An Uncommon Bond

by jeff brown

  As I kissed her new body, I remembered the previous Sarah—a youthful, supple body bursting with life-force. Now, her body was etched with the traces of time and life-learnings. It’s so interesting—when we are young, it’s the illusion of perfection that we fall in love with. But as we age, it’s the humanness that we fall in love with: the poignant story of overcoming, the depthful vulnerability of aging, the struggles that grew us in karmic stature, the way a soul shaped itself to accommodate its circumstances. With less energy to hold up our armor, we are revealed and, in the revealing, call out to each other’s hearts. Where before wounds turned us off, they are now revealed as proof that God exists. Where we once saw imperfect scars, we now see evidence of a life fully lived.

  Ahhh, what a journey it has been.

  After the shower, she led me to the bed and began to gently stroke my body. In total silence, she massaged and nurtured me for hours, kneading me back to life. A lover’s apology. When she was done, she lay down facing me. Still in silence, we looked into each other’s eyes, interspersing tears with laughter. As the universal portal opened yet again between us, all reactivities evaporated into essence. In this moment, there had never been a betrayal. There had been no time apart. There was only God’s reflection.

  Some people read the heavens by looking up. I’m a different kind of astronomer. I read the heavens by looking at Sarah. In her eyes, the starlit sky. In her smile, God shining true. The entire soular system—right here before me. Perhaps this is why I seldom looked up at stars since Sarah and I first met. Why look for the divine out there, when she’s right here, in the heart of connection?

  The next morning, we woke up aroused and alight, ready for the next stage of deepening. I turned toward my beloved and made love to her, worshiping her soul temple with heart-free abandon. As before, she was still God’s luscious fountain and I her diligent devotee. Unlike before, I approached her yoni with a tremendous tenderness, cradling it with my lips and hands, exploring it slowly and with great subtlety. Cuddlelingus. The portals of essence opened wide as I dove heart-first into her timeless rivers. The more intensely she climaxed, the more fully my thirst for God was quenched. I drank her in with bottomless delight.

  We spent the next two days in the room, alternating lovemaking with deep bonding sleep. As we communed, all the forms of our love-making moved in new and unforeseen directions. Where before I responded eagerly to her willingness, now I moved gingerly, wanting to take such delicate care of this great gift, like a grateful virgin in delightfully uncharted territory. At the heart of it, we’re all virgins when it comes to love. Where before our passion was like a rocket that catapulted us through Gods gates, it now slowed and softened in form and texture, less a bolting rocket and more a slow-moving presence, one that tenderly melted into divinity one breath at a time. Where before we would orgasm, now we would ourgasm—a shared climax of pure mutuality, a simultaneous soul-spasm of a unified form. We were missing something back then, often rushing to climax, in a flurry of hunger. No longer lustful, we were no longer racing to completion like two people who sensed their time together was limited. We now worshiped love as love worshiped us—with great presence.

  “Oh, Ogdo, it’s the same, except... quieter.”

  “Yes. So much stiller.”

  “I want to die like this.”

  “We will.”

  Although the tenor of our intimacy had changed, our access hadn’t. As it was before, we cracked through the veneer between our hearts and the universal heart every time we made love. Again, this was not the same universe I saw when I touched God alone. It was an entirely different skyscape, a magnificent galaxy revealed by love alone. As we breathed in unison, one soular flare after another lit our way, inviting us deeper and deeper into the heart of God.

  It was amazing to watch my sexuality come back to life with Sarah. When I was with Miriam, I had been at times sexually unresponsive. I told myself it was simply a question of aging. But it wasn’t. My body was speaking my soul’s truth, as it was now with Sarah. The heart-genital highway was back in business. The vitality of my erections was a direct reflection of the vitality of my love. Clearly, everything depends on where you are cuming from. Let there be no doubt: body and soul are reflections of the same divine mirror.

  Intrinsic to the transformation in our intimacy was a shift in Sarah’s participation. For her, it had always been more difficult to give. But this had changed. Now she honored my awakened masculine as I honored her awakened feminine, worshiping my body temple as I worshiped hers, celebrating each other with equal engagement. Where before my egoic power cock would have resisted, I was now more receptive—a tenderling warrior bearing the fruits of his soul’s labor. Any archaic ideas of the superior man on top fell by the wayside, as Sarah took her turn as the superior woman, exploring me in the same way I explored her—reverently, devotedly, hungrily.

  As familiar as we were to each other, there was a way in which it all felt entirely new again. We soon became one orgasmic tuning fork, naturally finding new ways of igniting and expressing our love. It was like beginner’s heart, over and over again, as we rested in our completeness. Finally chemistry, cumistry and karmastry together, at a time when both of us were ready to hold it safe. The best kind of ménage à trois.

  So much happened in those two days in room number 130. By the time it was over, we knew with certainty we were ready. Not ready for perfection, but ready to spend the rest of our lives crafting and nurturing our shared temple. Only death or alien abduction could separate us now.

  And perhaps neither. The call of the beloved is like a call from the unseen world. It outlives the death of the body, outlives the trials of mortal life, calling out to us from our eternal resting place, reminding us that it will soon be time to come home.

