Keep Your Heart Open Even While You Feel Pain
Below is an excerpt from the current book I am reading by David Deida. The main message of the book is that a woman must learn to keep her heart open in her relationship so she can continue to feel, love and allow the flow of life's energy to move through her. She does this so she can bring her light, radiance, sensitive emotions and loving connection to her man. David Deida is a fascinating author and I highly recommend reading his books. On of my favorite parts of this book is when he advises women to keep their hearts open even in the midst of pain and anger. He says at a certain point connection and love must be more important than fear and shutting down. This he says is stage 3 love - The advanced kind of love that can exist between a man and woman. I have been practicing this idea of keeping my heart open and let me tell you it is easier said then done! Yet, I am determined to live in stage 3 love. :)
Much Love,
Malena
Excerpt below from David Deida's book - "Dear Lover a woman's guide to men, sex and love's deepest bliss"
How to Stay Open
Dear Lover,
You and I have habits that act to separate us, especially in times of intensity. When we are upset with each other, sometimes I get terse and rigid. Sometimes you appear to get swept away in the flow of your emotions, and I can no longer feel your heart of love. I know you love me. And I love you. But sometimes we get lost inside our own shells of closure, and we don't allow our hearts to connect in love. I want to learn how to stay deeply connected with you in love, even when our shells of fear would otherwise keep us apart. I commit to practicing love, first loving myself as I am right now, and then by loving you as you are right now. But beyond that, I commit to opening as the love that lives larger than you or me or our relationship. I want to join with you in two-bodied loving so we can learn to open as the love that lives as the entire universe, the love yearning open from the depths of everyone's heart.
Some women confuse openness with a sense of feeling good. But you can be open and still feel great pain or the full range of emotional music. You can be angry, sad, or even afraid and still be open. You can want to kill your man and still be open. Openness is a trust of what you are feeling—this trust is love. Whatever you feel, you can love your own emotions as well as your man's—and beyond. With practice, your heart trusts open, loving your shells, your emotions, and whatever energy moves through you and your man, no matter how bad you feel. When you can open in trust then you are alive as love, even when love flows as the energy of anger, sadness, or fear. To allow you and your man to grow into deeper love and trust, you can randomly practice five key exercises daily, especially during emotionally intense moments.-
l. CONNECT THROUGH YOUR EYES Suppose that your lover insults you, then ignores you. You are hurt and begin to fume inside. He looks away from you, or you close your eyes. Instead, maintain eye contact. Even if you are upset, look directly into your man's eyes. If you look deeply enough into his heart, you will feel the part of him that you love, even if you are in a moment of hate. Actually look into your man's eyes and feel his deep strength, integrity, and his love for you. Perhaps you can only see a speck of his strength and integrity amidst a whole lot of muck, but keep feeling into this speck. Do your best to love the muck, and then love deeper into his heart, feeling his love for you, even if most of him seems repulsed. He has chosen you; he is with you,- deep down you can feel where he still loves you, right now. Gaze into his deepest heart, and offer him your deepest heart through your open eyes.
2. BREATHE TOGETHER When you constrict your breath then you block your emotional energy. If you breathe fully, then your energy can flow fully. If you can feel your man's energy while you breathe fully, then his energy can flow fully with you. If you contract your breath, then you won't be able to feel your man or yourself fully. Your heart will remain isolated behind your suppressed breath. So, offer the possibility of energetic connection by breathing open with your man. First, do your best to love you and your man just as you are, relaxing your breath more open. Then, feel your man's breath, matching your breath with his. Allow yourself to feel what your man is feeling, breathing how your man is breathing. Breathe together while gazing into each other's eyes, even if you both feel like strangling each other. Practice to open your heart in love and trust by breathing your man in and out. Breathe his love and his stupidity, his strength and his blindness, his sweetness and his anger. Breathe all the qualities of your man in and out, and open so you can breathe with him as one breathing two bodied being of love.
