We all come from the Goddess

That is the name of a song that appears on a CD and lyrics to one variation can be found here.
Seeing that I was part of the Jewish religion at one time, and to some degree it will always be a part of me even if I don't actually practice it, you have to realize if you don't know me - and if you have the link to this place you probably do - that I do not subscribe to or practice any one religion. I do agree that some movies I have seen lately, "The Secret" (a little heavy on the cheese with the material wealth focus, but good ides if you can get past that), and "What the Bleep Do We Know", both suggest that we influence the world and our own world with our thoughts a lot more than we realize. Since we have used the Goddess image at home a lot, and my relationship with the feminine side of life - good or bad, - has essentially been the most important part of my life - hands down - than obviously it is a powerful symbol for me that appears in many of my songs and writings lately, especially now that my songs have made a somewhat natural transformation in the last few years from negative to positive and self-affirming feelings. This all loving Goddess is my own spirit inside and outside of me that I have used to connect with myself and lift myself. Now that my wife is on a sleep deprived path to a nervous breakdown, I am going to prepare a guided meditation - obviously borrowed from many sources to some degree - but improvisational nevertheless, and start here:

Put some nice soothing music on in the background, maybe light up your favorite incense - I happen to go for this version of Padmini Om Incense:

Breathe in - slowly - feel the air filling up your lungs - release when it feels time to release - hold it just as long as you need to - observe it happening on its own, be a witness to the miracle of breath - breathing fresh clean air that sustains our bodies and allows us to live each moment and every day. Every breath that comes in allows us to breathe in the force and spirit of the great Goddess, creator of each individual life, your life, my life, all life. The Goddess can be experienced as mother - she is the great mother - the mother of all life - and the vast miracle of her power is that she is pure, unblemished love. She loves you with the complete undying devotion of the mother that created you, but there is no negativity here, no criticism, no anger, there is just pure acceptance and love. She can also be experienced as lover - she has always been the one who has filled your heart with desire and passion, but what you believed needed to be experienced with another actual being need only be experienced with her. Every one of your needs, hopes, desires can be reached through your relationship with this all loving, beautiful amazing Goddess. Every breath brings us closer to her. Breathing takes her presence, outside of us, and as we draw it in, brings it inside of us - so that ultimately there is no separation between inside and outside, we are one with the world around us. We may feel immense pain, hurt and emptiness inside of us - we exhale this out with each breath. In place of that we breathe in hope, love, and happiness with every breath and even if we do not feel those things at the moment, these positive feelings are coming into our souls with every breath. With this breath - hope, with this breath - love, with this breath happiness. I love myself - breathe - I love myself - breathe - I love myself - breathe.

Through her eyes, we stop all judgment of ourselves. Whatever negative feelings we have about ourselves, we breathe out and exhale with each breath. Whatever anyone else may think about us or the way we live - we take this negative judgement and exhale it. Our bodies, our faces, are spirits are beautiful - we are all an extension of the all loving, beautiful Goddess. She is perfect in our love, and we are also perfect - even through our falsely perceived imperfection. Our minds are perfect in their beauty and love. We know what we need to know and everything we need to know is in our mind. There is so much we do not know, infinite realms of knowledge in so many paths and directions, but intuitively, all we need to know - everything we need to know - makes up the vast realm of our mind. Our minds are perfect. There is no need for a piece of paper, degree, or level of education to tell us how beautiful our minds are. Our minds reflect in the presence of love from the Goddess, she loves us, and in our undying gratitude, we love her back, and we love ourselves back. The only true purpose of the mind - connected to the heart - is love and we bathe in that pool of love, breathe in the pool of love.

You feel love for your body, this machine that harbors your soul and mind. Your body is beautiful. Every wrinkle, blemish, ounce of fat that you want to judge and condemn yourself for, even the aches and pains in various places - despite what you may see as a fault, the Goddess sees as perfect beauty. You look in the mirror and see a perfectly beautiful individual looking back at you, the house and home of the most beautiful, heavenly Goddess who is reflected back in your face and body. Any image of perfection we may have is placed aside, and we look into the mirror and become that image of perfection. Regardless of age, weight, wrinkles, pimples - we are divine beings and perfectly beautiful reflections of the Goddess.