  25

  Wholemates

  It is now seven years later. We have spent these last years in worship. We have made an offering of our hearts. We have lived our love as prayer. Where before we wondered if our ultimate mission lived outside of us, we now recognize that it exists between us. We have become devotees to a greater cause—Us. With unwavering commitment to the union, our love has become our primary spiritual practice, our teacher, our clarifying path.

  People find their sacred purpose in many different places. Our love is ours. That’s where the Go(l)d is. It has been the fire that warms us, the fresh spring that invigorates us, the temple that houses us. Even when we lose our way, we always know where home is. With our beloved under wing, we fly our hearts home.

  Carved into the door to our bedroom are the words I wear my heart with you in it. On one wall of each room, there is a hand-written poem to the beloved. And there’s also a wall plaque on the hallway landing that reads: When two hearts beat in the same direction, the meeting point is God. She finally gave me that one. Wherever we look, we are reminded of our blessings.

  At the same time, it is radically different from our initial imaginings. It is more solid, more human, more real. If anything has held the temple safe, it has been grounding our love at every level on Mother Earth. We mutually accepted that sky-riding was our natural orientation, and that in order to sustain this powerhouse connection, we had to also ground our soles on Mother Earth. We are clearly soulmates—a love connection sourced in essence—but we have also become solemates—a love connection that is grounded in daily life. We had sketched our legacy in the sky, and now we are sketching it in the dirt. As solemates, we stand a much better chance of lasting.

  Our solemating demands a genuine integration with the practical world. This means regularly doing precisely what our merging nature resists: staying on top of our chores and obligations, remaining connected to our friends, leaving our love bubble and spending real time in the culture at large. We participate in society not to the extent that we abandon our uniqueness and morph into homogeneity, but in a way that keeps our timeless energy grounded in the flow of time.

  Remaining grounded also means retaining
our individuality and independence. After Sarah returned, I let go of my mediation practice. Wholemates had become an international bestseller, and I became a professional author-publisher, writing and administrating a small publishing business out of the house I purchased with my book royalties. Sarah was tempted to work with me, but instead got a part-time job as a naturopath in a neighborhood clinic, ensuring that we had the separateness we needed to remain healthy. When we reconnect at the end of a long day, it’s the perfect balance—a fusion of sovereign entities.

  Our solemating also has a psycho-physical quality to it. Recognizing our tendency to float into ecstasy, we have maintained a disciplined embodiment practice to keep us here. We practice yoga, dance and holotropic breathwork on a regular basis. And we have sustained a commitment to body-centered therapy with Sally, so we can keep our feet planted firmly on the ground and continue to develop the healthy ego and sturdy boundaries required to hold great love safe. We understand all too well how important it is to have a strong self to come home to, particularly given the fragmentation intrinsic to our merging. The more intensely we fly, the more deeply we ground. The more firmly we ground, the more safely we fly. From sole to soul. And back again.

  If you really want to know someone, start by looking at their feet. How grounded is their spiritual life? What is the inner-face between their earthly and their divine life? How fully do they make contact with Mother Earth? How present are they for the whole of the human experience? Do they come crashing back to earth when the truth hits the fan? The eyes are a mirror of the soul, but so are the soles. If you want to gauge how sustainable your love connection to another will be, observe the way they move on the planet. If they come crashing back to earth when reality comes a calling, you know you will have a problem when the romantic phase wanes and the next layer of truth arises.

  It’s not about giving up on the fairy tale relationship. It’s about landing it in reality. It’s about giving the fairy feet. It’s about peeling away the prince’s armor and loving the real being down below. It’s about wiping off the princess’ makeup and loving her divine humanness. It’s about finding romance in the naked fires of daily life. When our masks and disguises fall away, real love can reveal itself. Forget fairy tales, the human tale is much more satisfying. We just have to learn how to get turned on by humanness.

  When Sarah and I first connected in this lifetime, I was all-too-happy to see our psychological issues as unreal in contrast to our ecstatic experiences. In my mind, there was the soul’s journey and there was the human journey—and they were entirely different. But through a more grounded lens, I have come to understand that there is no distinction. In fact, I believe our unhealed emotional issues and patterns are actually direct reflections of the soul’s state of being. Where does spirit live, if not in the heart of our humanness? It’s all an integrated dance of sacred imagination.

  It would be easier to maintain the connection if we were at a collective stage in humanity where we truly understood the expansive role that intimate relationship can play in our spiritual lives. Relationship is not just a manifestation of the divine: it is also a fertile field for the soul’s expansion. It is a breeding ground for the soul’s emergence. It is where many of the soul’s lessons are harvested. To the extent that we learn the heart lessons intrinsic to our love connections, we expand in karmic stature. To the extent we resist them, we delay our own expansion.

  When we turn away from our lessons, the universe jumps into action, orchestrating our return—a symphony of self-creation dedicated to our unique expansion. This is the nature of karmic gravity—we are returned to our path until we fully walk it.

  Of course, converting our loss into expansion requires great courage and an adherence to a sustainable healing process. We have to go into the fire for as long as we need to transmute the suffering into gold. This means staying with our feelings until they are truly done with us, no matter how uncomfortable it is.

