Note: In lieu of Amanda Moreno’s column today, we have Donna Boyle’s essay from the Cosmophilia website, and we’d love to read your comments both there and here on this page.
By the way: if you did not get your 2015 annual readings from Planet Waves back in January, you can now order all 12 signs of Cosmophilia for half price. Eric creates these readings to be ideal for long-term use, and they make a valuable mid-year check-in on your progress toward your goals. — Amanda P.

by Donna Boyle

My first direct experience of being “more than my physical body” came while I was teaching a meditation. Guiding my students through a visualization, I was taken to a place in space where I was looking down upon the earth and floating in a vast universe — seemingly there for hours.

When I finally came back to the room, I was embarrassed and asked my students, “How long was I out?”

Photo by Danielle Voirin

They looked at me like I was crazy and said, “You only paused for a second!” I have held onto that experience for many years and it has helped me become who I am today and gain access to my own Light Body.

This re-acceptance of your Light Body is what you came here to do. You arrived in this current lifetime, this physical shell, as a being of light: a light body.

You also came into your new physical body with the intention to forget that, and then remember it at just the right time. You forgot so that you could learn the lessons needed for this lifetime.

Now is the right time. The stars and the planets are aligning to give you additional help — an added bonus. Let’s start re-connecting and re-membering!

Your Light Body is the you that is pure light. This light has been a part of you for many, many lifetimes and is the light that you truly are. This body of light knows no bounds, only knows love, and already knows who you are meant to be and what your soul/sole purpose is in this lifetime.

Your Light Body understands you don’t give yourself enough credit and remembers you are more than just your physical body. It waits patiently for you to realign with it.

Feelings of unworthiness keep you distant from your Light Body. Limiting beliefs do the same. There will be times when your Light Body will be in you — a part of you that is fully integrated. There will also be times when you cannot see it or feel it, and other times when all you can do is visualize it outside yourself. Repeat these words to yourself when you become aware of these thoughts, “I AM that I AM and I AM worthy.”

There is a reason you are reading this right now. Re-connecting with your Light Body is for everyone, not just light workers or those on a spiritual path. This re-integration is something all of us are meant to do. We are all awakening to the truth of who we are.

This new way of being can be confusing. For me, I needed to believe first that I was worthy of having a Light Body, let alone accept it as already a part of me. I continually used what I knew best — meditation and visualization. You can gain access to your Light Body by using these techniques, also called raising your vibration, and living in the present moment with all that arises.

The following exercises are from my experiences while integrating my Light Body and helping others re-awaken and re-access their own.

Continue reading here.

Editor’s Note: This week’s relationship-themed guest-post comes from Christina Louise Dietrich, whom we’ve featured a few times in the last year. She writes about her healing journey at her own blog. — Amanda

By Christina Louise Dietrich

Even though sexism has always decreed that boy children have more status than girls, status and even the rewards of privilege are not the same as being loved. — The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love by bell hooks

In·ti·ma·cy (noun):  (1) the state of being intimate. (2) a close, familiar, and usually affectionate or loving personal relationship with another person or group. (3) a close association with or detailed knowledge or deep understanding of a place, subject, period of history, etc. (4) an act or expression serving as a token of familiarity, affection, or the like. (5) sexual intercourse.

Christina Louise Dietrich

Our world, and particularly its children, suffers from a chronic and debilitating lack of intimacy.

Now, before you get triggered and label my intentions criminal, I don’t mean intimacy as its usually marketed and understood by western culture; that is, conflated with sexual intercourse. I mean the vulnerable space that exists between two people who are bonded through choice and intention. 

The example I’m going to use throughout this post is #2 from the above definition: a close, familiar, and usually affectionate or loving personal relationship with another person or group. So, when I use the term intimate parenting, you will come to know what I mean even as you may struggle with your reaction to what I’m describing.