You are where you need to be at this precise moment. Any place you may think you have been has been a place of the spirit, and at this moment you are in the cross-roads of many different dimensions - life, death, spirit, vast unseen worlds, combined with the physical place you associate with the address, city, country and planet you temporarily reside in. The Goddess brings us where we need to be at any given time through the miracle of Karma and destiny. Any place we will need to be tomorrow or at a future time, she will find a way to bring us there. We are always where we need to be. There is no place to get to in the future, no place to regret going to in the past, there is only this one beautiful moment now, that the Goddess has brought us to - and at this moment I completely accept and cherish the place where I am now. I will not worry about needing to be somewhere else, for I have faith in the Goddess and her ability to get me wherever I need to be and wherever I need to go - she will take me there. I release myself from pressure to be anywhere else other than where I am now.

I am in complete acceptance with everything the Goddess has provided for me at this moment. I do not need to accomplish anything more - I accept all of my accomplishments, and I have fought hard to accomplish everything I have achieved. There is no need to condemn myself for not being anything more or less than what I am at this moment. The role I may be playing - set aside in me in this lifetime through my path of Karma - is the role I need to be playing. I thank the Goddess for the miracle of being my own unique self, in this lifetime, and I do not condemn myself for not having more knowledge, education, or any material thing. I see that the life I have lived, the knowledge I have achieved has been a miracle. All knowledge may come and go as we are only renting our bodies and minds in this particular incarnation, but the love that comes from the Goddess, the love we have for ourselves and our fellow beings is eternal, infinite, and makes up all components of the universe.

Now - the reading stops and we continue to breathe in and out slowly and refelct upon all of these thoughts on our own.

Okay, just a little pinprick, there'll be no more AUUUUUUUUUUGHHHHH

...but you may feel a little SICK..

Sometimes I alternate between feeling like I am relatively stable, self-aware and together to the present feeling I have today - like there is quite a nightmare going on in my head that I have not entirely awoken from. I guess in reality I am a little bit of both - stable and unstable. I spent the spring and summer writing on, reflecting, singing about and experiencing a pretty nice state of love - and it works pretty well - ironically enough - when it is just me. Some call that masturbation - well - maybe masturbation is not such a bad thing, whether it is daydreaming a female presence surrounding you or doing what one does while putting on a favorite porn scene. When I am imagining the woman of my dreams next to me, I am doing okay. The problem that arises is when the thin line of fantasy crosses over to an actual female human being. That is when it starts to get pretty fucked up.

I know my anima experience, the experience of the female from a male point of view, has been quite a roller coaster ride ever since it first hit me at age 13. In the past it would go from idolization to eventual rejection and let down, where I would imagine the queen of my dreams as my savior, and maybe I was even hers, only to eventually discover that she was quite the opposite of that, and then quite a bit of anger would be the end result. It would finally dawn on me that the woman I idolized to be a goddess destined to fulfill my every wish and desire was not capable of doing that. Then a lot of dark feelings would result - rage and rejection among others. I can't entirely blame Heather, the gal I worked with in San Diego what seems to be ages ago now, for turning me into her supervisor and nearly ending my glorious claims career about 16 years ago once I reacted to her rejection of me. I know in my study of "borderline" personalities, the experience of the opposite (attracted) sex from one extreme to another is a characteristic - and although categories are limited, I am convinced my mother is about as borderline as they come. This feature of a borderline personality is one I happen to share.