  It also means being careful not to confuse analysis with healing. Dude was right—there’s a meaningful difference between a cerebral interpretation of an experience (“I know why this came into my life”) and an embodied awareness of it (“I feel why this came into my life”). Unless your knowing arises from your felt experience, it’s meaningless. Stay with the emotional process until your soul food is digested. It will be difficult at times, but the feelings will only hurt until they transform. Once they make it all the way through the conversion tunnel, the lesson takes root. Divine perspiration.

  Sacred Loving

  At the deepest level, honoring our union has been a journey into wholeness. There was no other way. When we kept it partial, it turned against us. Like many early life trauma survivors, we had overdeveloped certain threads of consciousness and avoided others. When we met, Sarah was an expert bliss-tripper. She wanted the light without the shadow it illumined. There were many ways I too was unwilling to own my shadow. In our own ways, we were both playing hide-and-seek with our own essence. Yet to honor this love right, we knew that we had to embrace all elements of reality. We had to turn on the light in every room, particularly those spaces that hadn’t seen the light for decades, perhaps lifetimes.

  Perhaps the most important question you can ask a potential love partner relates to their relationship with the shadow—their own, and the shadow that emerges in the relationship itself. That is: “How much work are you willing to do on yourself and the relationship when the s*#t hits the fan? Are you willing to go as deep as we have to go to work it through, or are you only interested in a breezy, low-maintenance relationship?” Few people ever talk about this during the romantic phase, because they are not envisioning the challenges to come. But it is an essential inquiry. I have known many people who were shocked to watch their ‘great love’ walk out the door when the connection required personal accountability and therapeutic work-through. Some of us will brave the journey; others will flee the fire. Some of us will do the work to transform our stories into the light at their source; others will run away with their ‘tales’ between their legs, only to find out later that their tales go with them everywhere they go. If you can determine someone’s willingness at the beginning, you can save yourself a lot of trouble later.

  With a quest for wholeness in mind, we agreed to work deeply with the challenging emotional material that our tremendous love excavates. We made a commitment to stand firmly in the bond, no matter what storms are passing through. Consequently, we have faced our demons in ways we never could the first time together. When our abandonment and engulfment wounds close in on us, we now bring them right into therapy. We have worked our stuff hard, massaged it, revealed it, owned it, and sometimes even healed it.

  And, just as important, we have refined the art of authentic right-lessness, not caring who is right, but mutually caring for what is true. This shift seems to have transformed our dynamic the most, moving us from the egoic need to win that was borne in our warring childhoods and past life history, to the recognition that victories are a shared experience, manifest in the strengthening of the bridge between our hearts.

  It’s not about someone winning our heart. It’s about restoring its aliveness. It’s about softening its armor. It’s about filling it up with light. When real love enters, it doesn’t take anything from us. It gifts us with the everything.

  This is every human’s birthright: to know the universe that love reveals.

  Our sexuality continues to transform on many levels. We had been profoundly alive to each other years ago, but there was a way in which our armor was still on when we made love. There is a meaningful difference between taking off your clothes and taking off your armor. Clothes come off lickety-split but armor can take a lifetime. I think both of us are beginning to understand this now. Intense soul-gazing has been replaced with a deepening vulnerability, one undress rehearsal after another. There is still an innocence in the field between us, but it’s an informed innocence now.

  When I used to go to bed w
ith a woman in my younger days, I didn’t realize there were so many of us in the bed at the same time. There was her and me, her parents, my parents, our past lovers, and anyone else we had unfinished business with. That’s the thing about being unconscious, we can’t help but bring our unresolved baggage into every relational encounter. Talk about an unwelcome orgy! It’s a busy bed when we are unconscious. Hard to move around freely with so many projections on the mattress. One of the reasons we do the work to heal our past is so we can actually create more space for intimacy. With our patterns fallen away, we stand a much better chance of holding love safe. With our projections worked through, we can actually see the beloved with clear eyes. Finally, it’s just the two of us.

  Where before we had a love, now we have a relationship. Or perhaps it would be better to call it a Realationship, a connection that cuts a swath through all manner of authentic terrain, not only the pleasant landscapes, not only the mired, murky swampland of endless triggers. All of it. This doesn’t mean we don’t argue, or feel at odds with each other, but it does mean that we are committed to finding the love everywhere we can, going deeper and higher into the heart. Peeling away layers, ever deepening. Now we don’t only pray to our union when it tastes sweet. We also pray to it when it tastes bitter. In its own way, it has all become sacred—every trigger, every conflict—because we recognize that it has the capacity to grow us to the next level of awareness. Holy shit.

  It’s a different thing, to make a relationship sacred. When it’s just the love you honor, you are still in two different worlds. You love her, she loves you, but what stands between you? What of the bridge between your hearts? What of the world you become together? Conscious relationship is all about the third element—the alchemical combination of two souls merging, the living breathing world that you co-create in love’s cosmic kiln. It’s the difference between loving and serving love. It’s the difference between the narcissistic quest for ecstasy and the joys of deep devotion. You serve loving. You are a devotee to the dance. The conscious-nest is a world unto itself.