What has been all but impossible to change is widespread cultural patriarchal propaganda. Yet we begin to protect the emotional well-being of boys and of all males when we call this propaganda by its true name, when we acknowledge that patriarchal culture requires that boys deny, suppress, and if all goes well, shut down their emotional awareness and their capacity to feel. — The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

My husband, Brendan, and I parent our 4-1/2-year-old son, Avery, intimately. For us this means we choose to feel into the edgy, energetically-charged moments that occur as a natural course of interacting with a young child, and then model what healthy intimacy looks and feels like. Intimacy that isn’t conditional and doesn’t cross personal boundaries. Intimacy that isn’t filtered through the lens of patriarchy, which equates to disembodiment and disowning his feelings.

I would categorize our approach as a subset of peaceful or gentle parenting, which one source via Google search defines as: regulating our own emotions when dealing with our children and responding to problems with compassion. Based on that, I would define intimate parenting as:

Choosing to regulate my emotions when dealing with my son and responding to problems that arise with compassion instead of fear, shame, or punishment, always remembering that he is a human being worthy of love and respect.

During a late-night discussion with Brendan last week, I asked him what intimate parenting meant to him. His response was so good that I ended up recording the remainder of our conversation, and I’m going to include a condensed version of the portion that’s directly applicable to this topic since it beautifully explains our motivations and the container we seek to create as parents:

Parenting is a calling. Since what you’re called to is greater than you, you’re also called to develop skills you don’t have, to develop ways of being you don’t possess or yet have facility with. The process of becoming a better parent isn’t (or shouldn’t be) goal oriented; it’s context oriented and it’s ongoing. You won’t complete this task in an executive fashion and then stop because the experience goes beyond its immediate object (the child).

As part of our being committed to intimate parenting, we choose to devote our attention and express our calling in a way that recognizes there are parts of Avery that are eternally wise and divine. Those parts we’re speaking to in him can receive the love we’re giving, but they can’t return it in kind because they’re filtered through a 4-year-old’s understanding of the world. In essence, he can’t — without being trained and abused in traditional patriarchal ways — reciprocate our devotion.

By staying aware of our shame triggers and seeking balance, we can offer our love and attention from a position of devotion that recognizes his divinity without compromising his humanity. The devotion we’re offering him is appropriate to its object, which is a critical part of keeping the interaction both psychically clean and physically respectful. For example, fetishism is devotion inappropriate to its object, like making shoes into a god. In our case, Avery himself isn’t the object; it’s his divinity, which is the part we can relate to, can resonate with. That’s the part of him that we are nurturing and stimulating.

When we’re close to him, when we are lovingly intimate with him, and we can feel that humming in our chest? That’s resonance between his divinity and ours. As we attune to that, our divinity aligns with and comes into resonance with his divinity. So his becomes stronger, clearer, and develops more depth as we stimulate it in him. If we don’t, and it remains dormant for long enough, it will be disowned. He’ll have to reclaim it and endure the grief and loss process like we’ve both had to do.

What we’re trying to do is contradict the deeply damaging effects of patriarchy, to cultivate an alternative version of masculinity for Avery to embody — one that’s grounded in his body and his intuition. One that nurtures and cares, one that listens and understands, one that believes in its own worth and has a clear sense of identity. One that has no need to dominate or belittle or bully or rape anyone.

One of the tremendous failings of feminist theory and practice has been the lack of a concentrated study of boyhood, one that offers guidelines and strategies for alternative masculinity and ways of thinking about maleness. Indeed, the feminist rhetoric that insisted on identifying males as the enemy often closed down the space where boys could be considered, where they could be deemed as worthy of rescue from patriarchal exploitation and oppression as were their female counterparts. — The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

So, intimacy and the direct modeling of it. Because if Brendan and I don’t model healthy intimacy, how is Avery supposed to know what it feels like when he encounters it in the adult world? If his child’s body is directed to deny its feelings, to suppress its need for love and affection, to react awkwardly and fearfully when someone tries to connect with him, then how can I possibly expect him to choose wisely? How can I entertain the hope that he will respect someone else’s boundaries; will consent to their wishes? How could he know what that looks and feels like if he’s never experienced it for himself?