3. RELAX YOUR BODY Relaxing doesn't mean going limp. To relax means to open so the currents of love and emotional energy can flow through your body unimpeded. You can relax and shout and jump up and down. You can relax and whimper and wail. When you relax, love eases your rigid muscles so that all energies can move freely through you. Your softest parts are most important to open while you are flowing with emotion. Your lips and tongue, your throat, your heart, your whole belly, your genitals—all the soft parts in the center and front of your body are the main avenues—or roadblocks—to the flow of your energy. If your belly is tight, then your anger will stay stuffed, only to erupt later in toxic release or self-abuse. If your heart is closed, your emotions will ricochet destructively, lashing inwardly or outwardly without love. If your jaw is clenched, then your head and body become disconnected, and energy will accumulate as tension in your shoulders and pound in your skull. But if you love your body, if you open your belly, heart, and throat, if your face and genitals ease open and relax, then your emotions can flow freely through you. Your body can be moved by your heart's true yearning and the spontaneous flow of your deepest emotional energy—you will be danced by your heart's deepest love and energy. Perhaps your dance will flow with grief or spite or terror. You can love whatever is flowing through you. If you do not clamp down and stop the flow, your energy will emerge from your deepest heart spontaneously, expressing your heart's open yearning, and then the next wave of yearning and energy will emerge through your body as love's free flow.
4. FEEL FROM YOUR DEEPEST HEART TO HIS While gazing into your lover's eyes, breathing with him, and relaxing your body to be danced open by love's yearning and energy, also feel into your lover's heart. From your heart, extend your feelers into his heart. Reach into his heart from yours, and open your heart to receive his heart's love. This is very difficult in the midst of emotional intensity. If your man is shouting at you, or you are hating your man, then your heart will try to disconnect from him to protect itself. You must intentionally extend your heart-feelers into your lover's heart in moments like these. Intense emotion is no excuse for a disconnected heart. If you want deep intimacy, you must practice connecting your deep heart directly to his, even when feeling his heart is the last thing you want to do. These are the most critical moments: when you are hurting each other, will you practice loving your hurt, loving his hurt, and softening open so you can offer your heart even more deeply, feeling into his deepest heart while opening to receive his heart-feelers? If you cannot practice feeling his deepest heart from yours, then you are practicing some degree of separation. You are denying the deepest yearning of your heart. You are refusing to yearn open as the fullness of divine love—you are disabling even the possibility of deep connection with your lover. These are the moments when the most is gained from practicing to stay open. No matter how callous or unpresent your man is being, practice loving and accepting yourself and your lover just as you are, feeling everything you are feeling, and then open your heart to extend your feelers into his deepest heart. Feel your lovers deepest heart from yours. You can do this while shouting and screaming. You can do this while breaking dishes on the floor or crying your eyes out. No matter how your energy flows or how he turns away, you can practice loving the waves of emotional energy that move through both of you while opening your heart to feel his.
5. EXPRESS YOURSELF SPONTANEOUSLY While you maintain the previous practices—staying in eye contact, breathing together, relaxing your body open, and feeling your lover's deepest heart from yours—you can practice trusting the spontaneous emotional expression emerging from your heart. Just allow your body to do what it does, as long as you are lovingly relaxing open and maintaining feeling-contact with your lover through eyes, breath, and heart. Allow your body to be danced by the full and untamed flow of your emotional force and your heart's tender yearning. If anger moves through you, then love your anger, vulnerably allowing every part of you to move with anger—your toes and fingers, your belly and vagina, your legs and ears—while staying feelingly connected with your lover. If you want, you can use words to express the flow of energy that moves through you. But often, your yearning heart is most fully expressed through whole-body, non-verbal offerings. Open as anger and show your hurt through sounds, facial expressions, and whole-body gestures. Allow your body to be spontaneously danced by love's deepest energy. By learning to stay open with your lover, even while he is rejecting you and you are ready to tear his head off, your hearts are available to touch, serving each other to open in deeper expression and communion. His hearts persistent loving pervades your drama of opening and closing. Your hearts devotion provides an ever-welcoming home for your man's fearful coming and going. Over time, all excuses to stay closed evaporate in love's openness. Then, you can truly extend your heart's yearning beyond self-love, through the two-bodied form of devotional openness, and to all beings, without your shells—or his—holding you back. By learning to love your shells and your lovers, and then loving through your shells to connect fully with your lover's deepest heart, you begin to learn how to feel the deepest heart of all beings, breathing the joy and suffering of all beings, opening as the love that lives and yearns at everyone's heart.