Do you self-sabotage? Do wandering thoughts dominate your mind? Do old habits sparked by old thoughts dominate your actions? Do fear and worry dominate your wandering thoughts, controlling you? Seek relief from your fears and worries by emptying your mind of your wandering old thoughts and sit in the bliss of empty mind. Wandering fearful thoughts do not aid you in your life; they only hinder growth and keep you stagnant, wondering what is wrong with you and why you are so fearful. Tell fear and worry to go away. You have no use for them. They merely crowd your mind with useless draining thoughts. Instead take action to change your mind, to think differently. Do this constantly, telling fear and worry and wandering thoughts to go away and insert positive thoughts in their place. Turn the old thoughts on their heads and begin each new day in a new way; think positively! The power of the positive is available to you right now, in your own mind. Mind your thoughts!
Why would men with such material wealth and power need to abuse that power for sexual contact with a woman? In fact, why would any man need to abuse his power to have a sexual experience with a woman?
True union…
Abuse of power is aggression. If a man exercises aggression to gain access to a woman, that man must, on some level, be terrified of woman. In his eyes, woman wields some power over him, which he must subdue to feel safe enough to engage with her.
It must also be stressed that “sex” under these circumstances has nothing to do with union, true joining with another person. Though the man may indeed gain access to his victim’s body, his sexual gratification remains purely narcissistic, locked within himself. Regardless of his victim’s physical reaction to his intrusion, there is no actual meeting in such an encounter. The man exits this kind of encounter still a prisoner to his own terror of woman.
All human beings issue forth into life as infants from the most powerful being on Earth: Mother! She who gives, nurtures and can even take life. The terror and total dependency upon this powerful Mother Goddess may recede into the unconscious as a man ages and develops in autonomy, but the power of this female imprint persists and is projected onto all women, the fascinating but terrifying, dangerous other. Even nonaggressive males deal with this terror.
Male initiation rituals, puberty rites of the ancients, resolved this dilemma for all males in a community by breaking the initiate’s dependence upon Mother through deliverance to the power of true adult standing within the community. From this position a man could stand on equal, albeit different footing from woman, and a genuine meeting with woman could happen devoid of violence.
Our modern world has rationalized itself beyond the need for initiation rites. Today these are largely held in the sacred journeys of therapy where the patient-initiate must slay the dragon of his Mother Complex to finally be able to see woman as equal partner.
What modern powerful men such as Weinstein, Cosby, and even Trump with his “pussy grabbing” reveal is that the acquisition of economic and material power in no way initiates a male into true adult manhood. Power might position a man to touch a woman as he pleases, but he’ll never touch a woman’s soul or experience a genuine union with her unless he achieves true manhood.
Manhood requires initiation. Initiation requires the defeat of the dependencies and the entitlements of childhood. Modern men must find their way to the initiation chamber on their own, with little or no community support. One modern initiation chamber, the psychotherapist’s office, is ready and waiting to provide the sacred space for the journey to real manhood.
Sex for the uninitiated man is his own narcissistic cell, a world of one. No amount of material acquisition or political muscle will release him from this solitary confinement. Only through taking the journey to slay his inner dragons may he be freed to enter the world and truly and safely be with a woman in real union.
Love is. It will find you if you open up and let it in. Though you may fear that you will never experience love that fear creates a blockage and then love can’t see you. Let love see you. Take off your fear and bare your soul and love will find you because love just is. It has no name, no color, no gender, no religion. Love just is. Let it in. Let it be a part of you like the air you breathe, like the ocean waters, like the flowing rivers, like the wind in the trees, like the great mountains rising. Be the love that is. Then you will know that love just is.
I am about nine years old. It’s summertime. I go outside to ride my bike, which is parked in the front yard of our house in the bucolic, rural area in New York State where I live. Just as I reach out to the handlebars I pull back in utter disgust and fear. Some unknown green creature with long legs and wings and a fiercesome looking face is perched on the right handlebar. I almost touched it! What is that!
The strangest creature I had ever seen! – Photo by Jan Ketchel
It looks prehistoric, something I’ve never seen before in my life. I am overcome with fear and nausea. I whack it to the ground and step on it. Shaking, I stand there and look at its crushed body lying on the ground, oozing out disgusting slime, more sickening to look at than when it was alive. I can only feel that I had just saved my life!
At the same time that I feel this I also know that I have just killed a fellow creature and I feel really bad about that. I tell myself I was frightened by it. It looked prehistoric, like a scary small dinosaur, and I couldn’t help myself, which is true, I just reacted and killed it. Instinctual fear drove me to kill.
Years later I read about the praying mantis being an endangered species. It was then that I realized what I had killed that day. To my nine-year-old eyes what I saw was much larger and more frightening to behold than a real praying mantis ever was. At the time I had never seen such a thing and so I could not place it. It frightened me so much that I had to kill it. This was a reaction to the unknown. Sometimes an instinctual reaction crushes the harmless and the innocent in a primitive instinctual projection based on unfamiliarity.
A few years after this incident, when I was about fourteen, I was out with friends. We had come upon some wild grapes. Reaching into the tangle of vines to pick a nice bunch I suddenly felt something clinging to my face. I could not pull it off. I thought is was just a grape vine caught in my hair or something. I asked my friends to help get it off me. They pulled back in horror and screamed!
None of them came to the rescue so I grabbed hold of it, a sticky something clinging tightly, and pulled it off my face with all my might. I held it up and found myself staring at the weirdest creature I had ever seen, even weirder than that praying mantis—a walking stick! It was big enough to cover my entire face. It had straddled my nose and mouth and eyes, stretching from forehead to chin. It must have looked like I was wearing some kind of strange mask.
This time I held the strange creature in my hands long enough to get a good look at it. I’d heard of walking sticks before but had never actually seen a live one. This was huge! I stared at it, freaky though it was, and then placed it carefully back onto the grape vine. Now every time I see a walking stick I am reminded of this experience and I once again remember how I held in my fear and disgust and just looked at this curious creature who shares the world with us. He got to live because I did not let my fear kill him.
In the first scenario I encountered my killer instinct in an automatic reaction to the unknown in the guise of the praying mantis. In the second scenario, although I was equally terrified, I did not react instinctively but instead paused long enough to allow consciousness to work with instinct to mediate and calm my fear, saying, “take a look at what this is and then decide the proper action/reaction.”
I do not judge my nine-year-old self for killing the praying mantis, it’s just where I was at the time. Now I try to live with consciousness as much as possible, pausing, like my fourteen-year-old self did with the walking stick, asking myself pertinent questions: What is the right thing to do in this situation? What is the right thing to feel? What is the right action to take?
We all have killed something at some point in our lives. How many mosquitoes, flies, and pesky bugs I’ve swatted at over my 65 years I don’t know, but I have certainly whacked quite a number of them to death out of sheer annoyance.
At the same time that I admit to that kind of killing, there is another part of me that would never knowingly harm another living thing, but sometimes she’s just not available when I need her. Sometimes the fearful me still steps in and just takes care of business.
A blog by J. E. Ketchel, author of The Recapitulation Diaries.
Steadiness is needed now, a firm hand and firm intent if progress is to be made, if worry is to cease, and if compassion is once again to be of any use. Ground yourself in right action. Ground yourself in clear mind. Ground yourself in loving heart. Ground yourself in knowing that as you breathe and clear a path to making changes in your own life so do your changes effect the greater world. Let your grounding intentions and actions ground others around you. Be a good example of what it means to be a mature and grounded being, loving and compassionate, within and without. Take responsibility where others do not. It’s time for someone to be in charge. To begin with, in your own life, it should be you!
