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CAN I LEARN FROM A WOMAN? Part I

Rev. Hans Peter Meyer

• 7 min read

Apprenticeship to Love, Chapter 280, September 20, 2024

  • Today's question: Do you know how you resist learning, how you resist receiving? Do you know how to turn this resistance into the willingness to enter the flow that is calling you?
  • My practice today: 4:30am yoga postures, Ganesha mantra meditation.

TODAY'S MEDITATION

I've learned this: don't ask her to teach or to lead. Instead, become more sensitive, so that I am aware of when I am being called to learn, called to receive, called to lead.

We have, for at least two generations now, been instructed that better communications leads to better relationships. The assumptions are that: "better communications" means more skillful use of language, sentences, words; and that "better relationships" means deeper love. I'm not convinced.

Yes, "better communications." But the more I learn, the more I learn that this thing called "communications" happens in so many more ways than the words or sentences I am adept at using. Ironically, with so many, the deepest communication and the deepest love occurs with deep and reverent silence. Here I learn to listen to women and children. To the animals that love me, and those that do not even seem to know me. To the trees and the seas that move around me.

I was taught, "clear communications" are the foundation for a successful relationship, necessary for a successful marriage. Now I am convinced of something else: The "success" of any of my relationships is more about my capacity to hold the confusion of communications, without expectations or demand. This capacity is the foundation for successful friendships, parenting, business partnerships, and, most of all, for marriage.

...

Everything begins and ends with me. Am I willing to take that responsibility? Am I willing to sit with the origin of the world and allow its mystery to undo all that I've supposed and expected and wanted?

I was asked by a client recently, How do you know you're in the flow of life? I've been thinking about this ever since.

...

This morning I woke from dreams and with feelings that have long lain dormant. It is good to feel these things that I'd forgotten. And confusing. This confusion is a sure sign I am near to some river, some flow that will remain a mystery until I surrender to it.

How to surrender?

Yesterday as I listened to a woman at a crossroads I remembered so many of my own crossroads. A gift, to be reminded. A gift, perhaps, to offer her the only wisdom I have: look down each road and feel into that road, feel into how her body imagines and knows that road.

She feels some urgency. I remember that too. As if, on the crossroads, we must make a decision. And, make it quickly. Why? I'm not so sure about that. Maybe it's that part of us —of me— that does not know how to hold confusion as a gift rather than a demand. Here's what I am learning: the only urgency at the crossroads is to allow my body to feel its way. The body is able to hold confusion, to hold simultaneous truths and feelings. The mind, much less tolerant of this experience of indecision. The mind wants to order and understand and then determine what is the correct decision at this crossroads. Without confusion. With only clarity. To be decisive. Articulate.

...

This morning I work from dreams and with feelings that have long lain dormant. I am confused, and content at the same time. If I am at a crossroads I do not feel any urgency. Not today. I feel only this strange, fecund moment.

This is, as I said to man earlier this week as he puzzled over his seeming seasonal sensitivities, my season for deaths. And for births. Endings. Beginnings. And often it is hard to know the difference. Sometimes there is no difference.

She is here with me today. And yesterday. And for a few more days before she flies away. Is this an ending, or a beginning? And how would I know the difference, unless I was so slowed and so still that I could feel myself in this crossroads and allow all possibilities to become images and sensations in my body? Romantic? Maybe. Domestic? Yes. I have created and am holding a space where she tells me she feels comfortable.

...

Later this morning I was looking at photographs. I was on a small mission for my daughter and her work on my mother's memoir. Pictures of my childhood. My father as barely more than a boy. Just 21, looking at me newly born. My mother, at 22 looking so much like one of my daughters. Children, with children. Knowing not so much. Except this: how to love me. I am grateful, that even in their naïvete they knew how to love me, and I in turn knew a little about loving my children when I too was too young and naïve to be a father. Certainly too naïve to know how to be a husband.

I am grateful that —finally, at 65 years— I am learning some of the arts of service, of sacrifice, of devotion that are required for this calling of husbandry. I am even more grateful that I have, today, one who welcomes, even invites, my fumbling efforts towards this calling. Husbandry requires character. Capacity. It is something I aspire to.