————-

Christina Louise Dietrich, a technical writer by trade, says of herself: “I write because I am claiming the voice my family and my society tried to silence, the voice that was my divine birthright. I am a woman, a mother, a feminist, a wife. I am compassionate, judgmental, loving, a bully, empathetic, obstinate, caring, rigid, and creative. I’m passionate about systems, beauty, process, experience, trees, interconnections, transitions, logistics, balance, and clarity. I manifest the Amazon, the Androgyne, and the Mother-to-be-Crone.”

Planet Waves is running a membership drive.
Read more in Solstice Fire and the Art of Service, by Eric Francis.

With both Mercury and Mars in Cancer opposing Pluto, and the Sun in Cancer, too, the sky is emphasizing our emotions. That’s not always comfortable. In this article originally published by Charlie Glickman on his website Make Sex Easy, he offers some grounded tips on how to turn toward the feelings in ways that strengthen intimate relationships. — Amanda P.

By Charlie Glickman

As a sex & relationship coach, I get to see people while they’re in the middle of some difficult situations. I’ve mediated couples during arguments. I’ve worked with people when they’re stuck in their triggers. I’ve talked with folks who were in the middle of their emotional reactions. And over and over, I’ve witnessed how much energy people put into trying to avoid the feelings.

Charlie Glickman

It can show up in a lot of different ways. Sometimes, someone will try to explain their feelings or their partner’s feelings away. They’ll say “it’s not so bad.” Or “if you just understood what I meant, you wouldn’t feel like this.”

Other times, they’ll get nitpicky about the exact sequence of event in order to prove that the other person shouldn’t be feeling that way. And then, there are the times when someone will get angry about their partner’s emotions and lash out.

What all of these kinds of responses have in common is that they’re attempts to make the difficult feelings go away. We do that because we’re uncomfortable with the emotions, we don’t know what to do with them, and we want our partners and ourselves to feel better. The two most common motivations in these moments are that we want to support our partners and we want to not feel our own discomfort. (I’m leaving out the folks who deliberately try to make their partners feel bad or who gaslight them. That’s abusive, and it’s a very different thing.)

The irony is that when we try to make the difficult feelings go away, we usually do the exact opposite: we make our partners feel worse and we add fuel to the situation that’s creating our discomfort.

So here’s a much better response: turn towards the feelings.

Turning towards the feelings means making room for them, validating them, and giving your partner permission to feel them. It doesn’t mean that you’re agreeing with their interpretation of events. It means that you understand that their feelings are real, wherever they come from. Here’s an example:

If you’re feeling angry with me because it was your birthday and you didn’t get a card from me, I can say, “I can see that you’re feeling really hurt and angry about this.” I can say that even if I did send a card but it hasn’t arrived yet. Or I can say that even if I know that part of your reaction is because your family ignored your birthday again and you’re feeling triggered. Turning towards the feelings means that I acknowledge how you feel, no matter where the emotion is coming from.

This is important because when we’re in a highly emotional state or when we’ve gotten triggered, we don’t process information well. We’re literally in an altered state of consciousness. Or to put it another way, our brains can only run a certain number of apps at a time. So when the “big feelings” app gets opened, we have fewer resources to think and talk about the situation. We can’t do effective problem solving until we’ve soothed the emotions.

The first step towards that is to acknowledge them. That tells your partner that you see how they’re feeling and that their emotions get to have their space. It doesn’t work if you jump to problem solving or trying to explain why your partner shouldn’t have those feelings because when you do that, you’re sending the message that you want the emotions to go away. That either makes the feelings get louder in an attempt to get the attention they want, or it makes them hide and turn into resentment. (Protip: nothing destroys a relationship faster than resentment.)

It doesn’t take a lot to acknowledge the feelings. Here are some useful phrases to try (X = the emotion that’s going on):

• I can see that you’re feeling X. Thank you for letting me know.
• It looks to me like you’re feeling X. Is that what’s going on?
• This seems like a really difficult situation. I can see how much X you’re feeling right now.
• I totally get how this situation is bringing up a lot of X for you. I’m glad you told me.
• I know you’re feeling a lot of X. That looks really difficult and uncomfortable.