Now though I want to focus on a somewhat more recent phenomenon - an experience which is of particular concern since it seems to be running in my immediate family so to speak - and that experience is that of nausea and disgust. It seems to happen not with a woman who rejects me altogether necessarily - as that was my experience with Heather - but more with a woman who I experience a certain degree of intimacy with - but there is a feeling during the experience that it is not right - like I am sucking in a terrible addictive drug which is not good for me in the long run, but that high is too compelling to walk away from. So - I make my deal with the devil so to speak, I become the vampire and meet up with my own inner parasite experienced through the relationship with an outer being perceived as and playing the role of the outer parasiste . I remember a woman I had a sexual relationship with in San Diego by the name of Raulin - I had some of the most passionate kissing and sex I can ever remember, but it felt wrong the whole time. She was an alcoholic, she completely bought into all of the cheesy aspects of the American culture that I have always rebelled against, she was not someone I could rely on for anything, and she was very flakey. She was someone I never would choose to have as a friend if not for the actual experience of sex. She slowly drove me into a state of frustration and anger and she seemed to thrive on it - as if she was getting back at someone through her experience of me. Finally when she started backing away in her own fear of losing control - when she claimed she was falling love with me and did not want to be, my own anger of all things was the entity that saved me from sinking back into the addiction. I remember screaming into the phone one day that she was either going to come over for once or for all or get the fuck out of my life - and I am sure that by that point she was too freaked out to come on over. I still remember the shaking urination that followed since I was so angry. I almost had a relapse, and she was about to come over for another dose of pleasure about a month or two later, but of all things a very nasty answering message I directed at her personally kept it from happening. She was stringing me along, and called a second time after the first initial call where she was coming over, and low and behold there was that message ripping her apart - calling her an alcoholic in a mocking way - and in being insulting and hurtful to her, I saved myself from my own weakness. Not much longer Victoria came along and she was the first and only woman I have not felt that sense of wrongness with. Of course - she has not been the answer to every single drive and passion of mine either, but that goes with the territory of a stable relationship.

But getting back to Raulin - I would experience these feelings of nausea and disgust, sometimes after I had been with her - sometimes I would associate it with the taste of the lipstick, maybe it was my own knowledge that I was doing something destructive to get my fix. Maybe there is some deep-rooted psychological association from the past that played into it - some unknown trauma I will never know about. There was a song on Dr. Demento called "Your love is like nuclear waste" which I associated with it, even changing around to "your love makes me want to hurl" when I wrote a little number inspired by my feelings. These feelings would be the other extreme of the high - the feeling of ecstasy from sex, coming down to a hangover feeling to of - my God what the hell am I doing and how much am I lowering myself to get a little passion, and how much of this can I take. These sick feelings came again when I had my internet affair a while ago - I would get these incredible rushes at time from contact with this lady, but they were followed by this internal disgust and nausea - sometimes out of guilt, sometimes just feeling like it was plain wrong.

So coming back to the present - I had a girlfriend I lived with for a year, and unfortunately although we were so close on some levels, we were miles apart on other levels. We broke up 13 years ago, but she has stayed in touch with me - the only ex-girlfriend I have who has. Exactly why she continues to contact me is not clear - maybe she thinks it will some day come back, maybe she has decided to blame me for everything that has gone wrong in her life since she expected me to make it all better and always stay with her. Since I was once sexual with her, the sexual association remains and it often is a fantasy for me to re-unite on that level. My wife actually was encouraging this for a while, to take the pressure off her - but the personality issues seem to always flare up - and the pattern seems to be the ex is friendly and charming, than the eventual resentment comes out in the form of criticism of my wife, criticism of me, and mocking sarcastic comments. She actually sent a V-day card with superimposed pictures of us all, with the wife simulating doggie style on me and me going doggie style on the ex - pretty sick and twisted. We stop talking, I tell her off, than she creeps back around (sometimes I am the creep I admit) - time and time again. So when I started feeling some revived feelings, and had some talks with her, all of a sudden - predictably - the attacks were back - and I warned her to stop, but some things are just inevitable - and next thing I know I am writing a pretty nasty and insulting comment to her just letting loose, she writes back that I am the meanest man in the world and never wants to speak to me again - and will consider it "stalking" (of all things) if I write to her again. This happened after feelings of lust and infatuation were setting in - the high is there one day, the next day I am sick to my stomach. On one level I feel bad that I wrote cruel comments to her, on another I feel this cold spot in me - something like that damn bitch had it coming and serves her right for putting me down.