...

Twenty-five years ago a friend quoted me the title of a book his wife had given him. The book was by her teacher. This teacher, a woman, asked of her students, and especially of her students who were men, "Can you learn from a woman?"

Every now and then this question peels me open to a deeper understanding of my resistance, not just to the women in my life, but to the feminine flow of life. Can I, a masculine-identified man, a man raised in this culture of decisiveness and direction and conquest and the need-to-know, can I surrender to the mystery and wisdom of the feminine, from which all that is important to me flows? And if I cannot surrender and will not learn, then what am I doing? And how do I change, to serve the flow, to be a husband to she who yearns to flow, who asks only that I surrender to her flowing and flowering?

Breathing in, breathing out. Every moment a crossroads? Or a moment to at least notice how I am opening or closing to everything, and how there is no decisive moment, only the fumbling towards love and beauty and fear and death and all of it a confusion that only my breath and my awareness can hold. All of it, at once.

TODAY'S INSPIRATIONS

🌀When we keep showing up for what needs to be felt, when we dare to allow our hearts to crack and surrender, grace can pour through us. This is probably one of the most challenging tasks we receive as human beings on this planet but the medicine it contains is the healing we need.  (Marieke, Kundalini Yoga School, Heartbreak)

🌀 The old meaning of enchanted is something like this: "I have been conjured and called by you, and consequence and the stuff of life are at hand, and many a thing has come to light, and just now, having met you, the river of my longing for life knows the shore that gives it its course and reason." (Stephen Jenkinson, Come of Age)

🌀He had become a man when he learned the chief fact of life, which is to take it slow and steady. Few things amazed him more than the evidence that other men had failed to grasp this. (Annie Dillard, The Living)

🌀The last of human freedoms —the ability to choose one's attitude in a given set of circumstances. (Viktor Frankl)

🌀The Fool is the archetype where birth and death meet. Which is why its corresponding number is zero. Representing the ouroboros. A perpetual renewal through openness that ultimately leads out of samsara. The ability to be and to live foolhardiness is exactly the same quality that allows the fool to be the living expression of love. (Sarah Elkhaldy)

🌀The Conscious Warrior takes 100% responsibility for the reality he has created — seeking what needs to be changed in him before blaming others. (John Wineland, Precept 5)

🌀I appreciate you. (My beloved, she who must be seen and held and known by my powerful and unwavering presence)

TODAY’S QUESTIONS

Do you know how you resist learning? Resist receiving? Do you know how to turn this resistance into the flow that is required?

TODAY'S SUGGESTED SHORT PRACTICE

My suggestions for your practice today, to breathe and feel the confusion of life —the tension, pressure, friction, and stress that makes everything possible— and then allowing this confusion to become more beautiful than you can possibly imagine.
Please read through first, then ...

  • Set two alarms, for times of the day when you have a five-10 minutes to become conscious of who and how you are in this day.
  • When the alarm sounds, wherever and however you are, take a few moments and ask yourself:
    • Do I know how I resist learning? How I resist receiving? Do I know how to turn this resistance into the flow that is required? What is stopping me from doing what is required?
    • Then, follow the short practice here:
      • Stand, or sit, or lay yourself down, and bring your attention to your body.
      • Feel the ground beneath you. Allow the earth to hold you with gravity. Feel how dense and heavy you are. Feel also how lightly you sit or stand or lay on the earth. Feel yourself between the pull of earth's gravity and the subtle but persistent pull of the sun, the stars.
      • Slow your breathing so that it is long and deep into your belly. Slow the inhale to a count of four or six. Slow your exhale to a count of six or eight or ten. Repeat three to five cycles of breathing, going a little slower with each cycle. Continuing to notice yourself held by the earth, raised by the sun and stars and sky above. Feel the subtle tension and pressure and friction and stress that allows you to be and rest and move in this body.
  • When you’re done, take another minute or two, breathing gently, slowly filling and emptying your belly.
  • Notice if your body-mind feels somehow changed. And whether you notice a change or not, be content with yourself, exactly as you are in this moment.
  • Continue with your day until the next alarm sounds, and repeat.

COMING UP