Do you see how there’s nothing in any of these examples that would come across as saying that the feeling is something to change or get rid of? That’s how you start to turn towards the feelings.

In some situations, the person who’s triggered will be able to find their words pretty quickly. But at other times, the emotions need some support and some space to go through their trajectory. As the feelings get soothed, they’ll start to soften and get smaller, which makes it easier to be able to think and talk clearly about the situation.

It takes a lot of practice to make room for someone’s emotions without taking responsibility for them, getting defensive about them, or trying to make them stop. I’m a big fan of the book Taking the War Out of Our Words: The Art of Powerful Non-Defensive Communication, though there are plenty of other great guides. It can also help to have a therapist or a coach guide you through the process a few times. It’s easy to get off-track when you’re trying something new and I’ve seen how valuable it is for my clients to have me there to keep them headed in the right direction. Once you’ve had some success with someone acting as your training wheels, you’ll find your balance and will be able to do it on you own with more grace.

Another piece of turning towards the feelings is allowing them to be present, whether you think that they’re reasonable or not. You can still make room for the emotions even if you think that your partner is overreacting, they’re misinterpreting the situation, or they’re triggered by some other experience. Once the feelings have gotten the attention they need and have been soothed, you can have a conversation about what caused them and what to do with them. You still need to be able to have that talk without getting defensive about it, but it’s a lot easier when the emotions have had their say.

It’s also important for the person who’s been triggered to be able to talk about their experience without attacking or blaming. Saying “I feel like you’re a terrible person because you forgot my birthday” is, in fact, blaming. The feeling might be anger, sadness, or abandonment. The interpretation is that it means that they don’t love you or that they’re a bad person. Wrapping the interpretation up in an “I feel” statement doesn’t make it less of an attack. It just makes it a passive one. If you want your partner to turn towards your feelings, you need to take the risk of being vulnerable with them. Attacking or blaming them makes it harder for them to be there for you. It’s far more effective to say, “I feel really sad and hurt that you forgot my birthday,” even if it’s scarier.

Turning towards the feelings can be a little intimidating at first. If it’s new to you or your partner, there may be a backlog of old emotions that come tumbling out. It can seem like all it does is stir things up more, but if you make room for them over time, those past feelings will calm down. When there’s a backlog, all it means is that you need to go back and take care of them.

One of the fascinating things about emotions is that they have no sense of time. If they’ve been ignored or set aside for a long time, they’ll come out just as fresh as if the original event just happened. Feelings exist in the present, so it doesn’t matter if they were caused by something years in the past. As far as the heart is concerned, the feelings are just as real as if they were caused five minutes ago. So turning towards them is the same process, no matter how long they’ve been waiting their turn. And just as with present-day emotions, they’ll start to calm down once they’ve had their space.

If turning towards the feelings is new for you, it’ll probably take some time to feel confident in your abilities. And if your relationship has a history of blaming or attacking each other, or if you try to explain the emotions away, you’ll have some learning curves. There might also need to be some conversations to clear old patterns out and learn to trust each other. It won’t happen immediately, but it usually doesn’t take long to start seeing progress. Once you build some momentum, you’ll probably be amazed at how quickly things change.

If you’re looking for some help to make that happen, I offer coaching sessions over Skype or FaceTime as well as in my Oakland, CA office. Get in touch with me and let’s talk about how I can be of service to you and help you figure out how to make things easier.

*******

Charlie Glickman, Ph.D., is a sex & relationship coach, a certified sexuality educator, and an internationally acclaimed speaker. He’s certified as a sexological bodyworker and has been working in this field for over 20 years. His areas of focus include sex & shame, sex-positivity, queer issues, masculinity & gender, communities of erotic affiliation, and many sexual & relationship practices. Charlie is also the co-author of The Ultimate Guide to Prostate Pleasure: Erotic Exploration for Men and Their Partners. Find out more about him and his coaching services on his website.