So here I am - back to feeling nauseous - I have felt sick to my stomach all day - did not sleep well last night, left the library bathroom smelling atrocious - and I ask myself - why? Why do I keep falling back into this ugly cycle - with her, with females in general - why does this experience bring out this twisted dark side and leave me in a state where I am so susceptible that the only way I can stop it is by childish rage and hateful insults to deter the other person from being around me. Can't I do better - haven't I reached a point of enlightenment where I am above this now? Well - obviously I haven't. I observe my own thoughts - hey fuck you - you insult me I am going to up the ante - that's what you get for attacking me in the first place. Am I really the creep she says I am, the meanest most disgusting vile person in the world? Maybe so - I can't say I am proud of throwing out a verbal grenade, and yet I know if I have to do it I will. I would much rather prefer to ignore it, act like it does not get to me - but the reality is it does get back to me, I am sucked into this state of infantile rage - and here I am 42 years old acting like an angry child. The cycle repeats once again I'll be tested, maybe some day it won't happen again. Once I realize that the rush - the great sex - the cheesy passion - is something better off lived in dreams than destructive reality, that I don't need someone outside of me to reassure me of my own worthiness, I won't have to keep going through this. It is just like manic-depression - which somehow I have staved off without medication - and it comes with the actual realization that feeling high is not the same as feeling happy, that ultimate happiness comes with a balance of lesser highs and lows, instead of the big high and the big crash. If you feel too good, there will be a price to pay and is the price worth it? In this case, the price could be feeling sick and even losing my family. Do I want that? No - of course not - but the devil so to speak, in the form of a seductive female - always seems to come around and test me from time to time. I am getting closer to moving beyond this - I hope. In the mean time - another dose of Pepto Bimsal please...

9 years of marriage as of October 2, 2007

I love you – written after 9 years of marriage and more than 11 years together

I love you – I know I say it so many times
I love you – and you may ask the reason why
I love you – not because I have to, need to, or necessarily even choose to or want to
I love you not because it is easy – nobody can honestly say it is, has been, or ever will be
I love you not because of any guarantees you can provide that we will be together tomorrow, the next month or the next year – life provides no guarantees other than the present moment, and even the present moment may be the last
I love you not because of where you want to be, which may be different than where I want to be
I love you not because I expect you to agree with me, agree with what to decide to do next, where to live next, how to live next, or even how to live at all
I love you not because I expect our life to be a continuous love affair, a fairy tale movie, or a dream come true – for I could never ask nor expect that of you, nor you of me
I love you not because I expect you to be in love with me, lust for me, desire me, or even necessarily want to be with me
I love you – not because we have different values, expectations, beliefs or desires

I love you – because you are who you are and I am who I am, and there will never be another you or another me
I love you because I believe fate brought us together to allow us to be together for the time we have had so far, and maybe possibly even one moment, hour or day longer than that
I love you because with you, and only you through some miracle I will never fully understand, we have created a live being that looks to us each for love, guidance, and acceptance
I love you because 9 years ago today I got dressed up in my best pair of shorts and sandals and even if I was reading a note back to a paid city official, in my mind I was reading a contract back to the creator and provider of all life
I love you because I swore to that being that I would love you and provide for you for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health – and despite every obstacle that makes that difficult happen, I continue to swear to God, the Goddess, and any other divine being that may want to listen that I will continue to do that
I love you because I cannot control what we have, what we are and what we will be and that to surrender to that love is to surrender to the devotion of the Yin and Yang , and the God and Goddess themselves
I love you now and forever, no matter who you are, what you are, where you are, where you go, what you do and where you decide to do it
Nothing can and will ever change my love for you