, I’m working on defining what fearless relating means for me.  I already know behind fearless relating lays an infinite abundance of love.  But although i’ve been creating this reality over time, I still have work to do.

I will share an excerpt from Vulnerability Diva Monique Darling, and Sex and Relationship Expert Reid Mihalko’s course on fearless relating.  To inspire not only myself but others that come across my path.  We paint our picture so it’s important to relax and allow.

“If you could have anything, do anything, what would you choose? What do you really want? What is keeping you from having it? Is someone else better qualified? Better looking? More financially stable? Do you have “problems”? What if every limit you have, every chain that binds you, is only there because you believe it is? What if the limits disappear, the chains dissolve? Your life is alive with an abundance of possibilities, opportunities, and potential all you have to do is be willing to say “yes”.

So much of the fear and hesitation in life comes not from the self, but from fretting about what others may think, what they will say, or to whom they might share it with afterwards rather than being able to enjoy the moment. Another set of fears come from passed-down beliefs that we accept without questioning them.

What if you could make decisions and follow your heart, follow your body and your desires without worrying about what others thought? What if you were fearless in relating – first, to yourself and then, to others?

We all have feelings of ferocity and tenderness, but we must feel safe in order to be vulnerable and intimate with each other. Part of that safety is being confident in our own ability to say ‘NO’ and take a stand for our boundaries. Only then can we play in the realm of our true ‘HELL YES!’”

Reid and Monique Are Bringing Fearless Relating & Energetic Play Back to Oakland March 12th

Living in LOVE <3

Connection vs Attachement: Letting go of the Ego

Wow, I know this already, every thought I already have, has already been thought.  What I know is an embodiment of all that I learn as I challenge myself to grow.  So I started this blog post, made the title and thought, I bet you someone has some cool posts on attachment and ego.  So the first one to pop up is what I’ll share because she says it probably more concise than I could.

Alexandra Goldwell, MA, RCC
“Alexandra teaches yoga and meditation and is a holistic, body-centered therapist seeing individuals and couples in private practice. After having found Western psychology to be insufficient at explaining human nature, she pursued Eastern ways of knowing and found an awakened meditation teacher and medical intuitive whom she has studied with for the past 9 years. Her work incorporates Eastern and Western tools for healing and is driven by intuition. She keeps life in balance by spending adequate time on the mat, dancing, in nature, and with dear friends.

LOVING WITHOUT ATTACHMENT TO THE EGO

Alexandra Goldwell

 February 26, 2009

This is a nice idea, certainly one encouraged by the yogic philosphy, yet we may not have an idea of what it really involves. As a therapist and yoga teacher, it has been rare to come across people who are interested in letting go of attachment to the ego. In a way, we enjoy the stories and dramas created by ego, and then other days, (when you have acted out the same patterned behavior for the millionth time), we hate it!

If you ask inside, “Do I really want to love without ego?”, and YES! comes from inside your being, (not from the head), then go for it. If it is your heart’s desire to love and experience relationship in this way, you must follow it! Otherwise, feel free to stay in ego love, watch it, and enjoy it. Practice observation of the projections of love, i.e. loving the projected mother or father, or loving the reflection of your perfect self or most hated self. There are lots of themes of ego love that can be quite dramatic, engaging, and chaotic. These games can serve as opportunities to learn a great deal about oneself. Enjoy the opportunity.

Even if one doesn’t really know how to love without attachment to ego, (like me, I’m learning as I go), if we remain committed to the intention, the heart will continue to expand and ego will continue to dissolve.

My elementary understanding of what comprises a tantric relationship is where I am committed to loving another from my Pure Heart rather than the small ego, remembering the other as the Beloved rather than as their small ego, and choosing to act with love in every moment with the other. How fantastic! …… and how utterly challenging.

In my explorations with sacred relationship, here’s the how to’s I’ve discovered so far.

5 Tips for How to Love Fully without attachment to the Ego

1. Get to know your ego, make friends with it, understand and accept its existence within you

2. Commit to a consistent meditative and breath practice so your ability to witness your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors with some distance increases.

3. Every time you notice the ego tempting you to put up walls of fear, resistance and judgement towards another, look within yourself to see what you are not content with within your own being.

4. Be honest with yourself. Be honest with others. Share your ego and its’ fears.

5. Share love whenever you remember. With your partner, your children, your friends, a stranger, a collegue, the Existence around you….in the most subtle ways we can share love and expand the energy of the heart. With some this may be a smile, a silent prayer, with others it may be sharing attention, listening, playing, giving something, cooking, writing a letter, massaging, holding a hand, a phone call, singing, dancing, creating, whenever you remember, share your love. This consistent remembering to take action from the heart (when it’s not an obligation!), expands consciousness and diminishes unconsciousness (ego).

Experiment and enjoy!”

 

Find her at http://www.shanti-centre.com or alexandragoldwell@gmail.com

– See more at: http://www.gaia.com/article/loving-without-attachment-ego#sthash.mogXz3HF.dpuf