With Mercury still retrograde in Gemini — and the Venus-Saturn trine offering some passion-and-discipline harmony — the timing is good for a piece about how to help those “we need to talk” conversations go well. This piece originally appeared in MaineToday.com, where you can read the second half of the article. — Amanda P.

By Amy Wood, Psy.D.

My job involves a lot of listening and talking (in that order) and so it goes that a topic of conversation I get in a lot is, well, just that — conversation. Conversation is important in forging connections, processing emotions, figuring out solutions, but there’s an unfortunate lack of real live conversation in a world that increasingly seems to value technological transactions over face-to-face discourse. And we need conversation when misunderstandings and other interpersonal obstacles arise.

Amy Wood, Psy.D.

That last one, those “we need to talk” conversations, is what comes up most. How to summon the courage to speak honestly from the heart. How to confront another person without hurting feelings. How to approach delicate matters without causing anger or shame.

Just last week I was conversing about, you got it, conversation, with my colleague David Lee, a consultant known for helping business professionals have productive exchanges about challenging issues.  We agreed that the hardest part of those “we need to talk” conversations is getting started.

Approaching another person about a tense topic is never simple, and David suggests we can ease the process considerably by keeping these three ice-breaking pointers in mind:

Make it your problem even when it isn’t

David says that many of his clients, accomplished professionals who strive for fulfilling relationships at home and work, put off difficult conversations because they’re fed up with having to accept responsibility for problems they haven’t caused. Why, they lament, should they have to take on the task of addressing yet another person’s poor performance; shouldn’t the onus be on the misbehaving person to step up to the plate for a change?

David points out that not all of us are evolved enough to recognize when a “we need to talk” talk is in order, and even less of us are equipped with the social repertoire to open up the floor for a candid chat. If you’re interpersonally adept, then why not exercise your social strength by getting the ball rolling? Instead of feeling resentful, appreciate that social sensitivity is your specialty and take the lead. By demonstrating the importance of getting a difficult conversation going, you can be a role model for others who aren’t similarly gifted.

Continue reading here.

Amy Wood, Psy.D. is a licensed psychologist with deep knowledge of human nature and a gift for helping adults become their own versions of successful. She facilitates growth and development through psychotherapy, coaching, mediation, speaking and training engagements, consulting, and writing.  Dr. Wood is award-winning author of Life Your Way:  Refresh Your Approach to Success and Breathe Easier in a Fast-paced World and writes the Living Smart blog for Mainetoday.com. 

David Lee is the founder and principal of HumanNature@work and the creator of Stories That Change. He’s an internationally recognized authority on organizational and managerial practices that optimize employee performance, morale, and engagement. He is also the author of “Managing Employee Stress and Safety,” as well over 60 articles and book chapters.

With its roots often in the past, avoiding disappointment in relationships is an ideal topic for the current aspects between the Sun, Neptune and retrograde Mercury. This piece originally published on sexuality coach Charlie Glickman’s website Make Sex Easy. — Amanda P.

When therapists, relationship coaches, and sex educators talk about the things that get in the way of creating positive connection and intimacy, we often include things like shame, anger, resentment, and unspoken expectations. But there’s one more that doesn’t get as much attention, even though it has a huge impact on our relationships: disappointment avoidance.

Charlie Glickman

Here’s a truth about relationships that we all have to face. Disappointment is going to happen. There are going to be times when you don’t get what you want, and there will be times when your partner(s) don’t get what they want. That’s just part of life. But here’s where it gets a bit trickier. You won’t always get what you want from your partner, and they won’t always get what they want from you.

Trying to avoid disappointment leads to all sorts of difficult situations. For example, if I can’t tolerate your disappointment, I’ll be a lot less likely to set a boundary with you. How can I tell you “no” if I’m worried about your reaction or if I feel guilty about it? How can I tell you what I want or need if I expect that you’ll have problems with that? Disappointment avoidance is one of the reasons that people withhold information, minimize their emotions, and allow their boundaries to become invisible.

Of course, we sometimes have good reason to try to minimize the other person’s reaction. Some people get angry, or threatening, or violent. Some people get passive-aggressive or manipulative. Some people use shame or guilt trips to try to get you to change your mind. Some people go into a shame spiral, which can be uncomfortable to be around. And if your past experience taught you that you need to avoid your partner’s disappointment in order to keep yourself emotionally or physically safe, it can be hard to shift that.

But it’s also important to be aware that much of the time, those patterns are rooted in the past, rather than your current relationship. Many of my clients are surprised when they discover that their partners can handle disappointment far more gracefully than expected.

It also helps when you learn how to talk about these things without blaming each other. There’s a subtle but important difference between “you made me feel this way” and “I feel this way because of something you did.” The first one puts all of the responsibility for your feelings on the other person, which means you’ve given up all of your power. The second one holds the other person accountable while you maintain responsibility for your emotions. That’s a much more empowered response.

That empowerment makes it much, much easier to tolerate disappointment. The difference between “you disappointed me when you backed out of the project” and “I feel disappointment because you backed out of the project” gives both people the room to let the emotion be present without getting defensive about it. That creates far more opportunities to move forward in whatever way they choose.

When you develop the capacity to allow for disappointment without blaming, shaming, or withdrawing, you lay the foundation for honest, openhearted, authentic communication. To do that, you need to be able to acknowledge that disappointment is present without trying to fix it or make it go away. You need to be able to feel it yourself, and allow for the other person to feel it. That’s not easy- it’s an uncomfortable sensation and it makes sense that we often want to fix it as soon as we can. But just like our other difficult emotions, the best way to “fix it” is to let it have its voice and to listen to it.

Having someone see you in your disappointment can be scary. It can feel really vulnerable, especially if you have fears that they will use it against you. Seeing someone else in their disappointment can trigger all sorts of feelings, including the urge to rescue them from it or to fix it. It takes a lot of practice to be able to sit with the emotions. While it takes some effort to learn how to handle both sides of the disappointment dynamic, it’s worth it because the payoff is the ability to be fully present in your relationships, to be honest with yourself and your partner(s), and to navigate boundaries with ease and grace.

A good place to start is to simply notice the ways in which you try to avoid disappointment, whether your own or someone else’s. Give it some attention and look for your patterns. Are there situations it usually happens in? Does it come up more around certain people? What are the messages you hear your disappointment telling you? What are the stories it holds? Once you have a handle on that, it becomes easier to create new patterns.

You can also explore what the somatic sensation of disappointment is for you. Where do you feel it in your body? Does it have a texture? A shape? A temperature? A color? When you know how your body responds to the feeling, it becomes easier to notice when the emotion is happening. That gives you more room to respond to it, in the same way that noticing the red light up ahead gives you more room to hit the brakes. When my clients are working through this, we put a lot of time into exploring the physical and somatic sensations of their emotions before we start unpacking the stories and meanings behind them. That works a lot better than rushing ahead to the words. (Calming breathwork also helps a lot.)

Learning to tolerate, manage, and honor your disappointment doesn’t sound like a super sexy thing. But I can promise you that it has the potential to make all of your relationships, whether sexual/romantic or not, much easier. It creates the space to be authentic and vulnerable with each other, which is what allows for connection, intimacy, and passion. Plus, it gives you far more opportunities to get what you really want. And that is where the fun is.

Charlie Glickman, Ph.D., is a sex & relationship coach, a certified sexuality educator, and an internationally acclaimed speaker. He’s certified as a sexological bodyworker and has been working in this field for over 20 years. His areas of focus include sex & shame, sex-positivity, queer issues, masculinity & gender, communities of erotic affiliation, and many sexual & relationship practices. Charlie is also the co-author of The Ultimate Guide to Prostate Pleasure: Erotic Exploration for Men and Their Partners. Find out more about him and his coaching services on his website.